(Proposed) Ideal Education System #2

I would like to concern in some points that can be considered as attempts in order to increase the quality of teacher for our next generation of teacher just as I explained in previous post. Those suggestions are being explained as follows:

1.      Teacher Training

We know that, the more expert the teachers are, the better quality they have. We may say that, by giving some training centers in some region of countries, it will help the government in producing good outcomes as some experienced, talented and skillful teacher. In this training center, the teacher could not only learn deeper about the subject he/she will teach, but also she/he will try to learn how a teacher should conduct the lesson in any circumstances, knowing the best way to interact with students, and furthermore the teachers will be able to solve some problems that may appear from their students. We found that by promoting this training, it will affect the ability of teachers in persuading more of the students in learning. However, this training can be conducted more effectively if the teacher candidate are graduated from higher education (undergraduate, master, or PhD degree). Therefore, it will make much easier in training them before going to the real education institution. At least they have more experiences and basic pedagogical knowledge compared to those who are not graduated from higher education.

Here, by having more experienced and educated teachers, we have more chance in giving a better output in students’ perspective; student achievement. The teacher will be more understanding the students needs, providing more teaching methods that will help the learning activity in the classroom to be held effective and efficiently. Therefore, in this case we can conclude that the more educated and experienced the teachers are, it will affect more the students’ achievement.

2.      Teacher Salary

The second aspect that must be considered as well in improving the teacher’s quality is the payment. The payment of teacher must be relevant to their works in the institution. We realized that in the reality, the higher education degree of those teachers have, the more payment they will get. It is not completely a wrong policy, because the quality of teacher is usually being seen (actually it is easy to see) by their degree of education. Even though we know that there are some teachers in different cases who are graduated not from that high education institution, but they can still perform well in conducting the lesson, even still we know that they must give much more effort to learn more about effective teaching and many other related things. However, despite of all those contraries, we must agree that, it is pretty important to understand in providing some funding of potential pay policies that will help us in keeping high quality teachers. Good payment will attract and retain effective teachers (Hanushek, 2006).

For addition, we may also give some rewards or bonuses for those teachers who performed the course well. So that they will race with each other (e.g: for getting a title as the best teacher for the year). Therefore, we may say that, giving a relevant salary to the teachers is another important thing that must be considered. And in the same time, by giving some bonuses or reward is important as well. It will extrinsically motivate the teachers in conducting lesson.

3.      Teacher Test

One other thing that is not less important to those suggestions I mentioned above is Conducting a teacher test. The main purpose of this test is just to evaluate from all the hundreds or thousands teacher applicants. We select them to know who is really ready physically and mentally. So it is pretty important to conduct such test to understand which one is ready to jump into school, and which one is not. In this test, the teacher candidate will get a certain score. It indicates the successful indicator by providing a range score that must be obtained by those candidates. According to Hanushek (2006) in his current research, he stated that teacher scores on achievement test have received considerable attention, because it has more frequently been significantly correlated with student outcomes (students' achievement). Therefore we can assert that by providing such test, it will help government in selecting the proper teacher, the one who has a great quality (with all requirements included) and finally they will be placed accordingly as needed to some areas as instructed by government.

REFFERENCES

·         Hanushek, Eric A., Rivkin, Steven G. 2006. "Teacher Quality." In Handbook of the Economics of Education, edited by Eric A. Hanushek and Finis Welch (1051–78). Amsterdam: North Holland.

·         Hanushek, Eric A., 2010. The Economic Value of Higher Teacher Quality. CALDER, The Urban Institute. Washington, D.C.

·         Varli, Zeynep. 2008. The Structure of Turkish Educational System. Practice and Theory in Systems of Education, Volume 3 Number 2 page 95-103.

·         World Bank (2011), “Improving the Quality and Equity of Bsic Education in Turkey. Chalenges and Options”, Washington, DC: The World Bank.