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As a former TFA teacher, I am a fan of responsible merit pay (and higher pay for teachers in general), but as has been continuously pointed out, it would be incredibly irresponsible to approve a bill that purports to do this without any guidelines as to how to determine what counts as merit.

posted 4 years, 8 months ago
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Why is anyone assuming that Hillary supporters would be swayed to vote for Palin just becasue she is female? Hillary stands for a woman's right to choose, national health care, and policies that protect our environment and attempt to slow global warming. Palin is anti-choice and supports drilling in ANWR. Does the McCain campaign really think that women don't vote on issues at all and will blindly cast their ballots for someone who disagrees with them on almost every point, but happens to have two X chromosomes?

posted 4 years, 8 months ago
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I'm a former teacher with the Teach for America program. I taught 7th grade in south Texas, on the Mexican border and I agree with the above comment. While it is true that no one becomes a teacher in hopes of making lots of money, I think that we do lose people who would have considered the job if the pay wasn't so horrendous. If you started teachers at the same salary as a starting engineer for example, far more undergrads would consider the career path. I also think that many teachers would be willing to work more - ie for a month or so of the summer doing planning and professional development if they were paid for it.

posted 5 years ago
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The only way to really eliminate racism - that gut reation you get when you see someone of a certain race - is for people to get to know each other across racial boundries. I was a Teach for America teacher on the Texas-Mexico border and all of my students were Mexican-American. Coming from a predominantly white community in Massachusetts and then Oregon, I was worried that I would find I was racist against my students since I had so little experience interacting across racial boundries. Instead, they quickly became just my students, not my Mexican-American students. I really believe that this change happened just as a result of all of us getting to know each other and needing to depend on each other in order to make the classroom work.

posted 5 years, 2 months ago
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