As we are approaching another primary season in addition to a major election cycle I thought I would reveal a little known secret solution to the problem of "education reform" that has been a well used and abused political stocking horse for about half a century or more. Its a secret solution that nobody who has a vested interest wants to consider. Its very simple and doesn't involve complicated voucher systems or lots more tax funded initiatives - or even unfunded initiatives or standardized testing. And its very simple in that it already has a vast body of common law behind it. Doesn't require Supreme Court oversight or questions of separation of church and state. Doesn't even require more tax dollars. So simple you wonder why nobody supports it. Require all employees of public school systems to send their children to one. Its that simple. Just like many firemen or policemen are required to be residents of the entity that pays them, require all employees of public school systems to send their children to public school. Require those employed by the taxpayers to consume their own work product.29 responses total.
how would you suggest we *require* it, write a *law*? heh, good luck attracting more teachers to the field and solving the problem of a teacher shortage that way, buckaroo. you get what you pay for. it's not the teachers who are the problem, think about it next time your daughter spends lots of frustrating hours preparing for some bush admin mandated *no child left behind* standardized test...think about where the problem lies.
In, uh, the Bush admin? Standardized tests? "No child left behind"? WHAT IS IT??
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they were talking the other day about a district wehre the teacher was removed in a dispute with the children in her calss, adn she was amking $75,000.00
jp2's experience with teachers is different from mine. But if what he says is true, it's probably because if you have that kind of knowledge, you can make far more money in just about any occupation other than teaching. There really isn't much to attract highly qualified people to the teaching profession. bru's figure is an unusual case. The average teacher salary in the U.S. is $44,400. It ranges from around $50,000 in California to $30,000 in South Dakota. Many engineering graduates have *starting* salaries higher than that.
In my experience, public school teachers have a certain loyalty to the public schools. On the other hand, it's not hard to imagine a situation where a child has special needs not met by the public schools. I remember a prominent politician who was very committed to public education. He was elected to a major position, moved to the capital, and sent his son to the public schools there. But the son had pretty bad time. He was targeted, beaten up by toughs day after day, and I think they broke some bones. Eventually, a deal was quietly worked out to send him to a suburban school district. Sure, it would have been easy to nail the father to the wall about this politically. But what the hell else could he have done? Provide a bodyguard and make his son even more conspicuous? Holding kids hostage to politics has a certain appeal, especially if you see teachers as the problem. Maybe in the long run it might change things for the better. But the needs of the kids in the present need to come first.
(I can't find the Ann Arbor salary schedule online, nor on my machine's disk right now. IIRC, an MA, with an additional 90 credit-hours, and ten years' teaching experience is worth $60,000/year. A PhD with ten year's teaching experience approaches $70,000. A BA and no experience is worth something like $26,000 per year.)
I'm sure the market has changed over the past few years, but when I graduated from college in 2000 a lot of my friends who had BS degrees in engineering and no experience were starting at $60,000. So basically, by going into education you cut your wage-earning potential by more than half, even if you pick a school district that pays relatively well.
(My little brother thinks he wants to go into teaching, and my dad is really torn between encouraging him and pointing out to him that there's no money in it.)
I wish Iwas making a salary of $40,000 at any position I have ever worked.
re9: talk him out of it. re10: i guess special ed let you down.
Teachers get three months off in which to earn even more money.
Not really. They have to continue taking classes to maintain their teaching certificates.
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Yep. My summer vacation will not be a vacation at all. I'll be doing summer school full time for certification.
Bruce, the only requirements for earning a high salary are perseverance and intelligence. Oh...
8D
Here's a theory you can boot around: Public schools were badly damaged by the feminist movement. Before the 1970s, teaching and nursing were among the very few professions which were wide open for talented women. Because the public schools had a more-or-less captive labor supply, schools didn't have to pay competitive salaries -- teachers, mostly women, couldn't get into other, better-paying fields. Once the rest of the economy opened to women, education lost its hold on the supply of talented women. I keep seeing solutions which I characterize as "fiat economics:" attempting to declare that teachers will become better.
Re resp:10: Anyone can become rich if they stop being lazy. Rush Limbaugh told me so. ;> (No, I don't believe it either.) Re resp:18: I think that's pretty much dead-on.
Yes. The funny thing is that you often see "shortages" in both nursing and teaching because the powers that be arent willing to pay the new market wage for those fields even *years* after women started getting into other things.
I don't know about perseverance and intelligence being the only prerequisites for a high salary. I *certainly* have the intelligence, and perseverance, but I don't make a high salary. Of course, the fact that I don't want to leave the job I have to take a step into the unknown and probably much more stressful world of new things has something to do with that, but I have always felt that loyalty and stability have points in their favor as well.
I'm not really sure why the free market fails in these cases. Shouldn't wages "automatically" rise as supply tightens?
(Assuming a perfectly competitive market and if the purchasers are willing and able to pay more.)
When it comes to chronic shortages, yes...the free market should cause wages to rise. However, there are other solutions. In nursing you see a lot of duties that used to be done by registered nurses now being done by people with less training which in a way has reduced the demand for nurses.
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Y'all forgot the Old Boy Network.
Remember, public school teachers are paid from public school budgets, which are set by elected officials.... who keep cutting them to pay off their special interests. In traditional supply and demand economics, when demand goes up, the amount of money that is (potentially) available goes up. That doesn't happen here. Or maybe demand hasn't gone up enough yet. Maybe in order for demand to really affect the supply of money available for paying teachers, educational conditions will have to get so bad that voters will force politicians to actually pay attention to education.
"[School budges] are set by elected officials.... who keep cutting them to pay off their special interests." So that's why the State of Michigan is cutting the amounts allocated to education, both k-12 schools and colleges and universities?
Re resp:27: I think it's more likely that bad conditions will be used as an excuse to get rid of public schools altogether.
You have several choices: