This message from one teachers' union
Editorials
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Saturday, December 9, 2006
Your boss comes to you at work. He sits down in your cubicle and says next year you’ll be eligible to receive a bonus based on your performance.
Everybody in the office will be eligible. He hopes it helps morale.
This won’t be a Christmas bonus, he explains, but extra money based on your performance. Your base salary wouldn’t change (except for the annual increase you get ’most every year). Your pay certainly wouldn’t go down. But the company has decided to start rewarding its best employees, and you’d be eligible.
The powers that be, however, aren’t sure just how to set up the bonus plan. The directors need some time to think it over, get input from employees like you, and generally see how much the home office back East will allow the branch office to pay in these bonuses. Whaddaya think? he asks.
HOW MANY of us, on being told about a deal like this, would rear back and say: “In any other business, who in their right mind would be asked to vote on a blank contract? Who would not be totally insulted?”
Totally insulted? A blank contract?
What the—?
Naive us, we thought the valued employee would be happy to take the boss up on that bonus, and maybe be glad he worked for such a progressive company. Even shake the boss’s hand. Think about it: The man—and The Man—is offering you more money. And all you have to do is the best job you can. Maybe the company doesn’t know how to go about handing out the bonuses yet, but at least somebody somewhere is thinking.
In business, this sort of thing happens every day.
At least, this sort of thing happens every day in The Real World.
But the world of an educrat is different. The bosses of the teachers’ unions live in a world where everybody must be paid the same—or at least be paid according to the same, single standard: time served. That way, no matter how good (or bad) a teacher is, he can be sure to collect the same paycheck week after week, month after month. Performance needn’t count.
Teacher A can be a dynamic can-do type who gives students her cell phone number so they can call her if they need help with their homework. She reads up on the newest teaching techniques on her own time, spends her weekends drawing up lesson plans, and, well, you know how the best teachers are.
Teacher B may be just one of those drones marking time till retirement. The only thing she cares about is, well, you have to wonder what if anything she does really care about.
The head of the Arkansas Education Association told a group of teachers earlier this week that Rogers’ school district should turn down all that cash the feds are offering—and turn it down for at least a year, maybe two, or maybe until Mr. AEA Boss can figure out some other reasons not to reward the most effective teachers.
The feds want to invest another $43 million in local merit pay programs between now and next year, and they’re looking for a few good school districts to start the ball rolling and begin submitting those grant applications and raising test scores.
Dan Marzoni, the AEA’s president, calls the idea absurd. Or as he advised the district: “Work with committees, slowly and carefully, to make sure any merit-pay plan is carefully built and very, very fair. To come up with a proposal within the time frame proposed here seems to me to be absurd.”
After all, the deadline for applying for the federal grant is only February 12th. That’s two full months away. Who ever heard of a bureaucracy making a decision that fast?
It’s not as if the
