Better public school teachers should get higher pay and more respect as dedicated professionals, business leaders said as they released a 10-year plan for improving the quality of public school teachers. The changes won't be cheap, the business leaders conceded. In return, teachers would have to give up the pay system used in the vast majority of the nation's nearly 15,000 school districts. Most districts pay almost all their teachers on a single salary scale in which raises depend solely on a teacher's years of experience and number of graduate degrees.
States tie teacher pay to their knowledge, skills, and their students' achievement.
The National Alliance of Business is a member of the Triangle Coalition. The textbooks the New York City publisher will put online this spring mirror its print editions. School textbook publishers commonly give purchasers of their printed editions a CD-ROM, or they set up special web sites containing supplemental materials. But up until now, the industry has provided complete electronic versions of textbooks only at the college level, not for K- 12 schools. Publishers have waited because of a range of concerns in the industry about the security of their content if it is available online, about the application of copyright law for Internet materials, and about a lack of access to the necessary technology in many schools and homes that would prevent online materials from being used.