CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. — For 17 years, Nancy Shipner has taught kindergarten in the same room at Calvin Donaldson Elementary in an industrial neighborhood snuggled in the shadow of Lookout Mountain.

Last year, she was still earning less than $35,000, so she "jumped through the hoops" to qualify for a $2,000-a-year merit pay raise under Tennessee's Career Ladder Program, begun in 1984 by former Gov. Lamar Alexander, whom President Bush nominated this week to be secretary of education.

But, like the majority of Tennessee teachers and administrators who join the program, Shipner did so with one hand over her nose.

Merit pay should be much simpler--teachers deserve more, and they should be paid more, Shipner argued.

Merit pay--arguably the attention-getting innovation that led to Alexander's appointment as the nation's No. 1 educator--establishes different pay levels for teachers based on their performance. To admirers, it is an incentive to better teaching. To detractors, it is a bureaucratic disaster that destroys teacher morale and retards system-wide pay hikes.

The controversy over merit pay is unlikely to slow Senate approval of Alexander's nomination. Alexander's political and educational credentials are broad: As governor, he increased the number of math and science teachers and raised budgets to put computers in junior high schools, and, more recently, he has served as president of the University of Tennessee. But his appointment is certain to focus attention on the impact of his most far-reaching program.

Groping for a way to keep good teachers, seven states have emulated Tennessee's Career Ladder Program since 1984, according to a new report by the Southern Regional Education Board, an Atlanta-based research organization.

The board said that an additional 18 states have some form of teacher-incentive plan, including California, which has "mentor teachers," who receive extra pay for working with other teachers to upgrade the profession and improve education.

Gale Gaines, a research associate at the board, said the mix of efforts "is evolving."

"There's definitely a lot going on," but the merit pay concept is too new to have proven itself good or bad, she said.

Tennessee teachers beg to differ.

Too complicated, too time consuming, divisive, unfair and unrealistic are just a few of the printable adjectives teachers use to describe the plan. Even state education officials concede that the original program needed extensive overhauling to be a minimally acceptable incentive tool.