Michelle Rhee has proposed a two-tiered pay system for the Washington, DC school system. Basically, if you want tenure, you make less. If you're willing to give up tenure, you make a lot more. This seems like a great way to get highly qualified people into public schools without bankrupting the system. By paying people more for giving up tenure, you can provide more money to people who care about money (presumably a lot of people who would work in teaching but aren't now) -- you incentivize them more stongly with an incentive they respond best to (money).
It should come as no surprise that most teachers in the district oppose the plan. They are exactly the people who don't care much about money -- the people who have been attracted to the typical tenured teaching gig. Of course a majority of them will not want to trade tenure for salary. That said, tenure's a nice thing, and worth a lot of money to a lot of people who would not hide behind tenure to shirk or do a lousy job. It's also worth noting that tenure is not such a crazy thing for teachers to ask for, especially when you consider places like Kansas where teachers could face punishment for teaching evolution. I think Rhee overstates her case when she says: "Tenure ... has no educational value for kids." When tenure protects a teacher from the anti-evolution agenda of an administrator, her students benefit.
So tenure has a purpose, but offering higher pay to some could attract a new class of people to the profession. But can tenure be protected once the choice of high pay and financial incenctives has been introduced? Will it be possible to choose a tenure compensation track without signalling insecurity about one's abilities? Is establishing a choice between tenure and compensation providing a choice at all?
UPDATE: In a sign that Whyroots is now driving the agenda of the progressive blogosphere, Ezra Klein has a new post about Michelle Rhee. He focuses on the issue of evaluation and the lack of a good method for evaluating teacher performance. It really is a critical point, and one I wish he wouldn't be quite so flip about (though who am I to criticize, since I didn't even cover it).
Basically, really strong incentives work best when they incentivize things people actually have control over. Part of the problem with evaluating teacher performance via standardized testing is that teachers don't have all that much control over performance. Parents matter, peers matter, the amount of sleep the night before matters, etc. Teachers definitely matter, but do they matter enough that the marginal impact of anything other than an amazing teacher or a terrible teacher will actually be picked up by the test? I doubt it (though I'll try to find some data on the topic). And if that's the case, then you're going to have a lot of pissed off teachers whose pay swings drastically because of issues they can't control.
It's like rewarding managers solely on stock performance. Maybe for the CEO that makes sense, but for Joe the Line Manager, he will, if he's doing a competent job, have about as much impact on stock performance as on the price of tea in China.
When former students talk about great teachers, we describe the transformative impact they have had on our lives, changing the way we think about the world and our careers. How in the world do you evaluate that?
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