Dave Eggers offers a heartbreaking work of staggering support for increasing teachers' salaries in the current Mother Jones:

As a nation, we're confused about how we see teachers. Most polls show that respect for the profession has risen in recent years, yet we have certain quietly entrenched ideasóthat teaching is easy, that teachers get out at 3 p.m. every dayóand these notions, all ludicrous, allow us to accept the injustice in teachers' dismally low salaries. We love teachers, we think they're saints, but most of us consider unavoidable the fact that they are underpaid and often have to work two or three extra jobs to maintain a middle-class existence.

The latest statistics put the average teacher's salary at about $46,000; some teachers earn a little more, some a little less (the average teacher's salaryónot the starting salaryóis $38,000 in Kansas, $36,000 in New Mexico, and $32,000 in South Dakota). Overall, that's about the same that we pay pile-driver operators ($45,980) and about $8,000 less than the average elevator repairman pulls down. Meanwhile, a San Francisco dockworker makes about $115,000, while the clerk who logs shipping records into the longshoreman's computer makes $136,000.

The first step to creating an education system full of the best teachers we can find is to pay them in line with their importance to their communities. We pay orthodontists an average of $350,000, and no one would say that their impact on the lives of kids is greater than a teacher's. But it seems difficult for everyone, from parents to politicians, to shake free of a tradition in which teaching was seen as something of a volunteer project for women whose husbands brought home the real money. Today's teachers need to, but very often can't, support a family on their salaries. They find it difficult or impossible to buy homes, to save money, to live comfortably, and, in wealthier areas, to live in or near the towns where they teach.

I vividly remember, while growing up in the Chicago suburbs in the '70s, knowing that my sixth-grade math teacher was alsoóeven during the school yearóa licensed and active travel agent, and I recall seeing a number of my high-school teachers, all with master's degrees or Ph.D.'s, painting houses and cutting lawns during the summer. This kind of thing still happens all over the country, and it's a disgrace. When teachers are forced to tend the yards of students' homes, to clean houses, or to sell stereos on nights and weekends, the quality of education is diminished, the profession is disrespected, and we parody the notion that we hold our schools and teachers in the highest regard. Teachers with two and three jobs are tired, their families are frustrated, and the students they teach, who want toóand shouldóconsider their instructors exalted figures, learn instead to think of teaching as a part-time gig, the day job for the guy who sells Game Boys at Circuit City.

Hat tip: Amardeep Singh

By far, the strongest opponents of school vouchers are teachers.

I'm sorry, but you can't have it both ways. You can't claim sainthood, claim it's "all for the children," and then go out, join unions and condemn the children of the poor to a lifetime of suffering from the effects of poor education because you're threatened by competition in your marketplace.

Teachers are part of the problem. F' them.

I'll consider raising teacher salaries as soon as they allow merit-based pay and limit or repeal tenure. Until then, it's all so just much whining as they use examples from their best to imply applicability to their mean. Until I can reward teachers for excellence, I don't want to hear them griping that they aren't all paid as if they were excellent. They aren't uniformly excellent. They aren't even uniformly adequate. And they certainly don't deserve uniform raises just because they exist.

Let teachers be paid what clients agree to pay them. Then we will find out how much we are worth.

Holy Moley! I want that shipping clerk's job!

Last I checked, the average wage in 2003 was around $36,000 But I guess "Teachers Only Make Average Wage!" isn't as alarming.

I'll consider raising teacher salaries as soon as they allow merit-based pay and limit or repeal tenure. Until then, it's all so just much whining as they use examples from their best to imply applicability to their mean. Until I can reward teachers for excellence, I don't want to hear them griping that they aren't all paid as if they were excellent. They aren't uniformly excellent. They aren't even uniformly adequate. And they certainly don't deserve uniform raises just because they exist.

