Teachers should be paid according to student performances. Teachers that I have encountered on a high school classroom level do not care about the kids and how much they are learning. They only care about the paycheck. Some of my

Good teachers are not rewarded. Incompetent teachers are protected. What's best for the kids is not even factored into the equation. It's all about seniority. Nowhere is that more obvious than when lay-offs occur. When a reduction in staff is required, do schools keep the best teachers? The answer may surprise you.

Thanks to collective bargaining contracts the teachers union has forced down the throats of every school district in the state, schools automatically keep the teachers who have been there the longest; even if they are the least competent, and even if some of the brightest and best must be laid off to protect those with seniority.

That really is how it works. No reward for a job well done. Just pay and job security based on seniority. Sure, teachers get an extra thousand bucks or so each year for extra college courses or degrees. But even that policy is a farce.

Thanks once again to the teachers union, extra college classes don’t have to be related to subjects the teacher actually teach. Math teachers can get paid extra for taking college courses in Modern Feminist Philosophy or Medieval Basket Weaving. That's really how it works.

Nothing in the current system is designed to improve the quality of the education our kids receive. The current system is designed merely to reward seniority.

Teachers would be paid based on the increase in the appropriate knowledge of students under the teacher's instruction. For teaching. And if lay-offs occur, school districts would keep the best teachers, not just those who have been there the longest. It's that simple.

For once, there would be some accountability in public education. Some reward for a job well done.

Our current system of paying teachers is designed to reward teachers for one thing: seniority. The longer they've been there, the more they get paid. When you reward something, you tend to get more of it. If you don't reward something, you get less of it.

That's exactly what's happening in our schools. The teachers who have been there the longest get more money and more job security regardless of whether they are doing a good job.

What we aren't getting more of is student learning.

Studies consistently show that how long a teacher has been teaching has no relationship to student learning. What that means is we are rewarding something that has nothing to do with the purpose of our schools!

It's pretty obvious that the best way to get more student learning which is the purpose of our schools is to tie teachers' pay to student learning. In other words, the more students learn, the more the teachers will be paid.

And, in fact, where this has been tried it has worked! North Carolina, which offers financial incentives to teachers for improved student learning, has shown the greatest student improvement in math and reading in the nation over the past ten years.

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