The claim that Romney wants to eliminate teacher certification is debunked and destroyed within the first few paragraphs of the primer. All Romney wants to do is modify some requirements for certification so that it is easier for good people who want to teach to realize that dream. It’s no secret that our country doesn’t have enough teachers; all media outlets routinely cover that story.
As
for teacher’s rights, those have gotten out of control. The recent Chicago Teacher Strike is a very
relevant example of that problem.
Chicago teachers now have the highest rate of pay before benefits in the
country at an average of about $89,000. And yet
Chicago students rank near the very bottom in time spent in the classroom and
the graduation rate in Chicago is only 60 percent! The person who posted the primer and those
who rose to her defense were practically making out the teachers to be the
victims in this case! And one said I was
misinformed because Chicago has four of the top 10 high schools in Illinois. Four schools do not a district make.
Yes,
teachers have a somewhat limited earning potential. Public school teachers know that when they
get into the profession, they are becoming public servants collecting a salary
from the taxpayer. But teachers get paid
more than enough to live decent lives and the longer they teach, the more they
make. My high school history teacher,
probably my best teacher ever, retired in 2012 after over 30 years on the job with
a salary 10 times his starting pay! With
hard work comes reward! Right now, too much
money is going into the teacher’s pocket and not into the student! Just look at Maryland’s higher education
system which I touched on last week!
My
notion that tenure is “a good thing because it protects good teachers” is also
ridiculous. Fine, standardized tests aren’t
the best measure of success and we all know that. But if a teacher is a “good” teacher, then
why do they need to hide behind tenure?!
Good teachers will have natural protection because students love the
good teachers!
I was the victim of a tenured teacher in 11th grade. I disagreed politically with my English teacher and all year she marked me lower than the rest of the class. I had proof. But I couldn’t do anything about it because she had a union and tenure backing her up. Had I tried to make a case out of it, I would’ve gone nowhere and spent a lot of money doing so.
Finally,
what is so wrong with merit-based pay? One
person said studies have found that merit-based pay “doesn’t work as well as it
was hoped”. Really? Several years ago, Michelle Rhee, former
Chancellor of D.C. Public Schools, developed a new labor deal (subject of this
op-ed) that would have included merit-based incentives for teachers and removed
tenure. Under the plan, salaries for
teachers performing well stood to rise substantially. The maximum pay under the new system would
have been $130,000! But, because the
union knew there were teachers in the system doomed to be fired under the plan,
D.C. teachers rejected it and instead got much smaller raises.
The
reality is that tenure and unions are holding America’s youth back. The educational system is broken and needs to
be reformed. Unions need to be scaled
back, tenure needs to be slowly reformed, phased out and replaced and
merit-based pay needs to come to public schools. Until then, students are at the mercy of
unions and the threat of strikes. Lost
educational time from striking unions only makes things worse. More money into teachers’ pockets means less
money buying new technology or new computers for students. I am confident that the Romney plan will reform
education while cutting costs and that children will actually start learning
more and performing better in school. America
needs to wake up and realize that.
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