If we had a free market for instructional services, we wouldn’t need to raise the issue.
No, they are, on average, overpaid for their abilities and effort.
Who knew.
Good teachers have always been underpaid, in terms of monetary reward, because of the great service they perform in molding young minds into highly productive adults. Inferior teachers, on the other hand, are vastly OVERPAID, in terms of the damage they do in destroying or inhibiting potential in these same young skulls full of mush.
The problem lies in that the good teachers cannot be identified and differentiated from the bad ones until after several years of experience and field testing. The evil of the Chicago system is that the bad ones cannot be weeded out and removed from the system. Because of the protective nature of the union membership, these bad teachers are shifted out of the class rooms, but instead of being fired outright and thus no longer a burden on the system, they are “kicked upstairs” into some meaningless position in “administration” where they sap the resources of the established cash flow funding, stealing it from what may be otherwise used to improve the delivery of educational services to the real consumers of those resources, the children.
Until this inherent evil is addressed and removed from the system, the cancer will continue to grow and fester, making the whole effort to educate the young an exercise in futility. While the time of the young is being filled, no effective, productive education is going on. That is not to say the young are not learning SOMETHING, it is just not socially or economically anything that is productive.
And all the while, the good teachers are steadily being driven out of the system. This is not a new problem at all in urban settings, as inferior teachers have plagued the system from the beginning. A sort of Gresham’s law concerning education is at work here, the inferior teachers driving out the excellent and merely good over time.
And thus, teachers end up overpaid over time.
It is a myth that public school teachers are underpaid. I’m a retired teacher / administrator in Texas, but I did a stint in the private sector. Teachers work 1660 hours a year in Texas vs 2020 for private sector folks. One or more of those hours every day is a “conference” period with no kids plus they get a duty-free lunch. This isn’t a rant against teachers. A few are incredible at what they do. A few are idiots. Most are good, caring people who do the best job they know how to do just like everybody else in life. It’s just that the numbers don’t support the “under paid teacher argument”.