While I agree that there are some teachers like this, they are very few and far between. There are far, far fewer bad employees in teaching than there are in the private sector, based on my experience in both situations. Trust me, there are far easier ways for these people to make money. Teaching is one of the toughest jobs out there.
As for my suggestions to fix this? I do support a base salary plus merit pay that is based on a variety of inputs: academic improvement of the same group of students over time,* administrator evaluations, and peer teacher evaluations.
*Difficult to measure improvement over time in some circumstances, usually in urban schools, where you can see student turnover rates of 50% or more over a school year. These are often the very students who don’t often have support at home and are often handicapped by a lower IQ and/or well below-average work habits. You cannot compare the results of a class like this with the results of a class in an upper or upper-middle-class neighborhood where the kids (usually with higher IQs) come from intact families and stable home environments with lots of support from well-educated, highly intelligent parents. There is just no comparison.[/quote]
We must be REALLY REALLY unlucky to have encountered 2 of these type of VERY RARE teachers in my daughter’s 5 years of schooling starting in kindergarden.
NPR had a segment in 2012 where an experiement was done in a struggling school district. They gave bonuses to all of the teachers at the beginning of the year, if the teachers do not meet certain academic criteria, the bonuses would have to be returned. This is compared to teachers that were promised bonuses if the same acadmeic criteria was met. The result showed if the bonuses had to be returned, the students ended up doing much better.
