The education improvement program — merit pay for teachers as part of a larger package — promoted by the Milken Family Foundation received a big public boost last week with this NY Times article about a similar program in Minnesota.
A consensus is building across the political spectrum that rewarding teachers with bonuses or raises for improving student achievement, working in lower income schools or teaching subjects that are hard to staff can energize veteran teachers and attract bright rookies to the profession. . . Minnesota’s experience shows . . . that an incentive plan created with union input can draw teacher support.
The plan that is gaining support was devised by Lowell Milken, according to Jana Rausch, who works for the Milken Family Foundation on this initiative. Before he started the foundation, Lowell Milken was a lawyer. As far as education goes, he is self-taught. Yet the program he devised seems to be working better than other programs. Of course many people have proposed merit pay for teachers; but it is the Milken Family Foundation that has managed to make it work. We need engineers to build a better plane. But we do not need education experts, apparently, to build better schools.