Woody Allen famously said that “80% of success is just showing up.” Though we can’t be sure of it, we suspect he may have been referring not so much to show business or life in general, but to the ins and outs of being a member of a teachers union. At page one of yesterday’s New York Sun, our Kathleen Lucadamo reported on 25 teachers in New York City public schools pulling down six-figure salaries. Many different factors are at work — such as retroactive salary increases for the years New York City teachers worked without a contract. No one says the teachers didn’t earn their pay. But most made the money they did simply because they have shown up for long enough and have taken on a few extra chores.

No one ought to have a problem with teachers being paid for coaching or working in after-school programs or teaching summer school. Extra responsibilities tend to translate into extra pay. But what is problematic is the extent to which teachers’ base salaries climb up to about $81,000 simply based on seniority — or the accumulation of meaningless education courses — otherwise known as “showing up.” Some teachers may indeed be worth upward of $100,000 a year, but we certainly don’t know which ones those are in a public school system that has, at the insistence of the teachers unions, consistently forgone any form of merit pay.

Merit pay — rewarding teachers with bonuses, and/or penalizing them, based on student performance — is one of the only ideas that could inject some form of accountability for teachers into the public schools. So, predictably, the obstinacy of the unions has been stark, both here in New York and around the country. In 2000, at its national convention at Chicago during the presidential campaign, the National Education Association passed a resolution that speaks for itself: “The Association…believes that performance pay, such as merit pay, or any other system of compensation based on an evaluation of an education employee’s performance, are inappropriate.” The buck, it seems, did not stop in the Windy City. In 2001, before the House’s committee on education and the workforce, the Big Apple’s Randi Weingarten, president of the United Federation of Teachers, slammed merit pay as “an arbitrary and divisive mechanism that undermines the development [of] collegial and professional relationships among teachers.” Perhaps Ms. Weingarten agrees with her parent union’s analysis of the current pay-as-you-show salary structure, posted on the AFT Web site, which proclaims that “the more you know about the task and the longer you do it, the better you should be at the task.”

We respectfully disagree. While there may be certain difficulties in measuring teacher performance, it is far from impossible. It could only be a plus to improve their performance. No one wants to penalize teachers working in the most difficult schools for having lower scores than those working in more affluent environs. But one can measure teachers’ effectiveness using improvement in children’s scores, or one could use parent or peer evaluations.

In Cincinnati, in 2001, the teachers union endorsed a plan that broke teachers into five salary categories — apprentice, novice, career, advanced, and accomplished — based on evaluations in 16 categories, called skill standards, basically a set of best practices for teaching. Unfortunately, the union in Cincinnati quickly shut down that city’s experiment after union members found themselves dissatisfied with their evaluations. Pilot programs in Denver, Iowa, and South Dakota have also had trouble gaining traction.

That the idea has gained any purchase at all against the teachers unions is reason to be hopeful. New York may be a tough nut to crack. It was only a few years ago that the UFT told Mayor Giuliani to go evaluate himself when the idea of merit pay came up here in New York. Ms. Weingarten did signal openness to giving merit pay to entire schools, but not to individual teachers. But with a chancellor willing to offer superintendents up to $40,000 in merit-pay bonuses, maybe there’s hope. Why not reward teachers for doing more than just “showing up”?