Index teacher pay to the 80th percentile

medium.com

3 points·scottrogowski··3 comments

There are a few issues with this:

* paying people more won't make them better teachers (well it might help, but it won't change who the current employees are). So you need some other method of working out who is actually good. Be that who to retain or who to hire. What that method is is very hard to agree on since measuring how good someone is at "teaching" is impossible because no one really agrees what a teacher does.

* the reason pay is so low is because tax payers don't care. Everyone pays lip service to education. Then they refuse to actually fund it and instead treat it like babysitting (just look at any element of schooling from the start times to sports spending to bullying).

As always, simple, easy to implement answers to complex problems are simple, easy to implement and fundamentally flawed.

because tax payers don't care.

And many that actually do care have ways of working around the system and getting a good education for their kids anyway. So they don't want their tax money going to a system they don't even need.

All the more reason they will oppose this: if state salaries go up, they'll have to match it in private schools so BOTH their taxes AND their fees will go up.

This is the sad truth of much state provision: If you do care, you go private. If you don't care, you don't care. It's only people who do care about education AND cannot afford to go private who gain from this. So a minority and a badly funded one.

In democracy the majority get the government they deserve. And the majority are morons.

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