Teachers sincerely believe they are underpaid. With SAT scores down nationally by as much as 40 points since 1970, despite the money and programs thrown at public education to stem the tide, there is a strong argument they are overpaid. And for sure, teachers are convinced that the private sector pays much higher wages. Every teacher or administrator I've encountered invariably cites an example in which someone they know or a family member is making six-digit salaries simply because they chose the private sector over teaching.
However, in the huge gray middle-management zone of private employment, teachers make approximately the same. If a teacher decides to pursue top management opportunities in education, they also make about the same as those in the private sector. Leaving out other professional compensation and high-risk Wall Street types, the area where private employees can make higher incomes is in sales or as an entrepreneur, for which there are no parallels in education. But that salary divide applies within every company. Its the owners and sales people who make the world go around and they have incentives to succeed because if they do, their company does. However, owners and sales people have to perform at very high levels to make the big money. Owners make nothing if the company does not succeed in a given year and sales people, with lower base salaries coupled with commission structures, see their income decline proportionately. If they are having a bad month, or if the industry they serve is in the dumps, they make less. If they do not perform even in good times, they do not make top money. The pressure is on every minute.
Granted, teachers have pressures of their own, mostly created by theorists and social activists who demand that schools adhere to varying and often vague racial and gender agendas over academic performance. Schoolteachers and education adherents point to the problems out there in society that make teaching more like riot control than pedagogy. This has come about because public schools have been the helpless repository of often un-thought-out central state ideology. Collectivist theorists have used school kids as guinea pigs for changing society by imposing busing, affirmative action, sex education theory, gender wars, multicultural studies, thought and speech control, ethnic self-esteem and activist environmentalism on the system. Standards of behavior, appearance and achievement have been abandoned in the name of societal fads and agendas. School is no longer the place where kids from tough home situations could at least find order and dignity.
From this perspective, perhaps teachers can't be paid enough. But despite more money spent per pupil and a decreasing teacher-to-class-size ratio, student performance is down and the achievement gap between black and white students has grown wider over the past 30 years; teacher salaries have gone up considerably. And teachers have additional economic advantages to compensate for their burden beyond a regular and increasing salary whether or not the states economy does well or whether or not students perform. Unlike the private sector where bad economic conditions endanger employee positions, teachers not only are unaffected, they enjoy the summer off, 10 days at Christmas, a spring vacation, fully employer-paid health insurance, a guaranteed paid-in pension and, the mother of all employee benefits, tenure, a job for life that requires a heinous felony or a high octane morals charge to lose.
Figuring out the actual compensation for a teacher or administrator in the North Carolina public school system requires stamina and fortitude. In Metros Education Special Report this issue Metro writer Daniel Pearson dedicated days of time and made a small dent in the fortress of the educational bureaucracy. But there is more hidden there, more extra thises and that's than were disclosed. For instance, the local paper in Morehead City carried information from a county commissioners meeting stating that the assistant principal at West Carteret Middle School was paid $75,000 per year. How that salary was derived is not apparent in the charts we publish in our Special Report, but there it is.
The net reality is that teachers often make more than middle-level white-collar employees. Assistant principals and principals make six-figure incomes and superintendents can make considerably more. Of course, they don't make the same as publicly traded companies pay their top executives, but neither do most companies. Its easy to forget that 90 percent of businesses in the US do less than $1million in sales. That is to say, the vast majority of companies, who hire the large majority of the work force, are small firms who not only cannot and do not pay mid-level white-collar employees as much as teachers and principals make, they certainly cannot afford for their employees to work only 10 months of the year. Small companies now make their employees pay for all or nearly all of health insurance premiums and only a scant few offer anything close to a company paid pension. And no employer in the private sector, from the smallest to the largest traded on Wall Street, offers employees tenure.
So, yes, many employees in the private sector have the opportunity to make a lot more money than teachers do, but they have no permanent job security. Teachers trade off security for risk and in that equation they do quite well. If the public thought that all teachers were at least adequately educated and prepared to help young people in life, pay and benefits and tenure would be accepted as fair compensation. But that is not the case. My guess is that over one-half of teachers in the states public school system do not have command of proper English usage, cannot pass a high school-level geography test and have only a minimum grasp of history, languages and math skills.
