Whining About Teachers' Salaries

The Daily Show's coverage of the protests of the unions in Wisconsin has been just superb the last couple of weeks. I can in no way best Jon Stewart and company's insight and wit; but watching last night's show got me so upset with the Big Business Fox News Pundits and their consistently inaccurate portrayal of teachers and their salaries that I decided to add my own voice to the din.

OK, let's first start with this idea that teachers make too much. Somehow saying that teachers aren't part of the working class has become the en vogue thing to do. Implications that teachers somehow view themselves and therefore their salaries as being entitled to higher praise and status are rampant amongst the pro-business Right-Wingers now.

It's so crazily untrue that it makes my brain muscles hurt. For starters, the irony is that the people yelling that teachers make too much are the ones saying that government has no business regulating a free-market and that if someone can negotiate a salary for themselves, then no one has the right to cap that salary. At least as long as their title has a "C" and a period in it anyway.

The teachers of Wisconsin, and indeed of America, are in the working class. They don't clock out at 2pm, like some on Fox News are claiming. If these suited stiffs really believe a teacher shows up on campus at 7am and leaves at 2pm they are so crazily high their bosses should drug test them. Ask the kids of teachers whether their parents are all at home waiting for them when they come home from their own day's schooling.

It infuriates me that these same people that defended the banks taking tax-payer bailout money and giving it to their CEOs as bonuses are telling the teachers to "pay for their own medical care" and that they make too much already. It's as if they've got no perspective on what function teachers actually perform in society.

Teachers aren't talking heads on Right-Wing propaganda television networks. Teachers aren't glorified babysitters (at least they aren't supposed to be, though that's what many of them have been relegated to thanks to increasingly uninvolved parents). Outside of a kid's parents, teachers are the most influential part of a child's upbringing.

Teachers give children the foundation of knowledge. Sure, in a perfect world a kid's parents would be able to do the same. But we all know that we aren't experts in World History or Calculus or Literature. So why not have someone who has their life to the subjects they teach give our children and that knowledge? In turn, wouldn't we value them even more for the work they can do that we can't?

A teacher on that level is much like a doctor or a mechanic or a computer repair technician. Unless you yourself are an accredited teacher, I doubt you'd sit your kid down and teach them Chemistry. The ones that are saying the most disparaging things about teachers are the ones that we all know would never home school their kids.

Teachers should make more not less. Isn't that the most ridiculously apparent fact in the history of man kind? Teachers don't get into the profession for fame or glory. By and large they enter the profession because they have a passion for the subjects they teach and they derive true joy from imparting that knowledge to 200 kids a day.

At the end of the day, if we refuse to pay our teachers well we won't attract a level competency that is needed to effectively teach. The same fools that preach accountability for teachers as if highly paid teachers wouldn't be held accountable know they wouldn't hire a work force that is 40% under paid against market value for their own business. So why are teachers the exception?

Americans are falling more and more behind in almost every aspect of life. We aren't the smartest on the block, and we aren't the most successful ones either. This has to be because of the abomination our educational system has become...which is directly tied to the level competency in our teachers.

If you pay teachers more, there is an instantaneous shift in expected performance. This holds true in every job market. From fast food chefs to top-level CEOs. An increased salary is a sign of expected performance results. I'm all for firing teachers that don't perform, but if we aren't doing everything we can to encourage intelligent, capable and qualified teachers to sign-up for the job anyway, whose fault is it that we have an abundance of less-than adequate teachers in the workforce?

By all means, folks, if you want your kids or my kids to remain stupid, then let's continue to make the teaching profession as unattractive as possible. Just know that those same dumb, uneducated, ignorant fools will eventually be responsible for paying our bills at the Old Folks' Home. They'll be the ones making decisions on behalf of society one day.

Eight years of a less than intelligent leader of the free world should have been enough for all of us to value education and educators above all other professions.