Walker: "Why I'm Fighting"

And who will judge merit and under what rules?

In any case a hundred thousands a year with only half of it as income for a person with a college degree is not that large.

So you are under the impression that most people would spend four years and at lest 40,000 minimum for a degree that pay less then 50,000 a year?

One of the trade offs for being a teacher is that the pay is not all that great but you will get far greater job security then in the private sector and your benefits are going to be good.

Walker: "Why I'm Fighting"

i wish he and all other politicians were fighting for their lives in some kind of Thunderdome like arena

that would be cool

I'd imagine merit would be determined similar to any other job, according to job performance. You have a boss, they see your job results and those that do a better job, get better raises and are rewarded appropriately.

Is it is 100% accurate, no - but better than keeping people simply because they have been in the job longer.

A couple of years ago, due to the economy, there were a handful of layoffs in my department. Thank goodness, they did not base the layoffs on seniority. Instead (at least what appears on the surface) those that were let go, were the weaker links - considering that those left behind had to pick up the extra work (as it still needed to get done), if they based it on seniority rather than performance, the company would have been in a heap of problems.

That fine and good but that was not the deal offer to teachers when they sign up for a job that only pay 50,000 or so with a four year degree.

Going to be fun finding the next generation of teachers. Hell maybe we could import them from the third world.

The old saying you can pay me now or pay me later.

If you wish to change the deal from fairly low pay but great benefits and job security to so so benefits and no job security at best you will need to greatly increase the salary.

Otherwise there is no rational reason for anyone to enter the teaching field as a public school teacher at least.

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http://www.nsea.org/policy/salaries/index.htm

National Teacher Shortage
Good for Education = Good for Business |Teachers are Performing: Now Pay Them! |Best Educated, Worst Paid |Good Teacher = Good Students |Nebraska Teacher Education Facts |Nebraska Teachers Salaries Lose Ground |Teacher Tenure in Nebraska |Top Schools, Bottom Salaries |Salary Task ForceA historic turnover in the teaching profession is on the way. More than a million veteran teachers are nearing retirement. America will need two million new teachers in the next decade, and experts predict that half the teachers who will be in public school classrooms 10 years from now have not yet been hired.

The Search for Qualified Teachers



•Nationwide, some 2.2 million teachers will be needed in the next 10 years because of teacher attrition and retirement and increased student enrollment.

•By 2008, national public school enrollment will exceed 54 million, an increase of nearly 2 million children over today. Enrollment in elementary schools is expected to increase by 17 percent and in high schools by 26 percent.

•In high-poverty urban and rural districts alone, more than 700,000 new teachers will be needed in the next 10 years.



Source: National Center for Education Statistics, The Baby Boom Echo Report, 1998

Paying for Top Talent



•Nationally, beginning teachers made $25,735 on average in the academic year 1997-98 (Beginning teachers average salary in Nebraska is $21,949). New engineering graduates earned $42,862, while new computer scientists' salaries reached $40,920.

•The national average teacher salary in the 1997-98 school year was $39,347.

Source: American Federation of Teachers, National Survey, 1999

•The national average teacher salary in the 1998-99 school year was $40,582; Nebraska's average salary for teachers was $32,880 � $7,702 below the national average.

•The national average teacher salary in the 1999-00 school year is $41,575; Nebraska's
average salary for teachers is $33,473 � $8,102 below the national average.

Source: National Education Association, National
Survey, 12-99


Teacher turnover



•In a typical year, an estimated 6 percent of the nation's teaching force leaves the profession and more than 7 percent change schools.

Source: National Center for Education Statistics


•Twenty percent of all new hires leave teaching within three years.

Source: National Center for Education Statistics


•In urban districts, close to 50 percent of newcomers flee the profession during their first five years of teaching.

Source: Darling-Hammond & Schlan, 1996


Greatest Needs



•The greatest teaching shortages are in bilingual and special education, mathematics, science (particularly the physical sciences), computer science, English-as-a-Second-Language and foreign languages.

Source: Amer. Assoc. for Employment in Education


Teachers Supply and Demand in the U.S., 1998



•About 42 percent of all public schools in the United States have no minority teachers. Minority students make up 33 percent of enrollment in U.S. public schools, while the total of minority teachers reaches just 13.5 percent. By the early 21st century, the percentage of minority teachers is expected to shrink to an all-time low of 5 percent, while 41 percent of American students will be minorities.

Source: National Center for Education Statistics, Digest of Education Statistics, 1998


•Teachers in high-poverty urban districts are the most likely to be under-qualified. Between one-third and one-half of all secondary math teachers in these districts have neither a college major nor minor in math.

Source: National Center for Education Statistics, Condition of Education, 1998


•About 50,000 special education positions either remained vacant or were newly filled in 1997 by teachers who lacked full state certification.

