Performance-based pay has been proposed and heartily resisted by teachers in LAUSD (Los Angeles). This article (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/21/lausd-

Performance-based pay has been proposed and heartily resisted by teachers in LAUSD (Los Angeles). This article (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/21/lausd-teacher-evaluation-utla_n_2517684.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/21/lausd-teacher-evalu...) says the union (UTLA) voted in January to allow performance-based evaluation, but I don't think this is linked to pay yet. Indeed, the superintendent of LAUSD is at this moment threatening to resign (http://articles.latimes.com/2013/oct/25/local/la-me-1026-deasy-20131026 http://articles.latimes.com/2013/oct/25/local/la-me-1026-dea...) because he and the school board (which is dominated by UTLA) are fighting about this linkage. The thing I just learned is that LAUSD has been forced to (eventually) link evaluations to pay due to something called the Stull Act. And it looks like that is a state-wide ruling that will eventually force all CA districts to do this. It's quite a situation. The outgoing mayor had made reform (a loaded word) of LAUSD a priority, but his candidates failed to dominate the school board. The charters and testing have the union grumpy. There were layoffs after the recession and several idealistic and highly-motivated LAUSD teachers I know were forced out under the union's last-in, first-out policy. They are now at charters and private schools. * I'm actually pretty doubtful about the precision of these test scores; I think they are noisier than most administrators seem to. And once you link pay to the scores, things are going to go downhill fast.