stimulant

But not for teachers?

“The tentative deal reached this week between the principals union and the city is being hailed as progress, in part because it provides for merit pay of up to $50,000 a year for principals who excel. Those principals, however, will have to manage their teachers without any ability to pay them more or less based on their performance.”

While I’m pretty dubious of merit pay (any reform needing a metric usually means testing, rather than teaching), I am also surprised by this:

“It’s always been a mystery to us why the unions oppose merit pay. No one, after all, is talking about reducing the pay of bad teachers, though that would be an improvement on the current system. The discussion is just about paying good teachers more.”

If testing is currently a fact of life, anyway, why do unions oppose merit pay? There are a couple obvious reasons (e.g. school politics is already ridiculously petty and catty, in my experience), but admitting any of them seems a bit self-incriminating.

Update:This is one, anti-union explanation of what’s going on:

Under state policies that either explicitly authorize or tacitly sanction union monopolies, roughly two-thirds of K-12 public school teachers nationwide, including union members and non-members alike, are forced to accept an “exclusive” union agent as their sole spokesman in contract negotiations. Effectively, that means teacher union officials dictate what the compensation policy is.

And here are a few pro-union ideas to balance it out: ‘If there is extra money for merit pay, then why does that money not go to the kids?’ asked Frank Cherry, a sixth-grade teacher at Imperial Beach Elementary School and president of the Southwest Teachers Association. “When somebody’s in La Jolla getting merit pay and we have kids here who don’t have food, something’s wrong there. […] Terry Pesta, president of the San Diego Education Association, the union for San Diego city schools teachers, said: ‘There are so many factors that weigh into student achievement. This is looking at a simple solution of blaming the teachers.’”

Honestly, I’m suspicious [of teacher’s unions].