Big news from DC! It looks like Rhee got most of what she wanted:

School districts around the country are eyeing a tentative deal that would make unionized teachers in Washington, D.C., eligible for merit pay, although district officials know replicating the model will hardly be easy.

For years, teachers unions have fought efforts to link members' compensation to improved outcomes in their classrooms, partly because of the difficulty of tying one teacher's efforts to student learning.

The deal between the district and the local teachers' union, announced Wednesday, is a coup for D.C.'s aggressive schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee, who had long sought to inject performance criteria into teacher evaluations for her 45,000-student system.

Teachers in the D.C. system can currently make a maximum of $87,000, but under the new system, that would rise to up to $147,000.

"We're really talking about being able to offer salaries that would compel people to become a teacher because they know they're going to be compensated at the right level," Ms. Rhee said.

She added that the new contract also gets rid of "ridiculous hurdles" to removing teachers who are not producing results. "If you are rated ineffective at the end of the year, you are terminated from the system," she said.

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· APRIL 8, 2010