As I understand the Race to the Top rules, a district can submit a memo of understanding that will keep it in the running for new money. If the local union co-signs, the district gets extra points. If the union refuses to co-sign, the district loses points but isn’t necessarily out of the running.

With respect to the substance of the issues, I’m wary of all doctrinaire positions. For example, although union members are apt reach for a cross and garlic at the mere mention of merit pay, I think we could find ways to reward outstanding performance if we tried. But designing a sensible system is genuinely hard, and many union concerns are valid. At the minimum districts should be fighting for contracts that permit differential pay for teacher with scarce skills. We know we need more students with higher performance levels in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields, but unions insist that we ignore that when designing salary schedules. A district may have 20-30 applicants for an elementary school vacancy (a half dozen of them so promising you wish you could hire them all) but only one or two candidates for a high school physics vacancy.

The amount of money involved in Race to the Top probably won’t be very large on a per district basis. Still and all, the program offers an opportunity for useful dialogue between administrators and unions on educational issues, not just money. If money comes through without too many strings, boards should seek union input in their planning. But boards should keep themselves in the game with or without union endorsement. As always, boards need to be ready, even eager, to explain their own decisions to the public.

Meanwhile, I’d like to know if any Pennsylvania school board anywhere has put merit pay on its negotiating agenda — even so much as proposing to form a board-administration-union committee to explore what a reasonable system might look like. If there’s any issue where giving the public a chance to comment makes sense, this is it. Can anyone give me a lead?

My own mind isn’t made up on the merits of merit pay. It strikes me as equally unwise rule merit pay out or to suppose that it’s necessarily a good thing. I’m afraid that any serious attempt to push a merit pay initiative may be doomed to end up like the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law — an over-complicated and clumsy response to a real problem.

Meanwhile, the defenders of the status quo have no doubts whatsoever. I found myself drawn out of personal curiosity to a blog called “The Quaker Agitator.” The anonymous blogger identifies himself as “Quaker Dave,” a New Jersey teacher with 28 years experience, a Quaker and a LIBERAL. (His capitalization.) In a post that appeared shortly after Obama’s statement, Dave fiercely defends the status quo and not because he thinks most of his professional colleagues are too dedicated to care about money. On the contrary. He thinks they’ll sabotage each other and even whole schools to get ahead of each other.

For one thing, merit pay pits teacher against teacher, and creates competition, not cooperation. And what will these teachers be competing over? Well, first there are the plumb [I"m sure he meant to write "plum"] schedules. … you’ll have reasons for teachers to be walking all over each other to grab the “higher track” kids, at the expense of those who are not deemed to be as worthy. And, if you’ve ever taught in a big public school, you know that the kind of office politics that can run rampant in a school building would rival that of any corporate suite. People are always finding ways to curry favor with the administrators who make scheduling decisions, so they can get the “smarter kids” and the more prestigious, less tedious classes. Not everybody, but quite a few.

Dave sums up like this: “No teachers’ union in its right mind would ever approve a collective bargaining agreement that included merit pay.”

He also adds links to several sites that he thinks refute the merits of the merit pay concept. All but one lead to thinly disguised rants. The exception is an essay by Alfie Kohn that appeared in Education Week on September 17, 2003, and entitled “The Folly of Merit Pay.”

Mr. Kohn’s essay is frankly polemical but makes points that should be taken seriously by merit pay advocates. He notes that most merit pay systems have been abandoned after a few years. That’s my impression, too, although I also have the impression that these systems have been so convoluted in hopes of meeting every possible union objection that they soon break down on their own weight. (I know first-hand that that was true of the first federal experiment in support of school choice, funded by the former Office of Economic Opportunity at Alum Rock School District, San Jose, California.)

Mr. Kohn raised several reasonable objections to merit pay in principle (not conclusive, but reasonable). The one I found most interesting is a contention that higher salaries will do little to attract and hold talented teachers. He cites a survey that “found that the main reason newly credentialed teachers were leaving the profession was not low salaries or difficult children. Rather, those who threw in the towel were most likely to cite what was being done to their schools in the name of ‘accountability.’”

I suspect this is true. It tracks not only what I hear from teachers but from also from doctors and other human services professionals. Red tape and a highly regulatory environment frustrates creative people and makes everyone afraid of lawsuits. Kohn concludes with a striking, if question-begging, paragraph.

So how should we reward teachers? We shouldn’t. They’re not pets. Rather, teachers should be paid well, freed from misguided mandates, treated with respect, and provided with the support they need to help their students become increasingly proficient and enthusiastic learners.

Is it a gross distortion of that paragraph to say that it boils down to, “Give us the money and leave us alone”? It’s hard enough to decide what “paid well” should mean in practice and even harder to find consensus on exactly which mandates are “misguided.” The reason NCLB requires separate reports on minority and low-income groups was that these groups were in fact being left behind — partly for reasons Dave describes. As long as parents are compelled to send children to specific schools as a condition of receiving public support, complicated rules will be required “in the name of accountability.” (Although we wouldn’t dream of forcing senior citizens to go to substandard neighborhood clinics as a condition of receiving Medicare, we do regulate — and I think over-regulate — physicians and hospitals. Only recently has much attention been paid to educating patients to be more sophisticated consumers of medical services.)

Public school teachers are both beneficiaries and victims of a Faustian bargain with society. In exchange for tenure-to-retirement job security, a generous guaranteed-benefit pension plan, and very high barriers to entry by any meaningful competition, they are indeed second-guessed to the point of distraction, regulated to a fare-thee-well, and too often reduced to “always finding ways to curry favor with the administrators” over issues like class scheduling.

I recall a neat summary of what the public expects of schools: “You must improve, but you must not change.” Tragically, that’s also an equally apt summary of the message that Quaker Dave wants to send to President Obama.