EDITORIAL: Obama gets it right on teacher pay

[jefferson_dem]

Obama gets it right on teacher pay

Competition needed, says the presidential candidate.

Hooray for Obama.

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama did something this week that probably isn't in the party playbook.

He stood before the National Education Association and told them he was in favor of merit pay for teachers.

"I think there should be ways for us to work with the NEA, with teachers' unions, to figure out a way to measure success," Obama said, according to printed reports. "I want to work with teachers. I'm not going to do it too you, I'm going to do it with you."

Indeed, like us, Obama realizes that performance-based pay for teachers can be seen as a positive, a joint effort between taxpayers and teachers to improve their pay and bring more accountability to public schools.

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But suggesting performance based pay is not akin to requiring teachers to be held to a higher standard purely on the basis of one state test. No, we agree with the NEA in suggesting that student performance, for instance, be judged not by a snapshot of students in one grade, but a series of evaluations that judge whether a student is learning as he or she advances from grade to grade. State tests are an important element of this process, but merely one part of a larger attempt to determine if schools are performing.

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We also agree with school board member Jean Twitty who suggested during her recent campaign that principals ought to be the first in line for performance based pay. Indeed, for those teachers who are afraid that merit pay leads to competition instead of cooperation, we say, why can't we have both? One of the successful elements of merit pay that has been instituted in school districts across the country has been the concept of rewarding groups of teachers, either in a subject area or specific school, for working together to raise performance.

The bottom line, as Obama told national NEA delegates, is that if the U.S. is to improve its public education system, it must introduce more competition to the process. We believe that if teachers and school districts work on a local level to embrace performance based pay and the accountability that comes with it, those critics who push for vouchers and other damaging anti-public-school programs will lose all momentum.

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