The Schoolyard Bully

From the tone of this article, you'd have to think it's the NEA and the AFT.

A piece from the article that doesn't work:

Or consider performance-based pay. Forty percent of teachers leave the classroom within their first five years on the job — in some measure because they don’t stand to gain the same performance-based pay raises available to their private-sector counterparts. Merit pay would help public schools retain good teachers by paying them more.

Let's note first that "in some measure" is a wonderfully inexact phrase; it could be one teacher, it could be all of them. Let's note too that as long as teaching is a government function there's a built-in incentive to keep costs vis-a-vis payroll down, so this idea that there's an untapped funding source out there just waiting to go to teachers is a figment of the imagination.

I'm taking a school law class now taught by a former superintendent who now does a ton of work for school districts locally as a hearing officer, investigator, and superintendent search consultant. He looked kindly on the proposed merit pay plan out of Idaho that would have given teachers raises of about $3,000 in return for giving up tenure; if you extrapolate that same number into Washington, with 80,000 teachers, you'd be looking at a cost of $240,000,000. It's not doable.

I think that if you do it right merit pay could work, under the perfect conditions and appropriate reasons. We can't pretend, though, that merit pay is a way to solve the salary gap, and it has to be acknowledged that (as with most things in life) it's impossible to do in a completely fair manner.

I do enjoy the discussion, though.