Let’s agree on something easy. Mediocre teachers do not benefit students. So there should be incentives to encourage teachers to improve. The single most important thing schools can do for their students is to employ excellent teachers.
One way for teachers to set high standards for themselves is to pursue certification through the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. Only about 1 percent of Maine teachers — roughly 200 out of 16,000 — are national board certified. Just 40 percent are certified on their first try.
It’s a rigorous, time-consuming process, one where teachers must not only prove they know their subject matter but that they engage students, link different disciplines, collaborate with other professionals and parents and meet many other standards.
It was encouraging last week to see Republican and Democratic state legislators override Gov. Paul LePage’s veto of legislation that will offer teachers a salary supplement if they become national board certified. LePage acknowledged in his veto message — which included a small smiley face next to his signature — that the certification is beneficial, but he referred to the bill as a Band-Aid on a larger problem of not having enough highly qualified teachers. He called for a larger, more coordinated solution.
Good for the Legislature for realizing LePage’s faulty logic. Of course the state can do more to attract great teachers, but giving them financial help to attain a difficult certification is part of the solution and should not be rejected simply because there’s no broader statewide approach.
LePage also used the veto to criticize the Maine Education Association, which represents the state’s teachers. By denouncing the MEA’s endorsement of same-sex marriage, LePage distracted people from the issue at hand — how to improve teacher quality — and threatened to punish teachers for a separate issue.
LD 1781 will only incentivize teachers to grow professionally by creating a statewide scholarship fund. It was a popular bill and originally passed unanimously in the state education committee, Appropriations Committee, the House and the Senate. The Senate overrode LePage’s veto on May 31 in a 26-9 vote. The House voted 129-12.
LePage should be proud of some of his education reform achievements, such as proposing and ultimately signing a bill to require districts to shift to a proficiency-based diploma. He signed another to make it easier for students to access career and technical education. We’re glad he wants to do more. But signing LD 1781 would have fit within his goals. Good for the Legislature for sticking up for hardworking teachers.
How Ironic that the only qualifications of a governor that feels that he is capable of evaluating a profession that he has no idea of the rigores of, is that he is able to pick up a pen and sign a veto!
Yes, LeBUFFOON is definitely “certifiable.”
How strange are times when rudeness passes for prowess and greed for glory.
And when corruption and asinine bullying pass for “a breath of fresh air.”
” By denouncing the MEA’s endorsement of same-sex marriage, LePage
distracted people from the issue at hand — how to improve teacher
quality”
I disagree. I believe SSM will pass and I will vote for it. But, it was the MEA that distracted attention from the goal at hand with a political endorsement outside of their area. Their endorsement was unnecessarily divisive and just shows that politics is more important to them than educating children.
From “Education NEXT” survey.
The survey’s most striking finding comes from its nationally
representative sample of
teachers. Whereas 58% of teachers took a
positive view of unions in 2011, only 43% do in 2012. The number of
teachers holding negative views of unions nearly doubled to 32% from 17%
last year. Perhaps this helps explain why, according to education
journalist and union watchdog Mike Antonucci, top officials of the
National Education Association are reporting a decline of 150,000
members over the past two years and project that they will lose 200,000
more members by 2014
Honestly, I feel that those teachers who now have a negative feeling of the Union, the majority of them would feel that way because of the Union’s inadequacies in dealing with the concerted attack on teachers from the right wing media and politicians. Teaching has never been a lucrative profession, however in some states they have lost the right to improve their stature with raises limited to the CPI and increasingly large amounts of money going to pay for benefits, so in fact the teachers will become poorer year by year. Here in Maine, we have seen them attack the pension so that by the time a teacher dies, their pension will be worth significantly less than when they first retire. I think most teachers want a Union that will stand up for them and run these nutjobs out of town on rails. I do not believe most teachers are upset with the backing of SSM, since we do not believe in allowing bullying to continue in school let alone in society.
I think that the Teachers Union like unions in general don’t understand that the paradigm has shifted. The days of Albert Shanker are gone.
Also gone are the days of an expanding economy where the only argument was who got what portion of an expanding tax pie. The pie isn’t growing any longer and now the fight is over who gets cut the least.
In Wisconsin (I’m not sure how it works here) the union held sweetheart deal with insurers from which they extracted money from the school added 300 million dollars to that states school budget. The Walker reforms allowed the cities and towns to use that money to prevent teacher layoffs instead of money pouring into the union coffers. Over the next two years as existing contracts expire there will be additional savings.
