Incentives, Aid for Teachers

As an educator at an L.A. Unified School District middle school, I took much interest in the two parallel articles by Matthew Miller and Jeff Horton addressing the question of improving teacher quality (“Cultivating Success,” Opinion, Nov. 30). As a teacher possessing a credential in physics, I took particular note of one of Miller’s solutions: to pay teachers in a few designated content areas more than their fellow teachers. He asked the rhetorical question: “Why should a physics graduate be paid the same as a physical education major when both have the same tenure in the classroom, especially since the science teacher has lucrative options outside teaching?” I completely disagree with his implied answer.

Effective teachers do more than just teach content. I would support a solution, more in line with Horton’s conclusions, that would instead bring teachers together by institutionalizing an Americanized version of Japanese lesson study [in which teachers critique each other], coupled with early-and-frequent training and support in classroom management skills.

Paul Burns

Granada Hills

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Miller says outstanding teachers are the solution. Nonsense. An outstanding teacher with 40 students in a math class, no matter how much you pay her, will not impart as much knowledge as two regular teachers with 20 students in each class. Teacher time per student is the controlling factor, not pay.

Dick Loutzenhiser

Palm Desert

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Miller has it backward. Pay teachers double, even triple, when they produce academic results. Can you imagine a Fortune 500 company offering its sales force fat salaries with the expectation of more sales? The incentive must be based on results.

Miller works under the assumption that teacher unions care about reform and student achievement. The hard reality is that unions protect bad employees. Incentive pay, bonus pay and income based on results fly in the face of the traditional collective bargaining agreement arrangement. Let management (principals and parents) design the curriculum. Let management build a compensation plan for teachers that correlates to student achievement and advancement. If this happened, a whole new generation of motivated and confident college graduates would invade a profession woefully in need of new ideas, concepts and passion.

Nick Antonicello

Venice

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Re “An Education Warrior Takes the Fight Higher,” Opinion, Nov. 30: Howard Blume damns former Mayor Richard Riordan with faint praise, giving him credit only for “sincerity.” Most unfair, Blume implies that the rising test scores in the L.A. Unified School District over the last several years occurred in spite of Riordan’s “top down” policies. In fact, the improvements in test scores for reading are directly attributable to the passage in 1998 of Proposition 227, which made possible English immersion for non-English speakers. Riordan was almost alone among prominent officeholders in the state in having the guts to endorse Proposition 227.

Doug Lasken

Woodland Hills

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Blume implied that United Teachers-Los Angeles and I don’t believe that all children can learn. We do! But I stand by my assessment that Riordan is a well-intentioned philanthropist whose zeal for education reform was sidetracked by what Blume calls “the imperfect school-as-business paradigm.” There was a time when Riordan worked with UTLA. Together we qualified a ballot initiative that would have capped administrative bloat in all school districts. The classroom would have been first in line for funding.

We also worked together to establish LEARN, which moved control from the downtown bureaucrats and gave parents, teachers and site administrators a real voice in how their schools worked.

Then Riordan began to listen more to his peers in big business than to the people working directly with children. He supported school board candidates who thought of schools as just another private enterprise. When Riordan’s Coalition for Kids held sway, the board created mini-districts swollen with additional bureaucrats and strangled LEARN schools. These “reformers” shifted hundreds of millions of dollars from classrooms to cover construction overruns and hire consultants. The voters finally pulled the plug after the board voted to increase class sizes.

I have never doubted Riordan’s sincerity, but if the state’s newly minted secretary of education still believes our schools can be molded into a business model, our kids are headed for even deeper trouble.

John Perez

President, United Teachers-Los Angeles