Is Wall Street best model for fixing our schools?

Nothing's got people so worked up right now as the issue of other people's pay.

Check out these two quotes I stumbled across last week in reviewing America's raging debate over bonuses.

1: "Our employees deserve tremendous credit for staying here and demonstrating unswerving dedication to the public interest."

That sounds nice — like someone deserves a reward. Only that was the CEO of Fannie Mae, insisting Friday that some of his fellow execs should get bonuses up to $1 million. Even though the mortgage company was wrecked last year.

2: "The public demands accountability. In the private sector, if you're not good, you're not going to get the raise or you're not going to keep the job."

Uh-oh. Sounds like somebody's run out of patience. That's state Sen. Steve Hobbs, D-Lake Stevens. Only he wasn't talking about the titans of industry. He was talking about ... teachers.

Public-school teachers should have their pay tied to performance, Hobbs told Seattle Weekly.

Because merit pay has worked so well in the corporate world.

The times are schizophrenic, aren't they? Just as we go ballistic over bonus pay in the financial world — even blaming it for causing the meltdown — President Obama and many lawmakers locally are pushing the same premise in the educational world.

There are a zillion versions of merit pay. But the basic idea is to link a person's pay with some measure of whether they're good at their job.

For Wall Street bankers, the gauge was profits or stock prices. For classroom teachers, it's usually student test scores. Those who get higher profits or test scores earn more cash. Those who don't are left behind, and eventually weeded out.

Simple, efficient, Darwinian.

Except on Wall Street it was a disaster.

All the big company failures of the past year were marked by a hellbent scramble for short-term gains, much of it fueled by the lure of bonuses.

At the very least, the bonuses did not buy results. At Fannie Mae, the bonuses allegedly were the cause of accounting fraud. Lehman Brothers doled out $6 billion in bonuses alone at the end of 2007 — yet went bust nine months later.

Now the firms that remain are still paying bonuses, rewarding the people who brought the global economy to its knees.

This is the model we want to bring into the schools?

I realize teacher merit pay would be different — nobody would get rich, for starters. But the idea is similar. It's to tie some pay not to experience or skills but to a short-term result — how students do on yearly tests.

Dan Grimm, a former state lawmaker who headed a task force that recommended merit pay to the Legislature, said that, if nothing else, we should pay principals and superintendents bonuses for hiring and firing the right teachers.

"Right now, they have no financial incentive to be diligent in the management of their staffs," he said. "There are tremendous disincentives for taking action against a poor-performing teacher. This is to change that dynamic.

"I think we know that if we reward good behavior, we'll get more of it."

Do we? I've written columns in favor of merit pay in the past, figuring it was worth a try. But the events of the past year have upended more than our 401(k)s. When CEOs making $100 million a year have just blithely run 100-year-old companies into the ground, it's hard to argue that pay has anything at all to do with performance.

Or that it won't have perverse consequences.

So here's a throwback question: What ever happened to the salary? You do your job, and you try to do it well. Like with cops — they don't get paid per criminal.

Why is everything else becoming so incentivized? Are we really this venal?

Maybe we are. So how about this: If we're going to tie teacher pay to performance, let's at least do it for the politicians, too.

Danny Westneat's column appears Wednesday and Sunday. Reach him at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.