Higher Pay for Math and Science Teachers

Coryoth writes "Following up a previous story, it seems that the Kentucky effort to provide increased pay to teachers with qualifications in mathematics, physics, and chemistry has been gutted. Teachers objected to differential pay, and that portion of the bill was removed. At the same time California has just put forward a similar measure, with differential pay for teachers qualified in mathematics and science. Shockingly 40% of mathematics teachers in California are not fully qualified in the subject — a higher percentage of unqualified teachers than any other subject. Is the Californian effort any more likely to succeed, or is it destined to be similarly gutted? Is there a solution to the woeful lack of qualified mathematics teachers that the Teachers' Union will find acceptable?"

Comments

Re:Education

[LunaticTippy]

Maybe we could save some of that money spent on establishing military control of nations on the other side of the globe and use it to fund our educational system. Nah, it costs more to teach kids Arabic and qurans cost money too.

Learn how to quote. Your pathetic attempt to put a carriage return makes your reply mix in with what you're replying to. Makes you look like a retard. (try wrapping your quoted text with <blockquote> tags or at least put in line breaks)

Are you seriously implying that if we didn't destabilize Iraq we'd be an Islamic country? How so? Saddam Hussein was a secularist.

Hmm, perhaps you are retarded.

Doh

[PenGun]

You have no respect for your teachers and you don't pay them much. You were expecting what exactly?

Chicken or egg question

[HornWumpus]

Do teachers only get $35/hour because they're incompetent or do only incompetents apply because the pay is low? ($35/hour is not that low, considering most teachers don't even have real degrees, only education degrees.)

The only solution that I know will not work is to pay all teachers the same.

I think it's time to privatize and dismantle the whole system. Some publicly funded schools in competition will produce better results then publicly administered schools. Create a managed competition. Schools the don't meet minimum results based standards are de-funded, the rest have to compete for parents to select them.

Granted these competing schools will improve themselves by dumping the bottom performing students into a shit hole. Frankly that's where they belong. They're hopeless cases, prevent them from dragging down the rest of their classes. The world needs ditch diggers too.

Something has to be done though, the 'born ditch diggers' are working as teachers under the current system.

Re:Not a coherent position

[rtb61]

Trolls always crack me up. Average beginning teacher salaries. Alaska had the highest average beginning salary in 2002-03, at $37,401. States joining Alaska in the top tier were New Jersey, at $35,673; District of Columbia, at $35,260; New York, at $35,259; and California, at $34,805. Montana had the lowest average beginning salary in 2002-03, at $23,052. The other states in the bottom tier were Maine, at $24,631; South Dakota, at $24,311; North Dakota, at $23,591; and Arizona, at $23,548.

Since when is uniformly of high quality somehow uniformly of low quality, your lie becomes the truth of exclusive for the minority excellence. You also immediately point to the glaring difference between the quality of schooling in different states which was exactly my point.