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posted by dsk on November 4th, 2007 at 9:49AM

>Or teachers don't get paid very much, so the good ones go to research and other professions. (From what I've heard from people who know teachers.)

I agree to a certain point. If the entire problem was money, we'd have solve this a long time ago. Thing is, high salary incentives only work in conjunction with being able to weed out bad and mediocre teachers. As it stands in Ontario, you work for two years and you essentially get tenure - at the university level, a professor really needs to work his butt off for many years (or become a world-renowned expert in his field) in order to get that kind of job security. So a wage boost now would do nothing but further reinforce the broken system.

Looking at it another way - a higher salary, in addition to attracting higher caliber workers, would also attract much more mediocre workers - so its vital that competence should be a criteria for continuing employment.

I'm with Dennis - the free market is pretty much the only way to guarantee high caliber teachers in the education system. This is not feasible in the current climate, so we should foster competition within the public sphere (via a voucher system or charter schools). The effect would be three-fold:
1) As I said, it would foster competition amongst schools
2) Competition would then necessitate firing bad teachers
3) It would break the union stranglehold on education. As it stands, we've given the teachers' union a monopoly on education, which gives them huge bargaining power - which they have abused to boost their salaries and protect their membership. If a guy like Seleika(sp?) made it through an entire career without getting his ass fired for incompetence there is a problem.

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