My point is don’t actively screw those people by coming up with a dumb compensation formula that punishes them for students underperforming before they ever entered their class. If you have merit based pay you need to evaluate how much a student improved under a specific teacher’s watch.
It wouldn’t if the obvious consequence of the bluntness was to chase good teachers out of the schools that most need them. And that’s what a blunt policy that punishes teachers for having students enter their class at a low level does.