Did your salary go up by 12 per cent this year? If it didn’t, how on earth can you afford the 12 per cent pay increase the Saskatchewan Teachers Federation is demanding?

Clearly, the union’s demand is unreasonable.

There’s no doubt that teachers should be offered appropriate salaries for the work they do. Like the saying goes, ‘you get what you pay for.’ Or at least you should.

Interestingly enough, what the teachers union doesn’t talk about is that many teachers have been receiving very generous pay increases every year.

You see, if you pull out the teachers union contract, you’ll see that a typical teacher starting out in 2007 would have made $43,124.

Yet for their second year of service, they would have automatically graduated to pay level two, which paid them $47,412. That’s a 9.9 per cent increase in just one year.

By year three (2009), that same teacher would have automatically graduated into the level three pay category; which paid out $51,724.

For those scorekeeping at home, that’s an overall increase of 19.9 per cent in just two years. The automatic pay increases occur during the first ten years of service and an additional increase on a teacher’s 15^th year; when salaries currently max out at $73,036.

What’s really striking about the teacher pay system is that it completely ignores performance in the classroom.

You could be the best teacher in the division, but because you only have five years experience, you would make far less than a mediocre teacher with fifteen years experience.  That’s why the best teachers out there should push for something the State of Indiana is doing right now.

Indiana just passed legislation to move to a system whereby teachers are paid for their performance.

According to State of Indiana’s web site, legislation was just passed that will see teachers “receive pay increases based on their level of responsibility, students’ needs and their effectiveness - instead of just based on their years of experience and/or the additional degrees they earn.”

An Associated Press story about the reform noted - “under the bill, teachers would be evaluated annually, and those in the bottom two of four categories would not be eligible for automatic pay raises. Local districts would create their own evaluations, but would have to include objective measures of student achievement, such as test scores.”

In other words, not giving every teacher an automatic increase is going to help control costs and give mediocre teachers the incentive to work harder to improve student performance. Why shouldn’t Saskatchewan look at the same approach?

Some suggest evaluating teachers is too hard to do as student performance depends on many things outside of the classroom. However, mankind has put a man on the moon; surely we can come up with a fair method of evaluating teacher performance.

In fact, if you pull a veteran teacher or principal aside and ask them who the best teachers are in their school, they can tell you. So why not consider making peer review and principals’ judgements part of a new system for evaluating teachers?

One thing is for certain, the Sask teachers’ union’s demands are unaffordable and outdated. It’s time for a new system that puts students, top teachers and taxpayers first.