[quote=ocrenter]CAR, I’m sure you would agree there are bad teachers out there that do not care, who would just check “profection” straight down the report card, essentially just clock in and clock out.
We do not seem to have an effective system in place in dealing with this group of apathetic teachers.
Before we spend any more money to improve compensation, do you have any recommendations to remedy the above that would not get push back from the union?[/quote]
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.
