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A better grade for bonus plan

By Times Editorial
Published March 25, 2007

Florida has failed three times with high-handed attempts to tie teacher pay to students' standardized test scores. The fourth effort, passed almost unanimously last week in the Legislature, may or may not end up rewarding the hardest-working and most successful teachers. But it at least took into consideration what a few of them had to say.

That alone is progress.

The new "Merit Award Program" still betrays a testing bias, requiring that 60 percent of each teacher's performance evaluation be based on how well the students score on tests. But lawmakers listened to teachers, principals, school boards and the new governor, all of whom insisted that job performance can't be measured by test results alone. The new plan allows school districts and principals to play a key role in establishing other standards.

The debate helped illustrate the absurdity of education reform in a political vacuum. Florida is trying desperately to recruit 30,000 new teachers in a national market where demand outstrips supply. The task is already complicated by the fact that Florida's salaries don't compete favorably even with Georgia's. Yet the previous bonus plans, ostensibly aimed at luring and keeping good teachers, were developed over the strenuous and repeated objections of teachers. How, then, were the bonuses supposed to provide an incentive?

For the better part of the last decade, Florida lawmakers have treated teachers as though they are obstacles to educational progress. That's an arrogant and ultimately self-defeating approach, one that led to a statewide rebellion over bonus pay. This new plan is still likely to encounter some resistance and is badly timed in a year with little new money for public schools. But at least lawmakers listened.

[Last modified March 25, 2007, 07:37:13]