Merit Pay

Re “Board OKs 6% Teacher Raise and Merit Pay Plan,” April 12.

It seems that [interim Supt. Ramon C.] Cortines was set in place for war. Not only does he take bold steps in reorganization to keep the Los Angeles Unified School District in place, he defies the wishes of parents, the employers. Now, he cries before the war, teachers whose students score high on the Stanford 9 tests will get merit pay.

What a farce! Again the victims will be our students caught in the middle. Teachers will begin teaching for the test, which has definitive arguments for bias. Students will be encouraged to memorize versus learn. Creative thinking will have limited benchmarks. Students whose abilities and gifts fall outside the test will fall through the cracks. How can so much emphasis be placed on a test that is optional?

I would fully support merit pay for those teachers who go above and beyond the call to ensure that their students succeed. In any school, parents can tell you who are the good teachers and the ones who shouldn’t be teaching.

The results of the Stanford 9 cannot begin to compare to the knowledge base of parents and students in terms of teachers who teach and deserve compensation commensurate with lighting the path to our future.

If the school board ran schools as a business, merit based pay would be commensurate with each employee’s ability / responsibility to build a solid foundation for the business to grow and thrive. Let us reward our educators who seek to teach all children to love learning so that our collective future will in turn thrive.

PEGGY AKBAR

Encino