Give teachers pay raises only if they prove they're worth it

Have you ever heard a bigger bunch of crybabies in this state than some public school teachers?

Let’s see – you get to work a little over half a year 6 hours a day (8 maybe if you count grading and aren’t involved in extracurricular activities), you have no service or publishing requirements, after a short period of time you have a job for life unless you’re caught with a live boy or a dead girl (or just a live boy, depending on gender), and in Louisiana your average salary with most having just a bachelor’s degree is higher than mine with a Ph.D. and 18 years of teaching at the university level.

Nonetheless, we get bleating like this:

Tessie Adams Domangue of Houma, the state Teacher of the Year, said she has a second job selling cosmetics because her school salary is less than $34,000 a year. Domangue, 34, said she sells Avon products as a second job and even considered leaving the profession before she was picked as Teacher of the Year.

Unless you have several children and/or medical problems in your family, you’d have to be a spendthrift to be unable to live on close to $34,000 for a little over half a year of work. I know several people who would do anything legal and moral to make $34,000 a year even working 2,000 hours a year. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out of the profession.

Simply, the typical public school teacher in this state has done nothing to deserve any kind of raise, given the results we get from the public schools. Still, if so many people have bought into this argument that public school teachers in this state deserve pay raises, at least they seem to have it straight that the reason why they didn’t get – a flawed plan by Gov. Kathleen Blanco to jack up taxes on an activity that had nothing to do with education, while the money was there all the time to fund this.

Nonetheless, I’d be happy to support a pay raise for teachers – if they’d accept accountability measures designed to ensure only quality and knowledgeable instructors continue to be employed, measures used by many other states, measures against which too many teachers and sybaritic unions have fought time and time again. A recent report of the National Governors’ Association reminds of the federal mandate involved in improved teaching, and specifically notes that

states are moving away from the notion of licensure as a way to ensure basic competence. They are designing performance-based licenses that require demonstration of subject knowledge and teaching skill, rather than basing licenses on course credits and hours of professional development. More than 30 states now require a candidate to pass Praxis II written tests of subject knowledge and pedagogy to receive a provisional teaching license. States are also beginning to use performance-based systems to create tiered professional designations—initial, provisional, professional, and master teacher licenses, for example.

Louisiana, it should be noted, does not require periodic testing of teachers for competency in their subject areas. And the standards for initially being licensed in an area are set so low (like most other states) it’s difficult not to pass them. Until standards are raised and periodic testing of teacher knowledge in their subject areas is instituted, teacher pay raises in this state simply are not warranted.