Teachers don't have tenure. Professors do. There's a significant difference, especially considering that college professors are relatively well paid. Furthermore, the reason that so many teachers aren't that great is because of the low pay. Most of the potentially good teachers go into better paying fields. If you want to attract talent, you have to be willing to pay for it, too. Plus, it's not like all doctors, lawyers, dentists, and football players are excellent either. There are many mediocre ones, but I don't hear you calling for them to be paid less. When you work in a field as poorly compensated as teaching, unionizing and collective bargaining is just about the only way you can make a living wage. If we were willing to pay teachers a wage equivalent to their value, we would be able to properly compensate individual excellence and do away with teacher's unions.

Ditto, Jacob.
I've had contact with the kind of teachers that the article praises and I would love it if their pay was raised significantly. Unfortunately, far from being a majority, these teachers hardly constitute a recognizable minority - at least in California schools. They are certainly not a good argument for across-the-board pay raises.

Ditto everyone (except mallarme).

F'them, huh? That's a big part of the reason I left public school teaching. For the money, teaching was too hard. Yes, I left school at 2:00, only to spend the next several hours planning and grading papers. Yes I had summers off, which I spent doing menial work and rereading next year's novels and texts. And yes, I opposed (and still oppose) school vouchers. Whose kids' parents are going to take that $7500 voucher and spend it at a $20,000 school? Not those of the poor kid in the back row.

I tripled my salary after 18 months in the real world, eventually topping out at an order of magnitude increase--for helping kids? No, for writing computer code. (Is computer code 10 times more valuable than a kid's education?) I worked fewer hours, had the respect of my peers and the public, and experienced far less stress.

As talented, dedicated teachers continue to abandon the profession, the quality of public education continues to decline. In my view, our society has the public schools it deserves.

As far as those whining, ungrateful parents and the outraged community who have to suffer the state of public education today, I say F'them.

By the way, Chris O'Donnell rips this whine festival apart quite nicely on his blog: http://www.odonnellweb.com/mtarchives/001070.html

Public school teachers where I live in Tennessee do have tenure. Maybe not the same type of tenure as in higher-ed, but tenure nontheless. A teacher has to commit a crime against a student in order to get fired. The incompetent ones get moved around the various schools.

As far as the wages go, I do not feel sorry for teachers. In Tennessee teachers are paid for a 200 day contract. Teachers get paid very well for basically working 2/3 year. Most people would love to get paid $30,000 (starting salary in my county for beginning teachers with Bachelor degrees) for working 2/3 of time. My mother is a teacher with 17 years experience, a master's degree with 45 additional graduate credit hours. Her hourly rate is higher than my attorney husband's hourly rate.

This is not to say that I think teaching is easy. I know that it is not. My mother is a teacher and I know what she puts into her job. But to say that teachers are underpaid is not correct. If teachers are willing to work a normal work year then give them a raise.

Everyone loves to beat up on teachers, but I think the callous attitude of "f-them" seems more than a little counpterproductive. By all means allow vouchers, charter schools, etc.--in my state, charter schools have become very popular and have siphoned off more than 10% of the kids from the big city school system where I live--but guess what? The charter schools aren't necessarily better. At least where I live, a lot of them are also coming up short on state tests, some are having funding problems, etc. etc. etc.

My father-in-law worked for thirty years as a public school teacher, and also sold real estate. I think it's very common for public teachers to hold down a second job, especially if they are the sole breadwinners. And yes, teachers who work a second job to provide classroom materials--art supplies and even snacks!--are heroic, in my view.

I'm also wondering why no one here is talking about the role of families and parental support in the classroom. I read an article once that said that class, race, etc. are not the determining factors of a child's success in the classroom--parents are. In short, a child at even the most squalid inner-city school can achieve if his/her parents make that child attend class, do homework, and are involved to some extent in the school. Our schools are only as dysfunctional as our families.

Is it really obvious that teachers "should" make more money than elevator repairmen? The elevator repairman works in what are probably often unpleasant conditions (in elevator shafts). He needs to have a well-developed sense of cause and effect, in order to isolate problems: I suspect there are significant numbers of teachers, and even professors, who would not be able to do this satisfactorily. He has direct responsibility for safety: if he screws up, people can get hurt or even killed. And he doesn't get summers off, either.

I wonder if Professor O'Connor ever thinks of Fantasia when reading her comments section.

