I agreed with everything you wrote, and then I agree with your commenters. I just don’t understand why you don’t see Klein and Rhee as examples of bad faith negotiators. Repudiate their excesses and there are plenty of improvements that we can make together.

And regarding your link, the last 1/3rd had no relationship with reality. We can’t replace one bad system with a worst one. The VAMs described by the New Yorker would cause an exodus of quality teachers from tough schools. To understand why, read the commenters above.

It really comes down to the due process provisions. If you assume that workers can freely represent their interests through collective bargaining, a contract negotiation can safely include merit pay. But no union leader can assume that. The person who wields power over termination, promotion and assignment really determines whether a union can protect its members from management favoritism and punitive retaliation. So labor advocates will tend to see any form of subjective due process as “union busting,” because it means that the manager holds power that can be abused.

The Denver ProComp system has survived, despite its struggles, in part because many Denver teachers saw the school superintendent (now a U.S. Senator) as a good-faith CEO who would block abuses of a performance pay system. The union’s participation in designing ProComp gave them a comfort level in supporting it. And even that wasn’t quite enough. Why should teachers give this potent authority to, say, the Washington DC superintendent, who seems less trustworthy?

That being said, I don’t like seniority-based systems. They don’t serve customers well in any industry. It’s just more obvious in education, where the customers are right there in the same room with the workers. But you have to take one of two strategies: break the union and impose it by force (a bad idea in my opinion) or demonstrate good faith to the teachers you want to work with and develop a system they can trust.

Why does this automatically equal union busting? Couldn’t a union negotiate minimum starting salaries, total compensation, health and pension benefits, non-insane due process provisions, and still be a union?

Of course subjective evaluation (along with data analysis) can lead to better salary and assignment decisions. But it can also be used to elevate cronies, punish reformers, and push out union activists – thereby destroying teachers’ ability to negotiate contracts and speak with a collective voice.

Decisionmaking based on seniority can damage the responsiveness of a large organization, e.g., a school system. But subjective evaluation can eliminate workers’ autonomy, e.g., bust their union. Obviously you don’t endorse this, and there are merit pay programs that seem to be threading the needle. But we have to recognize that the ideal system you describe has opponents with legitimate concerns that should be addressed.