Belleville's Teacher's union successfully negotiated one of the best deals in the state for their teachers - and in doing so, demonstrated their complete dissassociation with reality.
From the Belleville News Democrat:
First of all, yes, there are graduates walking into $80,000 to $100,000 jobs - but NOT IN BELLEVILLE - and not for most degrees! The people who walk into those jobs are going into highly technical positions in extremely high cost of living areas. The highest paying job the NACE Summer 2007 Salary Survey lists is for chemical engineers, which pays only $59,361. After tech jobs comes Financial - the highest one listed is business/managerial economics, which pays $48,483.District 201 Assistant Superintendent George Kohut said the median salary for the 2007-08 school year at Belleville East and Belleville West is $68,372. The highest paid teacher at East will make $100,275 this school year, while the top-paid educator at West will bring home $104,871.
...
"I don't disagree with you that we are some of the better paid teachers," said Sheila Misselhorn, head of the American Federation of Teachers Local 434 bargaining team that negotiated the new deal. "But all teachers are underpaid.
"Our new contract hardly makes us commensurate with other professions with our education level," she added. "It seems to me that there are first-year college graduates walking into $80,000 to $100,000 jobs. It takes us 20 years to get to that level, and most of us have master's degrees and well above that."
These, of course, are averages. If you got a B.S. in Engineering from Harvard and found a job in Silicon Valley, you will likely make more than the average. If, however, you graduated from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and got a job in Belleville, this is likely to be pretty close to what you are making.
Now, the argument has been made that your child's education is important. This, however, is not the only thing that drives value - if it were, then most of us couldn't afford water. Like most things, this comes down to supply and demand.
On the supply side, schools need teachers. However, if there are 2 million elementary school teachers in the market, schools will find it easier to hire teachers than if there were only 1 million (the 2 million teacher figure is actually pretty close to reality according to the National Center for Education Statistics). The easier it is to get teachers, the less schools will have to pay.
Contrast the above with a chemical engineer, which has a lower supply simply because most people simply can't or won't do the job. Getting through an engineering program at a university is HARD! the average SAT scores for engineers are among the highest of all degrees (as opposed to those for education majors, which are among the lowest) and they STILL tend to drop out or switch to easier majors at a higher rate than most other majors!
The demand side is affected by the quality of the education being provided and the cost of finding that level of quality (or better) elsewhere. Since there are MAJOR concerns that the quality of our children's education is nowhere near where parents want it - whether the problem lay with recent NCLB inspired regulations or with the system in general - and since there ARE alternatives ranging from private schools, which operate on a fraction of the budget public schools do, to homeschooling, which costs roughly as little or as much as the parents want to spend and STILL provides a better education, this demand is on the decline.
The bottom line here is that we are NOT going to provide six figure salaries for people fresh out of college to fail to teach our children basic math and reading. To get rewarded for failure, you need to go into politics.
If you're curious about what a specific teacher in Illinois is making, you might want to check out the Illinois School Salary Database. I've found it very enlightening!
update: 26 March 08 - updated the teacher's salary database link.
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