To take a near-comic example, the firms did not present a single executive as meriting a pay grade below the 50th percentile of their supposed peer group, according to two people in Feinberg's office.
The Giuliani administration took a hard-line approach yesterday in its first contract proposals to the city's 78,000 public-school teachers, making a long-anticipated demand for a merit pay system and an unanticipated demand that the teachers defer three weeks of pay.
And while Klein and his colleagues think that a proposal for a merit pay system will mitigate these social forces, in actuality, merit-based rewards in education have been tried and failed.
Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani wants a longer school day and a merit pay system, while the United Federation of Teachers is demanding a raise of more than 20percenttoto catch up with salaries in the suburbs.
City Hall officials focused repeatedly yesterday on several of their main goals in any teachers' contract: a longer school day, a longer school year and a merit pay system in which teachers' raises would be based on student performance.
Randi Weingarten, president of the United Federation of Teachers, said she would consider a merit pay provision but only in a contract that included a general wage increase at least equal to inflation.
Such a plan contrasts sharply with a merit pay plan that Mr. Giuliani has vowed to push through in negotiations with the city teachers' union this year.
"The question is whether or not the union will be an obstacle to putting in place a merit pay program".
Last April, the director of the state chapter of Americans for Prosperity, Dustin Zvonek, wrote an op-ed in the Colorado Observer to make a pitch for school districts to "develop a merit pay system which links better documented performance to higher pay for teachers".
The mayor also asserts that a merit pay system, tying raises to how well a teacher's students perform on standardized tests, is the best way to induce teachers to improve their performance.
