Here’s a quick followup on the New York City merit-pay plan announced last week. The United Federation of Teachers’ blog says the union-endorsed NYC plan sends a signal to Congress that this is the best way to do performance pay.
“New York City is sending a clear message to the members of Congress considering the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind: the way to improve schools does not lie down the road of setting teacher against teacher, but of bringing teachers together in common cause and effort on behalf of their students,” the UFT’s blog—EdWize—says in this post.
But, as I wrote earlier, Republicans are unlikely to subject federally financed performance pay to collective bargaining.
Even so, many UFT members aren’t enamored with their union’s proposal. Read through the comments on EdWize, and you’ll see that several members don’t agree with their leadership.
“It is a de facto acceptance of the NCLB principle that test scores are the only way to measure growth,” ILuvteaching writes. “I don’t get how I just got another e-mail urging me to fax a letter to Congress against merit pay in NCLB, yet here we are giving it a foot hold in our schools. Whatever happened to equal pay for equal work, the most basic principle of unionism?”
