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Merit pay for teachers a must

There are no bad teachers. Merit pay makes no sense.

Money isn't an issue?

You mean there is $20 million that could have been going for teacher salaries all along? Where have they been hiding it? Why have they been holding out?

Look, I'm the first one to say that the good teachers should get more pay. I work with a few that obviously chose the wrong profession. They are the large minority. I'd love to force them out the door instead of clean up the mess they make every year.

Merit pay won't do that. Some of these teachers are the "veteran" teachers. They teach the best kids due to seniority. Their test scores look great and on paper they are great teachers. However when you ask the students or parents they will tell you otherwise.

Merit pay will increase these kinds of problems. The veterans will take the easy classes with the brightest kids. The new teachers will be banished to teach the low level classes with the toughest kids, make less money than the veterans, and quit.

Utah doesn't need to be forcing more young teachers out the door. We need all the help we can get.

So where have they been hiding this money?

So what you're saying Anonymous is that all teachers are above average?

Anonymous is wrong. Merit pay is a good idea.

It needs to be developed in consultation with our teachers, administrators, parents and student and should reward teachers who are willing to mentor newer teachers, are willing to work in rural and inner-city schools that are struggling and are willing to take on additional assignments and roles outside the classroom in addition to receive more education and training in teaching methodology.

In this I agree with Barack Obama and disagree with John McCain whose view of what merit pay can be is limited. I believe the only reason teachers have been opposed to merit pay in the past is because of the motive behind it (conservatives).

It isn't intended to reward good teachers or improve teaching quality instead it's was intended to punish teachers who often work in difficult circumstances. Once they realize that merit-pay is in their best interest and provides a long-term career for them they will favor it.

This is why we must get away from the idea that there are "bad teachers" instead of teachers who haven't been taught, mentored and received the additional training they need to raise in their careers. It's time for merit pay!

The problem with Utah is they pay their administrators fifty percent more than the top paid teacher. If you don't believe it got to Utahsrighttoknow.com . This is absurd. In California, the principal only gets about ten thousand more than the top paid teacher! This way the money is more evenly distributed. This is how it should be.

Merit pay is a good idea in theory but it is too political in nature!

I love the statement "In a perfect world, people would be paid like rodeo cowboys. Do the job, perform well, and you get a check. Mess up, then we'll see you down the line."

Can we apply this to CEO's too? Increase revenues, keep employees happy, keep the stock price steady, you get paid.

Lay off workers because you can't run the business well enough to make a profit without firing people, you get to be the first one to get the pinkslip.

On teachers, why do we pay them so little? You might think that the people entrusted with the scholastic health of our kids would be paid in a manner similar to the people who care for their physical health.

We are willing to pay doctors hundred of thousands a year, but teahers who ensure scholastic health and future we only pay $30-50,000???

If we want the best people as teachers, in our free market system, we must provide enough of a financial incentive for the smartest people to become teachers instead of Doctors or getting the MBA.

Anonymous, are you being sarcastic? Of course there are bad teachers---I had some of them. There are quite a few bad teacher too, many who got into the profession because they couldn't do anything else and really don't like kids anyway (By the way, I AM a teacher, so I know there are also many wonderful selfless teachers).

I think merit pay is a good idea, as long as the regulation of it is good. It will be important to remember that teachers do not have as much influence on kids as we think--most of the success of students comes from their parents and home life. But if we can keep that in mind and not attribute all student successes and failures to teachers, then maybe we can develop a process for evaluating which teachers really are very skilled in their craft, and reward them for their efforts.

In a perfect world, bosses would have a clue. Given that too many bosses don't, merit pay has great potential to be too unfair. It is possible for a certain teacher to be assigned more than their share of troubled students. The DoD education system that serves the military doesn't have merit pay. What they do have is teachers who do not have an education degree. They have degrees in the actual subject that they teach. They are also paid very well, from 60k to about 75k per year. They value their jobs, they are glad to be there, they aren't kept in near poverty so they can concentrate on their jobs. They are respected.

Utah would do well not to be so cheap with its teachers. Forget Merit Pay until or unless the base pay is raised to a professional level. And for goodness sake lets require teachers who come into the system who are required to teach math to know math. Many teachers do, but too many teachers have weak math skills. A degree in math education is not an indication of a good math education. Require a degree in actual math.

