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Thursday, December 6, 2012

Jersey Jazzman: StudentsFirst: Wrong About Newark AND Chicago!

Jersey Jazzman: StudentsFirst: Wrong About Newark AND Chicago!:


StudentsFirst: Wrong About Newark AND Chicago!

I knew this would happen: the corporate reformers finally got a union to give in on merit pay bonuses, and now they want to shove them down everyone else's throat:
Teachers in Newark just OK’d one of the nation’s most progressive collective-bargaining agreements. It rewards great teaching and treats educators as true professionals, whose effectiveness in the classroom makes a big difference in the futures of their students.
It’s the first contract in New Jersey to reward highly effective teachers — particularly those teaching hard-to-staff subjects or serving in high-needs schools — with higher pay, and the first to end the traditional system of compensation in which longevity alone determines salary increases. It puts “merit pay” in its proper context: not as a driver of test scores, but as a tool to focus limited