Teacher Reform

This week of class has sparked so many ideas in my head. There are many of us who feel that teachers receiving tenure is unfair to students, parents, and the community. I have come to the conclusion that I am completely against teacher tenures. Some have brought up the point on how teachers may become less motivated once they are given it and therefore will affect the way they are teaching their students. It really stood out in my mind those teachers in "Waiting for Superman" who were waiting to be brought before a committee on a serious alleged offenses and they were all sitting around playing cards and also the part in the movie where the principal was going to fire all the bad teachers he saw from the camera in a student's backpack, but because of tenure was forced to rehire them back.

If I was able to reform the way teachers are paid in America I would get rid of unions and tenure BULLSHIT. Teachers would be paid salary and would be able to receive commission just like a typical worker in sales. The way a teacher can receive commission is through their yearly performance....so the dreaded test scores would come into play, but also the amount of growth their students achieve on average throughout the school year which would be weighted heavier. This would allow for teachers who are given high school students who have a third grade reading level to not be punished as long as they have made great improvements. Administration would be put in charge of completing teacher evaluations and each state's department of education would be responsible for checking and verifying that each district is recording accurate records. Of course this will always remain a figment of my imagination and would never happen because unions have been around for so long and trying to get rid of them would be near impossible. Almost no teacher will voluntarily give up their membership to the union or their teacher tenure, why because JOB SECURITY.

I found this article that discusses the compensation of teachers and how they aren't as bad as what people think they are. Some key points from the article are that:

*The wage gap between teachers and non-teachers disappears when both groups are matched on an objective measure of cognitive ability rather than on years of education.

*Public-school teachers earn higher wages than private-school teachers, even when the comparison is limited to secular schools with standard curriculums

*Workers who switch from non-teaching jobs to teaching jobs receive a wage increase of roughly 9 percent. Teachers who change to non-teaching jobs, on the other hand, see their wages decrease by roughly 3 percent. This is the opposite of what one would expect if teachers were underpaid.

*Pension programs for public-school teachers are significantly more generous than the typical private-sector retirement plan, but this generosity is hidden by public-sector accounting practices that allow lower employer contributions than a private-sector plan promising the same retirement benefits.

*Most teachers accrue generous retiree health benefits as they work, but retiree health care is excluded from Bureau of Labor Statistics benefits data and thus frequently overlooked. While rarely offered in the private sector, retiree health coverage for teachers is worth roughly an additional 10 percent of wages.

*Job security for teachers is considerably greater than in comparable professions. Using a model to calculate the welfare value of job security, we find that job security for typical teachers is worth about an extra 1 percent of wages, rising to 8.6 percent when considering that extra job security protects a premium paid in terms of salaries and benefits.

The link for the article is http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2011/10/assessing-the-compensation-of-public-school-teachers. It was pretty long, but had a lot of good points people don't typically think about.