NASHVILLE – The problem in many public schools around the nation is that teachers and their unions have been calling the shots for years.

That means adult interests, like raises, benefits, seniority rights and tenure protection, have been the top concern in far too many school districts. Students and their need to learn are secondary concerns.

Many schools have been trying to reduce that trend through a number of strategies, including the scrapping of union pay scales based on seniority and college degrees in favor of merit pay tied to student achievement.

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Two weeks ago the Metro Nashville school district was headed in that positive direction. Director of Schools Jesse Register unveiled a plan based on the Tennessee Education Acceleration Model (TEAM), which would give annual raises as high as four percent to those teachers who score high on a 1-5 evaluation scale.

The scale would be based largely on student state test scores.

As a story from The Tennessean put it, the impetus for the plan was to “retain and recruit the best teachers by rewarding them financially.”

The program was designed to meet a new state law that requires public schools to adopt some new form of “differentiated pay” by this spring, according to the news report.

Of course some teachers protested, which was a predictable response from the union types who want all teachers paid on the same scale, regardless of their effectiveness.

But somehow that predictable whining had an effect on Register, who announced Thursday that he would delay implementation of merit pay, and will go back to the drawing board to design a plan that “rewards and retains the very best teachers.”

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He just proposed such a plan. Why postpone implementation?

“At this time, we have decided to defer the decision on tying teacher pay to the TEAM evaluations,” he wrote in an email. “We will still move forward with the way we base pay on advanced degrees and how we recognize and reward team leadership, but we will not recommend basing raises on TEAM composite scores at this time.”

Even worse is that Register indicated he will confer with staff, including teachers, to learn what type of evaluation and compensation system they would prefer.

“We also will continue speaking with you about the evaluation system and hear your thoughts on what you like and what you don’t like,” Register wrote in the email.

It’s a sure bet that the majority of teachers, none of whom currently have to push themselves very hard to earn an annual raise, will say they prefer an evaluation system that does not consider student test scores or academic progress.

This is not the type of leadership that a huge metro school district requires.

Teachers, like employees in every other industry, need supervision, motivation and accountability. Without incentives provided by administrators, poor teachers will remain on the job, and too many competent teachers will continue to do less than they are capable of doing.

That’s unfair to students and their families, who deserve to have the best possible instructors in classrooms.

We hope Register rediscovers his courage and comes up with some type of system that requires teachers to do more than just show up every fall to get a raise.

They must be pushed to do their very best for the students, because the schools exist for the students, not the people who staff them.