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Teachers Talk Contracts
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 Negotiating teachers' contracts is not a process most teachers and school boards look forward to. And in recent years that process has become even more difficult--in some cases adversarial--as school budgets are cut and health care costs rise. We'll look at what happens between teachers and school boards at the negotiating table, why teachers are increasingly unhappy with what they are offered and whether they are asking for too much. Laura is joined by Karen McDonough, President of the New Hampshire Chapter of the National Education Association and Ted Comstock, Executive Director of the New Hampshire School Boards Association.
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I am from Hanover. We pay our teachers well but we still have no ability to get rid of teachers that are not performing. In fact, because we pay so well the worst teachers are even more likely to hide behind the union. How do I as a taxpayer feel I'm spending in the right place when the administration has no way of getting rid of dead wood? I think the union has outlived it's usefulness here and is in fact dumbing down our teacher base by protecting the mediocre. I am more than willing to pay the big bucks for quality, but my experience is that the worst teachers in our system just get better at slapping themselves on the back so everyone thinks they're great. And we wait for them to retire. It's no wonder such a fuss is made over hiring and firing of coaches. It’s the only place the board can exercise any control. Pretty sad.
A teacher can be non renewed within the first couple of years with no reason given. Do you think a couple of years is enough for an administrator to figure out if a teacher should be let go? After that a teacher can be let go with a reason. A union member will get protection in terms of due process or bogus reasons, but an administrator can get rid of a bad teacher. It happens all the time. Unions don't want bad teachers. That is a myth promoted by people for whom it does the most good. Additionally, a socalled bad teacher could just as easily be a teacher with higher standards than the community in which he teaches. Parents are notorious for protecting their children against the discomfort of high standards by blaming teachers.
I believe that all the discussion about teacher contract negotiations beg the real questions:Why doesn't the state of NH, the 7th richest state in the Union, contribute more to school funding, and why do we let insurance and pharmaceutical companies that are for profit and pay their CEO's in the millions to keep profits up, get away with ripping off large groups of folks by raising rates to the point where salaries are negated by health care premiums?
Remember, the CEO of Anthem/BCBS, now a for-profit, makes $47 million, plus,while the stock itself rises by 27 % per quarter.
Teachers are public employees, working for the common good, and should not be held up to communites as people who are taking food out of the mouths of citizens.
Teaching is not the only profession in which "market forces" are undermining the mddle class.
In the Conway School District we have a pay system that corresponds to our evaluation. The evaluation has 67 different items in four categories with "instruction" valued at twice as much as the others. A teacher can't remain at "basic" for more than a year and gets a minimal raise. A "proficient" teacher gets a bigger raise. There are circumstances where a teacher may get no raise. It is a system that rewards proficient teachers as long as the voters pass the special article. If they do not, then the promise of merit pay will have been given a serious setback. We take care of the merit, and the voters have provided the pay. As long as they live up to their part of the bargain, we will be supporters of our system of merit pay.