THE EDITOR, Sir:

After reading Cynthia Cooke's Tuesday, March 17, letter, though I was impressed by her assessment of the two very different teachers, one good, one poor, and while I have no doubt that many teachers agree with the notion of merit, or teacher-performance pay, I just really couldn't let her argument which, itself, was unfortunately a poor one, coming from an administrator, stand without a serious rebuttal.

The fact is that the presence of such a poor teacher, as she described, is her responsibility together with the board of managers or committee that passed this teacher through the probationary period most teachers must undergo. Beyond that, it matters little what credentials any teacher has if there is no way for a competent administrative group to remove that teacher due to poor performance.

Inherently unfair

Moreover, it is also very hard to imagine that the presence of this poor teacher could, in any way, be affected by any system that rewards teachers with money for their different performances in different fields. It is well known, for that matter, that far fewer students like, and therefore typically care, to do well in mathematics than they do in science. How indeed, could any method of performance pay account for that difference? In fact, it is far more likely that any such system would be as inherently unfair as one that can arbitrarily remove good teachers, which is not religiously or politically correct, as easily as it can for poor performance.

In short, a standard system of pay, differing only marginally from more training or higher credentials, is really the only realistic way of paying teachers and should be sufficient. In other words, the system that exists needs improvement, but certainly the administrative bodies of the school, principal, board of managers or whatever, need to do a far better job of hiring and keeping competent teachers and they need to be held accountable to do so long before they change teachers' salaries to reflect an even more potentially arbitrary system of grading their differences.

I am, etc.,

Ed McCOY

mmhobo48@juno.com