Romney Takes on Big Educrats

Massachusetts Governor and potential GOP Presidential nominee Mitt Romney is touting education reform, directly taking on the teachers' unions. Specifically, he is promoting merit pay.

The governor's bill seeks to upend the status quo in teacher pay and evaluation that has been written into collective bargaining agreements across the Commonwealth. Specifically, it would offer annual bonuses for teachers with a math or science degree who pass the teacher test in their subject, forgo tenure, and receive a satisfactory year-end evaluation. It would also make teachers in all subjects eligible for a bonus upon receiving an exemplary evaluation and empower superintendents to reward teachers who work in low-performing schools. Crucially, the bill would remove teacher evaluation from the collective bargaining process and establish statewide criteria for assessing each teacher's ''contribution to student learning."

While several states and districts nationwide are experimenting with differential pay for teachers, Romney's proposals are noteworthy for their breadth and the size of the proposed bonuses. All told, an effective math or science teacher could receive up to $15,000 a year in three bonuses.

Catherine Boudreau, president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, predictably criticized Romney's proposals as ''inequitable, divisive, and ineffective." The MTA denounced the proposal as ''uniquely designed to destroy collegiality in a school," ignoring the fact that performance pay is routine in such other professions as medicine, law, and engineering, not to mention in the Commonwealth's first-rate universities, including those that are unionized by the MTA.

I'm not keen on tying teachers' pay to students' test performance alone, but I do believe in merit pay in the public schools. Empower school boards and principals to determine what consitutes 'high performance.' Good teachers should be paid more, awful teachers should be let go.

Right now, being a member of the teachers' union gives you a ridiculous amount of job security.

FYI, Romney will be speaking at the Republican Party of Wisconsin state convention this May.