Education Week on merit pay

I love Education Week. Weekly news and information about my favorite topic delivered right to my house is a happy thing, and their archives have helped me plenty of times, especially when I was working on my Master's degree. Today I read an article from a couple of weeks ago on Teacher Pay for Performance with the usual arguments for and against merit pay. The interesting thing to me was the
message board that they have set up to discuss the issue, and some of the sad, sad comments within. For example:

• There are only so many schools with students who actually care to learn. These upper-income schools would attract the best candidates and then the remaining teachers would be left with the low-income and/or underperforming schools.
  

It's precisely this sort of attitude that makes NCLB necessary. "Shucks, it's not anyone's fault but the kids', really. We can't be expected to try and teach kids who don't want to learn. Bummer--let's give up!" That anyone would say this, much less someone identifying themselves as a NBPTS certified teacher, is profoundly sad.

• I can, and do, lead my students to well planned, diverse learning experiences that challenge them at all levels of cognition while utilizing a plethera of research-based instructional strategies to reach all learning stlyes.
  Unfortunatly, as with the proverbial "horse" they can be led to learning, but I cannot make them learn. The students today are content to disrupt, disrespect, do little or no homework
  (or classwork), and fail knowing they will be passed from grade to grade with no accountability on their part. Parents are absently copliant and assume no personal responsibility for their own failure to hold their children accountable.

The first part of this reads like satire, someone trying to hook together as many catchphrases as they can to try and win a game of buzzword bingo. If only she'd talked about changing paradigms to ensure cross-cultural collaboration in professional learning communities....

If this person is serious, though--it doesn't matter how great you think the lesson is. If they're not learning, you're not doing a good enough job teaching, period. If you're patting yourself on the back for how "well planned" and "diverse" you are while at the same time not getting any results, you're not doing a good job. Effort without results is fine for t-ball, but it's not much of a way to teach a public school.

I'm leaning surprisingly right on this blog. Cripes, I voted for Nader twice and I love my union. Must be the spring weather making me dizzy.