I mean, how much do teachers DESERVE to get paid, anyway?

Arnold is backing a plan to link teacher's pay to "merit." I think this is an excellent idea. I mean, as a teacher myself, I would love to actually be paid a salary commensurate to the importance of the work that I do, as well as the time, training, and effort that I put into it.
As I said, this is an excellent idea. Far too excellent to be limited to teachers. I think that everyone should be paid an amount that their performance merits. I think that CEO's of major corporations in particular should be paid according to some sort of merit based rubric.
I mean, did you know that Carly Fiorina (outgoing CEO of Hewlett Packard) stands to make 42 MILLION DOLLARS... for being fired? This is not salary money, by which I mean money she receives as compensation for work performed. This is money she's getting for STOPPING working for HP! This woman is making more money than the entire faculty of my school will make in 15 years... for NOT working! And why is she being asked to stop working for HP? Do you think that it's because her performance has generated more money for the company than expected? Is this outrageous compensation merited on the basis of the amount of money her performance generated for the stockholders from whose pockets this money will come (not to mention the employees whose employment and salaries actually are directly affected by the performance of the company, and for whom those 42 million could have contributed to benefits or bonuses)? If it were, do you think she'd be fired?
Anyway, that whole paragraph was an extended aside. What I really want to write about is "merit pay" for teachers. There are two reasons I can think of to institute such a system. First of all, it could be intended as an incentive. If we link pay to merit, teachers will be encouraged to get off of their backsides and actually start doing their jobs. I don't think I need to explain to you why teachers find this attitude to be insulting, demeaning, unfair, inaccurate, misinformed, ignorant, and several other adjectives, too. I think, however, that this view is fundamentally flawed for another reason. Please bear with me as I set this up.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that in 2003 (the numbers for 2004 aren't out yet), the average hourly wage for educators in non-supervisory positions was $15.64. Only two other categories were lower: Leisure/Hospitatlity (i.e. the people who put those mints on your pillow in hotels and clean rock-star excretions off the curtains) and Retail sales (i.e. the high school students at the GAP who are apparently in the middle of growth spurts rendering their shirts too short to cover their navels, and the elderly people who shoudn't have to work anymore but since Social Security isn't enough to pay the bills they've been fortunate enough to have their otherwise miserable lives filled with joy due to their job at Walmart, at lease according to the commercials). Who makes more than teachers? Well, manufacturing is slightly higher, with financial services, natural resources and mining, professional and business services and wholesale marketing making more than $17/hour on average. Construction is at almost $19/hour on average: that's over 20% more than educators. At the top of the list, Information services and Transportation and Utilities workers average over $20/hour.
So, what's the point of all these statistics? I just want to make the case that whatever motivates people to become teachers, it's probably not the money. Most people who come to education from other professions are not former hotel workers or Old Navy lifers. The level of education required to be a teacher (Bachelor's degree plus 1.5-3 years of postgraduate education) is a lot higher than most entry level positions. Your rank-and-file teacher does not see salary as a financial incentive to do their job and do it well. Rather, their salary allows them to pursue teaching by giving them enough money to live on so they don't have to get another job. The reasons they want to teach are not financial, but the salary is necessary for teaching to be a viable option.
That attitude has allowed market forces to keep the salary of a teacher low, below that of a construction worker or electrician. As long as the salary offered a teacher is enough to support themselves and their families in a modest fashion, the kinds of people who become teachers will continue to work. Labor disputes in education are the polar opposite of labor disputes in professional sports. Teachers protest when the amount of money they are paid are insufficient to support their families and will drive them into other lines of work just to make ends meet, or when starting salaries are insufficient to allow prospective teachers to pay off debts (remember, they need to take a year or more off of work to get their teaching credential (which costs money), take a lot of tests (all of which also cost money) and do their unpaid student teaching!) and survive the first few years at the bottom of the pay scale. How many pro athletes are going to leave sports for another profession that will pay them better? How many athletes worry that there aren't enough youngsters out there who want to join their ranks, and that the quality of the games will be hurt because prospective athletes are opting for a more lucrative jobs like driving a bus?
So, treating a teacher's salary as an incentive misses the mark, because the forces that motivate teachers are not financial. Rather than an incentive, it becomes a threat to their livelihood. It is not threatening their lavish lifestyle, it is threatening their ability to feed, clothe, and house themselves and their children. It becomes an incentive not to do a better job, but to do a different job -- preferably one where you aren't required to spend your days with your head on a wooden block under a masked man holding a big axe.
Remember that I said there were two reasons I could think of to institue a merit based pay system for teachers? The second reason (and, in my opinion, more likely) is that it's a way to save money. I really doubt that the proposals that come out will entail adding a bunch of money to the state budget for teacher's salaries. What will happen is that the same amount of money (or less, when adjusted for inflation) will be allocated, and redistributed to teachers on the basis of merit. Therefore, some teachers will get a pay cut, and a few might actually get a little more money. Of course, it will cost money to pay for the new bureaucracy that such a program would entail, and that money will probably come out of the pool, too, leaving less for teacher salaries. The beauty is, if an individual teacher's salary doesn't keep up with inflation, it's easy to say that it has to do with their merit, not with a lack of funding for teacher's salary in the budget. With an arbitrary scale to base salary on, it's hard to keep track of the big picture.
For all the talk in political circles of children being our greatest natural resource and leaving no child behind, the numbers tell a different story. CEOs like Carly and other super-wealthy Americans are getting huge chunks of the budget in the form of tax cuts (did I mention that half of Carly's 42 million is in the form of stock options, the dividends of which are taxed at a much lower rate as per W's tax plan? Convenient, no?), while children and their schools get less and less. I wonder if teacher's asked to resign because of low "merit" are going to get tax breaks, stock options, or any sort of severance package at all. I doubt it.
Later, I'll write about what the heck they mean by "merit" when it comes to teacher performance. It ain't pretty, I'll tell you that right now.

- "Yep, that'll do it."