Washington Post business columnist Steven Pearlstein writes today about Michelle Rhee’s proposed teacher-pay plan.

Sure, there will be times when teachers will be treated in an arbitrary and capricious way if they give up their tenure rights. Guess what: It happens all the time in the private sector, where hiring, promotion and pay decisions are sometimes made with incomplete information, favoritism, or undue emphasis on one factor or another. But despite this imperfection, despite the numerous instances of unfairness and poor judgment, somehow the vast majority of Americans manage to find a job, move up the ladder and enjoy their work, and companies manage to operate successfully and turn a profit. Pretty incredible, huh?

If the candidates aren’t going to take my advice, surely the National Education Association isn’t going to either. But still, let me offer one suggestion to its executive director, John Wilson: Find a different line of attack against merit pay than this one:

The unions oppose [merit pay] because it puts too much emphasis on one measure and doesn’t consider factors outside teachers’ control, John Wilson, the executive director of the 3.2-million-member NEA, said in an interview here.

“It’s very tough to hold the faculty accountable for test scores without holding students and parents accountable,” he said.

That’s a great point, John. Let’s figure out a way to hold third-graders “accountable” for learning to read. “Suzy, until you decode those ten words, no recess for you!” Or parents: “Mr. Smith, we’re going to garnish your wages unless you show up for next week’s PTA meeting.”

Mr. Wilson should just be honest: the NEA will support merit pay when hell freezes over. Which, according to Al Gore, is unlikely to happen anytime soon.

While taking the Washington Teachers Union to task today, the Post is mostly spot on. They are right to point out that the union is largely acting against the interests of its members, especially in terms of how much money is being offered to all teachers, green and red track alike. They run into some trouble near the end, however, when they address the issue of seniority. Professing they find the opposition by older experienced teachers “perplexing”, the Post editors ask: “Isn’t the argument for the seniority pay scale based on the notion that experienced teachers do a better job?”

At first glance, this seems nothing more than a stock rhetorical question getting at the heart of a contradiction—experienced teachers should be “better” and therefore benefit from and support merit pay. If experience is correlated with performance, we should be seeing the younger teachers up in arms. They’re not, of course, and that’s the point, argues the Post. But there’s a bigger issue here, and one that reveals why the unions and senior teachers have much to lose by Rhee’s plan. The Post points out the problem without even realizing it: “Isn’t the argument for the seniority pay scale based on the notion that experienced teachers do a better job?” These senior teachers wouldn’t just be putting their own jobs at risk; they would be confirming the illogicality of the seniority pay scale and in large part, the seniority based structure of teachers’ unions (and unions in general) all together. The senior teachers lose their non-monetary perks, the unions’ power structures are undercut. Their opposition doesn’t seem so “perplexing” after all.

During Saturday’s “Saddleback civil forum” with candidates Barack Obama and John McCain, pastor Rick Warren asked a single education question. (That he asked an education question at all was probably viewed as a major victory by Ed in ‘08.)

80 percent of Americans recently polled said they believe in merit pay. Now, for teachers, do you—I’m not asking do you think all teachers should get a raise. Do you think better teachers should be paid better? They should be paid more than poor teachers?

What a lame question. Not because merit pay isn’t important, or because there aren’t differences between the candidates. (Obama basically said “maybe” and McCain basically said “yes.”)

It’s lame because it has almost nothing to do with federal education policy. The program that all of this merit pay pandering is about—the Teacher Incentive Fund—provides $100 million per year to a handful of school districts. That’s one-quarter of one percent of the federal K-12 budget. To be sure, this program has been an important driver of innovation, but it’s tiny, and it impacts just a slender number of American schools.

What’s especially disappointing is that Warren asked a number of interesting questions on other topics. (”Who are the three wisest people you know?” “What was the greatest moral failure in your life?” “Does evil exist?”)

So moderators, if you want to ask interesting, consequential questions on education, try these:

1. How would you define a “failing school”?

2. How do you think most failing schools got to be that way?

3. What should the federal government do, if anything, about these failing schools?

Honest answers to these questions would provide keen insights into the candidates’ positions on accountability, on the question of forces outside of schools’ control, and on their thinking regarding the appropriate federal role in education. We’ll be listening.

