Arne Duncan Quotes

I believe in pay for performance.

I do not think that anybody should get paid for lousy performance. I've said that for a long time. If you work hard and you do good, you get paid well.

The idea of a merit rating is alluring. The sound of the words captivates the imagination: pay for what you get; get what you pay for; motivate people to do their best, for their own good. ... The effect is exactly the opposite of what the words promise.

The only way to earn what you're really worth is to get paid based on your results.

Salaries and wages must reflect the reality of the enterprise's economic performance; deviations from the planned performance should be reflected in pay.

I never wanted to get paid by the hour. If I was going to do more work than another guy, I wanted to get paid more.

Salaries should be set based on production and contributions, not positions.

I don't like bonuses for public services employees who do great jobs, like prosecutors or judges.

When money follows results - we will get more results for our money.

When I arrived at IBM, there were 'Team' signs all around. I asked, 'How do people get paid?' They told me, 'We pay people based on individual performance.'

If I were President, … schoolteachers would be paid more than movie stars and basketball players.

The NFL is a performance-based business, so you should have to perform to earn some of your money. At the same time, I realize that my success isn't just because of what I do out there.

Merit pay has failed repeatedly, and it's no surprise. When you base teacher pay on standardized test scores, you won't improve education; you just promote the high-stakes testing craze that's led parents, students and educators to shout 'Enough!' all across the country.

You get paid on what you did, not what you're gonna do. That's what people don't understand. You get paid on what you did.

In the final analysis, you always get paid for your results.

Work-get paid; don't work-don't get paid. Everybody is on commission

Like I always said, if I'm one of the top players in the game, pay me like I'm one of the top players in the game.

When it comes to public school education, we have been unwilling to measure our results. We've been unwilling to pay based on performance. We have tenure where, even if you can't teach, you can't get fired. We've been unwilling to invest in new schools.

If they're going to pay me like [Mike] Gallego, I'm going to play like Gallego.

Never is work without reward, or reward without work.

I am not a believer in large salaries. I hold that every man should be paid for personal production. Our big men at Bethlehem seldom get salaries of over one hundred dollars a week; but all of them receive bonuses computed entirely on the efficiencies and the economies registered in their departments.

With respect to teachers' salaries .... Poor teachers are grossly overpaid and good teachers grossly underpaid. Salary schedules tend to be uniform and determined far more by seniority.

If you start getting involved with government on, this one gets this pay and this one gets that pay, then you say, where does it all start? Because you could have a woman that's much better than a man; you could have a woman that's not as good as a man.

I say, too, with education, America needs to be putting a lot more focus on that and our schools have got to be really ramped up in terms of the funding that they are deserving. Teachers needed to be paid more.

And where the rewards for merit are greatest, there are found the best citizens.