Note the rhetorical sleight of hand in this op-ed piece. The op-ed piece, and the advocacy group sources it cites to back up its claims, take care to write about "teachers’ salaries" rather than write about "compensation packages for teachers." The rhetorical reason for this is to divert attention from how expensive it actually is to taxpayers to provide the total compensation package for a typical schoolteacher, including subsidies for "professional development" (which most professionals pay for out of their own pocket), family health care benefits, and defined-benefit pensions. And that's not even to mention the issue of schoolteacher job security

http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2008-05-06-teachers-t...

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41956922/ns/nightly_news/

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2011/0414/Why-N.J.-te...

which exceeds the job security of almost all other forms of employment in the United States

http://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/28/nyregion/teachers-and-tenu...

http://www.schoolmatch.com/audit/jacksonville/articles/teach...

whether or not the teachers are able to teach the subjects they are hired to teach.

http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf

http://www.nctq.org/p/

http://educationnext.org/evaluating-teacher-effectiveness/

Education reform is not a simple issue, and much basic research still needs to be done and assimilated to bring about improvements.

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2066577,00.ht...

But to begin to get United States schools on track to meet the standards met in other countries, policy analysts in the United States have to be honest about what the overall framework of regulation now is, and just exactly what teachers are accountable to do, for what level of compensation, under current contracts in most school districts.

P.S. I should make clear that an effective teacher is worth the teacher's weight in gold, and currently the best teachers in the United States are mostly substantially underpaid. But they are underpaid, in large part, because they haven't mobilized their own political participation to unshackle their pay from the lockstep pay scales that also are granted to ineffective teachers. That's why I do my teaching on a contract basis with public school districts or through my own nonprofit organization, so that I can deliver quality lessons without bureaucratic interference and gain professional recognition for the results of my teaching.