F teachers? A whine festival?

The reason teachers, at all levels, are paid so little is because the thing Americans fear least of all in life is ignorance, as so wonderfully proven in these comments.

Mud Blood & Beer:
In truth, I can think of a number of things that Americans ought to fear more than ignorance. But that aside, the reason that teachers are paid so little is because in many cases, public schools have shown themselves to be money pits. You would find few opponents of substantial teacher pay raises if there were a fundamental restructuring of the public school system. (In California, that could start with 1) a voucher program and 2)crushing the CTA.)

That public school teachers don't enjoy tenure is hogwash. I don't care what you call it or what kind of semantical games you want to play. The plain fact of the matter is that you cannot fire a teacher no matter how bad they are once they've been a teacher for a couple of years. Teachers won't gain the respect (and pay) that they think they deserve until they allow us to reward excellent teachers and shed inadequate ones. I'm done giving even the best teachers a sympathetic ear until they accept some outside evaluation on their value.

It's amazingly obvious that all these complaints against teachers come from those who haven't spent a day in the classroom.

Sure, vouchers would help, as would a mechanism for weeding out ineffective teachers. But the bottom line is, and has always been, that if parents are involved and push their children then the children get good educations -- regardless of all other factors.

So let me ask those of you with all the answers this: how has your unwillingness to be an active and involved parent now become the teacher's fault? If parents do their job, then teachers can do theirs.

MB&B:
I don't disagree with your contention that active parental involvement is essential to the student receiving a good education.
Perhaps you have been fortunate enough to have been in an environment where most of the teachers are competant and enthusiastic and the only thing holding them back are the parents. But many of us, I assure you, have not.

Good teachers deserve three times what they actually earn.

However, just off the top of my head, here are a few of the unsavory things I witnessed during my 13 years in a public school system:

- A teacher literally twisting the arm of a 10-year-old in front of the entire classroom until the boy was in tears.

- A social studies teacher who was either drunk or visibly hung over every day, and who assigned a year's worth of busy work (maps with tracing paper, that sort of thing).

- A teacher who teased students about their sexual orientation.

- A hypochondriac who could take one or two days off each week with no loss of pay.

And so on, and so on. My *good* teachers were genuine heroes, and I still keep in touch with some of them. But the best thing we could do to honor the good ones, and the first thing we should do, is make it *not impossible* to fire or punish their lazy, abusive, and incompetent colleagues.

Teachers don't want to be paid for value. Teachers oppose merits testing. Teachers seek tenure or the state of being un-fire-able. Teachers seek pay for seniority. Teachers oppose consumers having choice. Teachers oppose consumers being able to vote with their feet.

I am always amazed when, in light of that, teachers make these specious arguments as if they should be paid the way private markets pay workers. If that's what teachers really wanted, they would have to reverse themselves on virtually every position they have taken.

The comparison to longshoreman (including the dock shipping clerk) is spurious--longshoreman have incredibly high pay as shipping companies "bribed" the unions with high pay to get the workers to accept higher and higher levels of mechanization and automation.

I think people forget that jobs in this country generally don't pay by how important the job is to society, how difficult the job is, or how much work the job requires. Ultimately, one of the most important things that defines how much a job pays is how easily you can find people to do that job. An elevator repairman can make alot more than a teacher because it's a select set of job skills. However, there are plenty of teachers. At the university where I currently work, education is the second largest major (behind psychology). If you look at it from a supply/demand point of view, arguing who should make more a piledrive operator or a teacher is kind of irrelevant. Besides, the author seems to pick and choose professions to make his point. I mean, a dockworker is San Francisco? What about a dockworker in Alabama? What do they make?

Because education is compulsory and universal there are plenty of teachers and therefore pay raises for them are hugely expensive. As described in previous comments, schools are inefficient because of unionization and lack of competition. There's no way teachers can get significant raises in these circumstances.

MB&B..."It's amazingly obvious that all these complaints against teachers come from those who haven't spent a day in the classroom."

So, is it OK to have opinions about the design and quality of new cars if you haven't spent a day in an auto factory? You seem to be taking a position that would suggest that it is not...

