Dear Andrew,

Well done. You are leading our thinking about this immensely significant issue. It is ludicrous to suggest that teachers should not be rewarded for high merit.

Politically let's not pretend that this has much to do with teacher performance.

It is about Bishop bashing State Labor Governments and unions by linking Federal funds to the forced offering of AWAs to State school teachers.

This approach has failed in Universities and would bomb in schools.

If you want to improve State schools stop giving money to wealthy private schools.

Quite a good idea Andrew. Good article.

It teachers have pay rises on merit, then private schools should be funded on the merit of need. Some clearly don't need funding.

If private school funding is abolished, it could be replaced by many more scholarships where students are placed on merit.

I mean, it is only fair that if teachers are rewarded on merit, so should private schools and students subsidised in the private system.

If you can't just give pay rises to all teachers, then why just give all private schools money without a criteria of need or merit in performance?

Paying teachers based on performance would see the union movement become even more irrelevant. What a terrible world this would be if people were paid on performance. I suppose the unions could turn their attention more to GW fear mongering and strengthening their support for Labour in the upcoming election. It is good to see Mr Rudd is going to fund Private schools just like the libs. Where is this man different from Mr Howard?

Can you imagine the additional bureaucracy needed to implement a merit based pay system for workforces of 100,000 Victorian government school teachers or 200,000 NSW government school teachers.

Will the bureaucracy to eke out these merit based pay increases be funded? NO! So its going to be a crude calculation of merit based on student results, or teachers will have to produce reports and submissions to demonstrate their worthiness to receive a pay rise.

NEWSFLASH teachers are paid to teach our children not spend their time planning and justifying a pay rise.

There are so many teachers in each state that any mechanism that state governments can implement to reduce teachers salaries will have a big impact on recurrent expenditure. As the states can't raise their own taxes the teacher salaries are ultimately paid by the federal taxes.