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Recently the South Dakota Legislature has been looking to implement Governor Daugaard’s proposal to give bonuses to top teachers in the state. My first thought was, great idea; now what?

There are several different versions of incentive/bonus plans in my industry. Most of the plans reward employees for meeting and/or exceeding established goals, both individually and as a team. The expectations and rewards are clear and communicated so everyone is on the same page. Teaching is not an activity that would normally fall under performance-based pay. My biggest concerns are how will you measure it, and will it improve student achievement? How will we define success?

Even in Sioux Falls, there are diverse schools in which there may be barriers to coming up with a standardized way to implement the plan. From what I have read, most merit pay plans fail and very few survive. As the Argus Leader points out, even our educators that have spoken out seem to be split on the issue.

If implemented, the keys will be to make it special and different from the normal notions of performance-based pay and to give the legislature/schools the ability to tweak it to make sure it works. If you implement it, and it becomes a bureaucratic nightmare to manage, it has already failed in some part.

I think most would agree that teachers, and for that matter our children, are one of South Dakota’s most important resources (if not the most important). My children have just begun to enter the school system, and I couldn’t be more pleased with the teachers I have come in contact with and their genuine care for my child’s well-being. Teachers do more than teach reading, math, science, music, etc. They are involved on a grander scale on how my child reacts to learning something new, failure, success, peer pressure and a lot more stuff than what I dealt with growing up.