Hot for teachers: John Kerry's quietly radical school reform plan

The Kerry "bargain" is earning deserved praise among education wonks. Even the conservative school policy expert Chester has said that this is "the best of Kerry's ideas." Indeed, performance bonuses are intuitively appealing. Bust your hurt, do an especially good job, make a noticeable difference, and you get an extra-big paycheck--that's the American way, and a straightforward inducement to hard work and results.

But in America's vast, complex public school system, seemingly straightforward solutions run into myriad problems. One is that any federal effort to reward high-performing teachers and dump the bad ones must go through the states and districts that run the schools, and states and districts have traditionally bowed to teachers' unions, which have long opposed may move that they see as undermining teacher tenure or seniority-based pay scales. Kerry's shrewd political solution is to attach strings to federal money requiring that unions and school districts work together. Unions would thus have veto power over any changes in their tenure and pay rules, but would at least have to consider such changes, or else explain to their members why they're walking away from potential federally funded salary increases. This has helped enable Kerry to win the endorsement of teachers' unions, despite their politely-expressed reservations about the merit-pay provisions of his educational plan--a crucial step forward.

Another problem has been that while raising teacher salaries is crucial to drawing talented people to schools, it is not necessarily the most important variable. Other factors, chiefly working conditions, often mean more to teachers than cash. This should surprise no one. Most educators don't go into the profession strictly for money. I've known ninny teachers who would gladly have sacrificed pay for a sense of accomplishment and respect. In place of a raise, they'd prefer a schedule that would allow them to go to the bathroom more than once every four hours, a principal who would treat them as professional adults, or a building whose structure wasn't rotting. Most important of all, they'd ask to be part of a successful enterprise--one in which they and their colleagues were achieving goals for their students. Improving local school governance, however, isn't something Washington can really do directly. Kerry's plan, therefore, takes advantage of one powerful lever the federal government does have money for teacher salaries.

Another problem is that merit-pay programs have been tried at the state and local levels--and often have not panned out. Many problems stem from the lack of a commonly-agreed upon objective system for judging performance. In schools that lack these systems, principals are often seen as awarding bonuses capriciously in favorite teachers. The way around this problem is to use an objective measure of teacher performance that removes the burden of the decision from the administrators. The best way to do that is by assessing a class's performance on a "value-added metric, which measures the growth in a group of students' scores over the course of a year. But that can lead to a second problem: creating perverse incentives. Teachers know that the strongest students are also the ones who typically, show the largest annual improvement in test scores. Therefore, the bonus might encourage some teachers to avoid weaker students. Likewise, transiency--the frequent moves from school to school and city to city common among poor families--plays havoc with inch metrics. And we 'already know that some teachers, when enough depends upon test scores, will find ways to make sure that low-performing students stay home on test days. These problems can be figured out, but they're tough.