Gov. Sonny Perdue is moving full speed ahead on his proposal to put Georgia teachers on a pay-for-results system.

Perdue's plan, Senate Bill 386 introduced Monday, would pay teachers based on "overall effectiveness" of which 50 percent would be the academic performance of the students. A "statewide common evaluation instrument" would be established to determine a Teacher Effectiveness Measure, which would be the basis for half a teacher's pay.

"The remaining 50 percent of the calculation shall be based on one or more factors as determined by the State Board of Education," according to the bill.

As pointed out here previously, if teachers are going to be paid based on results, then the same rule should be applied to the governor, other state and local officials and legislators. If it's good for teachers, it's got to be good for everybody else.

In addition to a serious problem with his basic premise, Perdue relies on a teacher survey that says "yes and no" to the question of pay-for-results.

The survey by the Parthenon Group received 20,500 responses of which 15,300 came from teachers - 13 percent of the 115,000 public school teachers in Georgia. The other respondents were administrators.

In his state of the state speech last month, Perdue said: "Teachers told us overwhelmingly in a survey that they should be evaluated based on both observation of their teaching and student growth."

It's true that 80 percent of the respondents agreed that teachers should be evaluated on observation of their teaching and "the degree to which they've helped students grow academically."

But there was another finding the governor did not mention. On the question of whether "increases in salary should be driven by teacher effectiveness," only 47 percent of the teachers and administrators agreed. That's not exactly overwhelming support for pay-for-results.

Unfortunately, the survey did not explain or reconcile the difference in results for the two questions that used different terms - "helped students grow academically" and "teacher effectiveness."

However, in an op-ed piece yesterday Perdue came up with the explanation for how his plan works. He said it would "transform the way we compensate" teachers. He also said the plan would "take peer review and classroom observation into account when evaluating and rewarding a teacher for his or her performance," and "a teacher will not be judged on student's raw achievement, but on a student's improvement over time."

"It will put them (teachers) on the same playing field as our state's top coaches who are rewarded for consistently winning games," Perdue wrote.

Now there's an explanation teachers can sink their teeth into.

If teachers are to be rewarded like coaches for winning consistently, then they should get to choose the students they will teach - same as the coaches get to pick which players will make the team.

The analogy is all wrong, of course. In the real world even when teachers give their very best, they may not have "a winning season" because they don't have all top students.

dmckee9613@aol.com