7.07.00
Why Teacher Pay Raises Fail

6.27.00
The Politics of the Surplus

6.21.00
The Power of the Purse

6.09.00
A Big Tax Win — and A Loss

6.07.00
Battle of the Sexes

5.25.00
Goldilocks Was Wrong

5.18.00
Stop That Train!

5.09.00
States of Confusion

5.08.00
Congress Busts the Bank — Again

ately there's been a massive propaganda campaign about the inferior pay that teachers receive for their nine-month-a-year jobs. The NEA has been publicizing a study indicating that teachers are paid $30,000 a year less than computer engineers and other professionals. Robert Reich recently moaned in his National Public Radio editorial that we're never going to get better schools until we start paying teachers more. The message is: if parents want school quality, they are going to have to pony up for it.

Most public school teachers are not paid less than a market wage, but more. There is a competitive marketplace for teachers and it's called the private school system. And guess what? Private school teachers are generally paid about 30 percent less — yes, less — than what their public school counterparts earn. In the Chicago area, Catholic school teachers are sometimes paid only half what the public school teachers earn. Yet, every objective testing measure on student performance indicates that private school teachers do a better job than public school teachers. Even if we examine just the performance of the public schools across the states, we find that teacher pay is totally unrelated to student performance:

South Dakota ranks dead last in teacher salaries. It ranks third in SAT scores.

The problem with our schools is not teacher pay, it's the heavy hand of the unions. In 1960 only 20 percent of teachers were unionized — now 80 percent are. Back then public schools worked. Today most don't.

Ironically, at the same time that the teachers are complaining about being woefully underpaid, they somehow found the discretionary income to afford to raise their union dues at their convention in Chicago so they can raise more money to defeat Republican candidates in November. (Helping the Democrats take back control of the House of Representatives is a top NEA priority.) The NEA collects more than $250 million a year in dues from its "underpaid" clients. Big chunks of this money is diverted to promoting leftist political causes — including abortion rights, gun control, national health care, racial quotas and the election of Hillary Clinton to the United States Senate.

Until parents have total control over where they send their kids to school, and who teaches them, teacher pay raises further entrench a system that is failing our children.

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