More Performance!

Amusing Sherman Dorn post that also raises a serious point in response to this post. Dorn reminds us that performance and incentive pay is a complicated issue. He’s right. But, too often in education that complexity is held up as a reason not to innovate. I get uncomfortable with “performance-pay” being seen as test for toughness and something to be done to teachers rather than for the profession, but we do know that the current system of teacher compensation is not only unaligned with the broader goals of the education system (student learning) but actually works at cross-purposes with those goals. So, let’s find out what works better to recognize and reward performance. And, because we know that there are real differences in teacher effectiveness, we do have to use the “p” word in that conversation.