Dear Editor,
Alan Viarengo is about as clueless concerning merit pay as are Schwarzenegger the Politician and his cronies. Schwarzenegger’s poorly thought out initiative, (“School Employment Decisions. Employee Performance. Initiative. Constitutional Amendment”) involving merit pay and teacher tenure, was part of a committee hearing in a special session recently.
The governor, thinking his representatives were up to the task supporting his hastily drawn merit pay initiative, was dismayed to hear they were professionally chewed up by teachers, administrators and legislators asking the basic questions regarding merit pay.
Why were the representatives humiliated? They couldn’t define merit pay. They couldn’t give examples of how it worked or where it worked. They didn’t know how it was going to be implemented. They didn’t know how the state was going to fund it.
Most humiliating was that they didn’t realize the initiative requires all teachers and administrators to be evaluated every year. This would require 7,200 new administrators statewide at an estimated cost over $600 million. Throw another $1.5 billion for merit pay rewards, and the cost easily exceeds $2 billion. These funds would be in addition to the currently underfunded Prop.98 guarantee to public education.
Once the representatives realized they had been “hung out to dry” by the governor, they requested suspending the hearing until they could get answers to the same questions that I’ve proposed to the Walker’s and Viarengo’s of the world. With embarrassment, the organization generating the initiative, Citizen’s to Save California, decided to pull the initiative. Then they decided to keep it in place. Can you say, schizophrenia?
When Mr. Viarengo accuses me of “… throw(ing) money at everything,” I remind him of logic and reality. The Rand Corporation’s report said California public education is underfunded. The logical inference is that California should spend more for a quality public education. The merit pay initiative is not logical within the governor’s own context of fiscal reform, and does not address the reality of public education’s basic needs.
Elizabeth Hill, California’s Legislative Analyst, upon reading through the governor’s fiscal reform proposals, stated “We believe that the administration’s specific proposals work in exactly the opposite direction [as presented by the governor]. That is, they would put more spending on autopilot and make it more difficult to balance future budgets in a rational way.”
Mr. Viarengo, one does not obligatorily suspend logic solely to propagate a political agenda, unless, that is, they lay at the feet of Schwarzenegger the Politician.
Dale Morejón, Gilroy
