Here here and bravo!  Seriously.

Alas, not everyone is excited and darn it all if the Granholm-Cherry administration isn't in the tank for the Michigan Education Association:

"The public supports paying teachers on the basis of performance," said Thomas Toch, codirector of Education Sector, an independent think tank. "They believe that there are good teachers and bad teachers and they want to do anything that increases the number of good teachers."

Union leaders caution that there is no conclusive evidence that incentive plans work. Early experiments rewarding teachers individually led to questions about whether such systems were a disincentive for collaboration and teamwork. And teachers generally do not support incentive plans that reward some teachers in a building more than others.

Because that works so poorly in professional sports.  Does Ramon Santiago, the Tigers' bargain-basement, defense-first short stop work any less hard than Miguel Cabrera, the AL's reigning home run champ?  Certainly not.  In fact, he might work harder (the guy's a little fire bug out on the diamond).

Imagine, though, that Mike Illitch, the owner of the team, offered the light-hitting utility man Cabrera sized cash.  That'd be pretty foolish, now wouldn't it.  And a sure way to bankrupt the ball club.  

You perform, you succeed, you get rewarded.  That's life in the big city.  Sure, it inspires the worst of us to throw in the towel and to find an work place where they can become quickly lost in the shuffle.  But it also inspires the best of us to do bigger, greater, more important things than anyone has ever dreamed.  

Merit pay is an idea whose time is long over-due because the most obvious beneficiary isn't the teacher who'd start raking in the extra cash... it's the students across the state who'd benefit from the same great education from many teachers, a renewed focus on the part of many more and the pursuit of a new career by others who lack the drive but still occupy the desk at the front of the classroom.

If and when the President makes a formal proposal to bring Merit pay to Michigan we'll have found an area on which we can enthusiastically agree.  

Now if someone would just get a hold of Jennifer Granholm and John Cherry and convince them, too, to finally put kids above Big Labor leadership we might actually get somewhere.