I have done a lot of research on eduction and I have yet to come across a study that finds that cutting teachers pay and lowering revenue for the schools boosts test schools or enhances learning, yet money seems to be the main focus right now of our elected officials regarding education.
In my town of Saline, the people just elected a gentleman named David Holden who, when you get to the brass tacks of his policy, wants to lower teachers compensation because he believes in the well debunked fallacy that teachers are paid too much. Here is a guy who has seen his property tax rates falls for three years straight and works for a company that just gave out a $1.171 million bonus to it's top official. His personal wealth is on the rise and his contributions to the schools are down and his idea of shared sacrifice is that the teachers must sacrifice wages so he can keep his taxes low. I assume it is coincidence that school spending needs to be addressed just as the last of his kids graduates.
Since when did we put money ahead of education? Families and students go into significant debt to pay for a college education. I'm guessing that is because they think a good education is valuable. By all accounts the early years of education are the most important years of a child's development. Yet we are making the biggest cuts in the area with the greatest potential return. If you believe in running government like a business then picking your area of best ROI for cuts is the exact opposite of a good business model. Studies show that cutting money for education hurts the economy and leads to lower earning potential for our children.
Outside of money one of the only "solutions" Republicans are offering is to fire bad teachers. But the reality is that there is no bad teacher epidemic. This is political rhetoric aimed at turning the uninformed against tenure. The statistic Republicans always use when talking about tenure is the number of teachers fired in the New York school systems in 2008. The problem is, that by it self, this statistic proves nothing. Perhaps there are so few teachers fired because the vast majority are good at their job. After all only 1.5% of teachers in the New York school system in 2008 received an unsatisfactory review.
Rather than immediately grabbing our pitch forks and burning all of the "unsatisfactory" teachers at the stake with a "bad teacher" label, wouldn't it first be prudent to understand why a teacher receives such a rating and determine if extra training could improve the areas where these teachers performance is unsatisfactory? Should the knee jerk reaction of "fire the bums" be our first response? After all, replacing teachers already costs the US $2.2 billion a year and teachers are least effective in their first year meaning hiring new teachers lowers the level of education student receive until the new teacher becomes experienced.
This of course assumes that we even have enough qualified candidates to fill all of the openings created by firing these hypothetical bad teachers. Reports indicate that there is actually a shortage of qualified candidates not an abundance.
Additionally, a study about effective teachers found that the traits of an effective teacher become apparent by year two. Most teachers don't get a chance for tenure until year three or four. Perhaps the real problem hear is the evaluation process or the administrators who grant tenure. Also 46% of new teachers leave the profession within five years. Perhaps only the good teachers who are passionate about education survive past the first five years.
Another study by the National Council on Teacher Quality found that one of the biggest problems for education is a lack of good student teaching. Being a good teacher doesn't necessarily mean you are qualified to convey to a student teacher everything that goes into being a successful teacher. If that were to case Michael Jordan would be the best coach the NBA has ever seen.
Perhaps we shouldn't focus solely on firing bad teachers but instead work on creating more good teachers. Placing student teachers with educators who have been trained or demonstrate a skill in training student teachers on the finer points of being a good teacher may be a much better and cheaper use of our resources.
To make matters worse many of the "solutions" Republicans are currently offering to improve our schools are also the exact same things that are driving quality teachers away from the profession. These include the threat of layoffs, low wages, testing pressures, and poor work conditions.
The real problem with education is not the unions, tenure or teachers but the arrogance and ignorance of our elected officials who think that teaching is easy and the solutions are obvious.
If we really want to improve public education we first have to educate our elected officials so they can stop making decisions based on what they believe to be true and start making decisions based on what the data tells us is true.
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