Merit Pay for Teachers from NPR -

I heard this yesterday and I have not stopped thinking about since. The number one thing that sets me off is the juxtaposition of the good Gov. Terminator against the bad teacher unions. Of course the teacher unions are against anything that would make them accountable - This is total BS and really gets my blood flowing. Stop and think about it everybody - Teachers' pay tied to test scores. Right now the feds only require tests 3 times in a student's school career before high school. Which teacher are you going to hold responsible. If a whole class blows the third grade test, blame the third grade teacher? Or blame the K, 1 and 2 teachers? If those same kids did great, who gets the pay raise? So, that would seem to me to require testing in every grade. I have a 4 year old. If I am forced to, sit by and have him put through the testing meat grinder every year, even I would be tempted to look for a private school or charter school, who of course would not be required to give tests. Oh, I get it! Let's push even more middle class parents out of public schools! Now that they are out of our hair and we are collecting their money in the private sector, we can totally focus our energies to force feeding a narrowed down, test focused curricula to all the poor and disenfranchised kids that are left.

A couple of more things: It says in this article that Bush proposed a similar thing just after the Terminator, yet I cannot find any thing about it anywhere on the web, but I believe it. And on a related subject: in another article, Women Continue to Outpace Men in Graduating College it is stated once again that "most of the jobs of the future will require a college degree." Most of what jobs? The mostly low wage jobs that this economy has been producing since Reagan's days? No. These jobs will not be staffed by college graduates but by graduates, the ones that make it and the ones that do not, of the "prepare them for the test" public education system. Makes sense don't it? Meanwhile the more people that we can convince that "most" of the jobs will need college, the more people there will be to compete for those jobs and the less we will have to pay them. Meanwhile Learning Online Continues to Grow and I know that corporate America is already scheming as to how they can make profit on the middle class Americans that choose this means instead of the "Test 'em, test 'em" public schools.

How can we listen to this crap? How can we just sit here and take it? Please join me in resisting. Let us put our heads together to stop this trashing of one of the worlds' great public school systems!