NYT: Pay Teachers More

Pay Teachers More
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: March 12, 2011



From the debates in Wisconsin and elsewhere about public sector unions, you might get the impression that we’re going bust because teachers are overpaid.

That’s a pernicious fallacy. A basic educational challenge is not that teachers are raking it in, but that they are underpaid. If we want to compete with other countries, and chip away at poverty across America, then we need to pay teachers more so as to attract better people into the profession.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/opinion/13kristof.html?_r=1

How the hell does he expect teachers (or anyone else) to be well paid and receive benefits without a union? By the magnificent largesse of the state? "The state" is destroying unions so they can reduce salaries and benefits and eliminate pensions! How is it that otherwise intelligent people do not get this?

I agree we need to pay teachers more, but the argument that we need to pay them more to "attract better people" to the profession seems to be, IMHO, saying that the current people we have aren't good enough, and that they are the problem. If we offered teachers more money, we could get rid of the current teachers and get better teachers.

This seems to me to be directly at odds with the argument that the current teachers are fine, it's the level of support, the resources, and the issues they have to deal with that are out of their control (poverty, violence, drugs, etc...) that are the issue.

because the pay is so low.

Half of all new teachers resign from the profession within 5 years. They can't afford to continue teaching. We need to pay new teachers more to keep them in the classroom.

I'm just saying that the argument that we need to pay teachers more to attract better candidates seems to suggest that the teachers we have aren't good enough, and if we had better teachers, they could fix some of these issues. However, in many DU discussions on education I've seen, the consensus seems to be that the problem isn't the teachers at all, the teachers are fine, it's other factors outside the control of the teachers that are causing the issues in education.

These two arguments seem to be opposed to each other, and yet it's not hard to find someone who believes both.

The teachers are fine. If nothing else, they get stuck with too much of the blame - when the parents, students, administrators, and lack of funding share some of that blame too. Again the lack of funding speaks volumes too. At a smaller high school or junior college you might have a chemistry major stuck teaching chemistry, math, and biology. He might be an excellent teacher but it would be better if we had a full time bio and full time math teacher as well.

Moreover, we have on average good (some excellent, many good, some marginal, a few bad) teachers when we should be striving for excellent teachers. You can't just fire the bad teachers to fix the problem without increasing the pay either. You'll just get a revolving door situation. Also bad teachers and bad admins will annoy the good and excellent teachers.

And I appreciate your sentiment.

But I don't see that they are opposing arguments at all. Our kids deserve the best. And we should do everything we can to give them the best teachers we can.

no doubt higher pay would keep some in the profession.

that the "best people" are teaching and leaving within 5 years, it's suggesting that the "best people" don't even consider teaching anymore.

However, ineffectual teachers are both difficult to remove and overpaid.

Public education is facing some serious challenges and must find a way to overcome the fear of ideas that do not conform to long-established means and methods of the education profession.