Unions would be better off trying to help school districts save their budgets instead of engaging in an adversarial and controversial political fights. Instead they seem h*ll-bent on continuing the death spiral that has cost the 3.2 million member union (2007) 350,000 members in a few short years.
Unions often times try to help school districts save money. However, they will not do it at the expense of their teachers. In Wisconsin, they not only shifted more cost of the benefits to the teachers (including allowing schools to go to private insurers who may be giving sweetheart deals and kickbacks to the governor who then extract a greater profit from the premiums and therefore less money goes to actually keep teachers healthy). They also have made it illegal for teachers to ever ask for a raise.
If you believe that we need more outstanding teachers in America, this is not the way to go about getting them. We need to increase compensation and make teaching a more desirable profession increasing competition for jobs. If you believe that what we have is a pretty decent school system and we need to maintain status quo, then we should have kept things the same. If you believe that we should entirely destroy education, attract fewer quality teachers, and give children less of a chance of succeeding in the future, then what you do is what Walker, LePage, and their conservative water carriers have done.
Good luck with the strategy of milking the public. Wisconsin proves they are wise to you and your union antics and have had enough. If you can’t learn to do with less (like all the rest of us have to), then die the slow death if entitlement ignorance, not unlike unions in Wisconsin.
Are you aware that corporations are dealing with record profits and American CEO’s are dealing with record salaries? We are not ALL dealing with less as you assert erroneously. Instead of attacking Unions and their “entitlement mentality” it is time for you to join one and request a more equitable piece of the pie. I realize people like you believe that the American Business Class leeches are a better class of people than yourself (and that may be true in some cases), but the American Workers are what have made this country great and what will make this country great again. It is time to demand a fair share for the working and middle class.
I had the distinct misfortune of being forced into a union early in my working career. I saw firsthand the useless nature of unions! Never again will I be duped by them or their brain-dead mouthpieces!
I ask you this: Who’s salary is larger, yours or your union leaders? I assure you it’s theirs!!!
Your class warfare mantra is old, tired, useless and rejected, but you are free to still believe it if you wish.
I suggest if you want a ‘fair share’, stop your whining, get off your duff and go earn it! Stop expecting others to steal it FOR you and give it TO you. You sound like a relatively inteligent individual, get off your superiority balderdash and take care of yourself. Stop waiting for others to hand opportunity to you. Go out and grab it yourself.
This is America, the only person holding you back IS YOU!
You are still talking like the old narrative holds meaning. It doesn’t. Savings is not just the mantra of the day. It is necessary.
Just out of curiosity how does the insurance program for teachers work in Maine? Does the union here receive a kickback like the teachers union in Wisconsin?
This author seems to think what happened in California on Tuesday was more a harbinger of things to come than Wisconsin.
http://ideas.time.com/2012/06/06/forget-wisconsin-the-unions-biggest-loss-was-in-california/
Some can see (and admit t0) the writing on the wall. Other will never see, because they choose not to.
You said it.
Oh yea, another chance to pile on LePage! Gott’a get that daily fix of LePage bashing!
It seems that Governor LePage likes the attention. He does seem to have a filtering system that doesn’t allow anything through that might be in dissagrement with his views.
Don’t all in government use surrogates to filter the dissension? Lord knows King and Baldacci did! LePage is focused on fixing all the crap handed down by his predicessors and their Liberal agendas. He doesn’t have time for all the stupid nitpicking the Left lives to do on a daily basis.
It’s quite obvious that Governor LePage doesn’t know how to nitpick. He is too busy weilding a sledge hammer to fix a stop watch.
This newspaper seethes at the very idea that Democrats are out of power for the first time in Maine in 40 years.
Yes, Gov. LePage never passed Diplomacy 101, but he has been rather busy curing the multitude of problems left by Gov. Baldacci and Gov. King.
Tomorrow, the BDN will go back to singing “teaching is such a noble profession, la la la” yet if so noble, why do they need financial incentives to demonstrate competency?
If you think teachers don’t need to be conpensated for their level of education. Maybe you would like to hire people with no education to teach your children. Minimum wage sound OK? How about $5.25 training wage for the first 180 days?
Actualy, it would be great if the entire educaton system was based upon merit pay instead of length of employment and tenure. But it is not. So let’s scrape the current system and put in some real performance incentives. Hope you agree to this common sense idea.
