Political News and Commentary with the Right Perspective. NAVIGATION
  • Front Page
  • News
  • Multimedia
  • Tags
  • RSS Feed


  • Advertise on RightMichigan.com


    NEWS TIPS!

    Get the RightMighigan.com toolbar!


    RightMichigan.com

    Buzz

    Who are the NERD fund donors Mr Snyder?

    Raise the curtain.

    Manic Monday: Job losses, entrenched bureaucracy and... Merit Pay?


    By Nick, Section News
    Posted on Mon Feb 16, 2009 at 07:49:53 AM EST
    Tags: Granholm, Cherry, unemployment, Obama, merit pay, Ford, MEA (all tags)

    Another week, another 1,200 Michigan moms and dads out of work.  At one company.

    That's the word from this morning's Detroit News, reporting on the evaporation of more than a thousand white collar "jobs of tomorrow" at Ford Motor Credit.  Not manufacturing jobs, not line workers, not the sort of jobs that require a strong back and a hearty work ethic... rather, jobs that deal with numbers and largely require a good chunk of post-secondary education.

    Not that those folks will be lonely, though.

    Since it began the current restructuring campaign at the end of 2005, Ford has cut 60,500 jobs in North America -- including 13,200 white-collar jobs and 47,300 hourly blue-collar positions.

    Or as they say in English... "ouch!"

    Not that they're hurting everywhere, mind you.  The Lansing State Journal reports this morning that Ingham county business were relieved to hear that Governor Granholm's proposed state employee job cuts were coming in the Department of Corrections and not the bureaucracy.  All of those Lansing area shops and eateries depend on the red tape brigade to keep the paychecks coming.  In other words, they're in an awfully good place right now.

    There are about 14,100 state employees who work in Ingham, Eaton and Clinton counties; nearly 11,000 of them work in Ingham County.

    The state now is the largest employer for Ingham County, and many of those employees work in the downtown Lansing area, where they do some of their shopping and dining.

    BUT... and stop the presses... in honor of President's Day I've actually found something to embrace about President Obama and his federal administration.

    Read on...

    Peggy Walsh-Sarnecki at the Ivory Tower has an extremely insightful article (see, I'm full of sunshine of light) about the Democrat's expected push for merit pay for teachers in Michigan.

    Here here and bravo!  Seriously.

    Alas, not everyone is excited and darn it all if the Granholm-Cherry administration isn't in the tank for the Michigan Education Association:

    "The public supports paying teachers on the basis of performance," said Thomas Toch, codirector of Education Sector, an independent think tank. "They believe that there are good teachers and bad teachers and they want to do anything that increases the number of good teachers."

    Union leaders caution that there is no conclusive evidence that incentive plans work. Early experiments rewarding teachers individually led to questions about whether such systems were a disincentive for collaboration and teamwork. And teachers generally do not support incentive plans that reward some teachers in a building more than others.

    Because that works so poorly in professional sports.  Does Ramon Santiago, the Tigers' bargain-basement, defense-first short stop work any less hard than Miguel Cabrera, the AL's reigning home run champ?  Certainly not.  In fact, he might work harder (the guy's a little fire bug out on the diamond).

    Imagine, though, that Mike Illitch, the owner of the team, offered the light-hitting utility man Cabrera sized cash.  That'd be pretty foolish, now wouldn't it.  And a sure way to bankrupt the ball club.  

    You perform, you succeed, you get rewarded.  That's life in the big city.  Sure, it inspires the worst of us to throw in the towel and to find an work place where they can become quickly lost in the shuffle.  But it also inspires the best of us to do bigger, greater, more important things than anyone has ever dreamed.  

    Merit pay is an idea whose time is long over-due because the most obvious beneficiary isn't the teacher who'd start raking in the extra cash... it's the students across the state who'd benefit from the same great education from many teachers, a renewed focus on the part of many more and the pursuit of a new career by others who lack the drive but still occupy the desk at the front of the classroom.

    If and when the President makes a formal proposal to bring Merit pay to Michigan we'll have found an area on which we can enthusiastically agree.  

    Now if someone would just get a hold of Jennifer Granholm and John Cherry and convince them, too, to finally put kids above Big Labor leadership we might actually get somewhere.

    < Up From The Abyss - How does the Republican Party come back? | Monday in the Sphere: February 16 >


    Share This: Digg! StumbleUpon del.icio.us reddit reddit


    Display: Sort:
    Nationalizing our schools (none / 0) (#1)
    by Theblogprof on Mon Feb 16, 2009 at 08:31:47 AM EST
    I found one part of the article a bit disconcerting. It came towards the end:

    "We're not universally opposed to merit pay, especially the kinds of programs that President Obama is talking about," said Doug Pratt, Michigan Education Association spokesman. Obama almost certainly would have to fuel any merit pay plans with federal dollars. His economic stimulus package is expected to include money for merit pay, said Jane Glickman, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Education. Hear that. (emphasis mine)

    I commented on this in a post I wrote this morning: "The part that most concerns me about the last snippet, though, is the input of the federal government into our schools. This might be a stealth effort to nationalize our public schools. After that, forget about school choice ever being implemented, no matter the result." (link here)

    One other thing, Nick - I like the sports analogy, being a sports fan myself. What else can be a better analogy for competition than that?

    Display: Sort:

    Login

    Make a new account

    Username:
    Password:
    Tweet along with RightMichigan by
    following us on Twitter HERE!
    create account | faq | search