Yes, great teachers should be paid well. But there's another side to this coin.
Teaching is a brutal job.
Parents complaining about grades and/or teachers. Student behaviour worse than its ever been (with administrators that do very little about it -- partly because of outside pressures). Every bit of interaction with parents, and observed problem behaviours with students, must be documented. Dates, times, what was discussed, what actions are to be taken.
Far too regular class interruptions for all sorts of things (ex. sporting events, pep rallys, dances, early dismissals, awards ceremonies, field trips, plays). Teaching gets much more difficult when a non-trivial percentage of students are out every day, and/or class time is cut short (or gone) for other activities.
Rubrics required for everything (a teacher can't just say, "this is C work" -- everything must be documented, and this makes the amount of grading work go through the roof).
Unending meetings, data collection requirements (you'd be amazed at how badly administrators want to put a number on your kids). State curriculum requirements. Standardized testing. Paperwork up the wazoo.
And I don't even need to mention that you better not need to go to the bathroom during class, because you can't leave students unattended. And between classes, well, you've got 4 minutes between bells. Better make it quick. And hope another teacher's not using the same bathroom you're heading for.
Higher pay for teachers would be nice, but that ain't the problem.
> Parents complaining about grades and/or teachers.
Time magazine "Why Teachers Hate Parents" (2005)
"Ask teachers about the best part of their job, and most will say how much they love working with kids. Ask them about the most demanding part, and they will say dealing with parents. In fact, a new study finds that of all the challenges they face, new teachers rank handling parents at the top. According to preliminary results from the MetLife Survey of the American Teacher, made available exclusively to TIME, parent management was a bigger struggle than finding enough funding or maintaining discipline or enduring the toils of testing. It's one reason, say the Consortium for Policy Research in Education and the Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy, that 40% to 50% of new teachers leave the profession within five years. Even master teachers who love their work, says Harvard education professor Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, call this "the most treacherous part of their jobs."
"At the most disturbing extreme are the parents who like to talk about values but routinely undermine them. "You get savvier children who know how to get out of things," says a second-grade teacher in Murfreesboro, Tenn. "Their parents actually teach them to lie to dodge their responsibilities." Didn't get your homework done? That's O.K. Mom will take the fall. Late for class? Blame it on Dad."
Just asked one of my friends whose wife has been teaching for a while:
"yep it's true. she always has parent stories. last week she had one on the phone complaining that their kid got a C, yet they had no idea about what the kid was doing in terms of curriculum, homework etc and the fact they always messed around in class. yet, the parent went off on her"
Not only that (parents complaining to teachers), it gets worse. Some problem parents actually go straight to the principal to complain about the teacher -- based only on what their child told them ("But mom, Mrs. So-and-so picks on me! She told us X wouldn't be on the test, but it was! And she's unfair!"). This is without ever even contacting the teacher (this tactic is often coupled with "but I tried to contact Mr. So-and-so but he never got back to me").
Other parents think they'll go "straight to the top" and complain directly to the superintendent of schools in their town. When time comes to renew jobs for non-tenured teachers, I've heard tales of non-renewal (for the next school year) just because of a couple noisy parents.
I think they tried that in some districts by tying the amount of the bonus to the performance of the children in the class. The teachers were the one administering the tests so some of them gamed the system a bit and cheated on the grading of the test.
It's not a matter of gaming the system. The teacher is the system. Just about anything the kids learn (except for honors classes, where the kids will sometimes learn some things on their own) is due to strenuous effort from the teacher.
All teachers "teach to the test" to some degree. The good ones try to get the kids to use higher-order thinking skills, and their quizzes and tests bear this out. If you want the kids to get better grades though, you could just heavily cover the material that's on the test, then make sure you use exactly the same wording on the test as was on the homeworks and quizzes (as opposed to mixing it up a bit to get the kids to think about things a little more).
Teaching is a brutal job.
Parents complaining about grades and/or teachers. Student behaviour worse than its ever been (with administrators that do very little about it -- partly because of outside pressures). Every bit of interaction with parents, and observed problem behaviours with students, must be documented. Dates, times, what was discussed, what actions are to be taken.
Far too regular class interruptions for all sorts of things (ex. sporting events, pep rallys, dances, early dismissals, awards ceremonies, field trips, plays). Teaching gets much more difficult when a non-trivial percentage of students are out every day, and/or class time is cut short (or gone) for other activities.
Rubrics required for everything (a teacher can't just say, "this is C work" -- everything must be documented, and this makes the amount of grading work go through the roof).
Unending meetings, data collection requirements (you'd be amazed at how badly administrators want to put a number on your kids). State curriculum requirements. Standardized testing. Paperwork up the wazoo.
And I don't even need to mention that you better not need to go to the bathroom during class, because you can't leave students unattended. And between classes, well, you've got 4 minutes between bells. Better make it quick. And hope another teacher's not using the same bathroom you're heading for.
Higher pay for teachers would be nice, but that ain't the problem.