Teacher of the Year used by StudentsFirst to promote teacher pay bill he doesn’t support

[proud2BlibKansan]

n May of this year, Gary Abud, a science teacher at Grosse Pointe North High School, was chosen as Michigan’s 2013-2014 Teacher of the Year by State Superintendent Mike Flanagan. It’s an amazing accomplishment for a teacher who has only been at it for six years. Well-respected by both his students and his coworkers, Mr. Abud was a worthy choice.

To reward him for his outstanding achievement, the anti-union corporatist Mackinac Center — an ALEC and State Policy Network affiliate funded, in part, by the Koch brothers — did a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to find out how much money Mr. Abud makes. Once they found out, they proceeded to use him along with details about his salary to promote passage of House Bill 4625, a bill I call the “‘Teach to the Test’ Teacher Pay Act”.

HB 4625, a bill I have written about recently, changes teacher compensation rules to make it illegal for school districts to consider length of service as a criteria for teacher pay. Instead, it changes “job performance and job accomplishments as a PRIMARY factor in determining compensation and additional compensation”. Under the current law, the word primary is replaced with the word “significant”, giving local school systems flexibility in how they compensate their teachers.

In a post on their blog “Capitol Confidential”, the Mackinac Center wrote that Mr. Abud “made $56,876 in 2012-13, which is about $21,000 less a year than the district’s average salary of $77,969 a year.” Why does he make less than average? They falsely answer the question in the title of their post: “Union Salary Schedule Ensures State ‘Teacher of the Year’ Earns Near Bottom In Pay”, implying that this income disparity is the sole result of unions holding back good teachers rather than the fact that he’s only been teaching for 6 years.

Michelle Rhee’s anti-teacher group StudentsFirst, which promotes for-profit charter schools as the answer to all of our education system problems, picked up the ball and ran with it, sending out a deceptive email to their mailing list claiming, as did the Mackinac Center, that this problem would be solved by the passage of HB 4625, a claim which is flagrantly false.

more . . .http://www.eclectablog.com/2013/06/interview-teacher-of-the-year-used-by-studentsfirst-mackinac-center-to-promote-teacher-pay-bill-he-doesnt-support.html