I have to admit that I had been hoping for a while someone would do this. A new advocacy group founded this past spring, Strong Schools DC, has fomented a grassroots revolution and the D.C. teachers union is up in arms, reports the Washington Post. Strong Schools is relying on the common sense of teachers to get Michelle Rhee’s new merit green-red funding scheme passed. Instead of pressuring the union, which as much as we’d like hell to freeze over, is probably never going to support the abolition of tenure, Strong Schools is recruiting teachers to spread their message. It’s subversive and I like it.

The premise is simple: if you reward teachers for good work, as Rhee’s green track does, they’ll support you. It’s called self-interest and it has our favorite anti-reformer Randi Weingarten off balance. Apparently she’s “never seen anything like this”—that’s a shocker. Treating teachers like a herd of sheep, who can’t be fired, who have no incentive to improve achievement except for their own conscience, and who are afraid to be evaluated is never going to recruit the talent and hard work needed in the troubled urban classroom. Teaching should not be another civil service job. Teaching is hard. Teaching requires skills, ingenuity, patience, and teamwork. Teachers should be treated with respect—and what better way to show respect than to have pay match performance-like it does in thousands of other professions?

My congratulations to Strong Schools DC. Viva la revolución!

Update: I couldn’t help but be struck by the irony of this “joint proposal” from our the AFT and the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers.

“Whether on the job or preparing for work, Americans deserve the education, training and support that equips them with the skills they need to compete in the global marketplace and for the jobs of today and tomorrow,” said AFT President Randi Weingarten. “What is at stake is nothing less than the prosperous and safe future of our country.”

Wow, sounds like the teaching profession to me. Randi takes the cake, again.

Doesn’t appear that student performance is a part of this new proposed pay structure by the teachers’ union in Australia. A hundred indicators and not a one on how the students are performing?

Eduwonk Andy thinks that merit pay is the new vouchers. (Actually now he says “everyone” knows that to be the case.) Not really. Merit pay is more like charters—an issue that is promoted primarily by Republicans (especially at the state level) but which enjoys significant support among reform-minded Democrats. A better analogy is virtual schools, particularly the no-holds-barred, outside-the-system versions, which are openly despised by the teachers unions and increasingly under fire.

I used to work at K12, a company that manages lots of these virtual charter schools around the country, and have been following their “public policy challenges” over the years. Consider this episode from Wisconsin, for example, where the unions led a legal fight to shut down these options. (Thankfully the legislature later forged a compromise to keep them open, after thousands of angry parents turned up the heat.) It’s easy to understand why the unions see this as a high-stakes debate: such schools replace labor (teachers) with capital (technology)—the great fear of organized workers. More specifically, by relying on parents or other guardians to provide much of the instruction, virtual charters are able to put in place much larger teacher-to-student ratios than brick-and-mortar schools can. (On the order of 50:1 instead of 25:1.)

And now it looks like the issue of virtual schools is shaping up to be a point of contention for the 2008 presidential election. (See this excellent Education Week article for the scoop.) The candidates are pretty close on merit pay—but far apart on virtual schools. So Andy, which would you consider to be the “new vouchers” now?

Judging from several of the comments on my last post, the ideas that undergird merit pay for teachers are not lost only on NPR reporters. Corey, for example, writes:

Does LeBron play better when he’s paid $20 million than if he, and everybody else, were paid $1 million? That’s a legitimate question. And different from asking if it’s fair to pay LeBron the same as everybody else when he’s clearly better.

It’s also a different question than asking whether the players currently earning $1 million will work harder to try and earn as much as LeBron than they would if they had no potential for salary increases.

What is missing here is an understanding of, inter alia, the job market. Merit pay is engineered not only to develop better teachers by encouraging those already in the field to work harder, but it’s also—and maybe more so—designed to attract talented people to classrooms and keep the best teachers from leaving and pursuing other careers. So, yes, it is incredibly foolish to ask, as Larry Abramson did, “Is performance pay working if it just rewards teachers who are already doing a good job?”

