Clue to the Clueless Editors at the NYT

You cannot run schools on a "merit pay" system because school systems are notoriously political, and principals have complete and total power over teachers. Principals, unlike managers in private industry or in other governmental sectors, are not closely supervised and therefore they run the schools like their own little fiefdoms, doing whatever the hell they want when they want to do it. This is why teachers are terrified for their jobs; they know the extreme power imbalance between themselves and administrators, and their pitiful "unions" do little to rectify the situation. Administrators are held to NO accountability for their actions whatsoever, despite their often obscene salaries and perks.

A "great" teacher (typically somebody with many years in) can be a "terrible" teacher just by a principal loading a teacher with hard-to-reach students or students with behavior problems. Those "test scores" would go south as predicted, and the teacher could be sacked. Teachers, of course, do NOT select the students they teach; the administrators assign students.

Gates and Broad, to say nothing of Bloomberg and Duncan, must be paying the New York Times editors to come up with a bunch of nonsense.

Besides, schools are supposed to be collaborative enterprises consisting of TEAMWORK. They can't be run on competitive models. To force a "merit" system--merit, of course, not defined and doesn't truly exist--on teachers undermines the morale.

Not to mention school districts are too hard up for money to implement such a stupid system as that.

Why is the paper quoting the "New Teacher Project," founded by failed teacher and administrator Michelle Rhee?