By Victor Skinner
EAGnews.org

LANSING, Mich. – Michigan school districts are ignoring a state law adopted in 2010 that requires officials to use teachers’ classroom performance to help determine their compensation.

Of 104 union contracts reviewed by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, “81 of them did not tie salaries to teacher performance,” according to the Daily Caller.

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Mackinac education policy director Michael Van Beek told the news site “teachers are paid the same way they’ve been paid for decades … according to how many years on the job they have and how many academic credentials they’ve accumulated.”

Michigan lawmakers enacted the merit pay provision – which requires student performance to make up a significant portion of a teacher’s evaluation – as part of a package of reforms promoted by President Obama’s federal Race to the Top program, Van Beek said.

Several districts have followed the rules, although only technically.

Districts like Davison Community Schools and Stephenson Area Schools give high-performing educators $1 or some other miniscule bonus to comply with the law, essentially “thumbing their nose at the legislature,” Van Beek said.

“The (school districts) that have done something related to merit pay, most of them are providing a very small bonus that really is peanuts compared to what they are paid for based on their years of experience and academic credentials,” Van Beek told the Daily Caller.

Obviously, school and union officials are working together to negate the intention of merit pay in Michigan, despite its potential to dramatically improve student learning by identifying the best teachers and paying them accordingly.

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They’re avoiding the change because it threatens the traditional system of automatic raises for nearly every teacher, regardless of their effectiveness. Those who rely on the system for their livelihood – including school administrators, employees, teachers and union bosses – have a vested interest in protecting the tired old system, and they’re not going to let it go without a fight.

But public schools are not supposed to be about income for adults. They exist to educate students, and the system should be designed to do that as effectively as possible.

When school and union leaders tap dance around the rules, they’re not only snubbing their noses at the people who made the laws to begin with, they’re telling students and taxpayers that their paychecks are more important than kids.

People with that type of mentality are exactly the reason performance-based pay is not only important, it’s essential to changing the current dynamic in public schools.