Our View: Common sense teacher pay

The ongoing controversy over teacher merit pay is understandable. After all, teachers have been allowed to get pay raises and maintain job security each year with almost no accountability.

But frustration with the inability to get rid of bad teachers and reward good teachers has led most people outside the education establishment to conclude that teachers should be held to the same standards as other people who have jobs. Some would argue those should be even higher standards, because their jobs in teaching and molding youth are truly important.

So the Legislature passed a bill last year requiring good teachers to get paid more money and bad teachers to be let go. It makes sense, but that is not what has been happening. For the most part, teachers are paid the same based on how long they have taught — good, bad or otherwise — and almost none is fired, even when he is known to be a crummy teacher.

Implementing the merit-pay process is difficult for state school districts. But it shouldn’t be. Principals and teachers in a school know who are the good teachers and the bad teachers. Other teachers, particularly know the classrooms where students are learning and engaged and those where they are just being passed on.

But Florida is pursuing a tortuous route, using a “value-added model” that takes into account FCAT scores, expectations and other factors as half of an evaluation, and the principal’s observations and professional development goals for the other half. The idea is to make it as uniformly fair as possible, and transparent to some degree, but the result may end up being something incomprehensibly complicated, which will cause a lot more frustration.

This makes it all much harder than it needs to be.

Manatee County has not determined how to measure the value-added portion of the law yet. It is forming a committee to determine the best measurement method. But most hearts in the education establishment are not really in any of the process because they prefer the rather easy status quo. It’s always difficult to get out of your comfort zone.

The Manatee Education Association is supporting a Florida Education Association lawsuit trying to block the new law creating the merit pay, demonstrating clearly that teacher pay and benefits are more important to the unions than student achievement, which we have pointed out for years.

Education has a pretty long track record of discarding common sense for the latest fad in teaching methods. In the case of merit pay, good old-fashioned common sense is probably the best possible method.

In any industry, co-workers and managers generally know who the good workers are and who the slackers are. Complicated formulae for measuring effectiveness are usually not needed. And they probably are not needed in education.

Manatee County schools should utilize a system of teachers and principals for determining the best and worst teachers as much as state law allows.