663 DC Teachers Getting Raises Thanks To Performance Pay

I wish Bill Turque's column about the latest IMPACT teacher evaluation news out of DC hadn't focused so heavily in the lead and headline on people getting fired. The much more important part is way down:

Another 663 teachers (16 percent) were rated highly effective, making them eligible for performance bonuses of up to $25,000. The vast majority were rated effective.

There's nothing wrong with the government paying high salaries if doing so gets you high quality personnel. If generous salaries mean you get a lot of applicants, that's great. But it's worth looking at whether your hiring decisions have worked out well. And then if they have, you should by all means spend money. It might cost a lot to hire a lot of excellent teachers and keep them teaching in your school system. But that's money well spent. The idea that it's somehow "anti-teacher" to want to identify and compensate the best people in the system is bizarre.