By Ben Smith
(From Politico Blog, November 2nd, 2011)
We reached out to teachers’ unions and education reform groups to see how they felt about the Heritage Foundation/American Enterprise Institute study out yesterday saying teachers are “overpaid.”
American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten slammed the report, saying it’s full of “ridiculous assertions”:
While the American Enterprise Institute has every right to issue a report on teacher pay, reports like “Assessing the Compensation of Public School Teachers” are the reason many Americans pay no heed to what goes on in Washington. The AEI report concludes that America’s public school teachers are overpaid — something that defies common sense — and uses misleading statistics and questionable research to make its case.
If teachers are so overpaid, then why aren’t more “1 percenters” banging down the doors to enter the teaching profession? Why do 50 percent of teachers leave the profession within three to five years, an attrition rate that costs our school districts $7 billion annually?
And Charles Barone, director of federal policy at Democrats for Education Reform — typically a labor nemesis — said lower pay wouldn’t encourage improvement among teachers:
We think teachers are paid too little for what they are tasked to do but that far too little is expected of them compared with the task at hand. Paying them less won’t help kids. Expecting more of them and paying them accordingly will, as we are seeing in Washington [DC], one of the few [places] that showed gains on the [National Assessment of Educational Progress] scores released today.