I'm a little late getting to the news in NYC that the UFT and the Mayor have agreed on a compensation plan that will provide an average of $3,000 in extra pay to teachers and other staff in up to 200 high-need schools, if they meet performance benchmarks.  The program will be expanded to 200 additional schools next year.  As some readers will recall, I’ve written about AFT’s support for reforming professional pay structures before, and I’ve taken a shot or two at those who I don’t think are getting it right as to how to build and who should build this sort of a system. So I want to briefly address why I think the UFT and the City have created a good program.

Among the key components of a successful professional compensation program are that it not take any bread out of anyone’s mouth, and the NYC plan is all new money. Another issue is that individual merit pay can pit staff against each other.  I’ve read accounts of experiments in the UK that underline this.  The city is implementing a team-based reward.  The hope is that this will create opportunities (and incentives) for collaboration and teamwork.  The program has due process.  It only comes into effect if the principal of the school and 55 percent of the UFT staff agree to it.  Finally, if I’m reading this right, the plan covers not just teachers, but teaching assistants and a number of key administrative staff as well. A labor-management committee will, if a school meets the benchmark, figure out how to distribute the money, and again, the membership in the school has a chance to ratify the plan.  Edwize has the details on this, and on the program’s UFT supported antecedents. Note that this was something that was developed slowly, over a long period of time.

In the last AFT teacher salary report, I wrote about how teacher compensation lagged compared to that of other professions, and AFT issued a call to dramatically improve that compensation.  But I’m under no illusion that we can achieve that goal by simply doing more of the same.  This is a step toward a system that both does something different and that can empower the people that do the work.

Special note to bloggers out there:  Please stop writing as if we oppose pay for performance in all its forms at all times. And, in light of the latest bigtime blog dustup on the all powerful teacher unions, note to M McCardle, yes this only happened because we started reading Atlas Shrugged. Related Note to E Klein and M Yglesias, get with the accolades already. Update: A Rotherham links to lots of folks and makes some good points.