In his Class Struggle column this week, Jay Mathews spotlights a study which concludes that districts don’t necessarily need to pay more in order to find and keep good teachers.

They just need to do a better job of selling the idea that teacher pay isn’t all that bad. Especially if you can get two teachers to marry. Or something like that.

A marketing campaign to show students that teachers made more than they thought they made “would induce a 7 percent increase in the number of top-third students entering teaching each year (or an equivalent nationally of 4,000 additional top third students above an estimated baseline of roughly 55,000 who enter today,)” the report [from McKinsey and Co., the giant management consulting firm] said.

Paid training increased the number going into teaching by 11 percent. A 20 percent performance bonus to the top-performing 10 percent of teachers would produce the same 11 percent gain in top-third students.

But providing training costs money, something that is usually the first thing to go when politicians start cutting school budgets.

And that idea of performance bonuses? It lost some credibility this week after the release of findings from the “first scientifically rigorous review of merit pay in the United States” showing that paying big money incentives “produced no discernible difference in academic performance”.

Which, of course, did nothing to slow the Secretary of Education from pushing the concept as a major part of the Race to the Top competition and, also this week, sending $442 million to a bunch of RTTT lottery-winning school districts so they can set up merit pay plans.

So, whatever happened to the idea of only paying for “researched-based” concepts that have been demonstrated to be effective in improving student learning?

You know, the concept that was one of the cornerstones of No Child Left Behind.

And which has been consistently ignored by politicians and education “experts” since long before the law’s inception, going back to W Bush’s “Texas miracle”, which also turned out to be based on gut feelings and no proof.