Michael Bennet Quotes

I want to attract the best people into teaching.

To get enough of the teachers we need, teaching has to be a great job where talented people are supported and rewarded.

The biggest barrier we've seen to student progress is this: School policies and practices often prevent good teachers from doing great work and even dissuade some talented Americans from entering the profession. This needs to change.

I've focused on making sure we have talented teachers and principals in our schools through proposals like the GREAT Teachers and Principals Act and the Presidential Teachers Corps.

We don’t get the quality of people going into teaching that other nations do…. When people go teacher bashing, they are making the problem worse.

There are teachers' unions around the country realizing they want to improve standards of the profession, improve the quality of their profession, and ultimately attract the best and the brightest to their profession. The vast majority of teachers are dedicated and committed.

Barack Obama wants teacher service scholarships.

Few things are more important to our country's future than recruiting and keeping great teachers in our schools.

To encourage more top-caliber students to choose teaching, teachers should be paid a lot more, with starting salaries more in the range of $60,000 and potential earnings of as much as $150,000.

More than half of my former students teach - elementary and high school, community college and university. I taught them to be passionate about literature and writing, and to attempt to translate that passion to their own students. They are rookie teachers, most likely to be laid off and not rehired, even though they are passionate.

You can get rid of the teacher certification requirements, and you're still not going to have a rush of incredibly high-quality people going into teaching as long as teachers are valued in the way they currently are. The way we value people is by how much we pay them.

We need to reward the 'thankless job' of substitute teaching with better pay and chances for permanent positions. I look forward to the day when no student comes home saying, 'I didn't learn much today... we had a sub.'

We can not wait until we have enough trained people willing to work at a teacher's salary and under conditions imposed upon teachers in order to improve what happens in the classroom.

Teacher compensation isn't the only factor in cultivating great teaching. Other important priorities include changing how we measure student performance, providing more flexibility to teacher-preparation programs, and improving how we train and support principals.

It's critical that states improve how teachers are trained, recruited, evaluated, compensated, advanced, and retained.

We can pay teachers a hundred thousand dollars a year, and we'll do nothing to improve our schools as long as we keep the A, B, C, D, F grading system.

It is vital that teachers can be paid more without having to leave the classroom. This will be particularly important to schools in the most disadvantaged areas as it will empower them to attract and recruit the best teachers.

I think teaching should be a vocation, and they should be paid more for it.

Teachers make a difference, and we would serve our students better by focusing on attracting and retaining the quality teachers by raising teacher pay.

I've heard a number of our alumni - people who are running schools and school systems - think a lot about different models for the teaching profession.

We've done a terrible job of hiring, supporting, and retaining the people tasked with the difficult responsibility of teaching our children.

If we want to recruit and retain high-quality teachers, it starts with a fair wage, adequate working conditions, and the resources and support to succeed. Remember: teachers' working conditions are students' learning conditions.

While I agree completely that attracting good teachers is difficult, and we need to spend more time doing that - in part by paying them more money - I don't think there's any evidence for the idea that somehow tenure attracts good teachers. In fact, I think the evidence is to the contrary.

We have to fix the education system.

By continuing to increase teacher recruitment and training - and ameliorating wages and working conditions - we will be able to shore up the weaknesses of the French education system.