Has Mayor J-Hic’s Pro-Comp incentive plan for Denver teachers worked? Are Denver students better off today? If you thinks schools are getting worse in Denver, send a message to the Mayor and just vote NO on A thru I.
This is in the New York Times today about a similar “incentive” plan being proposed for New York teachers:
The insult New York Yankee’s coach (Joe Torre) feels for being offered a bonus ($1 million if he won the World Series) for doing something few baseball managers can do is nothing compared with the insult that New York City teachers should be feeling right now. At the same time Torre was being given the offer he couldn’t accept, the city announced that it will start offering bonuses to teachers whose students perform well on standardized tests. In other words, teachers can’t be trusted to do their jobs without bonuses. How insulting can you get?
And beyond the insult, such an incentive scheme is an effort to fix a structural problem on the cheap. If teachers are thwarted by their working conditions, then we need to fix the conditions, and not try to paper over them with bonuses. There are settings in which bonuses may make sense — if the work offers no opportunity to find satisfaction, for instance, or if it really is all about the money. And yes, there should be public acknowledgment of extraordinary performance. But that acknowledgment needn’t be financial, and it certainly shouldn’t be contractual.
The more society embraces the idea that nobody will do anything right unless it pays, the more true it will become that nobody does anything right unless it pays. And this is no way to run a ballclub, a school system, or a country.
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