(Guest post by Greg Forster)
Don’t miss this solid gold story of Chris Christie v. the dishonesty of activists claiming to represent teachers.
Buildup: Teacher in the audience challenges Christie’s statements about teacher pay, saying if his figures were right she’d be making $83,000, and she doesn’t make nearly that much. Christie replies that she does if you count benefits. She fires back that she has a master’s degree and lots of experience and she isn’t adequately paid for these. Christie remarks that if she doesn’t think she’s paid what she’s worth, she’s free to do something else with her life, and moves on to the next questioner.
Kicker: Public records show that the teacher in question makes just under $85,000 base salary. Oops.
Jay P. Greene's Blog 
The average teacher in Clark County (Las Vegas) makes $75k including benefits. Meanwhile, I make about as much as the average custodian in the Clark County School District.
Well, Patrick, you could do something else… like grad school. : )
Chris Christie’s certainly come barreling out of obscurity to become, at least for the moment, a hero of conservatives.
Do we know if she’s a math teacher?
Brian: “Do we know if she’s a math teacher?”
I resemble that remark.
Every child knows how to divide a cookie fairly: “You cut; I choose”. Implementation of this policy, in the form of tuition tax credits or vouchers, by legislators would limit demands which current recipients of tax revenues make on taxpayers.
According to Mike Antonucci, in the 2006-2007 school year New Jersey spent $15,691 per pupil to support the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel’s schools (the “public” schools). According to the handy online calculator this gives $65.3791666 per 240-day work year (I’ll explain why we do not divide by a 180-day school year presently). Dividing, again, by an 8-hour work day, we find that New Jersey’s taxpayers could support on-the-job training for students, whose lives are currently wasted in school, at a rate of $8.17 per hour.
Compulsory, unpaid labor is slavery. Students will work for freedom. Training an artistically inclined child or a mechanically inclined child for an academic career using the transcript as the incentive is like teaching a cat to swim using carrots as the reward.
If the US taxpayers’ $550 billion+ K-12 budget is not an employment program for dues-paying members of the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel, a source of padded constructon and supply contracts for politically-connected insiders, and a venue for State-worshipful indoctrination, why cannot any student take, at any age, an exit exam (the GED will do) and apply the taxpayers’ age 6-18 education subsidy toward post-secondary tuition at any VA-approved post-secondary institution or toward a wage subsidy at any qualified (say, has filed w-2 forms on at least three adult employees for at least the previous four years) private-sector employer?
I have an Ivy League degree and at the time I applied also a master’s degree from a well-regarded university in my subject area as well as nearly a master’s degree worth of credits from education school. I really wanted to be a high school social studies teacher in southeastern Pennsylvania which had relatively high salaries like New Jersey (maximum salaries routinely exceed $100,000 in school districts on the Main Line), and could never find a job besides that of a substitute after three years of searching. I was told that having a MA made me less attractive since I would have to start at a higher salary notch and that it was very competitive to get teaching jobs in suburban Philadelphia.
One item–I may have missed it–is that I think higher salaries do attract a larger pool of candidates to want to become teachers. It is apparently easier for individuals to get public school teaching jobs where salaries are lower. I asked Bob Maranto the question about district selectivity in hiring correlating with salary years ago, but he said there was no correlation, although it may not have fit his narrative–I’m not sure he had empirical evidence. But in general, I never see education policy experts make the point that higher salaries, in good market-friendly fashion, will attract candidates that could be better teachers. Have there been studies about whether certain areas and districts can be more discriminating in hiring because they offer higher salaries?
The fact that PA paid high salaries worked against me since I could never find a job. But that fact would make school districts be able to be more selective in hiring. I’m not saying that districts that pay well are smart enough to hire the best candidate, but they do, I think, have the opportunity. I would also like to know whether my experience of having more degrees is actually a hindrance in getting jobs as teachers. It seems silly that having more preparation in a subject area actually makes a candidate less qualified. It’s better just to have a BA.
In all fifty states, union rules (enforced through different legal means in different places) forbid schools to hire selectively in the way you anticipate. So it really isn’t a matter of measuring whether the market works; the market’s not allowed to work.
This is why having an MA makes you harder to hire. Districts aren’t allowed to select for teacher quality. Hence they select exclusively based on price. And under union rules they aren’t allowed to offer you the same lower salary they will offer to your BA-only counterpart.