In favor of merit pay

The President has come out in favor of merit pay for teachers, a concept I have long supported, although most teachers' unions do not. Consequently, as President of the McCook College Faculty Association, a branch of the Nebraska State Education Association which is a member of the National Education Association, I might find myself at odds with the policy of those two bodies.

If so, so be it. We just finished negotiations with representatives of the MPCC Board of Governors where we tentatively approved a 3.5 percent increase, pending approval by both faculties of McCook Community College and North Platte Community College.

That means the same percentage increase for everyone, regardless of ability.

I've served on several faculties at the colleges and universities I've taught at over the course of my career and this faculty ranks right at the top, so there's no doubt in my mind that everyone at MCC deserves a raise. I'm sure the folks in North Platte believe the same thing but because I'm not part of that faculty, I have no way to know.

But that certainly hasn't always been the case. I've served on other faculties where sub-standard teachers made it from one year to the next on the coattails of the achievers and I've always believed that to be a tragedy. I wrote a column some time ago about bad lawyers. Well, unfortunately we have bad teachers too. When I was on the police department, we had bad police officers. Every single occupation there is has high performers, average performers and sub-standard performers. The objective should always be to reward the high performers and get rid of the sub-standard performers in the hopes they would be replaced by at least average performers and hopefully, high performers.

But historically, that isn't the way it's been in education. If a teacher or professor can make it through until they're tenured at a school in which the educators are part of a teacher's union, they, for the most part, have a job for life, provided they don't commit one or both of the two cardinal sins that can get them fired; insubordination or moral turpitude. But after gaining tenure, they are rarely fired for inferior teaching. There are ways to assess teaching just like there are ways to assess practically any other kind of work and those who aren't pulling their weight and serving their students should have no more of a right to continue to practice their craft than any other worker who isn't performing up to par.

To claim that every educator deserves the same raise, regardless of performance, makes no sense at all.

Because of this many people also oppose tenure, which I do not. Tenure is absolutely crucial in the field of education because the schoolhouse is not just a place for facts; it is also a marketplace for ideas and some of those ideas are controversial and not supported by the majority opinion but still deserve to be talked about, discussed, and debated. It's what we call the educational pursuit; the ability to get beyond what somebody else says or thinks about a particular concept or perspective by developing the ability to think for ourselves. To learn how to think critically and analytically, to develop reasoning skills and abilities, to learn how to analyze both sides of the perspective rather than being anchored only to one; be it right or wrong. Those of you who have ever been on a debate team know this is a requirement. Whenever one is preparing for a debate, you must learn to forcefully and convincingly argue each side because you never know which side you're going to get. Obviously, the only way one can do that is to become acquainted with the pros of the other side; something most of us don't have a lot of practice doing and far too many of us have no practice at all.

Consequently, teachers must be protected from teaching a perspective, concept, or idea that conflicts with the current status quo of either the administration, the elected officials, the parents of the students, or the general population. This is embedded in a concept called academic freedom and is protected by tenure. There is no permanent damage attached to a student who learns to think for themselves and it will serve them far better in the future than simply becoming a "dittohead" for the loudest voice out there.

The United States has always been a nation of ideas and for us to hope for a future as bright as our past, it needs to continue to be.