Lower class sizes first to a realistic manageable number, then establish a Merit or Performance Pay. With large class sizes, the teacher is working too much on crowd control to determine teaching performance.

Why should teachers be the only government workers whose pay is tied to performance?

The rodeo analogy used in this editorial is silly and meaningless. You can maybe start to talk about merit pay once class sizes have been reduced to something manageable. Kids are not "widgets" where high test scores can be assured. Every child is different, has different challenges and it is unfair to measure teachers in such a subjective matter. I must say this editorial is superficial and unsubstantive.

There are no degrees in science education that I know of. If there are, I don't know any teachers that have one. We all majored in physics, biology, or chemistry.

I majored in Biology and took all of the same classes as the pre-med majors except for a few of the advanced anatomy classes. I definitely could make more money with my biology degree by working for the fed. govt.

After 16 years I still love to teach but often wonder what I got myself into financially...

"But haven't teachers been grading the students subjectively on performance since the School of Athens? Don't drama teachers, shop teachers � even coaches � hand out grades based on their own evaluation of a student's work and capability? The system has worked well for students. With oversight and some clear-cut criteria, it should work equally as well for teachers."

This has to be one of the dumbest analogies I've ever seen. What's next, not paying prison guards at all because their charges are there involuntarily? I think a person's paycheck needs to be evaluated a little more rigorously than a seventh-grade gym grade.

Merit pay doesn't exist anywhere. This ridiculous notion that people in business are "paid for performance" needs to be put to rest. They are paid based on who their friends are and where they went to school . . . period! I've been in the business world for 20 years and KNOW THIS FOR A FACT. I don't know how to pay schoolteachers for performance. Nobody does.

Fine, go ahead, do merit pay, change curriculum, inservice teachers more, make more hoops to jump through; just don't be shocked when the end results are the same.

Since teacher pay is public information, how would parents feel whose little darlings are placed in an average teacher, or below average teacher's class? (Maybe we could just evaluate most of the teachers as above average??) Since administrators usually let the squeaky wheel have the grease, the squeaky wheel parents will get their "special" children into the high performance teacher's class. I wonder how the rest of quiet parents will take that? There goes the neighborhood or ward.

It would be interesting. By the way don't give me, we'll draw out names, because the squeaky wheel parents won't tolerate that where their "special" children are concerned. Worst of all who gets the new untested teacher? I should have been fired that first year, but after making mistakes I feel I was successful in following years. The more years that I taught the fewer mistakes that I made, and I feel the wiser I became. There is more to this than simply evaluating teachers.

I am not opposed to a merit system. Unfortunately, for a merit system to work the base pay must a "livable salary". Absent that there really is no incentive. A little research on the editors part would reveal that even rodeo cowboy's have farms or ranches to meet their basic needs. It is interesting to note that the legistature who would like to see a merit system, doesn't want one for themselves. After the voucher debacle I can understand why. The other issue, one that can be solved is how to set up the system so that it is equitable across the board. Performance based on test scores fails to take into account how much parents, yes the most important link in any education, are involved and assisting at home. Socioeconomic issues will also play into performance. In a perfect world that would not be true, but this is far from a perfect world. Best plan, involve parents, teachers and administrators but keep the meddling from the legislature to a minimum.

The State should create a tipping system where parents can log on to a secure state website and give a anonymous tax-deductible tip to a teacher. Anonymous means kids whose parents tip would not receive any special priviledges, but it would allow for parents to acknowledge and support those teachers they believe are making a difference in the lives of the kids

Merit pay for teachers should be based on a very simple system. Give students a pre-test and a post-test. Simple. The more improvement they show over the baseline, the more rewards to the teacher. But the students must be motivated to succeed, too--that means eliminating social promotion and the parental pressure to give Johnny an "A" to increase his self-esteem even if he didn't earn it....

As usual the answer is somewhere in the middle. High achievement should be rewarded. Gold brickers and poor teacher should shown the door. That's the problem, how do you get rid of the bad ones? I don't want schools and teachers to start looking like stressed-out investment bankers at the stock market.

To GWB: The CEO has much greater incentive to perform well. Getting your head cut off with an inglorious premature end to your career, and far less compensation keeps those nasty CEO guys awake at night. You are hearing about the guys who "failed" and got publicly cashiered out.