Teachers need to make more money. This is extremely, painfully obvious. Teaching is an incredibly valuable and important profession, and the pittances that we pay our teachers are nothing less than shameful and pathetic. And this author is absolutely right (as was Brendan earlier) when she says that more intelligent people would be attracted to the profession if they knew that they could make a living at it.

My issue with the article about the charter school was that I thought the teacher salaries were a bit unbalanced; while I think that teachers should make more money, I also think that you need to balance basic needs. And, yes, I do think there is such a thing as excessive salary. Given how much of the population lives below the poverty line, I think you can see why the thought of using state funds to fund a few ludicrously high salaries would make me uneasy.

The solution of just raising salaries ignores problems like supplies, which teachers should not be paying for out of their own pockets, and basic maintenance issues. In the Times article, they were talking about a brand new school, so this wasn’t as much of an issue, but in schools in other areas, there are serious structural problems that are not being addressed…and the teachers are also being underpaid. I want to see enough money going to education that teachers can be well compensated for their work, making it into an honorable and appealing profession, and to make sure that all the toilets in the school are functional. Anyone who has read Savage Inequalities will know what I’m talking about.

I was also a bit depressed by the thought that a lucky few teachers would be getting insanely high salaries, while other teachers in the district would continue being paid a pittance. That would cause some resentment, I imagine. I think also that there is a fundamental imbalance between teachers and administrators, which they actually were addressing in the charter school article by paying the administrator less than the teacher.

It’s just a fundamentally broken system, and the point I was making with the charter school post was that raising teacher salaries (which needs to be done!) is not going to be the instant fix people seem to think it is. And that there needs to be some sort of reasonable cap for starting salaries; a teacher should be able to afford a decent house in a comfortable neighborhood with his or her salary, but a private jet isn’t necessary. And maybe I’m mistaken; maybe I shouldn’t be forcing my lifestyle judgments onto my conception of a reasonable salary. But as long as people don’t have universal health care, I’m sticking with the idea that government funds should be used to establish comfortable, reasonable salaries. Not stratospheric ones. If you can fund health care for every American and buy every teacher a jet, fine.

And I also stand firmly behind the fact that students who have awful home lives cannot succeed in school, and that if we really want to see change, we need to working from the ground up, making children a valued resource rather than throwaway garbage. Children should not have to live in places where people are getting shot all the time. They should have access to health care. They should know that they are valued. They should not be homeless, except by choice. If they end up in foster care, they should end up in stable, healthy, happy environments. You can pay teachers a million dollars a year, and it won’t matter if their students leave school every day and enter hell.