Paying Brave Teachers What They're Worth

Jay Matthews:

Eighteen award-winning teachers have come up with a performance-pay plan for teachers. It is full of good ideas. These people know what success in the classroom means. So why am I having trouble accepting the whole package?

The teachers, backed by the Center for Teaching Quality in Hillsborough, N.C., and calling themselves the TeacherSolutions team, break their plan into 10 parts. I will describe it in a moment and name the 18. There is no better use of the vast resources of the Internet than to give credit to good educators for hard work.

Some parts of their plan are solid. Breaking the base-pay system into three tiers -- novice, professional and expert -- makes sense. Rewarding teachers who help students make significant gains is an obvious step. Giving after-hours leadership assignments to the best teachers, not the oldest, and paying them for that time would also be an improvement. I am even willing to concede that teachers should be judged on improvement of their students on more than just one kind of assessment.

But the teachers trouble me with point number four, "Provide additional pay for additional degrees and professional development, but only if the training is relevant." And they lose me completely with point number nine, "Be brave, be bold."

Mike Antonuccia has more.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at May 9, 2007 1:26 AM
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