No it's not.
A teacher is supposed to teach. We want to pay them more because they keep saying that if we do they'll teach better.
We don't owe them money simply because they exist.
A teacher is supposed to teach. We want to pay them more because they keep saying that if we do they'll teach better.
We don't owe them money simply because they exist.
Given a choice, would you prefer the teacher of your kid paid 30k or 60k? I'd prefer the second option even if it would be the same person teaching, because do you really want your kids to be raised by people in dire financial situation?
A prospect of smarter folks becoming teachers (or staying in the field if they're there already) is a nice bonus.
It's way harder to find high-performing teachers when you lowball salaries. It's actually way harder to find _any_ teachers when you do that. So if you're not willing to raise pay, you'll take what you get and you'll like it.
> In the rest of the professional world we have to earn our salaries.
As someone who worked decades in the professional world before giving up a huge chunk of salary to pursue my passion for teaching, this is not entirely true. There are tons of slacker leeches in the professional world. I've seen it worse than in teaching.
Now, that's hard and I get that, just deciding how to measure teacher performance is difficult, but if it can be done it should be done.
The few teachers I had that left a lasting impression on me I value greatly, I wish more teachers were like that. And that's a teachers job, isn't it? Without a lasting impression most of what was learned is lost, so then it's not really teaching, just busywork.
I will say that there are probably a good number of teachers with the drive just beaten out of them by the bureaucracy. When you go into your profession to educate and you spend more time dealing with authorities, paperwork and silly requirements, that has a tendency to drag your performance down. The flip side of that though is ofc that that bureaucracy was largely created by teachers, probably the ones who would get fired without it protecting them.