Clinton raps teacher merit pay; Obama Navigates Merit Pay Issue

Senators Clinton and Obama are finally talking about education reform, with the latter giving a major speech on it last week.

 

1) Here's an article about what Clinton had to say:

Performance-based merit pay for teachers is a bad idea, Hillary Rodham Clinton told Iowa teachers on Monday...[But] she does support incentives for teachers who work in geographic areas and on subjects where there are shortages. And she has said she supports "schoolwide pay for performance programs because I think that the school has to be viewed as a whole unit with everybody working together."

It's not as bad as the headline appears, as she supports differential pay in two of the three areas in which it's needed: extra pay for: a) teaching in the toughest schools; b) subject areas in which there are teacher shortages (typically math, science and special ed); and c) the best teachers.  Unfortunately, she doesn't support c), the most critical one, but at least she supports schoolwide merit pay, presumably along the lines of what was recently announced at 200 schools in NYC.

 

2) Obama, to his credit, does support merit pay for individual teachers, albeit only when the teachers union supports it:

Obama's willingness to boost teacher pay based on performance separates him from his Democratic rivals, including Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., who supports school-based, rather than individual teacher-based, merit pay. The broader political significance of his unorthodox proposal is that it gives him an opportunity to buttress his argument that he is the Democrat best positioned to bring people together for purposes of challenging the status quo.

"I believe it is a bold move on his part," said Marc Lampkin, the executive director of Strong American Schools, a non-partisan education group funded by the foundations of Bill Gates and Eli Broad. "It is a differentiator. It is the kind of bold initiative that we need to sustain broad education reform."

 

While winning plaudits from advocates of merit pay like Lampkin, Obama avoided a full-scale revolt from unaligned teachers' unions by carefully calibrating his proposal.

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Clinton raps teacher merit pay

By MIKE WILSON, Associated Press WriterMon Nov 19, 5:50 PM ET

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071119/ap_po/clinton_schools_1

Performance-based merit pay for teachers is a bad idea, Hillary Rodham Clinton told Iowa teachers on Monday. School uniforms for kids, however, is worth looking at.

Merit pay for teachers "could be demeaning and discouraging, and who would decide" who would receive it, she said in a meeting with teachers at Cunningham Elementary. "It would open a whole lot of problems."

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Obama Navigates Merit Pay Issue

'08 Democrat Wins Plaudits for Challenging Democratic Orthodoxy 

Analysis by TEDDY DAVIS and SUNLEN MILLER
November 20, 2007

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=3894699&page=1

 

Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., appears to have carefully threaded the needle on the contentious issue of merit pay: his proposal to reward teachers based on student performance, which he unveiled Tuesday in New Hampshire, was praised by education reform advocates while being cautiously welcomed by the head of an influential teachers' union.

"Where they do succeed," Obama said of teachers, "I think it's time we rewarded them for it."

"Cities like Denver have already proven that by working with teachers, this can work," Obama continued. "That we can find new ways to increase pay that are developed with teachers, not imposed on them and not just based on an arbitrary test score."

Obama's willingness to boost teacher pay based on performance separates him from his Democratic rivals, including Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., who supports school-based, rather than individual teacher-based, merit pay. The broader political significance of his unorthodox proposal is that it gives him an opportunity to buttress his argument that he is the Democrat best positioned to bring people together for purposes of challenging the status quo.