As I expected, many readers reacted heatedly to last week’s column on a proposal to reduce teacher retirement plans so that teachers who produced the best results could be paid more.
“Our pension is one of the good things about teachers’ pay packages,” one reader said. “How dare you try to steal from our retirement!!!”
“All this garbage about rewarding the ‘best’ teachers with more pay is just a way to break the teacher unions,” another said. Some suggested other ways to finance more teacher pay, such as “cut defense spending by $200 billion” or “raise the income tax on the 1%ers.”
Some readers were friendlier to the idea. They seemed willing to wait for my promised explanation in this column of how researchers at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution thought this could work.
Their proposal is in an education policy analysis, “The Unavoidable: Tomorrow’s Teacher Compensation.” It was written by Hoover economist Eric A. Hanushek, based on background papers by Maria D. Fitzpatrick, Marguerite Roza, Steven G. Rivkin, Ben Ost, Andrew Morgan and Minh Nguyen.
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