Calling merit pay the best strategy to improve teacher performance, Mayor Giuliani is proposing a system in which individual teachers would be given raises or bonuses if their students showed improvement on standardized tests compared with the previous year.
In an era of accountability, they say, the rules will upend their efforts of the last few years to recruit new teachers, improve teacher performance and reward those who do best.
Recent efforts at reform, from George Bush's No Child Left Behind programme to Barack Obama's Race to the Top, have tried using carrots and sticks to improve teacher performance, without success.
The union's desire both to join and to stand apart from a White House-led effort to improve teacher performance represents the delicate situation it finds itself in as it confronts what Dennis Van Roekel, the union president, called "the worst environment for teachers I've ever seen".
Maybe the proposed property tax increase in a city already paying one of the highest national rates will help improve teacher performance and graduation rates.
To improve teacher performance, UNICEF is supporting MoE to strengthen its professional development system through developing standardized teacher's performance observation tools, training manuals, and a skilled cadre of trainers nationwide.
We also consider that this feature could support teachers' instructions and class managements appropriately, and improving teachers' performance by TEDViT's support would bring improvement of learners' understanding.
Only then can we undertake the important job of improving teacher performance.
