Thanks for the compliment, Alexander. I guess since everyone is qualifying themselves in terms of how many teachers they know or are related to, i must add that my mother was a fourth grade teacher, my father was a teacher, then a principal and a director of curriculum development for a large school district, my aunt was a teacher, my daughter has never, ever wanted to be anything except a teacher, etc. I don't believe any of this anecdotal stuff is at all relevant, however, to the discussion at hand.
The fact that we are now offering visas for teachers to come to America, that some school districts are discussing subsidies to help teachers buy houses, that huge numbers of substitute teachers with very little, if any actual teachers' training are on permanent assignment, are all concrete evidence that there is a shortage of teachers in the United States. And while it is true that teachers who have been teaching for twenty or thirty years are making significantly more than beginning teachers, and mostly purchased houses when houses were much less expensive, that is NOT a reason to call teachers's salaries adequate in general. You get what you pay for in life. If secretaries and laborers make more than beginning teachers, and college graduates can easily get much better pay in other occupations, you are not going to keep attracting enough competent and dedicated people to teaching as a career choice. |
