Teachers will engage in another work slowdown and refuse to work longer than the 7.5 hours a day required by their contract. After-school activities would be canceled again, just as they were this school year, and the education of our children will suffer. The school board will come up with the money by cutting programming from the curriculum. If that happens, Nashville's taxpayers will have been betrayed. The school board will ask for another tax increase.
Good teachers deserve raises.
Mediocre and bad ones don't. The union representing the teachers, the Metro Nashville Education Association, should drop its outdated opposition to peer review and merit pay. That's not likely to happen unless the school board proves itself to be capable of managing the schools in a manner driven more by business principles than political expedience. The board acted without consulting Mayor Phil Bredesen or the Metropolitan Council. Worse, much of the money would have gone for projects that had already been rejected by Mayor Bredesen.