Sachem Head puts forth a reasonable case for unions in the comments.
Before I come off as a total right-wing crank, let me add that I don’t think primary and secondary ed teachers get compensated enough. The couple that I know well - one charter school, one private - work their tails off and put their heart and soul into the job. Conservatives are fond of saying that throwing money at education won’t itself solve the problems. True in a sense, but at the same time we’re expecting plenty of culture workers - teachers, librarians, social workers, and the like - to be hard-working professionals without a professional salary. If we’re concerned about the quality of their work, we need to address that fact as a basic constraint. While sachem’s right that most teachers aren’t in it for the money, I bet if the pay increases were more than token, you would see a change in quality of labor pool, or at least a change in the expectations you could place.
Extra compensation need not be in money, it can be in prestige. And having some high-profile “crackdown” on bad teachers - or “bad teachers” - may be the surest way of chipping away at the prestige. Whatever your policy for encouraging (more) good teaching, the trick, politically, is to come up with a plan that gives a lot more carrot while pretending it’s giving a lot more stick.
One big question-mark - the summers off. They make it hard for people to remotely agree on fair salary comparisons. I wonder if we’re moving to a year-long educational system anyway, and what impact that will have on teachers’ salaries and prestige.
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