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.
