MARIETTA, Ga. – Automatic, annual step raises for teachers are not particularly wise in any school district.

But they really make no sense at all in Georgia’s Cobb County school district.

Step raises for teachers are common in public schools throughout the U.S. They are usually written into teacher union collective bargaining agreements, and guarantee most teachers an incremental salary increase each year.

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The raises are based on seniority, with teachers taking another “step” up the pay chart every year. Extra money can usually be made by those who have earned a certain number of graduate level college credits.

Step raises tend to be very expensive for school districts. That’s one of the reasons they are so illogical for the Cobb County district.

The district faced a daunting $86.4 million budget deficit going into the 2013-14 school year, according to media reports. To close the financial gap, the school board opted to give all employees five furlough day, and eliminate 182 teaching positions through attrition.

In other words, there really wasn’t a penny to spare.

Yet the district paid out a full $10 million in step raises to teachers that same year. It’s hard to imagine how school officials rationalized such an expenditure, particularly considering the deep educational cuts they were forced to make only a few months earlier.

How much learning was lost due to all the teaching positions that were left vacant? And how many of those positions could have been filled with $10 million?

But it goes beyond affordability. Step raises are a foolish investment for any school district that hopes to create any type of incentive for excellent instruction.

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The problem is that classroom performance and instructional effectiveness play no role in the raises. Great teachers are on the same pay scale as not-so-great teachers. Those who survive one year to the next will get a raise, period.

The problem with such a system can be illustrated within the Cobb County district, which has many different schools.

Students in those schools take the state’s Criterion Referenced Competency Test, which is designed to measure how much students at each grade level have learned.

The 2013-14 scores among Cobb County schools were all over the board, meaning all the students were not learning at the same pace.

For instance, 92 percent of students in Mabry Middle School met or exceeded standards on English/language arts, while only 80 percent of students at McCleskey Middle School accomplished the same feat.

83 percent of students at Baker Elementary met or exceeded standards in math, while only 50 percent did so at Dowell Elementary.

Seventy-one percent of students at Pine Mountain Middle School met or exceeded standards in math, while only 55 percent made the grade at Smitha Middle School.

It’s hard to say why the student test scores varied so widely among schools in the same district. Certainly socio-economic differences played some sort of role. Kids in wealthier areas usually do better academically than kids from lower income neighborhoods.

Does the quality of teachers in each school also play a role? Undoubtedly. Are all the teachers within each school equal in skill and effectiveness? Of course not.

The point is that there appears to be a great deal of difference between the quality of instruction in different schools within in the same community, and that’s also true from classroom to classroom in the same buildings.

Should teachers whose students excel be on the same wage scale as those who are less effective? If so, what is their incentive for continuing to perform at a very high level? And where’s the incentive for mediocre or bad teachers to improve their performance?

Step raises send the message that every teacher is of equal value, which is completely absurd.

School districts that send that message aren’t helping themselves, their teachers, or most importantly, their students.