This creates a two-edged sword, for there are many great teachers who are under withering fire from the public and parents, who deserve more pay and whatever perks we can provide. They are dragged down by the system that rewards mediocrity by not removing incompetent teachers. The good teachers do have it bad but then again, its not that bad. Consider what happened at Enron where all employees, good and bad, lost their jobs because the entire company was failing. If public education were forced to operate in the killing fields of the marketplace, it would have reorganized or folded 20 years ago. Yet it is able to lumber on in its mediocrity, floating the bad teachers and administrators with the good, gradually sinking to lower levels of achievement under the weight of its own incompetence.
As in any situation where a business is failing, customers and employees leave and look for alternatives. Parents are pulling their kids out of public school and graduates with teaching degrees are looking for other work, not necessarily due to the perceived low pay (that is not the primary motivation for those interested in teaching) but due to the sinking ship aura that pervades the classroom. Good teachers want to teach rather than act as a shill for some faddish social policy coming down the political pike. And many parents cannot endure the anxiety created by the casino of school environments in which its pure luck if the teacher is literate and the classroom safe from violence. Concerned parents are sick of the busing tail wagging the education dog even in the aftermath of court rulings striking down the abhorrent practice. Wake County just couldn't stand not busing children, so they have concocted a plan that moves children around like undesirables in the old Soviet Union, this time based on income rather than race. That is largely why it is estimated that 20 percent of students in the system will be in private schools by the end of the current academic year.
The solution to the tragedy in public education is not higher pay but better teacher performance instigated by the teachers themselves and their ersatz union, the NC Association of Educators. Instead of acting more like Teamsters than teachers, the NCAE and involved teachers need to take it upon themselves to change the current status quo from the inside out rather than the outside in. To stand up to the radical postmodern movement on college campuses in the 1980s, professors at Duke formed the National Association of Scholars and drew the line and fought for traditional scholarship in the face of heavy fire and malicious and slanderous tactics by Marxist activists. After 20 years, Dukes scholastic reputation is on the mend due to their efforts. The same can happen in K-12 public education if the good teachers stand up to their own peers and fight for integrity in the curriculum and high standards of scholarship and decorum in the classroom.
NOTES FROM LA-LA LAND
More junk science with an attitude just came in saying that the Triangle area ranks third nationally in sprawl, that new obscenity from the nutty fringe that they say is choking our cities, ruining our health and probably causing sexual impotence because we refuse to take the bus to work. When will we be free from this constant attack on our chosen lifestyle? The latest report was cooked up by professors of planning at Rutgers and Cornell and sponsored by Smart Growth America, a national coalition of anti-sprawl groups and includes the NC Smart Growth Alliance in Carrboro. Carrboro huh? Next the nutty professors promise to demonstrate that sprawl causes obesity, heart disease, high blood pressure and diabetes. Lets see now. We in the Triangle live in one of the most desirable communities in the nation, enjoy a neighborhood lifestyle with access to top-flight health care, culture, fine dining, good universities and these fools are angry that only 2 percent of us use mass transit? We like our communities and we love our cars so leave us alone please and keep your unscientific and politically motivated Politburo propaganda to yourselves.
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The Nobel people have finally lost it. They bestowed the 2002 Peace Prize on Jimmy Carter who told us as president that we Americans had an inordinate fear of communism and then sat back while the Soviet Union undertook over 25 initiatives right under our noses (according to former UN Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick in a speech in Raleigh 15 years ago) including propping up the Sandanista coup in Nicaragua. He was a weak and incompetent President who risked our security in the name of turning the other cheek. True to form, he used his acceptance speech to undermine US policy on Iraq.
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Please tell me I'm not the only one outraged that our floppy-haired US Senator John Edwards is walking all over us here in North Carolina in a breathtaking display of ambition and hubris seeking on our time and money the Democratic nomination for President in the 2004 elections. Does he think we are indeed that dumb not to see through this charade?
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To the letter writer who challenged me on the crime rate here compared to the UK (Correspondence, July/August 2002) the data are in and guess what? The UK suffers one murder per 100,000 population compared to seven murders per 100,000 in the US. So there.
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The station manager at WTVD-TV, the ABC affiliate in Durham owned by the Mouse (Disney) did not call me back after I left him a voicemail asking why ABC and WTVD did not carry the Presidents speech on Iraq last month. I did find out from anchorman David Crabtree at WRAL-TV (locally owned and a CBS affiliate) that his station decided to carry the speech although the network did not. The WRAL station manager Jim Hefner did the right thing and carried it anyway, remembering that it is the local affiliate that is licensed to serve the public interest, not the network. NBC, to its credit did carry the speech. So everyone around here did the right thing but one. I wonder when their license comes up for renewal?