Agree with you right up to the last paragraph. Teachers are not overpaid, not in any world I've lived in, nor is paying them more part of the problem. I don't know what your experience has been, but I can point to four really good teachers that my kids have had who've left the profession because of low pay. So, yes, fix poverty, absolutely, but I strongly resist the notion that paying teachers more won't help (them and students) or that they already make plenty.
I didn't say that they were overpaid, so that's a complete strawman. Nor did I say that paying them "more" was part of the problem. Another strawman.
Did you actually read my post? Or did you just knee-jerk react to it?
I said that "
It's no secret that many public schools are poorly funded and in various states of disrepair, and those issues definitely need to be resolved. But continuing to blindly throw money at the problem in the form of arbitrary increases to teacher salary and fuzzy "funding increases" that are non-transparent so that we never know where the money actually goes, will not solve the problem."
Nowhere in that section did I say that paying teachers more was "part of the problem." I said that "blindly throwing money at [the problem of poor achievement] in the form of arbitrary increases...will not solve the problem." My main beef is that when it comes to the topic of fixing poor student achievement, it seems that teacher pay always suddenly becomes the magical solution, and it usually goes something like this:
EMPIRICAL DATA: US students' academic achievement is poor and/or declining
TEACHER UNION RESPONSE: We need to pay teachers more!
Of course I'm generalizing, but this seems to me to be a standard response and when it happens is, functionally, a non-sequitur.
If a person were depressed, would the solution be to pay their therapist more?
I have several friends who are teachers, but I think many teachers seem to have an incredibly warped sense of reality when it comes to pay and being a salaried employee. For a 4-year degree, a new teacher in my home state (TN), starts out at roughly $41,000/year, working 5 days a week, 9 to 10 months a year, with 2 to 3 months off, and every major holiday off.
I started out working in restaurants. Starting salary for a new manager with a 4-year degree in my company was roughly $34,000/year, working 50 to 60 hours a week (sometimes more) on your feet, much of it in a hot kitchen, 12 months out of the year, no major holidays off, and only a week's vacation that sometimes you don't even get to take. They eventually changed that to $40,000/year (average starting salary nationally for rest. managers), which is still less than a new teacher who does far less work and get much more time off.
So when a bunch of teachers who make roughly $50,000 for 10 months worth of work a year, with summers and all holidays off, and (if their district has a CBA with their union) gets guaranteed (though small) raises every few years of tenure, guaranteed raises if they get a shitty online masters degree, etc...start to complain that they're "underpaid" because "teaching is the most important job of all" and sometimes they have to grade papers at home, I find myself having very little sympathy for them. I know people with master's degrees who started out making less than that for more work.
I have 4 friends who were restaurant managers who are now teachers, and they all say that (compared to a real, blue collar type of job like they used to have), that teachers' schedules are a joke and that they complain over stuff that people who have worked much tougher jobs for less pay would laugh at.
None of this is to say that funding issues do not exist. Certainly, they do, and I mentioned that in my original post. I do think teaching is incredibly important (which is why I do it at a university level) and, yeah, the really good ones are likely underpaid. But, the pay increases need to be properly justified and there needs to be evidence that: a) the increases are deserved and will be given based on merit and; 2) that the increases will demonstrably lead to improved achievement outcomes for the students (since that is generally one of the main arguments made for increasing teacher pay).
And, just as there are plenty of good teachers out there who likely deserve a bump in pay, there are a lot of shitty teachers out there who are not only overpaid, but shouldn't have jobs at all who are protected by teachers unions that are more concerned with flaunting power than doing what needs to be done to actually improve schools (just look at what happened to
Michelle Rhee when she tried to take on the unions and actually improve DC schools, though she did make a few controversial decisions).
And, a related issue is, how much is "enough" to pay teachers? I doubt the unions will ever be satisfied. There are many teachers across the country who make over $70,000/year. That's great for them, and I'm sure that most of them have earned it. But people who go into teaching need to stop suffering the delusion that earning a 4-year bachelor's degree in education is worth the same amount of income as someone who's earned a 4-year bachelor's degree in STEM. I thought teachers "don't go into it for the money but because they love teaching"?
This is the disconnect with reality that I think a lot of teachers (or at least their unions) seem to have based on the popular narratives that teacher unions like to trot out on national media; they truly believe that sitting behind a desk, grading papers, and standing/lecturing in front of a dry erase board deserves the same pay as a nuclear engineer or someone who does back-breaking construction work in the hot sun all day. Teachers get paid more than firefighters; people whose jobs are literally life-threatening. Think about that for a moment.
Personally, for the type of work that public school teachers do, I think $50,000 to $60,000 a year is fair, if not generous (depending on cost-of-living for their area), especially given that they mostly get summers off.
However, my diatribe notwithstanding, all of this is beside the point that the primary issue affecting student performance (or at least the one with the most immediacy and salience) is poverty. I, as a general rule, have no problem with paying teachers more up to a point. What I do have a problem with, is "increasing teacher pay" being viewed as some sort of panacea, or solution at all, to the problem of poor academic achievement. I am unaware of any data showing that increasing teacher pay has directly led to any measurable increases in student achievement.
Sure, pay teachers more if they deserve it and the district can afford it. But when it comes to combating the most important problem(s) underlying poor student achievement, which is SES/poverty, it's akin to a flea trying to fight back a hurricane with a fart. Or, trying to cure a patient's clinical depression by increasing their therapist's salary.