Our Fridays are dedicated to dishing out capitalist wisdom, to nurse us (U.S. Americans) through the present Marxist captivity of our beloved republic.
Milton Friedman explains one reason that mediocrity is about the best we can expect from the public school system:
With respect to teachers’ salaries, the major problem is not they are too low on the average—they may well be too high on the average—but that they are too uniform and rigid. Poor teachers are grossly overpaid and good teachers grossly underpaid. Salary schedules tend to be uniform and determined far more by seniority, degrees received, and teaching certificates acquired than by merit. This, too, is largely a result of the present system of governmental administration of schools and becomes more serious as the unit over which governmental control is exercised becomes larger. Indeed, this very fact is the major reason professional education organizations so strongly favor broadening the unit—from the local school district to the state, from the state to the federal government. In any bureaucratic, essentially civil-service organization, standard salary scales are almost inevitable; it is next to impossible to simulate competition capable of providing wide differences in salary according to merit. The educators, which means the teachers themselves, come to exercise primary control. The parent or local community comes to exercise little control. In any area, whether it be carpentry or plumbing or teaching, the majority of workers favor standard salary scales and oppose merit differentials, for the obvious reason that the specially talented are always few. This is a special case of the general tendency for people to seek to collude to fix prices, whether through unions or industrial monopolies. But collusive agreements will generally be destroyed by competition unless the government enforces them, or at least renders them considerable support.
If one were to seek to deliberately devise a system of recruiting and paying teachers calculated to repel the imaginative and daring and self-confident and to attract the dull and mediocre and uninspiring, he could hardly do better than imitate the system of requiring teaching certificates and enforcing standard salary structures that has developed in the larger city and state-wide systems. It is perhaps surprising that the level of ability in elementary and secondary school teaching is as high as it is under these circumstances. —Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (The University of Chicago Press, 2002), 95–96.
2 Comments:
#1 || 09·12·18··09:46 || Kim in ON
This issue of teacher's salaries is one that has always irked me quite a bit. Here in the province of Ontario, the teachers unions are very powerful. I had a friend who taught for about two years before having her children. Between maternity leave and personal leave, she was off work for the better part of three years, and her job was saved for her. I don't even know if she is a good teacher or not.
My son's music teacher is an excellent teacher, giving well over and above what is expected, and he has another teacher who is a lazy slob. I think the better teacher ought to be paid more, but I seriously doubt that is the issue. Salary scales here tend to vary according to the amount of extra training they do, not necessarily how they perform.
#2 || 12·02·09··05:17 || Kris Burgoyne