Shoveling day
Friends and relatives in the mid-Atlantic are spending this week shoveling loads of snow. I’ve been shoveling, too, if not snow. It’s time to deal with projects of various sorts, and I can’t complain too much about them: recruiting people for certain tasks; responding to a bureaucratic emergency or three; getting various bills paid; talking with colleagues […]
Additional thoughts on performance pay politics
An addendum to my entry earlier this morning: I think that there is a politically-robust rationale for performance-pay policies, but it’s not at the level of incentives usually used as the justification. The more plausible rationale for performance-pay policies is at the level of public-sector accountability: most people with jobs do not expect identical salaries or […]
Why the Teacher Incentive Fund and Race to the Top are long-term dead ends for merit-pay advocates
The apparent push in the proposed 2011 Obama budget for an enlarged Teacher Incentive Fund on the heels of Race to the Top makes me think that merit-pay/performance-pay advocates may be spreading their political capital very thin on teacher evaluation. Most advocates of paying teachers in part based on test scores are also advocates of […]