The teachers' unions are running a massive disinformation campaign here.

I am married to one, and have 4 siblings in teaching. They are all wonderful, but they know better to complain about their pay or conditions around people who work in the non-education world. In my 17 years of practicing law, my wife and I never differed in salary by more than a few thousand dollars a year, and she was the one making a little more the majority of those years. She does work hard and puts in many more hours than most people generally comprehend - but never worked more in any given week than I, and I had to work 50 to 52 weeks a year. She also has tenure and effectively can't be let go unless convicted of a felony. Outside of the education world it is not unusual to see a bad business year (or quarter) lead to getting the axe - little warning and no severence.

Do teachers have it easy? No. But they have it pretty good and their unions' attempts to make things look dire are not likely to win them much sympathy. If someone doesn't think teaching is a good deal, they should leave it. If there should then be a shortage of teachers, the pay will go up (market forces) and/or some of the innane union driven barriers to teachng could be removed (it seems odd to me that in my state it would take me as long to get fully certified to teach high school in the field of my bachelor's degree and doctorate - 3 years - as it did to get either my bachelor's degree or doctorate).

I'm a former teacher from Florida, where the school year was a whopping 180 days. Naturally, I left for more money, but I would've stayed on if an eleven month school year and prorated salary increase were possible. Teachers are relatively well compensated, IMO, considering the laughably short school year, the far better-than-average benefits, the lifetime job security, and near lack of accountability.

I taught in public schools, and served on a committee to examine retention and recruitment of quality teachers. The bureaucrats wanted us to say teachers needed more money to come work for us and to stay on, but in reality that was hardly the real problem. The real problems were the way the system made teachers lives difficult, so that people who were capable of making a living doing something else generally left to do that something else, and the only people who stayed were the saints and the incompetents. Unfortunately, the incompetents are far more numerous than the saints.

I could give a long explanation of what specific factors make teaching hellish, but suffice to say that low pay is really not one of them. Paying more won't make quality people want to keep banging their heads against the wall. Obviously, some districts are worse than others. In the districts that are not so bad, good teachers stay even for the pay they currently have. In the districts that are worse, fewer good teachers stay, and I guarantee they won't stay for more money.

I love the complaint above that yes, I got out of school at 2:00 but then had to put in several more hours of work--which, er, puts you out at the same time as the rest of the working world. Boo Hoo. And that yes, I had summers off but had to read. Oh, well, ok. And that puts you worse off than the rest of us how?

Not a single study anywhere has ever demonstrated a positive corelation between teacher pay and quality education, a fact attested to by thousands of outstanding--but poorly paid--Catholic school teachers worldwide. Perhaps when two thirds of our education funds quit getting gobbled up by professionals in the educational bureaucracy teachers will be better paid, but right now we aren't even getting our $36,000 worth. I can't see how doubling that figure tomorrow, with the same exact bureaucracy, unions, and administrators in place, will make one whit of difference. Is the claim that teachers--already working their poor fingers to the bone like galley slaves--going to really, REALLY start getting the job done when their payraise comes through, unattached to any kind of merit requirement? If you believe that, you're a perfect candidate for the contemporary classroom.

By the way, my brother is a firefighter. He also can't afford to live in the community where he works, and he has to work a second job to make a "decent" living. He knew the reality of the job before he took it. If he decides he doesn't like it, he'll change careers. If they can't find enough firefighters, they'll change the pay scale. Same with teaching, and I agree with Sage's comments above.

So the one perspective is that we'll get better teachers if we pay them more, and the other is that we'll only pay them better if they do a better job.

And the winner is: ignorance. Hooray.

The teachers at the parochial elementary school my daughter attended told me they could move over to the public schools and double their pay. They didn't do it because they liked having kids in their classrooms who had to behavior and be respectful, or else. And they were very good teachers, by and large, who liked the kids and did right by them.

Bring on vouchers and charter schools and let the market sort it out. The good teachers will prosper and the bad ones will get fired.

