Wide Support Seen for Pay Hike for Skilled Teachers

The Republican chairman of the National Governors Assn. said Sunday he believes taxpayers are ready to pay skilled teachers “50, 60, $70,000 a year” to improve the performance of U.S. schools and the productivity of their graduates.

“People know their paychecks are going down if our schools don’t get better, and that they will have to pay to have super teachers in the classrooms for their children,” said Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander, who heads the association’s education project.

Noting the intensity of recent competition by other nations, among them Japan and South Korea, which have surpassed U.S. literacy standards, Alexander said the nation’s governors “are ready to push” at their annual meeting in August for the sweeping educational reforms recommended in a report released Thursday in San Diego by the Carnegie Forum on Education and the Economy.

‘Will Pay for Education’

Education Secretary William J. Bennett, appearing with Alexander on the NBC program “Meet the Press,” joined in endorsing the thrust of the report. He agreed that “the American people will pay for education,” and said “they now want to see performance as a condition of paying.” The report “is very strong on that,” he said.

Bennett specifically commended the report’s emphasis on quality, competence and productivity “so that all teachers are encouraged to be as good as they can be.” Avoiding a blanket endorsement, he said he opposed a suggestion that teacher committees run schools and wanted to “look at” a proposal that federal programs include so-called equalization payments to poorer states to discourage the best teachers from migrating to states with the best pay scales.

Even as they supported the report’s goals, both officials cautioned that chances of putting them into practice will depend heavily on the reactions of the nation’s leading teachers’ unions, both of which were represented on the program by officials who served on the 14-member task force that drew up the report.

The problem, Alexander said, “boils down to whether the teachers’ largest union, and the teachers themselves, can accept our finding ways to pay some teachers more than others based on their ability and productivity.”

Praise for Report

Mary H. Futrell, president of the National Education Assn., the nation’s largest teachers’ organization with 1.7 million members, said she signed the report even though it recommends some steps the NEA opposes, among them merit pay for accomplished teachers. She did not refer specifically to this proposal, but praised the report because it suggests ways to improve teacher training, raises standards and teacher pay and “gives teachers more power.”

Albert Shanker, president of the 610,000-member American Federation of Teachers, said the report’s recommendation that there be national standards for teachers would not require creation of a new bureaucracy to certify teachers. Rather, he said, certification of teachers should be handled by professional certification boards in the same way doctors, lawyers and accountants are certified.