MSTA Continues to Fight Merit Pay

In what is essentially a precis of Sunday’s Baltimore Sun piece on merit pay for public school teachers and principals, today’s Daily Times glosses over the intense opposition of merit pay proposals by the Maryland State Teachers’ Association (MSTA).

Who could blame them. Short of molesting a child you can’t be fired. If your performance is bad enough, you’re bundled off to another school. You still get your annual raises. Yet, we are surprised when “Johnny can’t read”?

Merit pay is an excellent idea that helps to bring market forces to education. Given the socialist predilections of the national and state teachers’ unions, who would expect them to embrace such a notion?

Of course merit pay is not a silver bullet. If we are serious about providing quality public education to our children we must demand merit pay as one part of a serious approach to reform the public schools. Other actions than need to be adopted include abolition of teacher tenure (a polite term for civil service protection) and school choice.

School choice is probably the single most important reform that can be undertaken. Given that the Delaware State Education Association (DSEA), another unit of the fellow travelling NEA, is funding consultants to destroy the charter school movement in Delaware, there must be something to that notion besides the philosophical belief that freedom of choice (a key concept of liberty) always trumps socialism.

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cross posted at Delmarva Dealings