Commentary 3

Teacher pay must be earned
Posted by Star-Ledger editorial board November 17, 2007 10:30PM

It would be foolhardy to entrust the education of children to schools that do not pay their teachers enough to hire and keep good ones.
So no one should mind that most New Jersey communities are now paying starting teachers $40,000 or more a year. The New Jersey Education Association once set $40,000 as a statewide goal. Some communities are already paying rookie teachers $50,000 or more, and that salary now is the NJEA's goal.
To think it was only 22 years ago that people railed against state legislation that required all districts to pay teachers at least $18,500.


Teaching is a very demanding profession, and $50,000 does not go very far in a high-cost state like New Jersey.
Of course, others making $50,000 do not have the schedule of summer vacations and free days that teachers enjoy, nor the protection of tenure in their careers.
Taxpayers who pay teachers' salaries, and the students whose futures very much depend on what happens in classrooms, have a right to demand good work for good pay.
But it also is foolhardy for the NJEA to pretend that its demands are all that matter in districts where property taxes, chiefly for education, are reaching maximum load. In many communities, the overall educational results remain marginal, and the per capita income of residents is not close to $50,000. It is similarly foolhardy to tolerate contracts that demand added pay for teachers to do anything new or extra.
The NJEA has set the bar high for salaries. The bar for performance must be high as well.
It is only when respect flows freely between teachers and those they serve that the payoff for both teaching and education is what it should be.

Comments

Posted by Zemack on 11/18/07 at 8:38PM
Only a free market in education can ensure that the best teachers receive the highest pay. An arbitrary set of standards created by some board or committee can never take into account such intangible teacher qualities as inspiring the student's interest, generating his (or her) understanding rather than merely cramming his head with facts, and training his mind on the tools of logic necessary to acquire and integrate knowledge on his own and to relate that knowledge to broader abstractions.

Only when the people who know their children best, the parents, are able to "vote with their feet (and their education dollars)" and enroll their children with the teachers and schools they judge best will we begin to see a resurgence in America's quality of education. The schools with the best teachers, educational philosophies and methods will succeed and proliferate, while the inferior schools will either change or fall by the wayside.

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