Candidates Obama and McCain have both spoken about their support for merit pay for teachers. NPR’s Morning Edition wondered if such pay plans actually work, so reporter Larry Abramson went to Colorado to find out. 

After interviewing a teacher who has benefited financially from merit pay, but who doesn’t believe the bonuses have actually improved her teaching ability, Abramson asks:

This raises another question: Is performance pay working if it just rewards teachers who are already doing a good job?

Wow. Can we imagine such a question being applied to another professional field? Is performance pay working if it just rewards LeBron James when he’s already doing a good job? If NPR’s reporters have handy a dictionary, and they must, they might want to check out the definitional passage below the word incentive. 

This fall, Denver Public Schools will introduce the Mile High Parent Campaign, which encourages moms and dads to devote 5,280 minutes a year to their children’s educations. Cities situated at lower elevations are advised not to emulate the plan.

In other news from my hometown, ProComp, widely touted as the nation’s model merit pay plan, is provoking some nasty skirmishes between district and union leaders.

The Economist reports that Lousiana Governor Bobby Jindal apparently struck a deal with state legislators to get his voucher bill passed—a 123 percent pay raise for them in return for an escape from failing schools for 1,500 kids. Unfortunately for Jindal, voters are much more peeved about the politicking than they are pleased about the school reform.

Michelle Rhee’s radical teacher pay proposal also made this week’s issue. (The Gadfly covered it, too.)

While offering advice on how Obama can defend accusations of socialist tendencies, Matt Miller expounds upon the idea of merit pay in the pages of today’s Wall Street Journal. Miller writes:

[Obama] should make a $30 billion pot of federal money available to states and districts to boost salaries in poor schools, provided the teachers unions make two key concessions. First, they have to scrap their traditional “lockstep” pay scale. In this scheme, a physics grad has to be paid the same as a phys-ed major if both have the same tenure in the classroom, and a teacher whose students make remarkable gains each year gets rewarded no differently than one whose students languish. Second, it has to be easy to fire the awful teachers that are blighting the lives of a million poor children.

There are two key points here: the plan itself and the plan’s funding scheme. That we still have a lockstep pay scale in the first place simply boggles the mind, and Miller is right to want to abolish it. Making teachers’ salaries dependent on tenure makes so little sense it’s a wonder physics grads ever buy into this cockamamie scheme. As for banishing underperforming teachers from the classroom, again on point. I may not have gone so far as to argue that these teachers are “blighting the lives of a million poor children,” but I won’t interfere if Miller wants to call a spade a spade.

His plan goes awry when he suggests that a $30-billion “pot of federal money” be made available to subsidize these newly increased merit-based salaries. Miller fails to identify the source of this mysterious pot, and I worry what else would have to be slashed at its advent. How about we focus first on ending the mismanagement of funds already being channeled into schools, then think about falling back on the timeless adage of “throwing money at the problem.” Perhaps a plan like weighted student funding would do just the trick?

In short, Miller contradicts himself when he calls his plan “a common-sense, cost-effective way to get the teachers we need to the kids who need them most.” Merit-pay, firing bad teachers, and knocking the unions into line are matters of common sense, but the day $30 billion becomes “cost-effective,” I’ll eat my mouse and keyboard.

Speaking of which, the day the unions actually allow such a plan to proceed, I’ll eat my entire computer, mother board and all. Wishful thinking, Mr. Miller.

When New Jersey Commissioner of Education Lucille Davy called the severance package of the retiring Keansburg, N.J., Superintendent, “an absolutely outrageous, excessive, ridiculous package to pay anyone,” she didn’t really mean “anyone.” “Anyone” does not include high level consultants and traders, CEOs and chairmen, or partners from big firms who routinely receive these sorts of financial benefits while no one bats an eye. According to the New  York Times, Superintendent Barbara Trzeszkowski will walk away from 38.5 years of service with $740,846—$14,449 for unused vacation days, $170,137 for unused sick days, and $556,290 in severance—plus an annual pension of $103,889.

