The Argument for Merit Pay

I’m quite fond of the idea that Texas should use a merit pay system for teachers. For quite a while, I've wished that teachers would be hired due to how well they teach as opposed to just carrying a degree. Over the years, I've encountered several teachers that don't really like to teach or just don't know how to do so in an efficient manner.

With the sudden downturn in Texas' economy recently, the education department has been hurt quite a lot. At my former school, many great teachers had been fired because other teachers had seniority. If Texas focuses on seniority alone, some teachers may become lazy after several years and resort to teaching methods that may not be the most useful to students while it may be to them. Without calling names, I knew a teacher that would have important test grades on the syllabus but would sometimes put it off or not do the assignment at all if they didn’t feel like grading afterwards. This to me only reinforces to students that it’s okay to not to important things or to put them off for a long time. It doesn’t teach the future generations the importance of deadlines and how much it will affect them once they start to work in the real world.

If merit pay was implemented, teachers would focus on improving their teaching techniques and making sure that students fully understood the material they had to learn. This would also help school districts throughout Texas to keep the best teachers that know how to deliver the required information. If the best teachers were kept, then most students would know more about the courses they've taken from elementary all the way to high school and beyond. This would force teachers to actually pay attention to the students that don’t quite understand the material.

While this may create grade obsessed teachers, it will provide an incentive. Teachers should be paid accordingly to how well they know how to teach. Aside from having had a handful of not so great teachers in my life thus far, I do know several that deserved to get paid more than they currently were. Some teachers really care about the future of their students’ lives, and to me that creates a high level of respect towards the teacher. Teachers that actually care about making a difference in a young person’s life are the ones that matter the most and should be paid more and kept in the work force than the ones that don’t know how to make a difference.

Helping Those In Need

In Lawful Texan's editorial over immigration and tuition laws in Texas (Perry rightly defends tuition program!!!, October 30, 2011), Sherrell states that she doesn't believe in Rick Perry's idea of helping out the immigrants in Texas by allowing them to pay in-state tuition rates. I'll be quite honest from the start, I disagree.

Most incoming illegal college students didn't choose to come to the United States on their own. As a matter of fact, their parents did. Quite honestly, I find it unfair to those individuals who have lived in the US for a large part of their lives to pay tuition rates of an international or out-of-state student when their parents have been paying taxes the entire time they've been living in the state of Texas. These taxes may come in all shapes and forms, such as the sales tax which everyone pays while buying products anywhere in the state of Texas.

I don't particularly believe it's fair to those students who managed to make outstanding grades in high school to be denied the chance of attending college just based on documentation they don't have. To offer an in-state tuition rate to those individuals would really open doors for them to continue studying, obtain a legal status, get a degree, and then get a job that will help the economy grow in the future. What this country needs now more than ever are qualified and skilled individuals to take the economy one step further than the previous generations have done so.

While entering the United States illegally isn't the best of choices, the fact is that many illegal students don't really have a say as to whether they do or not. Many illegal parents are faced with tough choices in leaving their home nation to pursue a better future, not for themselves, but for their children and their children's children. As an immigrant myself, I know that it must have been difficult for my parents to leave the nation they were born in knowing that they would most likely never see their family ever again just to offer my brother and I a chance of having a brighter future. This brighter future consists of attending college, and if Perry will allow immigrants to pay in-state tuition rates, then God bless him. Immigrants usually have to take the lowest paying jobs just to survive, and with ridiculously high tuition rates, attending college for most immigrants would be nearly impossible.