Teacher Pay

I have written before about the need to INCREASE teacher pay, not cut it. This weekend’s NY Times published an op-ed saying the same thing.

We have a rare chance now, with many teachers near retirement, to prove we’re serious about education. The first step is to make the teaching profession more attractive to college graduates. This will take some doing.

At the moment, the average teacher’s pay is on par with that of a toll taker or bartender. Teachers make 14 percent less than professionals in other occupations that require similar levels of education. In real terms, teachers’ salaries have declined for 30 years. The average starting salary is $39,000; the average ending salary — after 25 years in the profession — is $67,000. This prices teachers out of home ownership in 32 metropolitan areas, and makes raising a family on one salary near impossible.

We have full time teachers who cant even afford to buy a house in many communities. In Madison Metropolitan School District, we have full time EAS (who are some of the hardest working people in the schools) who have their kids on free/reduced lunch! Now Governor Walker comes in, whose education himself is lacking, and gives school districts the “tools” of cutting teachers salary.

The authors of this op-ed are also the producers The \"American Teacher\" documentary. They point out the tremendous cost to our country by how we currently treat our teachers.

Imagine a novice teacher, thrown into an urban school, told to teach five classes a day, with up to 40 students each. At the year’s end, if test scores haven’t risen enough, he or she is called a bad teacher. For college graduates who have other options, this kind of pressure, for such low pay, doesn’t make much sense. So every year 20 percent of teachers in urban districts quit. Nationwide, 46 percent of teachers quit before their fifth year. The turnover costs the United States $7.34 billion yearly. The effect within schools — especially those in urban communities where turnover is highest — is devastating.

They then think big in offering solutions.

McKinsey polled 900 top-tier American college students and found that 68 percent would consider teaching if salaries started at $65,000 and rose to a maximum of $150,000. Could we do this? If we’re committed to “winning the future,” we should. If any administration is capable of tackling this, it’s the current one. President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan understand the centrality of teachers and have said that improving our education system begins and ends with great teachers. But world-class education costs money.

For those who say, “How do we pay for this?” — well, how are we paying for three concurrent wars? How did we pay for the interstate highway system? Or the bailout of the savings and loans in 1989 and that of the investment banks in 2008? How did we pay for the equally ambitious project of sending Americans to the moon? We had the vision and we had the will and we found a way.

Bravo to them, there are actual “tools” beyond cutting teacher pay! That is true “American Exceptionalism”!

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59 thoughts on “Teacher Pay

  1. Zuma you accuse me of being mindlessly partisan, and that’s fine since you are 100% correct, there is nothing that I agree with when it comes the current far left agenda that Democrats are following directed by people like George Soros. But I am wondering do you see yourself as anything but a mindless far left democrat partisan, because I sure do. I seem to have a second wind again, not going to fall back to the battles we had a few weeks ago going to stay way above your posting style and I finally after not blogging for the whole month of April, have again fired up the blog again.

  2. I had wonderful teachers for the 8 years I was in private school and had a number of excellent teachers in high school, but I do not see them as HEROES the NAVY SEALS that put a bullet in bin Ladens head now they are heroes. But teachers do have a very important job and they should be paid accordingly to their talents, why should great teachers who go above and beyond what is expected of them get paid the same those who just trudge through the day for a paycheck not really caring and don’t tell me there are none like that, it is not fair to the great ones. If they really want to just do a half assed, job they can become ambulance chasers.

  3. Notalib, I realize that you are not comfortable reading lengthy comments, but I hope that you will bear with me, and read this one in its entirety.

    Additionally, and if you’re truly interested in an honest dialogue, I’d appreciate it if you would honestly and dispassionately answer some questions for me.

    You said that “[T]here is nothing that I agree with when it comes the current far left agenda that Democrats are following directed by people like George Soros.”

    (1) What is the “far left agenda” of which you speak?

    (2) What is your evidence that it is being “directed” by George Soros or anyone else?

    You then went on to write, “But I am wondering do you see yourself as anything but a mindless far left democrat [sic] partisan, because I sure do.”

    (3) How is my thinking controlled by George Soros or anyone else?

    (4) What does “mindless” mean to you?

    Look Notalib, you seem to speak in short, evidence-free, talking points-laden bursts that never seem to be truly responsive to the evidence-supported points that are made to you. That’s where my description of you as “mindless” comes from. I don’t think that anyone else here would agree that the comments that I post are “mindless”. They’re well thought-out, well-reasoned and supported by evidence, But, you know what, I’m more than willing to listen to your reasoning in this regard. How, in any sense of the word, am I “mindless”.

    I’ll admit that, out of frustration with your seeming failure to debate reasonably, logically and responsibly and in a manner that I would recognize as approximating “discourse”, I have gotten a little personal with you, but the vast majority of what I have directed at you has been dispassionate, well-reasoned, logical and supported by evidence. You just haven’t responded in kind, and that can get kind of frustrating.

    So, I am a more than a little troubled by what you said at the end of your comment, to wit, that you are “. . .going to stay way above [my] posting style”.

    Notalib, in my view, you have often failed to respond to what I and other have had to say to you because you seemed to be out of your intellectual “comfort zone”. You have had a tendency in the past to hurl insults at your political opponents at the expense of presenting a rational, well-reasoned and/or evidence-supported argument, so I’m not exactly sure what you think that you’re “rising above”. Case in point: Zach once remarked (comment thread for “Sarah Palin gets warm welcome in Madison”) on your failure to respond in kind to a post of mine that he called eminently well-reasoned. You simply responded to Zach by saying that you don’t read the vast majority of what I write. That spoke volumes.

    You seem to have a tendency to find fault in others, and an singular lack of inclination to consider your own failings. The last sentence of your comment is evidence of that.

    We’ll get along fine, Notalib, if you just realize that I am a person by inclination, education and training (I’m a lawyer) who values a well-reasoned exchange of views, respect that, and try to contribute arguments to the “mix” here that bear that hallmark of normal “civil discourse”. I write a lot. I read a lot. I am willing to see a thought or argument through to its logical conclusion. You strike me, for whatever reason, as being the polar opposite, and I see the possibility that you lack the patience to do the same, both with arguments that you are making and with the arguments, something lengthy, that others direct to you. And therein, I think, lies the rub here.

    For the record, Notalib, as I’ve described elsewhere, I have gravitated toward liberalism/progressivism and the Democratic Party over time, and it was anything but a “mindless” process. I voted for George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004, and was a registered Republican until 2008. I soured on Bush and the Republican Party after they took the budget surplus left by Clinton and, as the proximate result of two unfunded wars, unfunded tax cuts and unfunded Medicare Part B, and profligate spending elsewhere, and create an enormous deficit. I also soured on the Republican Party because I didn’t share its socially conservative views or like the extensive influence that the religious right had on it.

    You can call me a mindless left wing ideologue, but the truth is something far different. I came to my political conversion much as I come to the opinions that I express in my comments here. Trained in the Socratic Method, I thought about things a lot from a lot of different directions, and discussed them at length with people from all political persuasions, and arrived at the place that I am now.

    George Soros has a lot of interesting things to say, and I listen to what he has to say, just as I listen to a great many other people. I used to listen to William F. Buckley, Jr. growing up. I still listen to similarly thoughtful conservatives like David Frum. I don’t think that you can call me “mindless” by any stretch of the imagination.

    1. So, what were you agreeing with when you said, “You are correct Zuma”?

    1. All right, then, cool. Why don’t we just use this as a jumping off point for a better relationship here, huh?

      Who knows, maybe I can even bring you all the way over to the “dark side” one of these days. . .(*laughing). . .

      Anyway, on to bigger and better things.

      If you have time, how about answering the questions that I posed up at the top of the comment:

      (1) What is the “far left agenda” of which you speak?

      (2) What is your evidence that it is being “directed” by George Soros or anyone else?

      (3) Do you [still] believe that my thoughts or worldview are controlled by George Soros or any other “far left” taskmaster? If so, how do they accomplish that?

  4. I am tired of teacher worship. Teachers are like other professions that have unions. Or corporations that have PACS. There is value in some and not in others.
    If you want to know about teachers and their influence on children then you might start with http://badbadteacher.com .
    If you really want to bonus teachers, then base their bonus on the children’s average grade performance one or two years afterwards. Teach third grade? Get Comp’d based upon the kids results in fourth or fifth grade.Every school system can track this for 80% of the students from K thru 12.
    I am tired of teacher worship. “Its for the children” is a very weary argument with me.
    Increasing pay does not mean you will attract better teachers or better people. It means that you will attract people who need or want more money.

  5. PB while I disagree with you on if you want to know about teachers and their influence on children website…sure there are bad teachers, there is bad everything. If you want to see the influence talk to anyone who is successful and they will tell you at some point it was a teacher who inspired them.

    As for your bonus idea, I agree with that. I wrote a LTE, that unfortunately I cant find, a couple years ago stating the exact same thing. For example when Russ Feingold was the sole vote against the Patriot act we should have went back and Bonused his social studies teacher. When Paul ryan tells us he wants to “save” medicare and his roadmap is what we need, then we should go back and severely punish his accounting and math teachers.

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