I find it hard to get too worked up about pubic school teachers' salaries when lots of them make more than college professors, have more job security (now that tenure for professors is going), and face considerably less competition for positions. Add to that about a decade's worth of difference in education and a much longer road to tenure (with ongoing proof of professional merit) and post-tenure review for professors.

Even with all their relative advantages, public school teachers can't seem to produce first-year college students who are more than semi-literate (and, in many cases, overtly hostile to education and educators). I also notice that, almost without exception--the students who are least prepared, least willing to work, and most hostile to learning are--surprise--going into education. They're the ones who stop every good dialogue with, "Is this going to be on the test?" And they still manage to barely pass the tests about which they are so obsessed. Or, perhaps that was the goal: barely pass (minimum effort being the standard). Should it surprise us that they go on the become bureaucrats and time-servers who, for the most part, don't really care about students (for all their pious talk) as much as hoading up the most benefits their manifest competitive inferiority will allow?

It's because I teach the future educators that my kids are homeschooled. I wouldn't trust most future teachers to make photocopies--they'd do a lousy job, take twice the usual time, find a way to steal, and complain about being treated unfairly.

Having looked at the market for teachers as a possible career, I can tell you that being a public school teacher in NYC pays far more than being a private school teacher here. And yet, these schools have no trouble producing excellent results in comparison to public schools.

There are lots of differences of course - when parents are paying for education, they tend to be more involved. Private schools can and will kick out students who are disciplinary problems. Private school teachers are less likely unionized. Many of these private schools are religious, and require students to take religion classes. The curricula of these schools do not change with each political whim. The per-pupil spending for the private schools is much less than that for the public schools (less bureaucratic overhead, lower salaries, fewer trouble students). One could go on and on.

If teachers are not satisfied with their pay, then they should leave. As someone commented above, if enough dissatisfied teachers leave, then the old supply-and-demand equation will kick in. Of course, at that point, the states may realize it would be cheaper to simply pay private school tuition than run their own school system.

Public school teachers do have it pretty sweet compared to most people - lots of vacation time if they want, defined benefit pension plans, tenure and seniority rules (where in some places, seniority makes you more likely to be cut). So they have to work in the summer to make extra money? Guess what - most people work in the summer.

I've got lots of family members who teach public school - particularly elementary school. They like the schedule and the benefits, and it's actually better pay than many of the jobs in their communities in South Carolina. Yes, I think the teacher's unions will find sympathy is pretty thin on the ground, as many other government workers have found out over the years. If you want "market rates", then go into the private sector. The state doesn't have a monopoly on education.

Teachers in my area are paid reasonably well. Not great, but fair.

However, I watch my son's teacher consumed with inane paperwork, asinine documentation requirements, and endless forms that consume much of her time. In order to give the students the time they need, she works an average of 60 hrs per week.

Between unions and public school administrivia, teachers are: paid for seniority vice performance; required to perform duplicative, menial tasks; locked into curricula that may or may not be the best method for teaching this particular class of students; and often regarded as babysitters. Further, they must "re-evaluate" grades for those whose parents whine loudly enough, pass students who have not mastered the material, dumb down their classes to the lowest common denominator (often in the state, much less in the classroom) and teach to standardized tests.

I'd rather be a sewer worker -- at least I could wash off the stench.

The salary statistics used to "prove" that teachers are underpaid are misleading. You can't compare pay in Wyoming to pay in New York without adjusting for cost of living. What I can live comfortably on in Texas is a lot less than I could live comfortably on in California.

What I think most people commenting are saying, and what Mud Blood & Beer seems to be (willfully?) missing, is that giving every teacher a 20% (or whatever) pay raise across the board with no reference to quality of work will not improve the situation.

Some issues to consider:
1) Quality of teaching is difficult to evaluate objectively, and even more so by bureaucrats. I taught for two years. I was evaluated 4 times, by a vice principal who barely knew who I was. None of the principals had any idea whether my teaching was excellent or poor, honestly, nor did they know that about any other teacher. One teacher in my school did not teach a single lesson all year, except when he was evaluated. Then he pulled a lesson out of his desk and taught it, receiving exemplary marks. The rest of the year his students watched T.V. He taught physical science. Under a typical merit pay plan, he would have been paid at the top level. In fact, he was. Would giving him a raise make him a better teacher?

