Posted on 08/15/2013 10:34:22 AM PDT by MichCapCon
The recently expired Leslie Education Association teachers' union contract gave teachers $26.60 an hour if they substituted for another teacher. It paid teachers $467 if their day involved going to more than one building.
The newly-approved contract will create a more comprehensive system that rewards teachers for being good at their job. In fact, the Leslie Public Schools district is using merit pay to benefit teachers in a manner that few others in the state have considered.
The district in Ingham County created a committee made up of teachers, administrators and board members that will develop a "total merit pay process" that the district can transition to, Leslie Superintendent Jeff Manthei said.
The specifics are still to be determined but the idea is to reward excellence in teaching regardless of the number of years a person has been employed. Past union contracts across the state have paid teachers according to their length of service only. A state law passed in 2011 said merit pay had to be considered.
The Leslie School district currently gives up to $400 a year for merit pay.
"We had teachers doing things that they had never done before," Manthei said.
Not all school districts took the law as seriously. Some school districts offered $1 to $3 a year to teachers as merit pay just so they complied with state law.
Manthei said the district wanted to do what was within the spirit of the state law, so the $400 was given until the district could create a more comprehensive approach to performance pay. He said he expects the committee to complete its work this year.
"The teacher reaction has been positive," he said.
Teachers see a system where they don't have to wait 30 years to make the most money, he said.
"I think there is a belief in our community that if somebody is doing a good job they should get rewarded for doing a good job whether they've been here 10 years, or 40 years or two years," Manthei said. "The present system doesn't allow for that. And we want to attract good teachers."
Leslie School Board Member James Wood credited Audrey Spalding, the Mackinac Center for Public Policy's director of education policy, for helping him get information to convince other board members to try a more sophisticated performance pay system for teachers.
"I don't think I could have got this pushed through if it hadn't been for her and the information the Mackinac Center had," Wood said.
Wood said he had long wanted good teachers to be paid for putting in extra effort.
"If you go the extra mile and give everything you got, you have to be recognized for it," Wood said. "By the same token, if you are just coming for a paycheck, you need to not potentially make what someone going the extra mile makes. There needs to be a difference and people need to realize that."
Spalding said aligning teacher pay more closely with performance is a step forward.
"There's no question that good teachers should be rewarded for producing better outcomes for students," Spalding said. "Paying teachers who are doing a better job more will encourage high performers and send a signal to teachers who need to improve."
Teachers should be contractors. Great teachers could write their own ticket and crappy teachers can whine about only making $7 an hour at McDonalds.
This would work well only if parents had free choice of schools to which to send their children, with the money following the child. Good teachers would attract students, and demonstrate they deserve the higher pay.
Congrats. You have just shown your ignorance of the teaching profession. They aren’t in it for the money, and your success depends a great deal on what kind of students are sitting in your classroom. Students with very involved parents usually have good grades. Students from homes where education is not valued usually don’t attend school regularly, or cut classes, don’t do their assignments or study for tests, and waste valuable learning time for those who want to learn by disrupting the class, leading to a predictable outcome for themselves. But of course, people like you would blame the teacher for that. A class full of the latter sort of student, with lessons constantly disrupted with disciplinary issues and parents who are not reachable by phone or letters home is not going to be a class with great passing statistics. Does that make the teacher a “crappy teacher”? No. It is more a case of a teacher who wants the best for their students but is banging their head against the wall in frustration for the fact that their hopes for the kids are far higher than the hopes of the students themselves. The students just could care less. They know they have to be passed anyway by virtue of administrative pressure on the teacher, so they don’t have to do any work.
I’m a teacher. What you post is the usual complete nonsense. This is a fantastic change. I hope more districts implement it.
Then I guess you should speak to a few dozen of my colleagues. Merit pay has never worked. They would label YOUR take as complete nonsense. We have our database of experience, you have yours.
“Merit pay has never worked.”
Merit pay has never been tried. Your side defines one dollar bonuses as ‘merit pay’ and then bleats about how it failed.
“They would label YOUR take as complete nonsense”
Unfortunately for them, it works well for us and we will continue to do what works well for us. Meanwhile, we kick your bloated public sector hiney in all the measurables.
Paying people what they’re worth always works. You can usually spot the worthless ones because they’re the first to start squealing about how unfair it all is.
http://gothamschools.org/2011/03/07/study-75m-teacher-pay-initiative-did-not-improve-achievement/
Merit pay didn’t work.
If it were up to me I would use existing school buildings and rent the facilities out to contract teachers. Unfortunately the public sector leeches are desperate to eliminate the competition.
Senate Bill 461: Impose term limits on charter school boards
Introduced by Sen. Hoon-Yung Hopgood (D) on July 31, 2013, to impose five-year “term limits” on charter school board members (but not on members of conventional school boards), after which they would be prohibited from being on the board again for 10 years. The bill also would require at least two parents be on the charter board, impose attendance requirements, require there be at least seven members on the board, and more.
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