Teacher Salaries

You might disagree, Kevin, but Im a believer that a good teacher is able to make a bad class do well. Good students will get the grades regardless of who's teaching them. You don't need a good teacher to get them to do well. A good teacher is measured by what they can do with the poorer students in the class and make them excel (to some degree).

I know for a fact that this isn't true because I've seen really good teachers get dragged through pomegranate due to a bad class one period and then be amazing the next. In life, we can only work with what we're provided. Often times there are classes that are just unteachable.

I think that, if one were to try and measure a teacher's value based on the grades they produced, it would have to be done using an average using several different classes. If a high school teacher who typically teaches 6 different groups a year isn't making any progress with any of their classes then yes, that's a reflection on them. But elementary school teachers who have a single class all year long would need to be judged over multiple years just to be certain it wasn't their specific class. But that's a terrible way to do things.

If the school system is concerned about a teacher not getting the expected results then they should send someone in to observe what they're doing for a while. If a teacher is truly ineffective and incapable of change then they probably shouldn't be teaching--they shouldn't just have their pay docked and left to continue their ineffective ways on our youth. I'm not saying they should be removed forever or anything, but perhaps there should be some sort of TEACHER BOOT CAMP (but not awful) that teachers who've been laid off because of ineffective methods can opt to go to, to learn alternative teaching methods so that they can continue teaching if it's a job that they really care about. And of course, knowing all of this is in place would be incentive for teachers to try their hardest. I think a universal pay raise would be correspond with such a new system being put in place.

Also, the real problem with being a teacher these days is PARENTS. Back when our parents were kids, if they did something wrong and their mother got called into the school then you'd be sorry. Their mother wouldn't believe a damn word that came out of their filthy lying mouths and the teacher was always right. Now, if a kid does something wrong and a teacher calls the parent into the school, the kid and parent end up ganging up on the teacher and questioning what s/he was doing and then they bring it to the principal and create a huge mess out of something that should be simple. Because every parent now believes their perfect child is incapable of doing wrong. Teachers can hardly be effective in that kind of environment.