If you did go to performance pay, it would be darn near impossible to find people who were willing to teach in the inner cities. Yes, there are a handful of do-gooders who would stay in the cities instead of fleeing to the burbs at first chance, and not get burned out in the process. But it's already darned hard to find qualified people to work in those schools, and a lot of the good teachers that could motivate disadvantaged kids eventually get burned out and tired of the inner city district administration bullshit and end up going to the happy land of suburbia where the lawn is green instead of asphalt and the students are less likely to be armed.

My Mom spent some time teacher recruiting for her district. It was very hard to compete with the burb districts for the special ed and bilingual graduates, even though those grads were most desperately needed in the inner city.

I work in the construction industry though I am not in a Union. Several of my friends are. Even they will admist there are some problems but let me point out something I have not seen brought up, Unions do a great job of providing us with safe, skilled workers to build us safe buildings. BEcause of organized labor, there is a large pool of highly skilled carpenters, welders, steel workers, cement workers, electricians etc to build us office buildings, schools, hospitals, housing, homes etc. These workers are union trained and licensed and get a fair wage, benefits, and retirement plan based on pretty shitty working conditions. These guys and gals are building these things in scorching heat, freezing cold, pouring rain and most don't complain or compromise their work. Also, do to this national Labor pool, sky scrapers and other large projects are actually able to be completed due to the fact that with some phone calls you can relatively easily get 1,200 trained electricians to your site. Yeah, you'll have to figure some logistics (get them to the site, pay for motels etc) out but there aren't many companies out there who have that many electricians on staff and if they do, commit them all to single project... When a large pharmaceutical expanded here in RI, that is exactly what happened, we had workers from all over the US doing work here. Some projects would likely be next to impossible to complete (I'm thinking Boston 'Big Dig' size) without Union workers and support.

I respectfully disagree.

I too worked in the construction industry in the mechanical contracting arena.

We were a non-union contractor.

We were put on site to build a very large project in a very short amount of time. The electrical contractors were union on this particular job. I walked that site every day and what you said about unions being able to flood the site is true but they work very inefficiently. Their crew size was twice the size it needed to be due to the lack of cross training union members have or the rules where one worker couldn't do another workers job because of not being in one's job description.

The non union company I worked for had a very comprehensive training program for welders, sheet metal workers, plumbers, and pipe fitters. We made money and projects were on time and on budget.

In the past unions had a purpose like you described, but in this day and age that is no longer true.

Maybe teachers in the hood could get "hazard pay." I have a teacher friend in AZ who receives bonuses for improving his kids' English reading and writing skills (Latinos, mostly immigrants). But its not easy when the kids only show up about half the time.

I'm very fortunate and I know it: When I graduated with my masters I thought I would end up at some rough school in L.A. or Vegas. I lucked out and I teach electives to h.s. students who like to learn, or at least are respectful ... Some of my friends teach the basic courses or teach at the alternative h.s. and like that because the students "need" them more. Our schools are totally socio-economically diverse: some kids grow up in meth labs and some grow up in mansions. Some kids can barely read in high school (despite our best efforts and zero help from home) and others go to Ivy League schools. How would we decide which teachers get paid more or less for their performance?

And how do you tell if a teacher really is good or bad when they've got 75%-100% turnover in their classroom over the course of a school year? When they've only had the student for a couple weeks before the big high stakes test?

It has been done in some states already. It was done in Florida about 20 years ago but the unions got it voted out. That cost my wife $3,000 a year in bonus money. The thing the unions disliked about it most was that there was some subjectivity in the system, but I saw that as one of its strengths. In other words, to agree with FLAJill, not all teachers are dealt an equal hand at the beginning of the year. So, the principal, or someone else in authority, has to make some judgement calls. Did teacher A do more with a bad bunch of kids than teacher B did with a good bunch? I think one of the keys to all of this is measurement. Measure the kids at the beginning, halfway, and end of the year so you know what progress they (and therefore the teacher) are making. If a bunch of kids averages a 50 on a test at the beginning of a year and an 80 at the end of the year, then that shows more progress than another group who started with a 75 and ended up with a 90.

As far as inner-city schools, you may have to pay teachers more to work there than in the suburbs. The big problem in the inner-city is discipline. Teachers do not want to teach where kids aren't listening or where their lives are at risk. The cities need to take back their schools from the kids.

Pay for performance is coming to the Department of Defense as part of Sec'y Rumsfeld's transformation. So, I will have to identify measurements as to the effectiveness of my performance and be graded on them. As for cops and other public sector employees, I think it can be done for them as well. For example, say one precinct reduces violent crime by 10% over the previous year. All the cops in that precinct get a bonus and the cops in the precinct where crime went up don't get one.