It has been a difficult few years for education. Every aspect of our schools has been under the microscope as we try to find new ways to make each precious cent stretch further, and teachers have not escaped that scrutiny. Imagine your son or daughter's teacher. Do you believe that individual is overpaid? Our experienced teachers have been popular targets this past spring. The image of the old teacher, ready for retirement, one foot out the door, soaking up the funds and doing little or no work, has been bandied about this year in the papers and in the news. Is that your experience? Mine has been that the senior teachers are those that are mentoring the first-years. They are the ones that are there to help, to share lessons, to take leadership of departments.
However, there is a concern in the community that our method of compensating teachers breeds inequity by favoring seniority rather than performance. To address this issue, School District #191 established a committee in April 2002 that is investigating methods of alternative pay and reporting their findings back to the school board. Will Morgan has been a co-chair of this committee since its inception and has gone to conferences and met with individuals from schools who have successfully established alternative compensation programs.
The initial conclusions from these meetings is that alternative compensation can work, but it requires a complete re-structuring of not only the pay-scale but of the school infrastructure. In order to adequately assess teachers, there needs to be a trained core of administrators who spend a great deal of their time in the classroom. In our current set-up, we tend to keep our schools administratively "light" in order to cut costs (administrators are the highest paid of the school employees). The warning on alternative compensation then tends to be that you have to enter into it with the right motives. If the idea is to pay teachers less, then alternative compensation is not the answer. If the idea is to pay teachers based on qualifications rather than seniority, then alternative compensation may be a plan to consider.
This web site was prepared and paid for by
The Volunteers for Morgan Committee
PO Box 1773, Burnsville MN 55337-1773