Schools need better teachers, not across-the-board reduced class sizes, better bells and whistles in the materials or "new" approaches such as the Singapore math or Daggetteers' Freshmen Nations, etc. Being a classroom practitioner is not at all the same thing as being an administrator. People who are gifted as teachers must not be tempted to leave the classroom for administrative positions, especially not because of salary. The skills required are very different. And what is it that Neapolitan youth really need? Administrators??? Steps are not pay raises--except for people who know nothing of the way of schools. Teaching is a very complex task that takes years of practice to explore, learn, and perfect. Unlike trades such as plumbing, electric, carpentry, teaching doesn't get easier the longer one practices in the classroom. It gets more difficult and time-consuming. Teachers of AP classes, for example, work much harder every day than others--I've done them all, from lowest to highest. People get to teach AP classes in high school (if the principal is at all well-educated him/herself) because they are excellent at it and constantly improve knowing their subject. But, boy, it takes way more hours and way better skills to do well than teaching the "lower" levels. I've heard administrators say, "The teacher doesn't matter." Just plug a warm body into the front of the classroom and force him/ her to practice taking attendance, issuing detentions, enforcing rules about I-pods and cell phones, facilitating "discussions," and so on. It's much more than that. Every year a classroom practitioner practices, s/he learns more about the subject being taught, learns more about how to interest students in studying that subject, learns how to advise young people about academic endeavors, and learns better how to recommend students to acceptance committees for jobs, college, and scholarships. We learn way more than what is in the answer books: how to open minds to new ways of thinking. To allow "performance pay" to be determined on the basis of subjective judgments by ill-educated and intellectually deficient principals and other administrators results in infighting and terrible staff morale. Forget the FCAT, sister tests, and school ratings. They do not measure everyone; they do not measure accurately. That most administrators don't know how to teach and are ill educated and are intellectually deficient is certainly ascertainable by just about anyone. Look at where they've received their educations, look at their course selections, their grades in those courses, their degrees. Look at their GRE scores. Why anyone stays on as a classroom practitioner is the initial assurance that exists in the teacher contracts embedding rewards for experience. And the commitment to influence students to absorb the best that has been thought and written in human history. Accumulating experience teaching is unlike any private business experience. Decades spent as a classroom practitioner are years spent NOT advancing up the ladder towards becoming CEO's. The "time off" so many Neapolitans bring up does not make teaching easier or less of a job than others in the private sector have. What do we do with all our "time off"? Teachers worth their salt study their subjects and fine-tune their plans for the next year (if the myopic administration even lets them know their next year’s assignment). CCPS gives only six (sometimes only five) days of annual paid "vacation." We don't have stock options or home relocation benefits. All the time teachers do not spend in the classroom is unpaid. Why would anyone stay? Love of advancing intellectually in the subjects being taught. Love of seeing students positively influenced by what one has to say. Steps are negotiated fair pay for earned experience and consequent expertise as a classroom practitioner. Do you want better people in the classroom? Don’t make these steps contract or disappear. Increase them. Attract the better people with adequate pay packages. And don't call salary steps raises. Pony up, even during this recession. Think of all the years we Neapolitans have squeezed the turnip. _That's_ really why we have the problems we do with not-so-good teachers. Who'd want to teach? Those that can't get by anywhere else? Put the dregs of the American work force in charge of the children! Naples' self-fulfilling philosophy: those who can, do. Those who cannot, teach. Those who cannot teach, teach teachers (and become administrators).