Merit Pay for Excellent Teachers

[Keith Broaders]

Click Here to Read About the Solution

The salaries in the public school demands teachers be paid based on seniority rather than the quality of their service. As a result a mediocre teacher with 20 years of service is paid the same as an excellent with the same number of years of service.

This systems enables the salaries of the poorest teachers to be subsidized by refusing to pay the excellent teachers what they are truly worth

School Districts should have a panel of elected officials to evaluate the teachers.

The teachers in every school should be ranked, with the top 25% of the teachers receiving a performance bonus of 25%, . If the bottom 25% of the teachers would have their salaries reduced by 25%

I believe that quality teachers should be paid considerably more and that ineffective teachers should find alternative employment. Many excellent teachers leave the profession because they are not being paid what they are worth.

Not all Major League baseball players are equally compensated and the superstars make considerably more than  journeymen. Excellent teachers are underpaid while many mediocre teachers would not even be employed in the private sector.

Our schools are failing because the system is broken and needs to be repaired. 

[Jeanine Kincheloe]

I do not agree with this. While it sounds like a fair solution, the facts are, there is such immorality in the culture at large, that parents are part of the problem. I teach. I get students who have been dumbed down from babyhood, ignored by parents too busy with their tech gods to read to their kids.

Every single student I get at the college level, who has problems in comprehension, has 0 curiosity to look something up, and 0 passion for reading and 0 ability to acknowledge their own part in learning. Parents, in the situation described above, will grade highly those teachers who give their 'gifted' kid an "A."  That is all they care about. 

They do not care if their 20-yr. old knows what kind of government we have, or if they can spell, constuct and speak sentences that have a singular noun with a singular verb. They do not care if their kid starts a sentence with the word, "Me."  They want someone else to raise and teach their kid. 

So, no. This is not the problem. The problem is the same. It is gov.co. The Fabian Socialists were recruited to come here and dumb down our population and they have done so. In my area, a heavy Appalachian area with low rates of higher education, the situation is so bad, some college English professors, don't even proofread students' papers. Why? Because everyone is just a data point in some list/aggregate of data, data, data. So, in order to increase the percentages of achievement of higher ed., they dumb down the courses, change exams so everyone gets a "B," and/or, they don't proofread a paper.

So, everything gets dumbed down in order to get more $$$$ from Gates and Gov.co.

The solution is getting education out of the trendy fashionistas in the Dept of Ed. Throw out the junk, No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and all the other bs.

This Covid crisis may in fact help fix some of the problem at the lower levels, which is where it started by showing parents that schooling can happen at home and that it works.

Standards in schools need to be tough and non-bending. How is it my Dad went to school in a 1-room schoolhouse in OK, and learned enough to be accepted into Chemical Engineering at U. of OK? How is it that my maternal Grandfather had a 2nd-grade eduction and was able to teach himself calculus, electricity, and wound up wiring the coal mines for lighting, so thereby was responsible for the lives of hundreds of West Virginia men?

These kids have been brought up in a culture of ROT. They read COMICS. They wouldn't know a classical piece of literature, such as Wuthering Heights, if it came up and slapped them on the face!

Please, do not lump all of us into the bad-guy group. It goes back to family taking responsibility, church calling out the wrongfulness of the culture, including gov.co., and gov minding being FORCED to mind its own business. 

The spirit of corporatism is at work. Data and Dollars. 

[Morton Thomson Jr.]

I know exactly what you mean,

You should see the textbooks my father used at Berkeley. No pictures. Small words and lots of them. Only a few diagrams if any. Engineering degrees were hard to earn back then.

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Why are teachers always the target?  Never the administration or school boards.  In 20 years of teaching, after 20 in the Navy, LCDR USN (ret), the level of leadership demonstrated by the front office ranged from not observed to nearly criminal..

[Morton Thomson Jr.]

Leave us not forget that The Online Professor was a teacher in that system.

[Bruce C Boldenow]

I get your point, I really do, but (I know, there always a 'but' it seems) the problem as I see it, is, who decides?  The pro baseball player has a set of statistics that are free of subjective evaluation (I know, except the umpire).  He bats XXX %, he has XXX RBIs, etc.  How does this work for a teacher?  Based on test scores?  Not a good idea, too many possible variables.  Does the administration choose?  I have seen many a time, the "teacher of the year' for a school, selected by the administration, was, according to students and fellow teachers, one of the poorer choices.  "A panel of elected officials"?  Who are they, what do they know about educational instruction?  I could be elected to a board to evaluate electricians, but I better not be, as I know little about electricity.  Even if the 'board' members are former educators, retired, or whatever, even that may not help.  If I have learned anything after 45 years in the classroom,   it's that, not everyone teaches the same way.  What is effective for one teacher may not work for someone else, but they both get good results, who decides who is the better teacher?  Frankly, much of the concerns here should be laid at the feet of the administrators.  If they do their job, they should be able to weed out poor teachers, but even this has its hazards.  What is the answer, I don't know if there is one.  One thing that has to change is the way we train our teachers at the college level.  They are too often taught by 'liberal' professors.  Here I am not speaking necessarily about a political point of view (that shouldn't show up in the classroom anyway), but the "liberal' idea that you can be the student's buddy, "just call me John", rather than Mr. Brown, etc. A classroom has to have respect (yes, both ways) and structure.  You don't accomplish this by being their 'buddy'!