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Originally Posted by Cletus Miller
If it was a stall, then Rhee should have moved on to the next issue.
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The contract was up, so that wasn't really an option.
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Also, the most common complaint I've seen from union leadership about merit pay is that it's a pretext/prelude to trying to require all the teachers to do more to avoid being fired (of course, they say it slightly differently).
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People often say things like that for listeners who think about these issues in a how-much-work-is-done-for-the-money way, especially people who think that teachers shouldn't complain because they get every summer off, and who wouldn't like that. I think a big issue that administrators would love to have more power over teachers -- because who wouldn't? -- and teachers would love to be free of that control -- because who wouldn't, especially when that control is being exercised by people who administer public schools?
To my mind, the issue is a lot like sentencing guidelines -- it pretends to be about the system's outputs, but it's really about the relative balance of power exercised by different actors within the system. Sentencing guidelines shift discretion from judges to prosecutors, who get to decide what's charged. School administrators would always like more power to fire teachers. It's not clear to me that has much to do with making schools work better.