2) The bureaucratic burdens on teachers are arguably more of a disincentive to continuing than the pay. My friend who taught math had to fill out lengthy justifications for every child who failed her classes, every grading period, plus prepare an individualized remediation plan. The easy solution would be just to pass them, even though they did not know the material. She instead tried everything she could think of to help them learn, but she had classes of unmotivated students who were woefully unprepared for the concepts they needed to learn, and her classes had typically more than 30 students in each. She lasted one year more than I did and is now an accountant.

3) The discipline situation in many schools is out of control, and teachers must deal with this as a constant source of stress. Our situation improved when they introduced a "three strikes" policy, where after three in-school suspensions a student would get moved to an alternative school for the rest of the year. It got the chronic troublemakers out of the way, and it sent a signal that we were serious about discipline. However, after a couple of months, just as it was starting to have a positive effect, it was stopped because the alternative school was full. Students took no rules seriously because all through the system the rules had never REALLY been enforced. You think about having to work in an environment like that, then decide if a few extra thousand dollars a year would substantially affect your decision to stay.

Kathy, your first point is well taken. You can count on a bureaucrat to screw up any evaluation system they're given. When I talk of merit pay, I'm thinking of parent evaluations. Believe me, the parents know who the good teachers are. Or more precise, they know who the truly outstanding teachers are. If you close the feedback-loop between parents and teachers, you'll see some good positive change in our education system. One indirect way to do that is with school vouchers--parents give the feedback that X school is inadequate. Another way to do that would be merit pay based on parent evaluations.

As a public school (and former private school) teacher, I have a few things to say...

1. I am one of the few in my profession who think that vouchers is a good idea. Paying teachers more won't help any more than throwing more money at the school districts to raise the "cost per pupil" expenditure. Unless there is true accountability, both from the district and from the teachers, nothing will ever change.

2. There is no such thing as tenure in Texas public schools. You cannot make that assumption across the board. We get yearly contracts and they can be pulled at any time.

3. Public school teachers sometimes make less, sometimes more than private school teachers. I got a 150% pay raise going from part time at a private school to full time at a public school. But I also have a colleague who made a comparable salary at the private school that she came from.

4. I am very anti-union: I think that unions are the ones that keep the schools from firing the incompetants. My husband works for the government, and because of their buracracy (sp?), they can't fire incompetants either.

5. Summers off and lack of skill in our profession is hogwash. I teach high school mathematics, up through AP Calculus. I think that my ability to teach kids that other have given up on and teach them college level mathematics makes me very skilled in what I do. Do not judge the life of a teacher until you have talked to one who has lived it. Yes, I am currently off for the summer, but I will be attending seminars and continuing education courses to keep up with the trends in education. The world is changing, and we can't teach like we did 20 years ago. And by the way, I usually work 50 hours a week during the schhol year - if you do the math that is comparable to 40 hours a week all year long (even if you don't take a 2-week vacation).

6. What I think will help - take a good long look at education in other countries. Americans believe that all kids should be college bound, and that is nuts. Trying to teach all kids as if they plan to go to college is ludicrous. Kids should be put on tracks depending on where their interests lie and then teach then what they need. Some school are attempting this and are having success, but when the state comes down and says that all high school graduates must have course X and course Y which they will never use past high school, it ties our hands as educators.

Enough of my rant - feel free to post comments. :)

You raise an excellent point about how our society thinks every child is college bound. This unfortunately places the onus on the teacher, which, of course, isn't fair. I work with teachers who are in the process of exiting the classroom in favor of the school meda center, and often hear this lament.

It has been my experience that teacher education programs admit everyone with a pulse. This is unfair to those in the program who are highly capable!! Right now, I can honestly say there are two severely mentally handicapped (officially documented, I have the inside scoop) students who are in our TEP. These two students need assistance using Microsoft Word and looking up a book in our library's catalog. This scares me.

