It may well be an excellent plan from a personal level, but from a societal level, having all of your teachers leave for better paying jobs would not be a great thing.
Perhaps you are right Euphonious, but I still maintain that the best way for teachers to get more respect is to quit and never return until laws and attitudes change.
True, however, I’m not entirely sure there is a shortage of people who want to teach, they are not leaving for better paying jobs. It’s not like the pay scale is a closely guarded secret, teachers have been poorly paid for decades. Nobody goes into teaching under the expectation of making lots of money, and there are a healthy number of qualified teachers available. They may not be the best teachers money can buy, but a bigger concern right now is the available funding on the local level to pay enough teachers, even at the current low pay scale.
Increase that pay, and I have no idea where the extra money is going to come from just to keep the current staffing level, chances are districts would cut more jobs and deal with larger class sizes.
Yes they are. ~50% of teachers leave before their first five years are up, and according to the study I cited above, the folks who leave TEND to be more effective than the folks who stay.
Check out the specific numbers I cited above. I didn’t expect to make lots of money, but I did expect, with very good reason, to be making about 17% above what I’m making right now. (And I didn’t mention before that the state used to pay for board certification and now doesn’t, costing me another $2500).
Where the extra money would come from? This one’s a total softball question: taxes. Instead of doing something ridiculous like our legislature just did (cutting sales tax by 1%, leading to massive education cutoffs and raising our state’s unemployment levels significantly), how about increasing taxes? Not a popular idea, but also not impossible, and it’s the only way to achieve this aspect of education reform.
You’ve gotta love the SDMB. I make a post about liking cats and people get on my ass about hating dogs.
I was only discussing LHOD’s personal situation, not the societal impact of various teacher compensation strategies. LHOD chose a career path with one set of characteristics (low cash pay, more job security, lots of time off, a government pension, warm fuzzies) and now he wants a slighlty different set of characteristics (viz., higher cash pay and less job security, no word on other stuff). The easiest way to get that is to change professions. (It would also be nice if LHOD could figure out whether he’s like a professional asking for a raise or a labor organizer trying to increase wages for laborers, but whatever.)
Ok, so we raise taxes to pay teachers. That just means that someone else is out of a job so teachers can get paid more. I wonder why folks like you never seem to look at the negative effects of high taxes and large social programs (oh right, because that would require thinking beyond your mantra of “if there’s a problem, let’s get the government to solve it”).
You could easily cut out some admin staff and extras at the district level and give teachers better pay and take the rest from another part of the budget that’s inflated.
No one here has suggested raising taxes AFAIK.
LHOD did in post 384.
I absolutely have. It’s ridiculous that raising taxes is such a bugbear. Sometimes you gotta do it, and to hell with the chicken littles who run screaming about what will happen.
To expand, we North Carolinians got our sales tax cut by about $7/month on average this summer. Woohoo! At the same time, our spending on education dropped to 49th in the nation. Woohoo! Our unemployment numbers rose dramatically, as the private sector, eyeing that extra $7 in everybody’s hands, failed to hire enough people to make up for all the teachers and teacher assistants laid off. Woohoo! Several state programs–AIG for gifted kids, professional development to teach teachers how to do their jobs, etc.–were eliminated, and districts are doing things like cutting supplies budgets to the bone in order not to fire even more people. Woohoo!
If you’re part of the Fundamentalist Revived Church of Rand, then sure, this was the right move to make. If you’re sane, and if you’re like a huge chunk of North Carolinians, you don’t pay attention to state politics at all. But if you’re sane and you’re one of the folks who does pay attention, you’re more than three times likelier to think it’s a terrible idea than you are to think it’s a good one.
Your cite (which is about whether people like the new budget) doesn’t support your conclusion (which is about whether people like the sales tax reduction). Not that it really matters what the results of this poll are or whether people like tax hikes or reductions in general, just wanted to point that out.
You’re not from North Carolina, so you’re not aware that the new budget basically had two major pieces in it, and that these major pieces dominated media coverage:
- Ending the temporary sales tax hike that was put in place a couple of years ago precisely to fill in budget shortfalls, reducing our tax burden by $7/month; and
- Slashing education funding to pieces.
There were some other pieces, too, of course, but they received virtually no coverage. So thanks for your input, but the cite is on point.
Oh? . . . :rolleyes:
Fair enough–I didn’t notice you’d suggested it.
It’s also fair to note that raising teacher pay =/= raising taxes. If Rand Rover is suggesting that there is an equivalence, then he’s wrong to do so.
ETA: Okay nevermind, I see you’re arguing that it’s not just one way but the only way.
I would just like to say for the record that if Frylock is suggesting Hitler had a good idea with that whole “kill the Jews” thing, then he’s wrong to do so.
[checks forum title]
Read the whole post, idiot.
I thought you were the one making the suggestion. Then I edited the post when I realized my mistake.
Yes, and I’m glad too Google it for you. Feel free to believe that the massive public rejection of the budget was due to the cut in funding for the Roanoke Island Commission if that’s what you have to do, or you could check out some of the hundreds of articles written about the budget process, its aftermath, and public perception. THe first LMGTFY is free, but after that one, I charge.
Teachers make easy targets for four main reasons: (1) They’re paid pretty well, (2) They get a lot of time off, (3) Tenure, and (4) their pay is tied to time in service, not performance. Of course this applies to public school teachers only.
Ummmmmm, where are public school teachers paid well? I have been teaching for six years, I have a graduate degree, both my husband and I work full time, and we still qualify for free & reduced lunches for my son. (Which means that TOGETHER we make less then 48 thousand a year.) As for the getting lots of time off, yeah, I guess it seems that way. Untill you look at the fact that most teachers use that “time off” to either work a second or third job to try to supplement their income, or to try to recover from the last nine months of battle! (And yes, it is a battle. Anyone who thinks that teachers just sit and munch bon-bons and don’t work has never had to spend any time in front of a classroom.) 
It is easy to think that teachers have a cakewalk, until you realize that we have EVERY kid in our classrooms, from the super brilliant kids, to the ones who really should be in the SPED room full time, but there is no money for that because of cutbacks that have happened in education. We also have the raging hormones of teenagers, the drama that goes along with it, and all manner of other factors that combine to make the REAL high school experience. Add all that together, plus the kid that just doesn’t care and is only there because the law says he has to be, and then try to get something worthwhile into their heads. OH! And since we don’t have enough to do anyway, we get to do all those things that help to keep kids safe-like watching for abuse signs, and making sure that kids aren’t bullied, things like that. Oh, and giving those wonderful sex ed talks that really should be the job of the parent. But hey, it is a free country, you are entitled to your opinon, however misguided it might be!
And how many kids will suffer while they work it out? People getting out of teaching because they don’t think they do it well or even not liking it is one thing. But if you force people out because of money, I worry about the societal implications. If you work for a private company, and feel underpaid, and leave, and this company policy of underpaying leads it to fail, no big deal. But students are pretty much a captive audience, unlike customers, and government policies which make the quality of the teaching staff go down hurts the people the school districts are supposed to serve.
I don’t know about the situation today, but just after we were married my wife, who had some teaching experience, checked into teaching at a private school in Louisiana. It turned out she made more as the night clerk at a cheap motel while waiting to get a real job, so no competitive salaries there.