Combat Pay for Teachers

Posted at 3:22 pm on Thursday, March 12, 2009, in Uncategorized, and tagged education, two-percent.

I am not an altruist; I am not one of those people. I probably wouldn’t make a great teacher because of it. And that is pretty much what we are asking young people to be when they take up the field of education: altruists. Now — don’t get me wrong — I don’t feel sorry for teachers. Most of them have it made. Two-week long vacations, summers off, pensions. There is nothing real-world about teaching, especially if you teach in the suburbs. For those that teach in the inner cities, teaching the students that society has given up on, or future students that society will give up on, it is an entirely different story.

I am not trying to rewrite the Two Percent Solution, and I ask you now, if you have any interest in centrist-based solutions for our nation’s domestic problems, please read the book. But let’s move forward.

We need the best and the brightest to teach. We don’t need those who aren’t good at anything else so they picked up education junior year in college. But how can we — as a society — ask the best and the brightest, who may have an inkling to teach (and many of them do), to take a job in the worst neighborhoods in America for $26k plus benefits? (One of the benefits is the ever-present fear of layoffs.)

Here’s the solution: pay more; a lot more. Offer the toughest jobs starting at $200k, with incentives for bonuses, but remove the protective clauses from union contracts. And draw a line in the teachers’ lounge: math and science teachers get paid more than gym teachers. It is also ridiculous to punish good teachers that may relocate over those that remain in one district to earn an increased pension.

We need the Stanford and MIT graduates that aren’t really interested in ripping off Americans on Wall Street, or polluting our lakes and rivers at GE, or designing silly entertainment devices with Twitter or Facebook, to consider teaching, but that is not going to happen if we pay teachers as second-rate employees. We also don’t need to force these people to think that they’ll have to teach for their entire lives, which is how the current pension-based equal-pay start-at-the-bottom system works. Many people switch jobs and careers, and this phenomenon shouldn’t be exclusive of teachers.

We need to elevate the position of teachers, and raising pay is the only way to do it, and with two percent of our GDP, we can do just that and a whole lot more. Read the book.

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