ICYMI: Republicans’ Plan To Cut Teacher Pay

Iowa’s education system is struggling. This plan will make it harder for Iowa to attract new teachers.

Des Moines – Kim Reynolds’ DOGE task force met last week, which should have resulted in ideas on how Iowa can find waste, fraud, and abuse. Instead, they came up with a fair number of bad ideas. One of the worst ideas the board, which is filled with Iowa Republicans, proposed was to tie public teacher pay to student performance.

This is a slap in the face to teachers across Iowa, many of whom already spend money out of their own paychecks to buy supplies for their students. There are a multitude of reasons why a student might be performing poorly: a turbulent home life, lack of consistent meals, undiagnosed or untreated disabilities or conditions, bullying or loneliness, mental health challenges, causes that even a great teacher is unable to fix. Cutting a teacher’s pay doesn’t solve these issues and merit-based pay systems have never been proven to get better results. It just punishes hardworking educators in the name of ‘efficiency’.

The plan doesn’t even make sense from a conceptual level. How would you track teacher performance? Would it allow administrators and school boards to pick favorites? Or would the state add another standardized test? That would give teachers a massive incentive to teach only the limited contents of the test.

“The Republicans give life to the phrase, ‘Beatings will continue until morale improves,’” said Iowa Democratic Party Chair Rita Hart. “The idea that you can punish a teacher into improving student outcomes just doesn’t make any sense. Why don’t Republicans come up with ideas that are actually going to be helpful to students and school systems? Instead of putting an end to the state’s voucher system that funnels millions of dollars away from public education and into private schools so Iowa public schools have the resources they need to improve public education, Republicans are lashing out at the educators who are the only thing keeping the whole system from falling apart. Democrats support our teachers; full stop. Republicans’ blame game won’t succeed.”

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