Matthew Miller A New Deal For Teachers

The author states in “A New Deal for Teachers” that in America, especially in poorer school districts, teacher quality is lacking. In urban districts, out of the new teachers hired in the next three years, about half of them will quit (usually the quality ones). The recruitment of better teachers is, as the author says, the biggest problem in our education system. He states that he’s been told by urban teachers that many of their colleagues are incompetent. Contributing to this is that state requirements are very low, which allows poor quality teachers into schools. Miller explains that smart and competent people who want to be teachers, are getting more and more difficult to find. This is true mainly because there are fields of work that those

same people can get that paid tens of thousands more dollars per year than teacher salaries. The author proposes that the way to fix the quality is to raise the amount of money that teachers make by 50 percent, and to pay by the intelligence needed to teach the subject and not by the “lockstep” pay scale. The lockstep pay scale pays all teachers who have worked the same amount of years, the same.

He also argues that without tenure it would to be easier to fire the 10 percent of teachers that are poor performers. I personally agree with Matthew Miller’s proposal. The first reason I agree with Matthew Miller’s “A Deal for Teachers”, is that something needs to be done about good teachers not being treated or paid right. I know many (in my opinion) great and intelligent teachers. They are working hard all the time to teach children everything they need to know. Meanwhile, they are getting paid the same as their coworkers who are doing nothing. In poor schools this might be even more important. In some cases, school might be the only place some children are getting taught important life skills, and their teachers might be the only good examples they have. I know a teacher who works in a poorer school. She’s told me about how hard it is to work at a poor school in general, with a lot of children who don’t respect teachers or adults and parents that also don’t respect the teachers. Couple that with low income and awful coworkers. If we keep giving our good teachers reason to leave by not treating them fairly, then we will never fix the problem of having so many bad teachers in our

public school system. One reason I agree that it was and still is a good plan is because of the fact that it would get rid of the lockstep pay scale and tenure.

In theory those programs are good ideas. But, sadly, it has made it practically impossible to fire the bad teachers and replace them with talented and qualified individuals. With these things gone, raising salaries and firing bad teachers will be possible. I have many friends that have had teachers who have gone from hard working educators to teachers who go all class without teaching a single thing. All of this because they got tenure, they don’t have to try anymore and no one can do anything about it. As Finn suggested, I think it would be good for the plan to be somewhat optional, mainly because it would be a hard transition to make quickly. I think it could also give away who the assets are and who are the burdens. I think that most of the good teachers, even the ones with tenure, would be open to the change, especially if it got rid of the incompetent teachers. Plus they should be confident in their skill enough, that they aren’t worried about getting fired the second they lose tenure. On the other hand, if they know they’re bad teachers, then they would oppose the new plan which would make it easier to fire them. To wrap up, I think that the New Deal is a good start to a long process to fix

the public school system that is, frankly, falling apart. I also think that a few things could be added to make it better. In my opinion if we wanted to improve schools more we would consider the negative effect common-core has had on teachers and students. It’s really sad that since this article was written nothing has really changed to improve this problem. I shall end it with this… This is why I’m homeschooled.