I would agree with that, except what metrics do you use assign that? A state test that fits Ogunquit well but not Lincoln?
With the current system we have now, children are not given any real incentive to perform. They know at an early age that they will be passed through to the next grade with little or no effort on their part. I know not all chidren are like that, but there are too many that will take advantage of the system.
Teachers are stuck with the system as it is. The only people who can change the system are the parents and the school boards.
Performance based on accomplisment of the students is subject to too many variables. A teacher may have a class this year that has a majority of children whose parents are very involved and push thier children. The teacher will look like a hero. Next year she can have a class of children whose parents consider school a nice baby sitting service and pay little or no attention to their childrens progress. The same teacher will look like a dunce.
You could also end up with a classroom full of children that have been diagnosed with ADD, ADHD, FAS, etc. and are on mood altering drugs. I still don’t know who is doing all these diagnosing.
Everyone can point to one or two teachers that really made a difference in their lives. They can also point to many more that were nothing more than a total waste of their time!
Unfortunately, the current system protects both.
They have already demonstrated some competency; they are certified to teach. The question is about getting advanced certification. We should encourage them to stay engaged and support them financially. …..and as you say be below provide some performance incentives so that they don’t coast their way through 20 years of tenure. I do hope, though, that the performance benchmarks are based on student improvement—-unlike blanket test scores that favor teachers in high SES districts [where the kids enter their class two grade levels ahead already].
Come-on, Linda Coan O’Kresik. Try to be logical, if you are going to feign logic. I do not agree with your opening paragraph, which is stated as plain simple truth, when it is anything but.
“Let’s agree on something easy. Mediocre teachers do not benefit students. So there should be incentives to encourage teachers to improve. The single most important thing schools can do for their students is to employ excellent teachers.”
It seems much more obvious to me, having endured many years of education myself going back a half century now, the single most important thing schools can do for their students is to get rid of the crappy teachers who are hanging-on to a job though their incompetence shines through and, is apparent to most parents and the great majority of students.
Neither students nor parents should have to tolerate these incompetent teachers. Everyone knows who they are. And, they should be terminated, -post haste-.
Probably the second most important thing Maine’s schools could do would be to raise the level of hygiene above the current standard of a monkey cage at a zoo.
I swim at the Limestone Community School, which shares a facility with the Maine School of Science and Mathematics. I recently mopped the men’s blackened locker room floor myself. It took me over an hour and a half to clean up the monkey cage like mess that had festered for at least six months -without ever once having been mopped-. YECH!
It is not just the teachers who are incompetent in Maine schools. The administrators should be sacked too, for things like such filth as prompted me to man-the-mop instead of swim for exercise as is my wont.
Linda Coan O’Kresik, Maine’s schools are in deep trouble, and our students and even our college graduates are in even deeper trouble. Their “education” is not leading them into becoming productive members of society.
At best their education is leading them into becoming part of the bureaucratic sinecure problem that is holding Maine back.
Providing incentives is fine, but don’t increase spending to do it. Instead, take it from some of the many incompetent teachers who don’t deserve what they currently get.
I can’t find the logic in Governor LePage’s ideas. According to Governor LePage we don’t have enough highly qualified teachers. How do you get them? The American way of getting better workers is to pay more or offer some other benefit to make the job attractive. That’s basic economics. So Governor LePage, do you have plans for making teaching a more attractive occupation so that you will get better people?
It actually seems that you and your fellow conservatives are trying to go in the opposite direction. You want to pay less. You want to eliminate teachers’ collective bargaining rights which contribute to better compensation. (Think about Governor LePage’s colleague Governor Walker here.) You want to reduce retirement benefits. It seems that you think that you can upgrade the teaching profession pretty much by words alone. That is wishful thinking. Do you have any good plans?
No, see in the New America, the way to get better workers is to make the conditions of all worker so horrible that a job requiring a college degree and paying 46k a year after 15 years is seen as a great job. It is time to start pushing back. By Hook or by Crook.
There was an opportunity to push back in Wisconsin, but the “New Amercia” won. There will be an even greater opportunity to push back in November, but I have a feeling that the “New Amercia” will win again.
Push against what?
The parasitic leeches at the top killing this country. It is time for workers to start demanding more for their efforts.
I assume you were a teacher. Was I wrong? So I reiterate, Push against what?
