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

As I recall, you have done some field research on the matter of teacher salaries and incentives.

 

You need to move to California, young-gun. Pervs who do depraved things to children get $48,000 grand a year in retirement alone.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/02/la-teacher-suspected-of-lewd-conduct-keeps-benefits.html

 

Maybe they're just angling for a better class of bribe.

 

Gladly. They're called universities. How many kids in the last 20 years had the math teacher making 200k who spoke about nine words of English? That's some teaching. Colleges hire people for what they know, who they know, where they publish and what kind of grant dollars they can attract. Where's teaching ability? Waaaay down the line.

You start dropping $150,000 and you'll attract plenty of interested parties, many of whom will be what you call "industry experts." <i>Hi, I've been in the engineering field for 16 years. Can I teach trig?</i> Those folks know trig. They don't know teaching.

If you really want to fix education, shit, throwing more money at teachers won't do it. I don't even think the teachers are the problem. Or their pay, precisely. Parents are the problem. Culture is the problem. TV is the problem. What chance does a $200,000-a-year teacher stand against a mom whose idea of parenting is letting her 12-year-old watch a night of Jersey Shore and Teen Mom? None. You might as well burn the fucking money. Ditto for the fireman making $150,000 a year to cook gourmet meals, work out, and occasionally watch homes and buildings made out garbage, easily-flammable materials burn insanely fast and out of control. You're paying them to stand there and regard the burning pile of shit.

You cannot throw money at that portion of the problem and expect any useful results. If you start paying teachers that much, you'll either quickly turn into a meritocracy - where, like college, nobody much gives a shit whether you pass or not - of knowledge founts, or you'll have principals breathing down the necks of teachers every day of the week.

You talk absurd? Here's absurd: Let's pay the teachers of failing schools even more money to not solve child welfare, violence, drugs and materialism.

 

Highly-skilled...at what? Being engineers? Being advertising-copy-writers-turned-English-teachers?

How are they at classroom management? At talking to piss-poor parents? At detecting depression? At knowing when to give a kid a second chance vs. bringing the hammer down? At walking the tightrope between talking the kids' language and being offensive?

<i>Hey, he plays basketball - sign him to a rodeo contract!</i> Huh?

 

To answer young gun's question, this is the guy who unseated Lowell Barron, who belongs in the Crooked Pol HOF. Among other delights, he was one of Bobby Lowder's toadies on the Auburn board and the board of Colonial Bank, and got some pretty sweet no-bid contracts from the university.

 

Apples and oranges, Alma.

University professors are paid those salaries largely because of their research.

 

I didn't say they weren't.

The bigger the salary, the more onus there's going to be on "added benefit." You'll absolutely price real teachers out and "clout" in. <i>Well, we got a bank exec.</i> You're introducing athletic competition precepts into the classroom, which doesn't wash, because in school, you're graded on the performance of everyone - especially the bench-warmers.

 

As as (Republican/Libertarian) public school teacher who happens to be a big believer in capitalism, it saddens me that someone from our side of the political aisle doesn't really understand the basic point of capitalism -- if you pay your labor more, you will attract higher-quality labor. If you pay it less, you get what you pay for.

A few years back, the community where I teach got tired of losing its best educators to other neighboring districts, so it substantially increased teacher pay so it is now among the highest in the state. Guess what? The school is consistently rated as one of the tops in the state and is one of only eight schools in the state up for a prestigious national award. Our reward? A state legislator said "that school district's pay scale is too high and we need to get it back in line with everyone else."

Truth: I would never have left journalism for education if I didn't get a significant increase in pay and job security for it. I felt a call to teach when I was an SE, probably more than I feel it now. But now that the state has frozen teacher pay and basically eliminated any job security, I've got a continually-updated resume.

 

Cracks me up when people talk about where teachers fall on the average or median pay scale.

Roughly 28% of the U.S. population has a college degree, which is pretty much universally required of teachers.
Less than 10% of the U.S. population has a graduate degree. A pretty significant plurality -- if not majority -- of teachers have them (myself included).

Yet, teachers -- who rank in the top quarter of educated Americans, and many of whom rank in the top 10% -- are expected to be paid like the people who sleep through their classes and couldn't hack it in college.

Spare me, please. I'm a professional who takes my job seriously and worked my @$$ off to get to where I am. I should expect to be compensated like one, not like (and no offense to those of us who are) a secretary.

 

And are those educational requirements, or the relative pay versus other fields, a lot different from when you got into teaching? Probably not. I can't imagine that you would have been unaware of such an injustice as you were signing up for the classes to get that master's degree.

 

I don't deem it an injustice, but the area of education now isn't the area of education -- at least in my state -- that existed six years ago when I got into it.

What I signed up for when I went to grad school (twice) was a job where I could make a difference in my community, had a 7-3 workday, had a decent -- but not great -- salary (at the time, a slight improvement over my salary as a veteran small-town SE) and a ton of job security.

The state legislature has since deemed me -- and all of my colleagues -- to be overpaid and essentially dictated that salaries should be frozen and reduced to numbers that would make most journalists blush.

But the argument often made by politicians and education critics is "Teachers make $$ compared to the average salary in the state, which is $." I'm just pointing out the ludicrousness of that argument. Teachers are also significantly more educated than 90% of society, yet are expected to be happy by being paid like a lower-middle-class laborer who barely passed high school.