Blog
How Low Can You Go?
Our state legislature recently passed three major educational reform bills. The first one significantly restricts collective bargaining by local unions. The second mandates a pay for performance model based on school-wide achievement, and the third requires increased use of technology and online learning for high school students. Other than the pay-for-performance bill, introduction of these bills was done without input from educators or stakeholders. Read more
Collective Merit Pay: Supporting Collaboration Over Competition
Kildeer Countryside Consolidated School District 96 was engaged in contract negotiations throughout the 2009–2010 school year. The economic climate coupled with increased accountability requirements contributed to a different landscape than in years past… Read more
A PLC Approach to Merit Pay
The Race to the Top guidelines have sparked renewed interest in the topic of merit pay for teachers. In earlier blogs we outlined why we oppose the idea of merit pay for individual teachers because the concept is based on faulty assumptions and there is abundant evidence… Read more
Does Merit Pay for Individual Teachers Align With the PLC Concept? Part I
The idea of merit pay for individual teachers has been touted as a way to improve student achievement. One state, for example, proposed a merit-pay system that would designate up to 25 percent of teachers in a district for a 5 percent merit-pay bonus on the basis of student achievemen… Read more