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2003 MacArthur 'Genius Grant' Winners Announced
ccnull writes "This year's list of 24 MacArthur Fellows has been released. Each winner of the so-called 'Genius Grant' receives $500,000, no strings attached. 2003's winners include a blacksmith, a biomedical engineer, a computation geometer, a biophysicist, a nurse, and a short story writer 'crafting witty, experimental prose.'"
I was primarily interested in addressing the issue from the point of view of the guy doing the complaining, as opposed to outlining how to fix American education. From the point of view of the teacher, the choice is pretty simple. Accept the pay or find something else to do.
If you want to address the overall problem, though, I'd say the problem lies primarily in management. Government-run schools have no incentive to become any better, because there's no market mechanism to force them to. The system squeezes out many of the really good teachers, because they don't want to put up with the garbage that goes on in most schools. Some of them end up doing other things and others end up in private schools with better management (where they make less money).
If you look at teacher salaries over the past 40 years or so (and the rate of increase), I think you'd have to conclude that low pay isn't the problem. Relative teacher salaries are higher now than they were 30 or 40 years ago. (I can't cite inflation-adjusted figures, but I think the facts would bear me out on that very readily.) I think there are plenty of decent people who would be willing to teach at the salaries that teachers make -- IF they were allowed to teach and not be made into babysitters AND if the incompetent boobs were weeded out. (One of the biggest frustrations among teachers I know is the quality level of many of the teachers around them. I'm currently dating a teacher who has very interesting stories about that.)
There are plenty of jobs that pay less than teachers are paid (and that also require college degrees). For instance, I used to be a newspaper editor. You'd be shocked how little reporters at small newspapers make. TV producers in many, many markets make less than teachers, too. These are just a couple of examples I'm familiar with. The point is that there are PLENTY of well-educated people who make less than teachers. It's the management structure that's destroyed education, IMO, not the salaries paid to teachers.