CMS honcho Pete Gorman provides here his most complete vision yet for a pay for performance regime for the district’s teachers. As he notes, the key is designing a system that the teachers themselves believe in and support. Not easy, but not impossible either.

To make it happen, however, we’ll need to see improvement on two local government bugaboos, trust and transparency. Many CMS teachers simply do not trust CMS leadership, often with good reason. But some teachers are also needlessly afraid of the word “performance,” as if all that notion will reduce to is student scores on end-of-year tests. A properly designed performance pay system would do no such thing.

Gorman says he is committed to doing this the right way, to getting teachers involved in building their own pay and evaluation plan. We’ll just have to see if that in fact happens or not.

Bonus Observation: It should go without saying that the plan cannot function without weeding out incompetent teachers. That is why I am telling CMS that your plan cannot function without weeding out incompetent teachers.