Backbone of education system

Teachers are the backbone of our education system. They are the heart and soul of what make our schools run and we should be celebrating them and promoting them.  

That’s why over the last four years, we’ve instituted a teacher pay raise that brought the average teacher salary up to the southern average, created a Teacher’s Bill of Rights, eliminated duplicate and burdensome paperwork for teachers, and expanded a teacher merit pay model.

We’ve established strong building blocks to ensure we have a great teacher in every classroom, but we need to do more. The reality is that union leaders are ignoring the needs of great teachers across the state and holding them back from being rewarded for their efforts. That’s offensive to our teachers.

We must reward teachers for doing a good job because they have the largest impact on a student’s achievement in the classroom and the workforce.

In a recent op-ed, Nick Kristoff asked this question: what should you do if your child’s terrific fourth grade teacher decided to retire?

His response? Hold a bake sale, go door to door, and come up with a $100,000 bonus to get that teacher to stay. Why? Because the potential impact that that teacher will have on your child’s future income far exceeds that sum.

The opposite is also true.  Kristoff says it makes much more sense to pay a bad teacher a $100,000 buyout to get them to leave the classroom n and replace them with a merely average teacher n because the future income loss of your child will be far greater if they stay in that teacher’s classroom.

These kinds of numbers reveal the heart of new research that was recently released from a group of Harvard and Columbia professors. Having a good fourth grade teacher makes a student more likely to go to college and less likely to get pregnant as a teenager.

Put another way, having a great teacher can change a kid’s life. The solution to this problem may seem simple n just replace all the poor performing teachers with excellent teachers, right?

Unfortunately our system today often crushes talented teachers and it makes their jobs harder, not easier. No matter if they do a good job or a poor job, teach English or music, teach high poverty or middle class students, union leaders want us to treat all teachers the same. It’s not fair to our kids and it’s not fair to the effective teachers in this state.

This was confirmed recently by a report from a national education organization about teacher quality in Louisiana. The National Council on Teacher Quality gave Louisiana on C-minus for teacher quality.

The study said Louisiana doesn’t do a good job of keeping effective teachers or removing ineffective teachers from the classroom. The report also said that our current system focuses on seniority over effectiveness when determining personnel decisions.

The report lays the blame on Louisiana’s tenure system because it’s hampering efforts to reward good teachers. That’s why our plan will finally recognize good teachers, promoting the profession the way it should be, and ensuring that every child has a high quality teacher.

For all teachers, we’re empowering districts to use compensation to keep good teachers by allowing them the flexibility to pay teachers more, and we’re banning the practice of simply using seniority to make personnel decisions.

We’re going to give superintendents the lead role in hiring and firing decisions and we’re going to tie teacher certification to effectiveness.

For incoming teachers, we’re going to give districts the flexibility to base a teacher’s salary on effectiveness, hard to staff subjects, high poverty schools, and core subjects.

Finally, we’re going to reserve tenure status for teachers that have been highly effective, making tenure a recognition of excellence.

Across the country, many other states are taking similar action to help reward teachers and put a great teacher in every classroom.

The bottom line is that teaching is not only one of the most important professions in the world; it’s also one of the toughest professions.

It’s time to finally reward teachers for taking on this important role and give them the tools to succeed and help our kids succeed.