“Getting Paid for How Long You Breathe”

"Class Warfare" was finished in mid-August.

Michael Medved interviewed Steven Brill today about his new book, “Class Warfare.”

He is a big proponent of performance pay for teachers.

Brill cited a school building in Harlem in which half was occupied by a regular public school and the other by a charter school.

You don’t need to guess which one was succeeding.

The reason Brill, identified as a liberal by conservative Medved.

The title of this article was one of the lines that Brill used several times during the first part of the interview.

Under current teachers’ contracts, pay is determined largely on length of employment.

And, something I have never understood, graduate credit hours toward master’s or doctor’s degrees.

The Harlem charter store of which Quill spoke requires an extra month of work dedicated to training teachers how to succeed with students that the unionized teachers in the same building don’t.

You may remember how disturbed I was at Downstate Republicans and local Democrat Jack Franks who refused to vote for Senator James Meeks bill to let up to 30,000 kids’ parents have the choice of vouchers to get out of Chicago’s consistently failing schools.

See

Jack Franks’ Liberal Politics Hurt the Most Needy and Disadvantaged Kids while Voting Against Saving Hundreds of Millions of Dollars.”

Brill praised President Barack Obama for his Race to the Top program to improve education in states who promised to make changes that the Federal Department of Education thought would work.

Brill argued for a uniform curriculum for courses like algebra.  He argued that there is a best way to teach it and that technique should be mandated nationwide.  He would allow for regional differences in other less objective courses.

The way we have let our inner city Chicago public school students fail is an abomination.


Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *