[geeks] One of the things I love about America

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Thu, May 02, 2002 at 07:29:49AM -0700, Peter L. Wargo wrote:

> I'm no big fan of unions, but my dad was a teacher for 32 years, and the 
> teacher's union was essential to him getting any kind of pay 
> raise/benefits.  In a small public school system where the administrator 
> gets 4x the pay of the most senior teachers, there is a problem.

And that is exactly what the teachers unions should be doing.  Not informing
public policy on education.  I think that moves like encouraging laws that
make life harder for private schools, homeschoolers, or requiring things like
every teacher be certified in every subject they teach (which the way the
bill was written would have killed a lot of private schools in PA, thankfully
it was defeated) is served by trying to increase the amount of jobs available
for teachers, thus making them more valuable, rather than concern for students
like they claim.

Also, while I think that teachers deserve to be paid more than they are, I
don't think that increasing pay will fix anything.  Maybe offering increased
pay for better performance could be usefull though...  But that has it own
sets of problems (how to measure performance, encourage fairness, etc).

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd