Obama on teacher compensation

Barack Obama is endorsing merit pay for teachers. His general idea is to create incentives for teachers and districts to innovate their teaching methods to improve student performance. How this will be substantiated for qualifying for the pay is another matter that’s not detailed. Andrew Sullivan blogs some push-back on the idea from the NEA and others. It’s hard to say how these student improvements might be documented in an art program. Improvement in creating art is not always visible. Improvement might be in the way a student thinks about the world more broadly or the way he or she sees things more critically. It seems that innovation is a natural offshoot of creative expression. So, what we should have is more art classes and better paid art teachers! This can only get students in the mode of critical and broad thinking – the kind of mode that benefits their work in other subjects like science and math. I’m all for this. Maybe Senator Obama will be too??