Is this the future of merit pay? Chairman of the Keansburg school board, Joe Hazeldine, explains that Trzeszkowski was “worth every single penny she earned, if not more.” In fact,

“She took Keansburg from the bottom of the Abbott districts to the top. Our college acceptance rate quadrupled. We had kids going to Ivy League schools. That doesn’t just happen. How do you put a price on that?”

The responses to Trzeszkowski’s contract have centered on whether or not the district’s Abbott classification should come into play. Named after a NJ Supreme Court case in 1990, which identified thirty-one districts as providing an “inadequate” and “unconstitutional” education, one of the qualifying Abbott criteria is overall district poverty. Keansburg is still receiving (according to the Times) 77 percent of its budget in Abbott dollars—to the tune of $31 million.

I’ll admit that a district this strapped for cash probably shouldn’t be spending this much on one employee, regardless of her accomplishments. I’d also have liked to see Keansburg lose its Abbott classification all together if its superintendent was going to get six figures. But maybe this is the type of money it takes to attract needed talent to struggling districts like this one. Would we all be as upset if Keansburg were more affluent—and $800,000 were easier to spare? Above all, why do we think it is so outrageous to pay handsomely for a job well done in this context when we have no problem with it in other professions?

Performance-based pay (PBP) programs for teachers have been growing, especially since the advent of the federal Teacher Incentive Fund program a couple years ago. ProComp out of Denver is probably the best known PBP and rather unique since it’s being funded by a $25-million mill levy approved by taxpayers. Like many of these plans, ProComp is extremely complicated, which is part of the reason that management and union reached an impasse in contract negotiations over how to change and improve it for the next iteration.

ProComp is a voluntary program—indeed, this was one of the major reasons it was passed—and less than half of Denver teachers have now joined the plan. That means roughly $87 million in ProComp dollars will be left over at the end of the 2008-09 school year. Not surprising, DPS says it could find a place for those extra greenbacks, perhaps by directing it to younger teachers leaving the system at high rates. But Henry Roman, involved in the program from the get-go, says not so fast: “At this stage, I feel more information is needed before people make final recommendations.” Indeed. Before that money is redirected anywhere, stakeholders need to stop and ask themselves why so few teachers have signed on to the program.

Having evaluated one of these programs myself, it’s often teacher misunderstanding that’s a primary roadblock to progress. And from what I know, ProComp is as complicated as they come. And it does not, as some have proposed, reconstruct a teacher’s base salary from scratch. Instead, teachers layer the base with various cash amounts through fulfillment of or service in a variety of capacities. The laundry list of eligible cash categories covers both traditional ways of building earnings (e.g, masters degree) and more forward-thinking methods (e.g., student achievement, teaching in hard to staff schools). Many of these “layers,” though, become part of a teacher’s salary year in and year out—a factor which some say is currently being overlooked with all of this talk of milk-and-honey ProComp surplus.

Teachers either consider the program too risky to get involved or they simply don’t trust it. But really, how risky is a laundry list of salary add-ons? And why, after so much time, energy, and positive P.R. on this effort (up until now), do teachers still look at it with a suspicious eye? This well-publicized impasse doesn’t help. Let’s hope this initiative doesn’t get totally derailed. The Denver voters were sold a program that awarded teachers for raising student achievement, improving teaching skills,  and taking on more difficult assignments. That’s how the money should be spent. If we can’t get more teachers to volunteer for it, so be it. Go back to the drawing board or let the money sit. But don’t creatively redirect it so it no longer aligns with its original purpose.

As an aside, I’m wondering if volunteering is really the way to go with these PBP programs. We have another one starting up right here in our own backyard. It’s also voluntary, though on a much smaller scale (just 12 schools). With up to a $10,000 dollar bonus, might teachers suspicions disappear?

If I were an anonymous blogger and had to pick a clever moniker with which to sign my pithiest posts, I might actually opt for something similar to that decided upon by this person, who goes by “Dr. Homeslice.” I’m edgy and educated, it bespeaks.

