MERIT BASED PAY FOR THE EDUCATOR

Traditionally our West Virginia public school systems have based an educators pay on years of service rather than the achievements their students have accomplished in the classroom. Nor to the effect on their stature after graduation.

I feel there is a new and more effective way to award “merit bonuses” to the teacher that makes an impact on our school aged children.

Administered, and most importantly, monitored properly and fairly, merit pay would be an excellent incentive to compensate our educators that strive to achieve the improvement of our students learning capabilities and abilities.

I have discussed the scenario with teachers, principles and administrative heads of their fears that the principle -- who would ultimately be in charge of the merit bonus recommendation -- would favor certain teachers, effectively limiting other teachers.

The plan I offer will successfully address those and other concerns fairly:

HIGHER OBJECTIVE STANDARDS

We frequently require more testing on our children with new types of modern and up-to-date exams and techniques. I feel that in this new day and age administrators can quantify how much knowledge an educator invokes into their students.

Proven facts show that better teachers require better pay if retention is the ultimate goal. So based on performance, ones pay can and will change results-minded legislators to approve individual merit bonuses.

A report by the Boston based non-profit group named fittingly --The Community Training and Assistance Center -- released results of a Colorado merit pay experiment that let the teachers set their own goals to boost their students performance. The end conclusion was that it worked very well there. So why can’t it work here for our children?

Another solution would be to make merit pay part of a larger salary reward system which monetarily fulfills the educator in those hard-to-find mathematics and science teachers. Which once again, in my opinion, is the very near future of the ever changing and evolving education system to prepare these young men and woman for the future.

Something new is definitely needed when the retention of our teachers is the main goal. We must use the financial security of merit based bonuses as a monetary award to retain those educators that push our students to the next level and certainly to heights and aspirations. But also to attract the next generation of upcoming teaching graduates that harbor similar wants and goals for our children.