Insult to injury

Florida school districts will link teachers' pay to their students' standardized test scores. Sounds like a great idea, if you want the best teachers to all work in the richest districts.

Let me explain something. Standardized test scores have been shown time and again to correlate very highly with wealth and race. Unless those have become things we want to test for before we let anyone graduate, there's a problem with rewarding just test performance. What will happen with this teacher pay measure in place is that the differences already present will be exacerbated, as some teachers seek profit by going for jobs in already high-performing districts, or are economically forced out of teaching because they chose to work with struggling students.

This is just another step on a trend that misallocates funding in our schools towards having the most damaging and class-reinforcing results. Why do we spend the most money on suburban districts full of high-performers, while starving urban and rural districts of the resources they so dearly need to catch up? There can only be one expected result - that education becomes divided more sharply in quality, and that the gulf between the children of means and the children of poverty grows wider.

We should not accept such un-democratic, un-American structural flaws.