My thoughts on the much needed and half passed Education reform in Florida: abolishing teacher tenure and substituting a merit pay system.
I read this comment on an article about said subject and it really got to me:
Quote:
"Teacher's cannot and do not create wealth and cannot be measured in such ways. This is why merit pay is a fallacy."
You could not be further from the truth my friend.
Teachers can and DO create "wealth" - in fact that's their job. When you create wealth you are essentially creating capital, and that capital is in turn invested to create more wealth. In this case, we are talking about HUMAN capital. Why do people go to college? To increase their wealth of knowledge or their human capital. That same question can be applied more broadly: why do people want/need education? To increase their human capital.
Monetary Profit does not (yet) enter this equation. As you said, and hopefully is the case, most teachers enter the profession to pass along knowledge more than to make a killing of a salary. Sadly, with tenure the career choice also attracts those who just want job security and don't care about teaching. Merit pay a fallacy? Hardly. With a merit pay system those teachers who were truly attracted to teaching will be rewarded for good teaching and those who didnt now have a great incentive to better their teaching. Personal profit now enters the equation. You could choose the career for the most benevolent of reasons but the fact remains that you would always prefer making more money to less.
Creating incentives for teachers to do a better job is the only way to save our great nation. 50 years ago, the USA was unparalleled in academic achievement. Now? We are mediocre. How does it make any sense that in Washington DC school district over 50% of middle/high school students were deemed as being behind grade levels, while less than 0.1% of teachers in DC were fired due to poor performance (from a Newsweek article).
Something needs to be done to save our children's education (and therefore our nation's future), and tenure is not helping it is hurting. Merit Pay systems fix this, plain and simple.
It was also mentioned that a merit system would be unfair for a teacher of a higher subject because the students they get are ill-prepared (Example given was Algebra 2 teacher getting students who barely know Algebra 1 and having to waste time catching them up)... Benchmarks solve this conundrum: test at the beginning of the year and at the end, if significant improvement then the teacher DID something, if NO improvement (which is currently the norm) then the teacher just held onto their job.
In short: this is MUCH NEEDED Education reform - it is NOT the end of teachers and schools, it is the end of bad teachers and bad schools.
The Nobel Laureate Economist Milton Friedman said, "In our current educational system, close to 30 percent of the youngsters who start high school never finish. They are condemned to low-income jobs. They are condemned to a situation in which they are going to be at the bottom. That leads in turn to a divisive society; it leads to a stratified society rather than one of general cooperation and general understanding. It is a disgrace that in a country like the United States, 30 percent of youngsters never graduate from high school. And I haven't even mentioned those who drop out in elementary school. It's a disgrace that there are so many people who can't read and write. It's hard for me to see how we can continue to maintain a decent and free society if a large subsection of that society is condemned to poverty and to handouts."
It is more than time we did something.
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