Good Long-Term Investment

In considering teachers' and administrators' pay, there is evidence that alot of money is being targeted at paying our educators. I do question who is being paid, how much they are getting paid and the criteria for which they are getting paid.

No one would argue the value of a good teacher and the impact that a quality teacher has on student performance. However the way our public education system is structured right now (thank you unions), people are being awarded for the time they've spent occupying space~teaching position~within the system. Was it the teachers' unions that established that? This system keeps the unions strong and it keeps warm bodies in place where we should have measurable incentive based merit that pays for performance. No other functioning system in our country rewards people simply for sticking around. The system now provides incentive to occupy space, not accelerate children. Only through recognizing worthy contributing individuals will we keep them around.

It takes a good two years to develop a teacher's general abilities. Studies show that after that, performance is pretty well where it is going to be. By that time, the good teachers have begun to become disenchanted with the current status quo, teach-to-the-middle, 'don't rock the boat' mentality that pervades the academic arena. So often, the good ones go out and thrive in the competing economy and the ones who can't hack it there get to remain and feed off the public dole. That is not to say that all of the teachers who stay past their 2nd year are without value~That's not it at all.

We just need to be aware of the excessive cost to train these quality teachers and then lose them. We are looking at a serious crisis in not having enough teachers in our not-so-distant future. Band-aids on the gushing wound in the form of a bonus here and there~uniformly distributed~won't solve this crisis. Investing in quality teachers to keep them in the system would go a long way in stabilizing the educational crisis in Missouri.