Merit pay

When the bosses who run the nation's two largest teacher unions claim to favor merit pay, it's time to check the fine print.

On Monday, for instance, Randi Weingarten, the newly elected president of the American Federation of Teachers, said she supports tying teacher pay to student performance.

Or did she?

In her first major address since being elected by a majority of the AFT's 1.4 million members, Ms. Weingarten told the National Press Club that "of course there is" a role for performance-based compensation.

Why, Barack Obama was booed by teachers when he mentioned such a notion while attending teacher union meetings during the campaign.

But what Ms. Weingarten has in mind -- while a step forward from the one-size-fits-all wage scales that now dominate the nation's public schools -- is not a system in which individual teachers who stand out are rewarded for their competence and service.

Instead, Ms. Weingarten wants any "merit" pay to be school-wide, spread among all the teachers at a specific campus that shows improvement, rather than actually directed toward those who led the charge. Ms. Weingarten cited New York City's "merit" pay structure, where teachers at 200 at-risk schools may receive bonuses if school-wide test scores show improvement.

Under Ms. Weingarten's version of "merit" pay, teachers whose students struggle to move forward would receive the same salary hikes as those whose young charges show dramatic improvement; good teachers in hard-to-find specialties would receive the same bonus raises as the gym teacher down the hall.

And there would still be no penalty for teachers on failing campuses whose students are pushed forward each year and arrive in junior high school -- or even high school -- unable to comprehend a simple paragraph or do their multiplication tables.

At this point, reformers should be happy with any union movement on this topic, at all. But a true "merit" pay system would include raises for individual teachers who have demonstrated the skills necessary to ensure that kids leave their classrooms with a better mastery of the subject matter than when they first arrived.