It’s safe to assume, though, that Dr. Homeslice does not possess a PhD in economics. The veiled vituperator takes me to task for suggesting that teachers’ unions in fact hold down educators’ wages and make it difficult to attract talented people to the profession. They do this in several ways, such as demanding smaller class sizes (i.e., more teachers) and across-the-board salary raises, which means that every teacher—the good, the bad, the ugly—no matter which subject he teaches—physics, English, dodgeball—receives the same, measly bump. Why not have fewer teachers, make sure they’re good teachers, and pay them a lot more? This seems to me an elementary point, and I’m always puzzled that clever, savvy people (doctors, even!) have such a taxing time accepting it.

Yesterday, we noted that Kevin Donnelly, authority on all things related to Aussie-ed, was displeased that Victoria was offering its teachers a massive, across-the-board pay raise decoupled from accountability. With principals, though, it’s another story.

Senator Barack Obama appeared on Fox News Sunday and (among other things) spoke of his school reform bona fides. Chris Wallace asked him to name an issue where he’d be willing to buck the Democratic Party, and Obama pointed to education:

I’ve been very clear about the fact—and sometimes I’ve gotten in trouble with the teachers’ union on this—that we should be experimenting with charter schools. We should be experimenting with different ways of compensating teachers...

So far so good; though charter schools were mainstream once upon a time (Bill and Hillary Clinton were big supporters back in the 90s), the issue has become increasingly polarized. And while the UFT has a couple of charter schools itself, most unions have been on a rampage against them. And he has gotten in trouble over his pay-for-performance comments, as at the NEA conference last summer. But here come the caveats:

WALLACE: You mean merit pay?

OBAMA: Well, merit pay, the way it’s been designed, I think, is based on just a single standardized test—I think is a big mistake, because the way we measure performance may be skewed by whether or not the kids are coming into school already three years or four years behind. But I think that having assessment tools and then saying, “You know what? Teachers who are on career paths to become better teachers, developing themselves professionally—that we should pay excellence more.” I think that’s a good idea, so...

What he describes here—paying teachers for “developing themselves professionally”—is exactly what the teachers’ unions want. He completely backed off his pay-for-performance proposal. So how exactly is this an example of bucking the Democratic Party?

At his high school alma matter yesterday, John McCain made his first major education speech (not just the first in this campaign—the first in his life, as far as I can tell). He voiced support for several sound policy ideas, including school choice and merit pay. But what’s most worth noting was his rhetoric, particularly about teachers. Seeking to avoid the mistakes of another war hero, Bob Dole, who attacked teachers unions in his 1996 convention speech, and was made to look anti-teacher, he clearly wanted to side with excellent teachers while decrying the bureaucracies and unions that defend their incompetent peers.

Much of the speech is a stirring personal account of his days at Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Virginia. He speaks glowingly of his favorite teacher there—William Ravenel, who was “as wise and capable as anyone could expect to be... loved English literature, and taught us to love it as well... He was simply the best man at the school; one of the best men I have ever known.”

Then he broadens his praise to include all teachers—or at least all good ones:

Teaching is among the most honorable professions any American can join... Theirs is an underpaid profession, dedicated to the service of others, which offers little in the way of the rewards that much of popular culture encourages us to crave—wealth and celebrity... We should be wise enough to understand that those who work diligently and lovingly to educate the children we entrust to their care, deserve the gratitude and support many of us wish we had given those of our own teachers, who once made such a difference in our own lives.

Then goes for the pivot:

We should reward the best of them with merit pay, and encourage teachers who have lost their focus on the children they teach to find another line of work.

Then goes for the throat:

Schools should compete to be innovative, flexible and student-centered institutions, not safe havens for the uninspired and unaccountable... There is no reason on earth that this great country should not possess the best education system in the world. We have let fear of uncertainty, and a view that education’s primary purpose is to protect jobs for teachers and administrators degrade our sense of the possible in America. There is no excuse for it.

I would have skipped the “protect jobs” line (who really holds that “view” anyway?), but overall it’s a nuanced, and appropriate, discussion about state of teaching in America. Bottom line: John McCain is no Bob Dole.