Huh. Can’t help but wonder if this:
Across the country, districts are struggling with shortages of teachers, particularly in math, science and special education — a result of the layoffs of the recession years combined with an improving economy in which fewer people are training to be teachers.
… has anything to do with this:
Righties constantly lecture me about the virtue of markets in efficiently allocating scarce resources: if there’s a shortage of apples the price will rise, prompting farmers to grow more apples, until supply eventually meets demand, and all that. And yet oddly, not once in this article about the scarcity of teachers does anybody ever mention the idea of paying teachers more money. Weird, right?
My mother was a school teacher, but if my own daughter came to me and said she wanted to be a teacher too, I’d do everything I could to talk her out of it. Because why would I want my daughter to work so hard for so little money and such utter disrespect? No, not disrespect. We don’t just disrespect teachers these days. We vilify them.
You want to attract more great teachers to the profession? Pay them more. And stop threatening to punch them in the face.
[Cross-posted at Civic Skunkworks]
Last week Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant* and I got into a conversation about rent control via email, and she provided such a clear and straightforward explanation of her position, that I asked if I could just repost it here to HA. Instead, she got back to me with the following slightly expanded, better formatted, and presumably copy edited version of her initial off-the-cuff response.
