This past Monday, the Wall Street Journal postedan opinion piece by Fran Tarkenton in which he postulated what the NFL might be like if it had to play by what he called “teachers’ rules.” Tarkenton says:
Each player’s salary is based on how long he’s been in the league. It’s about tenure, not talent. The same scale is used for every player, no matter whether he’s an All-Pro quarterback or the last man on the roster. For every year a player’s been in this NFL, he gets a bump in pay. The only difference between Tom Brady and the worst player in the league is a few years of step increases. And if a player makes it through his third season, he can never be cut from the roster until he chooses to retire, except in the most extreme cases of misconduct.
Tarkenton’s argument is not particularly new—the idea of performance or merit pay for teachers has been around for at least 60 years—but it is increasingly popular with the public. No Child Left Behind created a system for
