Public school teachers over the years have painted themselves into the worst of two worlds – they are union, and yet they are not really. Teachers are “union” to the extent that in many school districts they organize, affiliate with the National Education Association or the American Federation of Teachers. They negotiate in local school districts their pay, benefits, work day, working conditions, job security, leave policies, and sometimes even the criteria, documents, and processes by which they can be evaluated. That is pretty much unionized.
They also allow teachers not certified in their subjects (their craft) to work alongside them for the same pay. Any real union would have its workers “off the line” in a heartbeat before non-masons or non-carpenters could be called such, paid the same, and interspersed among them.
Some teachers also work a great deal “off the clock.” Reading and skillfully grading 150 fifteen-page themes over a weekend is serious professional work. Yet other teachers drawing the same pay never have papers or projects to take home and grade. This is a major disparity in the teaching business and one to which the union casts a blind eye.
Indeed it is truly the worst of two worlds – a trade insufficiently union to require overtime pay for its hardest working members, yet so over-unionized as to have strict socialized pay scales ensuring the best and worst of the lot earn the same if they basically are the same age.
The fix however is quite easy. It merely requires recognizing that in our K-12 system there are two distinct groups of teachers; and merit pay discussions aside, the single best reform to teacher pay is to finally admit that one group of these employees is frankly more important than the other.
Teachers who teach state mandated tested subjects – science, math, reading, etc. should be in a separate “professional” pay strata 25-50% higher than present. The professional pay strata (approximately $40-$80K) would assume compensation for work beyond school hours as with any salaried professional. It would require and reward subject area leadership and additional work days – breaking the chains of the 9-month stigma. It likely also would eschew thoughts of unionization.
The funding for this higher pay rate for “test area” teachers would come from the support teaching areas, those who teach non-state-mandated subjects. Quite honestly we do not need a $55,000 masters-degreed elementary physical education teacher. Capping salaries at the baccalaureate level (approximately $30-45K) for this stratum of teacher comprised of all support subject areas would allow for the higher salaries of their colleagues.
The differentiated pay levels would also encourage a stronger pool of candidates to enter the more challenging subject areas as prospective teachers thus internally feeding and growing the quality development of our schools, and that is a very sound business principle.
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