Seeking GREAT Missouri Teachers

At the same time we desperately need to bring up the grades in Math and Science, in our state and in our country, we continue to overlook the need to provide incentive to quality teachers who can find better wages in the free market and fail to lure quality individuals to the teaching profession to inspire young minds to become the scientific leaders our country truly needs heading into the new millenium.

In the most recent Science Teachers of Missouri's newsletter, a report by the National Research Council, the main operating agency of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering, said,

"At no time in history has improving science education been more important than it is today. Major policy debates about such topics as cloning, the potential of alternative fuels, and the use of biometric information to fi ght terrorism require a scientifi cally informed citizenry as never before in the nation’s history. Yet after 15 years of focused standards-based reform, improvements in U.S. science education are modest at best, and comparisons show that U.S. students fare poorly in comparison with students in other countries. In

addition, gaps in achievement persist between majority group students and both economically disadvantaged and non-Asian minority students. In part, these achievement gaps mirror, inequities in science education and take on greater signifi cance with the looming mandate of the No Child Left Behind Act that states assess science beginning in the 2006-2007 school year. Thus, science education in the United States has become a subject of grave and pressing concern."

According to The Washington Post "Schools in Houston, Denver, Minnesota and elsewhere have...tried to link teacher pay to performance, but those efforts have been either less focused on test scores or narrower in scope. The Minnesota plan, enacted last July, is voluntary, and thus far more than a third of the state's 339 school districts have expressed interest in the system, state officials said. Districts that join the effort must base 60 percent of teacher raises on a handful of factors, including student test scores. Florida recently implemented a plan to link improved performance with teacher pay.

"We don't have all the answers today," Education Commissioner John Winn said, "But we will work with teachers to develop a system. I know it adds pressures, but what profession doesn't add pressure for performance?" Winn asked. Though no perfect system currently exists, it is inspiring that some states are giving it a serious 'go', involving teachers, administrators and educators to come up with something that works.