Ny Times Article on Teacher Merit Pay

My comments will be in line.

Long Reviled, Merit Pay Gains Among Teachers

By SAM DILLON

MINNEAPOLIS — For years, the unionized teaching profession opposed few ideas more vehemently than merit pay, but those objections appear to be eroding as school districts in dozens of states experiment with plans that compensate teachers partly based on classroom performance.

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Minnesota’s $86 million teacher professionalization and merit pay initiative has spread to dozens of the state’s school districts, and it got a lift this month when teachers voted overwhelmingly to expand it in Minneapolis. A major reason it is prospering, Gov. Tim Pawlenty said in an interview, is that union leaders helped develop and sell it to teachers.

“As a Republican governor, I could say, ‘Thou shalt do this,’ and the unions would say, ‘Thou shalt go jump in the lake,’ ” Mr. Pawlenty said. “But here they partnered with us.”

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“It’s looking like there’s a critical mass,” Professor Odden said. The movement to experiment with teacher pay, he added, “is still not ubiquitous, but it’s developing momentum.”

Some plans still run into strong opposition from teachers and their unions, as in Texas and Florida this year, where skeptical teachers rejected proposals from school districts. An incentive-pay proposal by Chancellor Joel I. Klein of the New York City public schools has stalled, with city officials and the teachers’ union blaming each other.

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Merit pay, or compensating teachers for classroom performance rather than their years on the job and coursework completed, found some support in the 1980s among policy makers and school administrators, who saw it as a way to encourage good teachers to work harder and to weed out the bad ones. But teachers saw it as a gimmick used by principals to reward cronies based on favoritism.

And this is the crux of the matter. Teacher's unions are so strident and aggressive because principals have no adult supervision.

I have experienced this with my own children, where a principal, either directly, or through coddling one fo their toadies, have cost the district with NO negative consequences.

The Department of Education is encouraging schools and districts to try merit pay. [Last week it awarded 18 new federal grants, building on 16 others distributed last November. That makes a total of $80 million that the Bush administration has given to schools and districts in 19 states that have incentive pay plans.] ......

This action has NOTHING to do with education, and EVERYTHING to do with politics.

Simply put, there is no Bush admin policy apparatus. Everything is political gain, and this is an attempt to weaken teacher's unions.

The positions of the two national teachers’ unions diverge on merit pay. The National Education Association, the larger of the two, has adopted a resolution that labels merit pay, or any other pay system based on an evaluation of teachers’ performance, as “inappropriate.”

The American Federation of Teachers says it opposes plans that allow administrators alone to decide which teachers get extra money or that pay individual teachers based solely on how students perform on standardized test scores, which they consider unreliable. But it encourages efforts to raise teaching quality and has endorsed arrangements that reward teams of teachers whose students show outstanding achievement growth.

This is beacuse the NEA has delusions of grandeur, and see their labor union as secondary to their status as a "professional organization".