...of rewarding excellence...."

Indeed.

Next, he'll be for lower the pay for American auto workers.

This guy is become old by the minute.

Teachers need more support and better pay.

It's ridiculous that Terrell Owens' contract with the Buffalo Bills so dwarfs the salaries of classroom teachers. But his income will also dwarf firefighters' and police officers' salaries, librarians' salaries, and nurses' salaries. Something is dreadfully wrong when we happily lay down orders of magnitude more money for playing a children's game from August through February than we do for teaching our children from August through June.

I'd love to see classroom teachers get a bonus every year tied directly to the number of their students who demonstrate improvement not on standardized fill-in-the-bubble tests, but in ability and knowledge. You don't evaluate that in 30 minute increments on a scannable form, though. With the press of budget, the lack of time, and the inability of fast, easy measures, that'll be difficult to prove.

I also think that, yes, we should be able to fire teachers whose students don't demonstrate improvement. We should be able to fire -- and file criminal charges against -- firefighters who commit arson and police officers who mistreat or murder those in their care, custody and control. It's simple logic.

Yet I think all these professions -- and they are professions -- deserve to have unions; so do the auto workers, the coal miners, the merchant marine, the steel workers, the telephone operators (are there any left? regardless, the people who maintain the telephone networks and do customer assistance and information for all of us out here with landlines) and the nurses. Heck, I think we ought to have unions for reporters, and copy editors, and university graduate assistants, and mechanics and HVAC repairmen.

But then I'm a known socialist whacko, so...

There are union-rule procedures for discipline, and termination, of employees whose performance is substandard. That's another benefit of unions that our pro-business government cannot seem to wrap its tiny mind around -- you can't unfairly fire people, you can't force them to swallow huge cuts to keep what's left of their jobs. But if you document and counsel the unsatisfactory worker and that person doesn't improve, yes, you can terminate an employee. You just can't do it with the snap of your fingers on any whim.

in all industries, from garbage-collectors and animal control through juco teaching and firefighting and yes, running international banking and finance corporations, PERFORMANCE ought to determine tenure and pay and bonuses (to some degree this actually works in the NFL/NBA/MLB, but it's not perfect there; it's not completely Darwinian, either, because the media does influence what happens in the locker rooms -- witness the prevalence of doping in MLB).

How that performance is measured would have to vary according to the task and the variables. A teacher working with remedial math students might not have as much trouble, I suggest, showing that the students in the class are improving as would the teacher whose students are on the fast-track (advanced placement calculus), I'd think, at least in part because in a world where we treated our children the way we should, the teacher who has a remedial math class would have three to five students per class session (I cannot imagine a district where a teacher has 40+ advanced-calculus students in any single class period, but I am not a teacher so I am sure there are such districts) ideally and no more than 10.

This is, sadly, not how we do things in the USA.

I do think unions are needed. I do think seniority is important. I do think protecting freedom of speech and association should be a paramount consideration -- nobody should be afraid of losing her, or his, job, for speaking out against asinine policies, for example.

We don't have a true meritocracy in the US. No aspect of our society is run that way. I want to see the changes come from the top down. I think Madoff and Stanford belong in jail; and yes, I'm one of the people who thinks that AIG should fail -- its corporate officers belong in jail. The guy who invented credit default swaps belongs, in my not very humble opinion, in Leavenworth, on charges of treason.

But there MUST be a way to ensure that people who are burned out or unqualified or whose methods do not work don't hold jobs teaching our kids that need to be filled with enthusiastic, qualified, effective teachers. I don't know a better way to express this; let me say it with a cast of non-teachers, and see if it makes better sense to you.

It's like giving a Fox News salary to David Brooks, while letting him keep his NYT gig AND teach j-school at SUNY NYC. He's not really qualified to do two of those jobs, let alone all three, and I'd be all for making sure he never got the chance to collect all three salaries, let alone brag about it in national media outlets. A union should protect him in one of those jobs; it shouldn't protect him in all three, particularly when there are union members who could do two of those jobs more effectively than he could.

Managing union employees is relatively easy - just follow the book. I urged inclusion of the division I ran in the bargaining unit, it made it easier to increase their wages, which left me with a far better class of employees. Productivity increased enough to offset the higher wages. I was not unhappy with that move.

My problem with the union was that it got in the way of solutions that worked for both my employees and me. For example, we wanted to change the schedules. But, I couldn't just meet with my employees (who were asking for schedule changes, but to whom I had to say not only no, but I can't even talk with you about that because it would be an unfair labor practice). Instead, I had to wait for the contract negotiation process, and submit my suggested changes to the bargaining team, as did my employees for their side. Then someone else sat down and "bargained" away what each side wanted. It was cumbersome, and often counter productive.

For what it's worth, it is perfectly possible to fire a union employee on the spot. It's just a matter of what the infraction is. I fired a lot of people (mostly after a multi-step process), and I never lost an appeal. But there were rules that called for immediate termination. There were sexual harassment events that got the offender out the door on the spot. I fired people for a couple of gross safety infractions - the sort of thing that was 1) deliberate, 2) against a clearly stated rule, and 3) posed an imminent threat of death or severe injury. The fact is that a workplace is potentially dangerous place; there are rules. One simply must be able to remove workers who grossly violate those rules and the speed with which that happens must be tied to the danger they pose to their fellow workers and the institution as a whole.