9486 in the collection
(Right after all Doctors are paid by the amount of people who are cured, and all Dentists are paid by the amount of teeth that are perfect...)
WASHINGTON -- All public school teachers should be paid more, and high-performing teachers should get the highest pay, a broad-based private commission reported Wednesday.
For $30 billion a year, all the nation's public school teachers could get 10 percent pay increases, and the top half could get a 30 percent raise for superior performance in raising the academic achievement of their students, said the Teaching Commission, which was formed and chaired by former IBM Corp. CEO Louis V. Gerstner Jr.
"The governors are the principal agents for change here," Gerstner said at a briefing in the headquarters of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. "I would hope we could get this done next year in six, eight or 10 states."
The commission took no stand on how local, state and federal governments should split the cost of its reforms, Gerstner said.
He said the commission hopes to be as influential as the groups he and other business leaders set up in the 1990s to agitate for the test-based school reforms that started in a handful of states and culminated in the federal No Child Left Behind Act.
Besides current and former corporate leaders, its 19 members include two educators from the Atlanta public schools, Superintendent Beverly Hall and Scott Painter, who teaches physics and chemistry at South Atlanta High School.
"Teaching is the single greatest determinant for student learning," Hall said. She said Atlanta's board of education has already approved a plan for higher pay for its teachers, "and there is a pay-for-performance element in that plan."
The commission agreed unanimously that a switch from seniority-based pay systems to pay for performance would have to be linked to other changes that, though less controversial, could be just as hard to achieve.
Those changes would be stricter entry standards and beefed-up academic standards for teacher education programs, less cumbersome hiring processes, and more time, money and other support for school principals to organize mentoring and professional development by classroom teachers.
Some teachers will balk at pay for performance, and some university presidents will resist spending more on programs that educate future teachers, warned Painter, a graduate in chemistry from the University of Texas at Austin who first went to Atlanta through the Teach for America program.
But, he predicted, in the end most teachers will decide that pay for performance offers them not just more money, but more respect and "more opportunities to shine."
The report drew a mixed reception from the National Education Association. It supports incentives based on skill and competence, but is skeptical about whether there is a fair way to base bonuses on student performance.
— By ANDREW MOLLISON
Panel seeks higher pay for teachers
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
2002-01-15
www.ajc.com/news/content/news/0104/15teacherpay.html
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
Pages: 380
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