Source: Council for Exceptional Children


•Less than half of the teachers hired during the last nine years participated in formal induction programs during their first teaching year.

Source: National Center for Education Statistics

Just because she was named "Outstanding First Year Teacher" doesn't mean she was an outstanding teacher but that out of the new crop of teachers, she was the best.

a friend of mine is a teacher, just for a laugh i went to rate my teacher to check him out, his rating was terrible, with both kids and parents, if you read the responses it quickly became clear that the reason was he expected the kids to take the subject (music) they were in seriously, he wasn't expecting perfection, he was expecting them to try, even parents made comments like, "music is just a throw away subject, why doesn't he lighten up"

It may cause as a result the teachers pay to go up - basic supply and demand at work. If the supply of teachers go down, then in order to attract more, the pay will need to increase.

I am not saying I am necessarily against collective bargaining, however, people who work in a position should be rewarded according to their performance and not simply because you go to work each day for x number of years.

I don't think the kids should be rating the teacher - the teacher should be rated like anyone else in a profession by their performance.

Although plenty of hard, but fair teachers are looked at by their students positively. Maybe not in the current year, but afterwards.

Sorry I never been impress with the way private business often handle laying off workers.

Too many time very high preforming employees had been let go because they are earning more then a new hire would be or two or three news hire for that matter.

The results was that those of us remaining have to try to bring up the new employees up to speed and at the same time somehow produce the same work output with far less skill workers.

The managers look good for reducing the payroll and the problems that hit down the road because of their actions are never never their fail.

If the managers are very luck they had in fact been promoted out of the department that they had help destroy before the chickens come home to roost.






The result is that the deseccions

Mr Walkers explanation is B.S.. I had kids in school before we had unions with power among the teachers. The best teachers werent kept when layoffs were necessary. The ones who kept their jobs were the relatives and friends of the school board members and the adminastration. Being a good teacher dident mean ****. I am sure when all the unions are gone we will get back to having to kiss ass to keep your job.

That has not been my experience.

If a company were to be successful they would get rid of the dead weight. I have not yet seen a high performing employee let go. Sounds like you work for a crappy company.

I wouldn't doubt that - seems this is quite common in government.

But I don't think the unions avoid this - there is also lots of this going around in union groups. Neither situation promotes keeping good employees over bad. Unions keep those longest in position (not necessarily bad in theory as you would expect those more experienced to be more valuable - reality though is it really just encourages one to stay in the job longer not necessarily be better).

To me there should be some sort of balance between the two. Meet certain standards in performance and receive rewards based on that - with that being equal - the high performing first and seniority second.

Walker is pulling a fast one on you all. This is not about salaries, or merit pay, it is about collective bargaining as a whole.

The key word in the phrase bargaining, is "bargain". This means that the government should negotiate with the teachers, fire fighters, civic workers and police officers who educate of our kids, protect us and serve us. Obviously, when you have two sides negotiating together, each side is going to get some of what it wants. But each point isn't on its own, it is part of the overall compromise.

Picking out one small nit as indicative of the whole issue is a sleazy trick.

Teachers, for example, are the people who know about education. They have taken the classes, they have given up other opportunities. They have the experience, expertise, knowledge and passion for education. Why shouldn't we give teachers a voice?

Questions of class size, resources needed, and time for the task of teaching are very important to the process of education. Teachers know the most about these issues, why shouldn't they have a voice?

The politicians want to shut out the teachers (and fire fighters and civil servants) based on politics rather the on any professional knowledge. Collective bargaining is crucial to giving the people doing the job a voice.

YOU are living in a dream world and what you and those teachers are demanding is not "bargaining" and the whole world knows it. Bargaining implies that there are two sides of something at a table and what you're talking about is public unions and other government wonks meeting in a room to determine how much they can squeeze out of the taxpayers this time before they squeal.

The main players absent at that process are the ordinary people and tax-payers of the place and pretty much the only way they have to get a place at the table is to elect Scott Walker and 19 Republican state senators, which they did, and shut the game down, which they've done. I mean, if you can't deal with democracy, there are places which don't have it and you might be happier living in one of them.

It happen sadly all the time and in the case of school teachers somehow I have the feelings that good teachers who do not have their noses up the rear ends of the principal or other school administrators and who tend to dare to speak the truth to power will be far more likely to be lay off then bad
teachers who are in good political odor.

I don't doubt stuff like that happens - why I've heard of good teachers leaving the profession.

Unfortunately most government bodies do not have to be financially responsible - so making sure you hire the best individuals isn't in their best interests.

So you wish to prmote such behaviors?

How must will having cheap second rate teachers cost the society down th road do you think?

Not at all - just stating a fact that in many government bodies as being financially responsible isn't something they need to be to stay solvent, they do not have the same incentives as "normal" private businesses. So their incentives are different - for instance hiring their drunk brother in law at worst or medicore cousin at best.