Posted on 09/01/2011 7:30:31 AM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer
How would the nation's school system be different if teachers were paid like engineers?
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan proposed last month that a significant boost in teacher salaries could transform public schools for the better by luring the country's brightest college graduates into the profession.
But it's possible that teachers would rather have more job security than a higher salary. When Michelle Rhee controlled Washington D.C.'s schools, she offered up to $130,000 salaries to teachers if they would give up their union's tenure and seniority rules and agree to be paid based on their students' test scores. She could not get the teachers union to accept her offer.
Rhee eventually negotiated a slightly watered-down version of her plan, but she resigned only a few months later when the ouster of Mayor Adrian Fenty was widely seen as a rejection of her education policies.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
we’ve got the “brightest” screwl graduate in the u.s. presidency
and look at where that’s got us!
Exactly. It doesn’t matter how much you pay the teachers, as long as the ultra-liberal NEA is in charge of education. The students will still be fed a load of mush.
This argument has never worked.
“You have to pay for quality” BS. Esp in this economy. I know all kinds of people working for next to nothing who are “worth” more.
No, don’t pay teachers 60K That is more than people with better degrees than “education” make.
They might be "lured" there, but they sure won't be hired. The jobs are already filled with union flunkies who have seniority, and any new hires are selected to fill diversity quotas.
No.
Do not even THINK of comparing an education degree with an engineering degree.
$60k for a “teacher””?
Bwahahahahahah.
That’s a back-asswards idea if I ever heard one. Engineers get “paid like engineers” because their job performance and contributions to productivity demand that level of compensation. Public school teachers nowadays aren’t even at the basic competence level, so they probably couldn’t demand their current salaries in a free market, much less the salaries of engineers. If not for the unions they wouldn’t even have their jobs.
How about teachers try to actually perform the jobs we are already paying them to do before they ask for a raise in their base pay? Is that really too much to ask?
How about we make them all contractors and privatize all schools?
Teachers of WHAT? Kindergarten? High School Calculus? Get rid of government intervention in education and the market would take care of the salaries.
Government school teachers aren’t victims; government school teachers aren’t heros or heroines; they are enablers of the left and willing destroyers of culture and minds. Moreover, many, if not most, barely can read.
Teachers unions don’t exist in a vacuum. They are supported by most teachers. We need to stop romanticizing a professiopn that, today, is utterly corrupt and filled with incompetents.
You can’t pay them off, when inflation kicks in, 130k isn’t going to buy a loaf of bread.
How about if an engineer, architect, scientist (with the requisite degree(s)) became teachers? Would they deserve $60K plus salaries?
teachers don’t want their salary to be determined by market forces supply and demand
The free market should dictate teacher’s salaries.
The free market will only exist in education when the NEA monopoly is GONE.
Why not $1 million a year? Taxpayers would surely support that if every student coming out of the school was a little Einstein. Is that the guaranty the NEA is promising? Teacher pay as a proxy for performance?
This silliness reminds me of why the old-lne steel industry died in Pittsburgh. Guys who swept the floor made $30,000 per year in the 1970s. And no one else was permitted to sweep the floor. You might have thought these guys were the best damn floor sweepers on the face of the Earth based on their salaries. If you did, you would have been wrong.
60 grand to spout liberal nonsense that doesn’t prepare kids for the real world? Yes! As well, teachers should be given that and more because they can’t find decent holiday dream vacations on the meager less-than-60-grand salary they have for their 3 months off work paid vacation. And teachers always vote Democrat because — as everyone knows — they do it for the students.
You might lure bright, competent people to the profession, but they will leave almost immediately unless teaching is their passion.
The lack of discipline, the lack of structure and organization at the classroom level, the lack of support by educrats and the dealing with “clients” that cannot be turned down, denied or rejected in any of their demands will drive bright, competent people right into another profession.
As far as I’m concerned, teachers should be contractors.
We probably already pay teachers the equivalent of 60K, if you break it down by the hour.
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