Teachers Unions

Everybody has had a bad teacher. I had one whose entrance to the classroom turned teenage boys into a pack of baying apes, swinging around the room, playing with various implements, even occasionally fighting, while he talked his way through the curriculum.

But similarly everyone has a teacher they remember as a good communicator who helped kids learn and get better results. That both of these types of teacher in the same school get the same pay is prima facie silliness that has been entrenched by unions in the public schools system and inevitably leads to the best staff being enticed away to the private sector.

Now Labor has proposed $8000 bonuses for high-performing teachers, here the unions are again, saying the plan is “misguided” and calling instead for “investment in schools funding”, a wishy-washy way of saying please hand over the money, just not the way you’re planning to spend it. It is hard to interpret this Pavlovian response to performance-based pay policies as anything but protecting bad teachers and, somewhat perversely, getting in the way of keeping great teachers in public schools.

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