News In Brief

School task force urges pay increase for teachers

A task force chartered by Congress urged states and localities Tuesday to raise the salaries of all teachers and to experiment with giving the top ones merit pay.

The Task Force on Merit Pay made several other recommendations aimed at raising the quality of teaching, such as raising the standards for admission to college education departments, devoting at least 3 percent of school-district budgets to faculty development, and creating a federal scholarship program that would pay the tuition of top students if they agreed to teach two years for each year of government assistance.