I experienced two almost foreign sensations while watching the Democrat presidential candidates debate in Iowa Sunday morning -- relief and excitement. Serious contenders for the presidency actually spoke to the heart of a crucial domestic issue: education. Resuscitating and improving public education is not only a serious moral commitment to the youth of America, but it's also a quintessential political bellwether issue.
If a candidate understands the real, on-the-ground severity of the education crisis in America and can fight for clear-thinking solutions, then he/she is inherently a champion of social justice. If a candidate abdicates his responsibility to public education by offering superficial band-aids, or even worse, villainous profit-driven proposals like vouchers and privatization, then his true colors are seen.
During the Democrat debate, many candidates displayed a refreshing bit of candor that appeared to signal a party-wide atonement for following the president in lockstep to pass the radically flawed and discriminatory No Child Left Behind Act in the bleary wake of 9/11.
A recent column I wrote titled "The Fallacy of Teacher Merit Pay (By a Teacher)" drew some lively action in the comments section. The exact question of teacher merit pay was put directly to the candidates and each of them (except a rampaging Mike Gravel) rejected the concept of giving teachers bonuses based on their students' standardized test scores.
Barack Obama, Bill Richardson, and Joe Biden each spoke in ways that impressed me, as a teacher, that they had spent serious time talking with educators. Each referenced a loved one who teaches, and of the importance of paying teachers higher salaries in order to attract and maintain a corps excellent leaders in American classrooms.
Senator Clinton made a plea for universal pre-kindergarten, a direly needed amendment to our system. Clinton also voiced approval for incentive pay based on schoolwide performance, a potentially dangerous stepsister of teacher merit pay that may continue to foster the culture of high-stakes testmania.
Accountability in schools can no longer be synonymous with nothing but test scores. The Democratic candidates appear to hear the cries of teachers and students for more fair, multidimensional assessments of their performance, and more importantly, for the tools to facilitate real learning. It's a cautious optimism, but as we near the sixth anniversary of the No Child Left Behind quagmire, the fresh air is welcome.
Dan Brown's memoir of his first year teaching, The Great Expectations School: A Rookie Year in the New Blackboard Jungle, is now available. Dan will be a guest on NPR's Diane Rehm Show, along with Jonathan Kozol, on Thursday, August 23.
Follow Dan Brown on Twitter: www.twitter.com/danbrownteacher
The truth is that many teachers are not underpaid at all. Gym teachers. Teachers who failed their licensure exams 40 times before passing. Football coaches teaching world history. These teachers are overpaid.
Math and Science teachers ARE underpaid. there is no shortage of gym teachers. There is a huge shortage of math and science teachers. According to the last Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) about a third (35%) of secondary school math classes are taught by someone who doesn't even have a minor in a math related field.
So why should we raise the salaries of unqualified teachers or those who teach subjects that are neither crucial nor understaffed? Why not devote those resources to the subjects that we need to improve recruitment in?
Try doing some rough estimation about the amount of money you're talking about wasting on positions that don't need raises. Say the proposed "minimum wage" would increase the salaries of about 15% of teachers (the rest already making that or better) by an average of $5,000/year. 15% of 3.2 million teachers is about half a million teachers (480,000). 480,000 x $5000 each is about 2 and 1/2 BILLION dollars ($2,400,000,000) devoted to this RANDOM initiative. (If you want to get exact numbers NCES and the SASS should have them).
The same folks who say performance pay has no research proving its efficacy ignore the fact that there's even less research supporting across the board pay increases as a strategy for school improvement. Why not spend money where it's needed and where it's effective instead of spreading it so thin that it does little to no good for anyone?
I always hear the argument that throwing money at something doesn't solve it or make it better, except for the military. Throwing more money at the military always seems to make it better. Why does it only work for the military and no where else? Could someone take the time to explain this to me, because the more I know the less I understand.
Talk about an impressive First Lady!
You know, there are just no good reasons that could counter the merits of a Biden presidency!
Vouchers offer students an alternative to this "quagmire" that is the current public school system.
How do we measure these? Number of A's given? Success on a standardized test? College graduation rate? Hours spent in the school?
Detail of their lesson plans? The idea isn't a bad one, but implementing it is not only problematic but also unreasonable.
As for unions, they also guarantee the employment of effective teachers and there are far more effective teachers than ineffective. What keeps teachers from teaching to the level of their lowest teacher in the building? Pride in our work. The vast majority of teachers I now take an immense amount of pride in what they do.
We aren't just people who decided we wanted summers off, that we can't do anything else, or that we wanted to play kickball all day long. Teachers are people who understand the role we play. We know what can happen to our students. We are willing to accept the role we play in our society and culture. We reflect on what we do and how it affects our kids. Sure thee are exceptions, but like anything else, the exceptions are not the rule.
Is it wrong for us to ask for fair compensation? Is it wrong for us to want to attract the best and brightest to our profession? In both cases the answer is "No".
What is wrong though is taking money for public education and giving it to companies who do not have a student's best interest in mind. Businesses are for profit and what ultimately matters is their bottom line. Using that same money to attract more people to teaching and cutting out the for-profit middleman is a better way to improve results and education.
I've often thought a very good idea for teachers would be a form of bonus pay without ties to standardized test scores but rather tie some sort of bonus pay system to studentss' rate of college graduation? Obviously there's problems to be found in a system like that, but is that somewhere worthwhile looking into starting at?
And to the poster who says that a minimum salary of 40k is absurd: what are you high? There is perhaps no single profession of greater importance to the future of this (or any) nation than teaching. And why shouldn't we pay these teachers that kind of salary when CEOs and stock brokers and all sorts of profressions make many times that?
My brother, who is a teacher, just received an $11k bump in pay. Was this because he is a great teacher? No, it was because of a new contract. He is 29 and is making over $60k per year. I would say that is very competitive with other professions. Also, he never has a review and his job security is top notch. He is tenured, so he can never be fired and he has a pension, which will allow him to retire without having to put too many of his hard earned dollars into a retirement fund of his own.
My curiosity comes not from a worry about anecdotal evidence, but from the apparent irrelevance of this particular data point. There are parts of the country in which the minimum wage is an irrelevance because the labor market is tight enough to keep wages higher. But that does not make it an irrelevancy everywhere.
This is particularly true since part of the issue with education in the US is the great disparity of quality. Does your brother work in an upscale school district with a strong school system?
The 40k proposal could be ridiculous, but the evidence point you give is completely irrelevant to establishing that.
When a school can hand pick its students from among a competitive group of students, it's not hard to show progress. Unfortunately, the playing field wasn't level. Schools with students with a much wider range of needs were for the most part shut out, even though they had substantial gains. Like NCLB, here is another example how little bureaucrats know about education.