Teachers Merit High Pay

In Westchester County, New York, citizens are banding together because they believe $70,000 per year is too much to pay a group of college-educated professionals. Those professionals work at least forty hours a week, take home paperwork every night and are expected to entertain an audience of 30 for five or six hours a day.

The workers in question? Public school teachers.

An article on the front page of the New York Times last month said that many residents of wealthy New York suburbs do not want to continue paying high taxes to support public schooling, especially if those taxes go toward what they see as astronomical teacher salaries.

Martin Halpin, for instance, a resident of Irvington, New York, "started feeling crushed" by his tax bills a few years ago. The median teacher salary in his district was $67,680 last year, compared to $43,014 in New York City and an average salary of about $35,000 across the country. Because of his approximately $7,500 tax bill, he says, he has had to postpone replacing the plumbing in the bathrooms of his "modest, split-level home."

The article, however, did not describe the condition of his bathroom's pipes. His complaint reminds me of the parents of a friend of mine, who refused to send her to an expensive private college but bought a $20,000 car during her freshman year at a state school.

It's all a matter of priorities.

Mr. Halpin certainly is justified in his complaint that his taxes are high--$7,500 is a lot to pay, even though he knows his high-school age daughter will benefit from that money. And anyone would be angry if he were paying to support salaries $24,000 higher than those in a city just hours away.

Yet Mr. Halpin shares a generation of Americans' lack of understanding: the realization that public education is one of the most important assets in which our country can invest. Good teachers inspire students to learn, and educated students become educated citizens. Educated citizens vote and contribute to a better society. In order to produce that better society, however, we need to go to the root of the problem: put more money in the schools to finance higher teacher salaries.

Imagine a world in which teachers were paid as much as lawyers or doctors; imagine if the average income for teachers throughout the United States were $70,000. College graduates from schools like Harvard--other than those students who have wanted to teach since they were 12--might actually be drawn to teaching instead of professions like investment banking, because they would rightly believe they could make a decent living as a teacher. As it is now, with the average starting salary for teachers about $23,000, no wonder many college students shun the profession without seriously considering it.

If teacher salaries are higher, job openings will draw better-educated, more qualified people; accordingly, if administrators know they will have to pay a new teacher $50,000 or $60,000, they will not settle for some of the mediocre teachers now filling our public schools.

That is not to say that there aren't superb teachers; there are teachers who inspire kids to become astronauts, presidents of the United States--even to become teachers themselves--and give them the tools they need to achieve those goals, But there are also far too many teachers who see their job as a kickback and who assign fill-in-the blank worksheets all day. If salaries were high enough, getting a job as a teacher would be a more selective process.

As Linda Rosenblatt, a spokeswoman for the New York State United Teachers union, says, "competitive salaries are what have strengthened many schools in Westchester Country, by making them an option for bright and creative people who might have otherwise taken their talents else-where."

The obvious question, however, is where to find the extra money to finance $70,000 salaries. It must come from taxes, but are voters like Halpin in New York, who can only control at the local level how much they pay for schools, really going to vote to pay still more taxes?

It won't be easy to convince those such as Victoria Nikolov, one of two people elected to the Irvington school board with the endorsement of a local antitax group: "Schools are very important, but it's never been proven that throwing money at education improves it," Nikolov says.

She's absolutely right. Throwing money at education will accomplish nothing; investing money in higher salaries, more computers per classroom, newer textbooks and reduced class size, however, could help a lot.

It will also be hard to persuade those with no children in the school system, such as the elderly, Many of them believe they have no direct stake in the public schools; in a way, they're right. But if they care at all about the nation's future, then they do have a stake, for schools shape children's minds and character, and children make up the future.

And it will be close to impossible to persuade people like William J. Volckman, a Westchester financial consultant, to support an across-the-board salary increase. He believes teacher raises should be linked to performance. That's a commendable idea, but in the end it would end up costing more money than it would to pay better teachers higher salaries.

How do you evaluate teachers, after all? student evaluations can be flawed, especially if a teacher is tough but good. Standardized test results penalize the teacher for the ability of the students he or she teaches: what if one teacher is fantastic but teaches average kids, and another is mediocre but teaches the highly gifted? Administrators could sit in on classes and evaluate, but how would administrators, many of whom have never been teachers, know whether a teacher is good? Evaluating teachers would be too uncertain and too expensive.

The only solution, then, is long term: convince people like Mr. Halpin that having good teachers for our nation's children is worth waiting a couple of months on that bathroom plumbing. The probability of succeeding in that persuasion is bleak, however; in state after state, voters have steadily cut back on education al funding, and with the Republican-controlled Congress looking to cut just about everything, further federal aid is unlikely at best.

We must radically change our society's thinking about education. In California, employers for part-time jobs have taken a step in the right direction by calling teachers for information about student's classroom abilities. That links success in education to success in the "real world," a tie that many students do not or do not want to see. We must convince parents that the best way to get kids to care about school, aside from encouraging them at home, is to give them teachers who demand nothing less than their best--and to find those teachers, we must give them the salaries they deserve.