THE PSYCHOLOGIST : Do teachers deserve higher pay?

Do teachers deserve higher pay?

In the article excerpted below, Roger A. Reid, Ph.D. puts up an eloquent argument to say that they do and I guess we would all like to see that. He omits mention of some relevant things, though.

The biggest is that teacher salaries already take a big slice out of state and local budgets. Even a small increase in salaries would therefore add up to a huge hit on the relevant budgets. Multiplying an increase by the large number of teachers makes a salary increase very difficult.

The other thing he overlooks is that a teaching certificate is no guarantee of anything. One hopes that certificated teachers are better at the job than someone who merely has a relevant degree but it is not always true. The school principal should be free to decide that after observing the candidate teacher in action. I must admit a personal interest here. I taught High School with very good results even though I had a degree only, no specific teacher qualification.

So I think the policies adopted by Governor Doug Ducey are reasonable. Not only are eased qualifications reasonable but even the resort to larger class sizes can be reasonable. The research generally shows little correlation between class size and educational outcomes. Putting a large number of pupils before a good teacher can have better resuts than putting smaller classes under mediocre teachers

So, sorry, Roger. You are being too one-eyed about this

The job teachers do today determines the quality and condition of tomorrow’s world.

It’s a foundational component of predicting how well we’ll get along with others. It also influences how many young people decide to pursue a particular profession. And that’s in addition to imparting a minimum level of proficiency with math, reading, and a general understanding of how the world works.

It’s a big responsibility.

And you’d think someone with the credentials, experience, education, patience, vision, and perspective to perform this job would be at the top of the list of professional compensation — similar to a doctor, lawyer, or the CEO of a major company. Because a teacher’s paycheck is more than compensation. It’s an investment that pays future dividends.

But that’s not the reality.

The reality is a sad mix of budget cuts, low salaries, and unsafe working conditions that essentially say, “Why did you become a teacher? We don’t value you or your contribution.”

Why such a discrepancy between the importance of the job and the compensation?

State legislators say they don’t have the money.

That’s a lie. They don’t have money for teachers. Conversely, they have plenty of money for pet projects, political grandstanding, and funding agenda-based projects that buy votes, seniority, and tenure.

The result? Teachers are leaving — walking away from an honorable, vital, and necessary profession because they can’t financially support themselves and their families.

To put that into perspective, let’s compare the compensation of two professional groups. The median compensation for a public school teacher is just over $51,000. By comparison, a family doctor can expect a median income of $ 197,000.

But wait! Certainly, a doctor’s job is much more important than a teacher’s, right?

If you believe that, ask your family doctor what inspired her to pursue a medical career. Ask her how important her teachers were in motivating her to become a doctor.

If compensation is any indication of how much we value the profession, teachers might as well pack it up and hit the road. Because frankly, it’s pathetic — an embarrassing reminder of how much we take teachers for granted.

Seems like a teacher shortage would be enough to motivate legislators to re-consider their budgets for public education. And it has. But not in the way you might think.

The answer coming out of Arizona isn’t in favor of higher wages. No, instead of paying teachers what they’re worth, the intellectual brain-trust that is the Arizona legislature has decided the answer to the problem is to lower the hiring standards — to be less scrutinous when hiring those who perform the most important job in the country.

In a nutshell, Arizona Governor Doug Ducey recently signed legislation that creates exceptions to laws that previously required traditional public school teachers to have a college degree and/or to have completed some form of supervised, in-classroom training.

And that means the current generation of Arizona parents can now anticipate a less qualified individual taking over the responsibility for the education of their children.

https://medium.com/publishous/roger-reid-teaching-is-a-thankless-profession-e9771e4943d

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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

Do teachers deserve higher pay?

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