Jacob, I'd have to respectfully disagree about the parents. I personally called 120 parents each year to invite them to open house, and only 1 parent attended. None of my students' parents had any idea what went on in my class.

I'm sure that some parents keep tabs, but not the majority.

Kathy,

The only time the parents MIGHT even attempt to be concerned is if their offspring won't be graduating from high school after 12 years (never mind that the offspring flunked 1/2 their classes, usually due to skipping school), or being the class fool. I feel bad for teachers because if you got rid of the students who really didn't want to be there in the first place, teaching would be a great profession to be in (just my two cents worth).

I have to agree with the comments on the NYC situation. The NYC educational system is so top heavy with administrators and senior support personnel and managers that fewer than 50% of the educational staff are teachers. I think the last number I saw reported was 35% of the employees of the Board of Ed were teachers.

Another point that I think needs to be addressed is that how many of the teachers actually teaching really do a good job. Too many of them have degrees in education and know how to fill out lesson plans and do all the paperwork, but when it comes to the subject to be taught they are woefully inadequate. At the same time I know people who want to leave good jobs to teach subjects in which they are acknowledged experts and are willing to take some education classes to gain those skills, but because of the draconian requirements of the educational establishment they are not able to be hired. I know that the NEA has done some good things for teachers in the past but from what I have seen of their actions in the present the best thing that could happen would be for them to fade away and let the good teachers actually teach without all the extra unnecessary requirements the NEA has lobbied to have put in place. It is to the point that every time I hear the head of the NEA here it just makes my teeth hurt and my head ache. She has to be the most grating person to follow that I know of. There seems to be no scheme that gains her another notch on her belt of scalps she has taken from people who really do want to educate the kids, a thing she has no inkling how to do, that she will not support to the best of her ability and she will go anywhere and blather on at great length anytime to render her support. The NEA should just go away!!

"Meanwhile, a San Francisco dockworker makes about $115,000, while the clerk who logs shipping records into the longshoreman's computer makes $136,000."

I realize that most of us would like those jobs, but they are inherited, and an interesting reflection of the longshoreman's union. Not that they don't work hard, the average longshoreman burns 7500 calories a day or more.

But, look at average income for people with a law degree -- it was around 40k last time I looked -- or the average income for PhDs in the same community (the high school teachers in the Brynn Mawr community used to make more than the college profs -- there was an excellent Wall Street Journal on that topic).

The real story should read: "teachers make only 10% more money than the average for their communities" -- though whether that is fair or not is an interesting thought.

Of course I live in a communit where we willingly tax ourselves more to pay more and the normal teacher in the high schools has a masters degree.

So, my vote obviously goes to more taxes and better pay for better teachers.

But the issues are complex.

Hmm, I haven't litigated a case with a claim involving the Texas "tenure" law for school teachers in three years, so it may have changed, but there are a number of significant rules, administrative review and appeals, and limits to what can be done to "non-renew" a teacher's contract.

Or there were three years ago.

Kathy, Just because parents aren't talking to YOU doesn't mean that they a) don't know what their children are learning b) everything they want to about you and your classroom (good and bad) and c) know that their input is unwanted in the current educational system. My admitedly subjective observation in being a parent of school children and talking with other parents has been that parents know a great deal about the teachers at their children's schools and their relative merits.

The other thing I've observed is that a lot of parents have given up on trying to change their schools and don't see any reason to continue wasting energy trying to talk to school administrators or even teachers. U.S. schools right now are beyond unresponsive to parents and in the experience of myself and too many of my friends and family, schools are outright antagonistic to "amateur" input from the parents who, after all, only have to live with the consequences of their children's education. Why do you think that vouchers and charter schools are becoming so popular? It's because parents are sick of playing on a field so antagonistic to their input. They've tried for years to change the school their children are attending--now they're ready to change the school their children are attending...

Mr. Eggers might be pwerfully informed by a quick review of Econ 101: Supply and Demand set price for any good or service. Farmer justify their demands for more money because they are closer to God tilling the soil of our land and providing for the food of life. Teachers justify their demands for higher pay because they have such an impact on the future of our country...our youth. I would be wealthy beyond measure if I could "buy" people for what their boss/market says they are worth and "sell" them for what they thought they were worth.

