Douglas Alexander: “I will conclude my remarks with a little bit of history. If you sense, in my voice, a heavy amount of disappointment, it…”

“I will conclude my remarks with a little bit of history. If you sense, in my voice, a heavy amount of disappointment, it is because this goes back a long ways. In 1983, when I was Governor of Tennessee, I proposed what then was the first statewide program to pay teachers more for teaching well. We called it the Master Teacher Program. I was astonished, after a term as Governor, to discover that not one State was paying one teacher one penny more for teaching well. I could not understand how we were going to keep outstanding men and women in the classrooms, particularly--this was 25 years ago, almost--now that women had many more employment opportunities. The math teacher was headed for IBM, the science teacher was going over here. One reason was because of the teacher pay scale. You could make more for staying around a long time, you could make more for getting another degree, but you couldn't make a penny more for being good. I went around to try to find out how do we reward outstanding teaching, and everybody said you can't do that. Not quite everybody. One person who did not say that was Albert Shanker, who was the head of the American Federation of Teachers, which is the second largest teachers union.”