The Miami Herald reports on a new bill designed to improve education quality. (H/T Weekly Standard via ECM)
Excerpt:
The proposed law, which passed the House of Representatives 64-55 and the Senate 21-17, would base half a teacher’s evaluation on progress that students make on tests, most of which have not yet been developed. If the students improve, educators could earn more money.
The current system rewards teachers based on years of experience, advanced degrees and extra certification.
Got that? So the bill would make it law for teachers to be paid based on their performance, (at least a little), just the way that you buy things from Amazon.com and Wal-Mart in the private sector. If you don’t like what you’re getting, then why should be forced to pay more for it?
Well, here’s what the unionized public school teachers did:
Miami-Dade schools are open Monday and parents are told their kids should come to class as usual, despite hundreds of teachers planning to call in sick to protest controversial legislation that would overhaul teacher pay and tenure.
At John A. Ferguson Senior High School in West Kendall Monday morning, the teacher parking lots weren’t as full as usual.
“There’s nobody at school,” said 17-year-old Stephanie Barrios. “Everyone’s being relocated to the cafeteria and gym.”
She said a two-page handout listed the number of absent teachers on Monday — about 180 out of 600, Stephanie estimated.
Unionized public school teachers are not actually grown-ups. They are in a state of arrested development, hoping to put off the demands of adulthood by throwing tantrums whenever anyone threatens to take away their over-paid, underperformed jobs. There should not even be a federal department of education, in my view, and teachers should not be allowed to unionize. Why should parents be forced to pay for a low-quality education, which is really nothing more than coercive indoctrination of children by the secular left? Private school teachers are hard workers – they get paid based on the quality of what they produce.
This article is a fine, fine piece by Mary Katherine Ham, and I highly recommend that you click through and read the whole thing. I wish I had written it myself, since school choice is a big concern of mine. It should be a concern for all parents. We need to be pushing for more homeschooling protection and more school voucher programs.
UPDATE: I’ve received an e-mail from a hard-worker public school teacher who wanted me to say that not all teachers are happy with what the unions do, and that some public school teachers do work hard in spite of the anti-child, anti-parent stance of the teacher’s unions. Some teachers work extremely hard on their kids, teaching them well and volunteering for sports and field trips. But the union won’t allow them to be paid more. Some teachers have to work in very difficult environments like Compton, CA, dealing with children who are very challenging. In those cases, the hard-working teacher may part of the solution for a child looking for a better life.
Wouldn’t it be great if those good teachers didn’t have to join unions and could be paid what they are really worth? But the unions says no way.
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