Merit Pay: It's the Real World, Baby!

While I'm on a roll offending people, I want to talk about merit pay for public schoolteachers. Merit pay is giving a pay increase to teachers who actually produce results. And who are the major opponents of this novel idea? You guessed it: the teachers' unions.

Opponents of merit pay argue that it's unfair. According to them, if certain teachers are "buddy, buddy" with the principal, then they're more likely to get a pay increase, whether they're any good or not.

But that's the real world, baby! In jobs that actually require effectiveness (e.g, corporate America), there are times when it's not what you know, but whom you know. No, it's not fair, but it's better to have a system that rewards people on the basis of merit, rather than to pay everyone the same amount because some unfairness may creep into a meritocracy. Why should public schoolteachers be insulated from the ups-and-downs of real life?

The sense of entitlement held by a lot of public schoolteachers simply baffles me! They are such elitists. They're against school choice because they think they shouldn't have to compete like those in the real world. They hate No Child Left Behind because they feel that they're above accountability.

I'm not saying NCLB is perfect, but, sheesh, at least it adds accountability into the system. I say we do to it what Bill Clinton suggested for affirmative action: mend it, don't end it.

To be honest, I don't get warm, fuzzy feelings when I think about the public school system. Its elitism on the backs of taxpayers simply galls me. There are teachers who have the audacity to think that they know more than parents, all because they have a piece of paper. In last week's Meet the Press, Senator Carol McCaskill said, "We are who we are as a nation because we figured out how to educate our kids with public money, public education." Give me a break! We were a great nation before public schools even existed.

I'm pleased that both Barack Obama and John McCain support merit pay for public schoolteachers. Obama actually got a poor reception with teachers' unions because of this! He reminds me of Matt Santos, the Democratic candidate for President on The West Wing (played by Jimmy Smits): sure, he supports the usual liberal Democrat spiel of "tax and spend" for education. But he also imports accountability into the mix, ensuring that our tax dollars aren't going down a rathole.