If you want $350K/year become an orthodontist, if you want to teach quit whining.

By the way, teaching is NOT delivering educational results, particularly to the economically disadvantaged who need them most. The rich buy their way out of the system with private school, the middle class vote with their feet and move to neighborhoods that have good public schools, heros opt out via home schooling, so that only the inter-city pupil has to suffer the true impact of the educational monopoly.

Vouchers for every parent and let the market decide.

Regards,

Ty Greaves

The $46,000 figure is skewed. To figure out how much the average teacher gets paid, several factors need to be taken into account.

Average Salary $46,000.00

Plus adjustment for three months off per year (46,000*(3/12))=$11,500.00

Exclusion from social security taxes. Teachers in Kentucky are able to opt out of paying this tax, probably similar in other states ((46,000+11,500))*6.2%=$3,565.00

An incredible pension in which many people would have to save 10% of their salary for a comperable retirement (($46,000+11,500.00+3565.00)*10%)=$6,106.50

For a grand total of $67,171.50. This is a comparable figure to compare.

I am not saying teachers are not worth this amount or more. I just think all facts should be on the table for a level discussion.

Many people argue that a beginning teachers salary is only around $30,000 a year. I know many attorneys who have passed the bar exam who start out around $30,000.00 a year. Very few occupations pay large amounts to people just out of college.

The fundamental divide here is between the ideas of socialism and those of capitalism. The socialists would like the world to operate a different way than it actually does, by setting wages for a preferred occupation. Capitalists know that the outcome when prices/wages are fixed is often nowhere near what was hoped, and oftentimes quite opposite to that intended.

As Mises and Hayek knew, and the Soviets, China and Cuba have proven, planned economies simply do not work. Not ever, not anywhere. The vision of what people "should" earn is a false one.

Okay, so about this elevator repairman job. You people who talk about how teachers shouldn't be paid more because they get the summers off and only work till 2 in the afternoon listen up. Okay, so an elevator repairman has to watch out for the safety of the people using the elevator and works in horrible conditions and you say teachers wouldn't be able to handle that, well here's a reality check for you: TEACHERS WORK IN THOSE CONDITIONS! We are responsible for lives of our students-or your children. We are responsible for making sure that they are learning and that for the most part of the day that they are safe. In addition, if more money was funded for schools teachers wouldn't be working at the dumpy schools they are. Those are some horrible conditions.
If you people would spend one day in a school you might actually realize that the teachers can only do so much and it is really the parents who make the biggest difference in their child's education. A student can work well in school all day and go home to a family that doesn't care if his/her homework is done; they are allowed to watch TV all night and play video games. What are you people going to do when you're old and the only people to take care of you, or run the country are the students you didn't care about. You don't care about their future, or their education. If you did you would be funding the schools and teachers and being involved in your child's education.
And to the people who think that teachers shouldn't be paid more because they only work 2/3 of the year: teachers work from sunset to sundown the entire school year. Most don't go home from school until well into the night. They are not compensated for any of the materials that they use in their classroom (that the state cannot provide), and most of their summer is spent preparing for the next school year.
A school is not a business. Teachers have no control over their "raw materials" or the students that walk into the classroom. Public schools cannnot turn any child away. You business people can send back your bad materials. That's why teachers are against vouchers. The country already cannot afford to fund education and provide every child with an "equal opportunity." If they could, then we would never need vouchers. Vouchers are given so parents who aren't happy with their child's school can send them somewhere else. Well, those parents should stop running from the problem and get involved with the school. They need to stop the complaining and volunteer at the school, or even just make sure that their child is learning at home. It all goes back to the parents.
If America wants teaching to produce real results it needs to stop pointing fingers at the schools and teachers and know that when you point one finger at them, three are pointing right back at you. WAKE UP! The whole system can only improve with more funding. I'm not saying you have to pay the teachers more, but at least compensate them for providing the educational materials they provide in the classroom. It's about time that the parents, and even people without kids, stop blaming the teachers. They ARE doing their job, are you?