Professional pay

Principal Pay

The Center for American Progress released a report this week on reforming principal compensation, while the National Association of Secondary School Principals published guidelines for evaluating effective principals. Calls to create voluntary national certification for principals that first surfaced more than five years ago also are being renewed.

Such efforts are being driven in part by concerns that Congress will define a “highly qualified principal,” just as it has a “highly qualified teacher,” when it reauthorizes the No Child Left Behind Act. Education Week

and from the Center for American Progress synopsis (full report here):

...we have only a scattershot picture of issues such as the extent to which principal compensation is linked to specific principal credentials or characteristics, or covered by collective bargaining agreements; whether principals are financially rewarded for taking tough leadership assignments; and whether there is a link between their compensation and measures of their performance.

Professional Teachers

State educational data may hold the secret for improving education in Tennessee. According to state research, teacher quality explains 68 percent of the variation in student performance. Good teachers, not greater per-pupil spending or palatial hi-tech school buildings, make the biggest difference in educating children.
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Teachers who are good at their jobs should be paid more than those who are not. It's that simple. State leaders should scrap the state's teacher tenure and pay systems and install a performance-based salary system - one that treats all teachers like the professionals they are. TCPR's Drew Johnson at Chattanoogan.com

And a California teacher agrees:

When the CTA lady came to the union meeting to specifically alert new teachers to the dangers of proposed merit pay provisions, I shook my head in tight side-to-sides, because true systems of meritorious compensation are the future of the work we do. New hiring practices, the dissolution of tenure, authentic evaluations, performance based pay – this is what’s needed to get us off that ledge and quell the schizophrenia of being an ambitious and successful teacher in a public school.