I can agree with that, I hate entranched interests just like the next person. On the other hand, making the system more responsive on the employer side is going to unmask problems on the employee side related to market pay: get rid of all the dead weight teachers, then you'll have to fill class schedules with effective teachers, and how many do you think there really are who will work for $60k/year in New Jersey?
So yeah, I bet you can get tons of qualified bachelors degree holders to work for a salary that's higher than the average for their level of education, with superlative benefits compared to what is available in the private sector.
The average salary for a professional degree in New Jersey is $68k. How many teachers have master credentials? It doesn't end when you get your bachelor degree.
Anyways, the free market works both ways, even libertarians can appreciate that. I totally think that teacher salaries should be market driven, but when you get rid of the all the low-quality teachers (low-quality works exist in the private sector also, mind you), you'll have a huge problem attracting the right standard of talent to fill in the gaps.
So the solutions must be formed like:
(a) get rid of bad teachers
(b) recruit and retain good teachers
A "war on teachers" in general does nothing about (a) and only screws us on (b).
> The average salary for a professional degree in New Jersey is $68k. How many teachers have master credentials?
That's highly misleading, because that lumps in MA's together with MD's and MBA's and JD's and MSc's in Computer Science, and skews up the average by the large number of MBA's in NJ who make a lot of money on Wall Street. By and large the MA's that most teachers have are worth almost nothing extra in the job market.
When I hear calls to pay teachers more, I think back to my own teachers in K-8, the majority of which were very average people.[1] Even if we posit that we need higher-quality teachers who will cost more, why do we have to accomplish it in a way that pays all of these mediocre people far more than they would earn in the private sector? If IBM wants higher-caliber people it doesn't just increase salaries hoping to get more qualified applicants. That's ass-backward. It tightens recruiting criteria, and if it has to pay more to attract candidates that meet the criteria, it does so.
I'm not opposed to paying teachers more on principle, but if its something we want to do, we can't just raise salaries and hope it attracts more qualified people to the job. We need to: 1) screen for quality the way other higher-paying jobs do; and 2) force existing teachers to qualify on the new scales to keep their jobs.
I'd be happy to pay $70k/year starting salaries to teachers if I knew that the school district required a teacher to graduate in the top 25% of their class at a school where the median SAT was at least 1200. But it makes no sense to pay our existing body of largely mediocre teachers even more money.
I don't disagree with all of this, but I'm confused by the focus on things like SATs and where they graduated in their class. If you're teaching 3rd grade math, the grades you got in your B.S. Math degree are virtually irrelevant; we're not looking for mathematics experts to do this job, but for people who are good at teaching third graders.
Some relevant criteria:
1. Being willing to learn about, and able to implement, the pedagogical best practices in your area. You should not invent your own way of teaching math, because there is solid data on ways that are better and worse.
2. Being good at classroom management and debugging kids' behavioral issues. A huge part of K-8 teaching is just managing the class and heading off disruptions to people learning anything. This might even be more important than #1, because when you screw this one up, everything goes to hell.
3. Having some kind of positive impact on motivating students and making them not hate school or think it's useless. Fairly subjective.
My own experiences are that the "smart" teachers I had in K-8, retired engineers and such who were very good at school and had earned lots of money elsewhere previously, were mostly poor teachers. I'm sure they were actually good engineers, and that might rub off into them being good college-level instructors. But they didn't know how to run a classroom of 8-year-olds, or how they should structure the classes to introduce concepts in a way that works for elementary-school students. So if we're going to up standards, I would want to make sure we up the right standards, rather than selecting for more of those kinds of people. And I group myself there, fwiw; I have fine tech credentials but no ability to teach kids.
Anecdotally, I know many. Both my parents would work for that amount all their lives if they had to because they're good and love the profession.
More importantly, $60,000 is enough for a middle class income. It's also not the reasonable maximum for being a public or private school teacher in metropolitan areas. You can realistically earn $90,000-$120,000 as a teacher if you're good, network for connections, and stay in the loop for jobs. Seniority and having a degree go a long way to raises.
10 or 20 years ago maybe, but today? You can make $60k a year simply working the rigs or construction before the crash; what happens when the 2008 recession really ends? It also quite depends on what they can make doing another job. An English teacher might not have so many other prospects, but a math and science teacher does. Keep in mind, once we've gotten rid of the slackers, we need to replace them with talent, sure some will be in it not for the money, but how far can you go with just those teachers?
9-120k$ sounds more like a real professional salary. But then when you get rid of the bad teachers, don't more of them fit into being good? Can society afford this?
