Nearly all the teachers qualified for merit pay in a Minnesota school district reports the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s “Q Comp” program gives high-quality teachers up to $2,000 annually for meeting personal, classroom and school goals.
In the last round of evaluations in the 2006-07 year, 603 teachers “exceeded standards,” six “met standards” and not a single one fell below standards. Even considering their good reputation, is it really possible that not a single teacher is falling behind?
. . . Asked how the few teachers who don’t meet the highest standard must feel, state Sen. Chris Gerlach, R-Apple Valley, laughed.
“Those must be the ones under indictment or something,” he said. A merit-pay system that isn’t more selective, he said, is simply a pay increase.
Via Core Knowledge Blog.
Is that in the Lake Wobegon school district where all the students are above average?
What did anyone expect? After all, Lake Wobegon IS in Minnesota.
Welcome to the marvelous world of teacher’s union contracts.
> A merit-pay system that isn’t more selective, he said, is simply a pay increase.
Paging Dr. Obvious!
A few years back (10-15?) my parents did a houseswap with some people in small-town Canada (Ontario, I think), and the big news while they were there was that for years the teachers’ union had presented a proposed pay scale with 15 steps, whereby those on step 1 would be paid very little, and those on step 15 would be paid a great deal, and proportionally for those in between. For many years (20? 30?), the city authorities had been approving these salary schedules, until some citizen finally went to the trouble of dividing the total teachers’ salaries in the district budget by the total number of teachers. The number was way higher than anticipated, and they soon discovered that all of the teachers had been in steps 14 and 15 for years, without anyone else ever noticing.