WWJD? He'd keep teachers broke for the sake of the kids

Teacher pay needs to be significantly raised in conjunction with merit-based pay and fewer barriers to firing.

 

I'd actually agree with McGill. You don't want attract mercenaries to the industry whose No. 1 goal is take a lot of money and act as a get-it-or-hit-the-bricks fount of knowledge.

 

You make an unsupportable leap here: That people who collect higher salaries would somehow be less capable of teaching, i.e. would impose a "get-it-or-hit-the-bricks fount of knowledge."

Support that.

 

The idea that lower salaries attract better teachers and that higher salaries would attract worse teachers is so fucking patently fucking absurd that I can't believe that SportsJournalists.com Nation is about to jump back in full force to support it. I'm backing away from this thread before my head explodes.

P.S. I realize part of this stance is that it is self-reinforcing, i.e. it legitimizes our own decisions to go into an industry that pays us like garbage men.

 

Dick, you haven't been around long enough to appreciate the full depths of stupidity SportsJournalists.com nation can hit sometimes. However, I'm working on the assumption that Alma isn't aware of the blue font.

 

I don't buy the guy's assertions as a practical matter, but he raises a reasonably valid theoretical point. You supply your labor in exchange for the utility you receive from your customer. There's buying power, of course, but there are ancillary benefits -- prestige, etc. If you control for differences in cost of living, for example, some people would take less money to work in New York than they would to do the same job in bumf*@k Arkansas. If you assume that a portion of the benefits that accrue to teachers is non-monetary in nature, then raising the monetary portion of the compensation package will serve to draw in, on the whole, more who are less motivated by the non-monetary aspects of it. That is, those who wouldn't have considered a teaching career before will now. If being motivated by the non-monetary portion strongly correlates with being a good teacher, then on the whole you might crowd out some of the good teachers.

Again, I am not saying that this will/would happen in reality today, but the theory underpinning it isn't invalid.

 

Yep, that extra $18,790 per year will keep legislators from being swayed by millionaire lobbyists.

 

The headline says teachers are broke. Are teachers broke?

 

I don't agree that the underpinning theory is valid. Increasing the pool of job applicants wouldn't "crowd out" candidates less interested in monetary compensation. If they are good candidates why couldn't they compete equally for those jobs? On the flip side, improved compensation would also attract to the field more to people who would be great teachers but whose superior skills had previously priced them out of the market.

I'm assuming we can agree that more competition in the labor pool among more highly skilled people would be desirable.

 

The logic of this Alabama lawmaker is so flawed, its not worth debating.

 

He needed to sell that philosophy at the National Prayer Breakfast [/crossthreading]

 

Didn't say it wouldn't be desirable. I am saying that more competition in the labor pool, resulting from a change in the proportion of total compensation that is monetary rather than non-monetary, would inevitably bring in those for whom the monetary component is of greater importance than before. Of course those for whom the monetary component is of (comparatively) lesser importance could compete equally, but they would face greater competition from the more mercenary types. If one assumes that being drawn to the non-monetary aspects of a teaching career is something of a prerequisite to being a good teacher, then this means that, by sheer force of numbers, the teaching pool will be diminished by such a shift in the compensation structure.

I couldn't disagree more. The lawmaker in question may not have thought this through very well, but the logic is not fundamentally flawed. The debate is not only worthwhile, it's of critical importance. If you could have just as good -- or better -- a teaching workforce by lowering salaries, then you should do that. If, as I believe, you have a better teaching workforce by raising salaries, then you should do that.