Education Reform In The News

TEACHER UNIONS AND MERIT PAY
Editorial, Investor's Business Daily, March 8, 2000

        The union that represents Los Angeles teachers opposes a plan that would increase salaries. That's an odd position for an organization that claims to want to increase teacher's pay. Too bad the union's obstinacy isn't an isolated case.

        If it were, public schools across the country probably would be turning out better students.

        The Los Angeles Unified School District is proposing a new contract that includes a 6% raise. But it also contains what the unions consider a poison pill - a merit-pay proposal.

        Teachers at the district's worst-performing schools could earn an extra $ 7,000 a year if their schools' test scores improve and they develop their teaching skills. Teachers could also earn higher pay if their students show notable improvement in standardized tests.

        There's plenty of room for improvement. Test scores of L.A. Unified students routinely rank near the bottom of the state, while dropout rates are near the top.

        With the merit pay plan, the overall raise for L.A. teachers would be 10%.

        Predictably - yet still incredibly - the union says no. The Los Angeles Times reports that the union's president is threatening to strike over the plan. And he's not taking a new position. Detroit school officials had to drop their merit pay plan after teachers went on strike for 10 days at the beginning of the current school year.

        Is that how unions plan to improve their members' lives? By striking against the chance not only to make more money, but also to let teachers increase their own sense of worth through better job performance? It's doubly odd in a system where teaching self-esteem is more important than teaching basic academics.

        Linking pay to performance has long been anathema to teacher unions, even though teachers in private schools usually operate under a merit-pay system. It's no coincidence that student achievement is higher there than in public schools.

        As retired school administrator Henry F. Cotton wrote last year in Education Week: "Education is perhaps the only profession, absent those in the former communist world, that has tried to succeed while totally delinking reward from performance. The result is a system that undermines the work ethic and destroys productivity."

        Instead of merit pay - which would spur productivity - the union wants an across-the-board 15% raise. And that's telling. The union doesn't want teachers to be held accountable for their performance.

        Let's be clear about what the teachers' union seeks. It wants a system in which teachers who do a good job aren't rewarded, and teachers who don't aren't punished.

        Unions are marching against prevailing attitudes when they fight merit pay. California's Public Policy Institute released a survey in early 1999 that found 84% of the public wants teachers paid on the basis of merit.

        Sometimes widely held opinions can be wrong. But not in this case. The unions are rejecting common sense and basic economic law - and, in the end, the children.

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Link to further coverage on the Los Angeles District's plan.

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