I know the free market ideologues believe sprinkling some magic competition dust will improve schools but I have never actually seen anybody show how teachers or their unions are the problem we face with education. Blaming unions and teachers is an ideological complaint from the right wing. I am not saying it may not have some merit but on its own it is inadequate to understand our educational system. Oh and we have a country where a largeish number of people believe in creationism, so how smart do you think adults are in this country.

If we want to improve education we need to look at a lot more then just teachers pay. How about fully funding and expanding Head Start programs? (These have a long history of success)

Making preschool cheaper and more available?

Having parents get more involved with their children’s schools?

Offer more vocational programs for high school students who aren’t on a college track?

Decrease classroom size especially for grade school kids? ( This has been shown to have a consistent positive impact on children’s performance)

What is strange about this is that it’s not how merit pay works for most people in the real world. For most people, our pay is based on our boss’ evaluation of our performance, which may or may not incorporate some sort of standard measurement of performance, but is rarely solely based on that universal measurement. In the case of schools, this would usually mean simply giving principals more autonomy over personnel decisions. Particularly in smaller districts, it then becomes pretty easy to hold that principal accountable for bad teachers via school board elections (this is obviously not so easy in large districts – but there are ways around this problem).

Badger – classrooms across the country are in fact extraordinarily different. Such is the nature of such a massive country. Does the basic math change? No. Does the method to teach it effectively change from one school to the next? Yes. From one classroom to the next? Yes. From one student to the next? YES. So national standards and tests to measure them fall woefully short of the realities facing teachers (and students) in the real world, regardless of the fact that trig in Arizona is the same as it is in New York.

As far as pay goes, going back 2 generations we find that students were typically not educated by someone with a Masters degree. Many times there wasn’t a Bachelor’s degree. The idea that the common man can’t teach 4th grade math is a proposition continually given but never proved. If anything we are probably eliminating better teachers from the qualified pool because of ridiculous education requirements. The biggest problem with performance based pay is that we pretend we can speak with a level of precision that we simply can’t. A class increasing their Math SAT by 10 points could be a lot of factors, but one of the least likely factors is the comparative skill of the teacher.