NACST Newsletter

Volume XXVII No. 2 - January 2006

Excerpts from "The Last Word Anna Quindlen" Newsweek November 28, 2005.

The average new teacher today makes just under $30,000 a year [nationally], which may not look too bad for a twentysomething with no mortgage and no kids.

But soon enough the newbies realize that they can make more money and not work anywhere near as hard elsewhere.

After a lifetime of hearing the old legends about cushy hours and summer vacations, they figure out that early mornings are for students who need extra help, evenings are for test corrections and lesson plans, and weekends and summers are for second and even third jobs to try to pay the bills.

According to the Department of Education, one in every five teachers leaves after the first year, and almost twice as many leave within three.

Unfortunately, the current fashionable fixes for education take a page directly from the business playbook, and it's a terrible fit.

Instead of simply acknowledging that starting salaries are woefully low and committing to increasing them and finding the money for reasonable recurring raises, pols have wasted decades obsessing about something called merit pay.

It's a concept that works fine if you're making widgets, but kids aren't widgets, and good teaching isn't an assembly line.

In recent years teacher salaries have grown, if they've grown at all, at a far slower rate than those of other professionals, often lagging behind inflation.

Yet teachers should have the most powerful group of advocates in the nation ... their former students.

I am a writer because of the encouragement of teachers.

Surely most Americans must feel the same, that there were women and men who helped them levitate just a little above the commonplace expectations they had for themselves.