<p>We all know that there are some bad teachers. For me, that is an even better argument for higher pay for teachers overall. Teaching now attracts the bottom third of college graduates. Again, I think we have to ask ourselves what it would take to attract students from the top two thirds, and whether we are willing to pay it. No one will ever go into teaching to get rich, but we live in a society where salary is a reflection and a measure of how much we value people. As standardized test-driven classrooms and scripted curricula make teaching even less attractive for the brightest and most creative young people, just who will go into teaching? It would be interesting to look at the stats for Teach for America – to see who does remain in education after the two years, who is still in it after five, and ask what it would have taken to keep them in it instead of heading to law school or consulting.</p>
<p>Those who argue that teaching is such a nice life style, low stress, short hours, tenure… Then WHY do so many people drop out of teaching within the first five years? Salary and lack of respect for the hard job they do are two reasons that come up over and over, along with the administrative/paperwork burden.</p>
<p>Tenure is a difficult issue, I agree. Historically, job security was a trade-off. You took lower paying civil service jobs, and you understood you would not lose them. But there is another issue, too, when it comes to teaching. If you saw the PBS special the other night on creationism in one school district, you saw how the science teachers united against the school district’s requirement that they read an anti-Darwin statement in their biology classes, and that they treat Intelligent Design as science. Would they have been able to make that stand if they did not have tenure? I wonder. I do think there needs to be some sort of tenure for this reason, but perhaps there are other combinations of incentives/disincentives to weed out poor teachers or help them improve.</p>
<p>BTW, I don’t know about New Jersey, but in the San Francisco Bay area a recent study found that $70,000 is the MINIMUM salary to raise a family with two children in a style that is barely middle class. That is, that’s the bare-bones budget for housing in a lower middle class neighborhood, transportation, food, childcare. No vacations, no frills.</p>