But how exactly do we measure the value of a teacher?
I can now appreciate how much courage it must have taken for those teachers to let me deviate so broadly from the lesson plan. With today?s pressure on teachers to ?teach to the test,? I wonder if any would or could take the time to coax out the potential in a single, shy student.
If we want to understand how much teachers are worth, we should remember how much we were formed by our own schooldays. Good teaching helps make productive and fully realized adults ? a result that won?t show up in each semester?s test scores and statistics.
That?s easy to forget, as budget battles rage and teacher performance is viewed through the cold metrics of the balance sheet. While the love of literature and confidence I gained from Ms. Leibfried?s class shaped my career and my life, after only four short years at Hibbing High School, she was laid off because of budget cuts, and never taught again.
Today's shortsighted approach to balancing the budget will result in devastating results down the line, if some serious thought is not given to the consequences of a taking a meat ax to our safety net of services and our educational system. While lawmakers may congratulate themselves on "cutting and balancing", who will look at the lives that have been adversely affected and the opportunities lost...Florida is about more than a balanced budget--our quality of life and the quality of lives of future Floridians are at stake--and could be lost forever.
