My teaching soapbox

I go on a teacher soapbox so often on here, those who don't know me probably think i'm a teacher. Those who do know me probably think i'm just sucking up to my niece. I'm not. I just look back on my life and i realize the people who had the greatest effect on me (for better or worse) were my parents, my high school football and baseball coach, and my teachers. My parents did it out of a love for me. My coaches out of a love of sports. Teachers, well, who knows why they put up with me? Anyways, here's an article by Anna Quindlen which pretty much makes the point i've been trying to make over the last year or so - that teachers are underpaid.

Highlights:

The average new teacher today makes just under $30,000 a year, which may not look too bad for a twentysomething with no mortgage and no kids. But soon enough the newbies realize that they can make more money and not work anywhere near as hard elsewhere. After a lifetime of hearing the old legends about cushy hours and summer vacations, they figure out that early mornings are for students who need extra help, evenings are for test corrections and lesson plans, and weekends and summers are for second and even third jobs to try to pay the bills.
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Instead of simply acknowledging that starting salaries are woefully low and committing to increasing them and finding the money for reasonable recurring raises, pols have wasted decades obsessing about something called merit pay. It's a concept that works fine if you're making widgets, but kids aren't widgets, and good teaching isn't an assembly line.
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The point about tying teaching salaries to widget standards is that it's hard to figure out a useful way to measure the merit of what a really good teacher does......
...Tying raises to pass rates is a flagrant invitation to inflate student achievement. Tying them to standardized tests makes rote regurgitation the centerpiece of schools. Both are blind to the merit of teachers who shoulder the challenging work of educating those less able, more troubled, from homes where there are no pencils, no books, even no parents. A teacher whose Advanced Placement class sends everyone on to top-tier colleges; a teacher whose remedial-reading class finally gets through to some, but not all, of a student group that is failing. There is merit in both.
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In recent years teacher salaries have grown, if they've grown at all, at a far slower rate than those of other professionals, often lagging behind inflation. Yet teachers should have the most powerful group of advocates in the nation: not their union, but we the people, their former students.

Amen to that, i say.

If you hold to the notion that teachers are overpaid, imagine this scenario. Put yourself in a room with the 10 brightest, most ambitious and capable kids in your local high school. Ask them why they don't want to be teachers. $10 says one of the reasons is because teaching doesn't pay enough. Better to get a job as a CEO, run your company into the ground, and collect that nice hefty severance package they offer to get rid of you. And we complain about tenure...