Monday, July 01, 2013

$1.50 Merit Raises for Teachers

The company that profits from red light cameras in Baton Rouge released a study claiming that yes, the red light cameras saved many lives over the past five years. In other shocking news, advocates for Charter Schools claim massive success in education reform for the New Orleans area.

When I travel I get this a lot. People from all over the world have heard that charter schools saved New Orleans' once dismal public education system. I found out yesterday that my wife, a teacher in a charter school in New Orleans, received a merit raise of $1.50 for next year. That's because she reached her school's goal of 80% student achievement on a certain standardized test, or something else, I didn't fully understand. We were re-watching Game of Thrones episodes and that was more interesting than taking the time to comprehend what goal she reached to get the $1.50. But the point is, as far as I am able to speculate, that the governor of Louisiana and all of the other "treat education like a business" people will now be able to accurately claim that they paid high performing teachers more as an incentive for their good work.

We haven't decided yet how Therese will spend that $1.50. Maybe she'll splurge on an ice cream cone, but those likely cost twice her raise. She spends quite a bit, as do all of the teachers I know, on classroom supplies. Maybe she'll get a few pencils and an extra eraser.

6 comments:

David said...

Quit complaining! An increase of $1.50 per hour is almost $3000 per YEAR! That's nothing to sneeze at!

Michael Homan said...

Yeah, it's a $1.50 raise total for the whole year. $1.50 per hour would have been great and much appreciated. So it's like $.000000000000001 cent per hour raise.

Diesen Link said...

Thanks for everything!

Unknown said...

It is realyy ridiculous how little money teacher get for their responsibility and hard work. Of course, merit raises must be higher, because financing is the most important thing for effective education sytem. In such case students will be ble to ger excellent academic papers academic-writings.com and pass their exams well.

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Grand-essays.com said...

It is unbelievable. Education is the most important constituent of development and success of a state, but teachers are still paid very low. The system should be changed and everyone should understand that a teacher's job is not that simple and easy as it is thought to be in general.