Analysis Of Matthew Miller's A New Deal For Teacher

Today’s students face great challenges as they prepare for college and their future careers. A major factor in this journey is the teachers and the knowledge they pass on. These teachers, however, aren’t always decent at what they do and fail to prepare these students for the future. Matthew Miller discusses this issue in “A New Deal for Teacher,” an article in The Atlantic Monthly. He has found that bad teachers are the cause of a large educational gap between poor school districts and other school districts. This especially affects the poorer school districts because they have less money to spend on good teachers. He argues that the satisfaction of teaching and other indirect benefits don’t make up for the relatively low wages; the job can’t …show more content…
This raise is simply too drastic, and I believe that it won’t achieve the desired result. While the raise will draw good teachers to the schools, the teachers, usually experienced, must come from somewhere. This takes from the learning at other schools and just shifts the problem of bad teachers elsewhere. This doesn’t just affect public schools but also private ones. I’ve seen this happen many times, especially at the private high school I currently attend. Teachers who do a great job of teaching and motivating students must leave in order to better support their families. The school must then find a replacement, often on short notice, resulting in a teacher who does a poor job. This also happened to my sister at the public she attended. The teacher she would’ve had the next year left to pursue a different job, and she was left with a teacher who put the students down. This raise also demands a double in the tax for education. This also chokes out private schools as many of the parents who pay for private tuition must also pay this tax. This has become a problem for my parents in sending my siblings and me to a private school and even public colleges. Because of the problems it would cause for other schools, I am against Miller’s plan for a general …show more content…
This means teachers would no longer get paid based on years taught but rather by performance. I believe this would not draw in better talent but take a lot of the appeal from teaching. Teachers would not have nearly as much security as they want and the process of teaching would be so much more stressful. While still having to teach students well, they would have to teach them well in accordance with the curriculum. This would make teaching an everyday battle to teach the students. I’ve found that when I am judged based purely on my performance, I lose all joy in that activity. Knowing that everything I do has an effect on my reward or pay, just puts me under a lot of stress. While this new pay scale would initially draw in more teachers, there would soon after be a drop in teachers or a lowering of state educational standards. Because of these resulting problems, I am against Miller’s new pay