The War on Teachers
No matter how disillusioned we are with Barack Obama—no matter how disgruntled or disappointed we are with the job he’s done as president—none of us would be silly enough to suggest that if only we had paid the man, say, $1,000,000 a year instead of that measly $400,000, he would have done a better job, because, as everyone knows, the more you pay a person, the harder they work.
As absurd as that suggestion would be, a version of it is being used by anti-union propagandists and free-market fanatics to attack our public school teachers. They’re not only pretending that a bonus system rewarding teachers for raising standardized test scores is the way to fix what ails our education system, but conversely, they’re arguing that if the carrot doesn’t work, you simply revert to the stick. You fire teachers whose students don’t improve their test scores.
But a recent study by Vanderbilt University more or less put the kibosh to that nonsense. In the Vanderbilt study teachers were offered bonuses ranging from $5,000 to $15,000 if they succeeded in raising significantly
As absurd as that suggestion would be, a version of it is being used by anti-union propagandists and free-market fanatics to attack our public school teachers. They’re not only pretending that a bonus system rewarding teachers for raising standardized test scores is the way to fix what ails our education system, but conversely, they’re arguing that if the carrot doesn’t work, you simply revert to the stick. You fire teachers whose students don’t improve their test scores.
But a recent study by Vanderbilt University more or less put the kibosh to that nonsense. In the Vanderbilt study teachers were offered bonuses ranging from $5,000 to $15,000 if they succeeded in raising significantly