A New York City schoolteacher responds to this article in the New York Times, which presents a new charter school’s plan to pay its teachers $125,000 (and that’s before a possible performance-based bonus). Will six-figure pay keep the education system’s blues away? Post your thoughts in the Comments.

 

Op-Ed Response by Jennifer Fernandez

While paying a teacher 125,000 bucks sounds like a wonderful idea, I personally do not feel that paying a teacher more is the most effective way to improve teacher performance. I do not feel that most teachers make the decision to teach based on the salary. I, myself, sometimes even forget that I’m getting paid because the amount is so insignificant. In general, I don’t believe that money is the greatest underlying factor that motivates individuals to teach.

The best way to get better teachers is to put more effort into training and support programs that help teachers understand their value. Many teachers do not recognize what immense importance and grave responsibility is intrinsic to teaching. Just like students, better teachers must be constructed from a richer, holistic standpoint. Mere incentives are not going to create better teachers. We must start with the question, ‘what do our teachers need to know and understand in order to be equipped to teach in today’s schools.’ When we can answer that question, we can begin to tackle the educational dilemma that we face today in public schools in many U.S. cities.

I honestly believe that most people who become teachers do so not for the money, but because they truly want to make a difference. However, faced with hardened, undisciplined students and apathetic, sometimes enabling parents, somewhere along the way they become disillusioned and apathetic themselves. With better training and a greater multi-level societal support system, teachers will maintain the initial charge that made them decide to take on the challenge of teaching in the first place. Money can’t buy good teachers. Teaching is a passion that has to be nourished and maintained in one’s heart.

Now, am I saying that it would hurt to pay teachers more? Not at all. In fact, I think that teachers should get paid at least $80,000. I mean, it’s not an easy job and it should definitely be higher on that salary list. But, what I am saying is that it is going to take more than the money band-aid to heal, as the article puts it, “undisciplined children, bad parents, and a subculture that denigrates education.”

The immediacy of the need to prioritize education must be recognized on a societal level. Then, a higher teacher pay would not be some estranged attempt to fix a very complex issue, but rather it would be a lateral symptom of a necessary wide-scale paradigm shift.

Jennifer Fernandez is a seventh grade special education teacher in New York City.

Photo: Collapsed bookshelf in a Baltimore, MD classroom by Critical Exposure (www.criticalexposure.org), a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit that provides cameras for public school students to document their dilapidated classrooms and school buildings as evidence for the need for education policy reform.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, March 13th, 2008 at 1:21 pm and is filed under Voices. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.