A new topic to rant on

Since I’ve pretty well beaten the topics of media and academic bias to death, I’m going to toss out another one that’s near and dear; public education reform.

I think this recent editorial in the NYTimes demonstrates just how messed up the current system is. Essentially the article laments the fact that 20 percent of teachers must work summer jobs the authors feel are beneath “similarly educated professionals” to make ends meet. Naturally the author’s solution for this inhumanity is to raise teacher salaries across the board.

The salient fact this editorial is missing is that there are no other remaining fields outside of government where “similarly educated professionals” belong to unions. Since the only real value of unions was to protect the largely interchangeable and disposable unskilled pool of immigrant human capital from declining working conditions it should come as no surprise that teachers are now valued by the economy as if they are interchangeable and disposable. Without exposing individual educators to the same risk/reward forces of accountability which are daily realities to “similarly educated professionals” in the private sector, there can be no real societal or economic justification for the kind of across the board pay raises the editorial proposes.

Teaching is an enormously important career and requires highly specialized skills and education and I feel it’s to the detriment of society that an anachronistic barrier in the form of teacher unions stand in the way of being able to justly reward teachers that are performing at a high level(and fire those that are not).