Education Reformer: Successful Students = Teacher Pay Raises

by Jim Brown
January 26, 2004

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(AgapePress) - A leading advocate for education reform is opposing calls for an increase in base salary for all public school teachers. The former education advisor to President Ronald Reagan instead wants teacher pay linked to student performance.

A non-profit group called the Teaching Commission recently recommended that a significant portion of teacher pay raises be tied to the progress of their students. The Commission says teachers who raise student achievement and have expertise in their subject matter are being compensated by an 80-year-old system that pays them the same as their least-efficient colleagues.

Former Assistant U.S. Education Secretary Chester Finn agrees. "One of the great tragedies of American education -- and one of the principal reasons that teaching today does not qualify as a true profession -- is that results don't seem to have anything to do with compensation," Finn says, "and of course, they should."

Now president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, Finn says increasing the base salaries for all public school teachers would, in effect, reward bad teachers as well as good ones. Making it clear that he has no objection to paying teachers more, he says he would prefer whatever money is available be put into performance-based raises -- and not into a "generic, across-the-board" increase in teacher salaries.

"If money is scarce and you have to make a choice between putting the next million or billion dollars into base salaries or performance raises, there's just no doubt in my mind that the latter is where you ought to go," he says.

While Finn and other education reform advocates like the idea of tying teacher pay to student test scores, the National Education Association claims such pay plans are too subjective. Currently, education and work experience are the deciding factors in teacher salaries and raises. Arizona, Florida, Iowa, and Kentucky all provide some sort of performance-based teacher compensation.