Lars Larson on Teachers and Performance Pay

Should teacher pay be tied to teacher performance? You know, the idea seems perfectly common sense to me. Tie the pay of teachers to the performance of teachers.

Now, I know I’m going to hear from teachers who say, “Well, how do you do that? How do you figure out the good ones and the bad ones?”

If you are a teacher and you are in a building. You tell me you can’t figure out which of the teachers are really good and deserve higher pay and the ones who are really bad and don’t deserve to be paid at all or deserve to be paid lower salaries? If you can’t tell me the answer to that question, you probably shouldn’t be teaching in that building. You certainly shouldn’t be a principal at that school.

But, a good principal, hired by a good school board, can decide which teachers deserve higher pay. It’s done in the private sector, in all kinds of fields that are judged subjectively all the time. We can do it in education. It will fix the system that currently pays you more for being there 20 years whether you are a good teacher or not. It pays you poorly, whether you are the best teacher in the building or not and if you’ve only been there a couple of years.

“For more Lars click here”