Actually Cheese, my statement was about those of us in the middle class and working class in this country. Those of us without golden parachutes and daddy founded companies. Those who actually do the work in this country. Those of us whose backs this country was founded on, thrived on, and are now being asked to make sacrifices so the rich can be richer. Yes this does include public employees who are being asked to take a pay cut so we can give the leeches more of a tax cut. I say we set tax rates back to what they were under Reagan for those of us who work for a living, and set the tax rates for bankers and investors to the same standards. By doing so, you can guarantee that people who make more than $15 million a year pay more in taxes than 16%.
So you aren’t a teacher.? You are merely someone raging against the night. No solutions except meaningless class warfare generalities.
When you revert to the tax rates under Reagan… Do we also get the same deductions we had that were given as a tradeoff then? I would love to write off my 3-martini lunch… Can I deduct my credit card interest like I could in 1984? Do you know you are not making an apples to apples comparison?
But even then you don’t consider the changes that have happened in the world since the 80’s. China is a world economic power. Europe is an economic basket case. The world changes and what worked in 1980 will not work now. Nothing is ever the same.
The public employees and teachers are not requesting/demanding money from the federal government in any case. They are demanding money from their neighbors in the form of higher property tax increases.
It is the pubic employees neighbors who can’t take the extra tax load and they simply aren’t going to pay any more. Look what happened in California this past Tuesday when two different cities by 70% overwhelmingly voted to restrict public employee pensions saving property/home owners millions.
Your efforts would be better served (if you are a teacher) in getting your union to cut costs to school districts instead of lining their pockets. Otherwise you should find a way for that bitter rage you exhibit to keep you warm on these cold Maine mid-winter nights. Because austerity is coming here and we, none of us, is going to be able to change it.
“You are merely someone raging against the night.”
Batman already has that job, and he is one of the 1%…
And THAT is why you will never be more than you are right now, a loser!
Sure Jon, why don’t you climb out of your parents basement and off of the Ron Paul Websites and start dealing with the reality that is out there. The Upper Class has been engaging in class warfare and depriving workers (you know the people who actually produce something in this country) of their fair share for far too long. It is pretty telling that they have broken this country so much that we now attack teachers making 40k a year. I realize morons like you will continue to defend that, and it is your right. However those of us actually aware of what is going on will continue to fight it.
Fight what? Fight to have your neighbors pay you more money by raising their property tax?
Cheese, sounds like you are bordering on Class warfare there. Do you not think that teachers should earn a middle class wage? There are no teachers in Maine getting rich. In fact the highest paying school district pays 76k with 30 years experience and a PHD. Now perhaps you would prefer that teachers work for free, but they must get paid for their time. What do you think it is worth? Instead of attacking middle class workers, why not set your targets at the people who have taken the largest share of the profits of America for the last 30 years.
Because you are the one who doesn’t recognize who pays the bills. It is the middle class homeowner that pays for teachers and public employees. Not some large profit taker because that isn’t the way its done. You don’t even have the first idea about the system you rale about.
Cheese, maybe you don’t understand the system. If the Leeches would pay their workers what they are worth, instead of playing them against each other, people would be able to afford newer cars. With newer cars, more excise tax is collected. People would be able to afford nicer homes. With nicer homes, more property taxes are collected. People would make more money and be able to take care of their kids better and fewer money would have to be spent on special services at school that go to try to counter-act the negative effects of society. Cheese, I understand the system perfectly well. There is a reason that enclaves of wealth perform better on standardized tests than poorer schools. It is a combination of parenting, resources, and yes more experienced better treated and better compensated teachers. When we have a thriving middle class, everyone benefits, however with a thriving middle class perhaps the top executives would not be able to afford a 5th or 6th million dollar home.
Heavy imagination. A lot of ifs ands and maybes… not one realistic idea. The world you think exists doesn’t.
Cheese,
It does work, and it has worked every time it has been tried. In fact, it is working in Finland right now. It works in Germany. It worked in the US in the 1950’s and 1960’s. It will work again here if we let it. It is telling that the countries with a robust middle class and outstanding educational attainment all have a thriving middle class and CEO’s who make on average 20-27 times what the average employee does as opposed to our 344 times. Greed is killing this country.
How can i say this… Last time…This is not the US of the 50’s nor are we Germany (who by the way live within their means). What works in another time or place does not necessarily work now.
Cheese,
It ain’t working now for the vast majority of Americans. It is working for a privileged few. We need structural change.
Cute.