[July 3rd] - Speaking at the NEA's annual meeting, union President Reg Weaver announced that the NEA believes that the starting salary for the typical teacher should be $40,000 per year. Think about that for a second.

A young man, barely 21 and with a 4-year degree, working 9 months a year, should begin his career earning $40,000 a year, or about $28 an hour. Now don't get me wrong, I'm about a year away from getting that 4-year degree, and Lord knows, I'd love to earn $40,000 a year as I learned how to do my job. But it makes no sense, and this is precisely the reason that so many teachers in right-to-work states are leaving the unions and joining professional organizations. The president of the largest teachers union says he is going to use all of his "political clout" to make this happen, yet he admits that he has no idea how much this might cost a school district.

Well, let's consider Mr. Weaver's proposal on one elementary school here in my community. This school has 26 teachers. The starting wage here is $27,500. To be fair, you'd have to increase all teachers salary or first year teachers would be making more than 10 year veterans. So if a first year teacher earns $13,000 per year more, then all teachers would have to have a similar increase. This one elementary school would require an additional $338,000 a year. Of course, Reg Weaver knows this will never happen, but it's a good "red meat" issue for his members.

But it makes the union and union members seem unreasonable. It takes a highly specialized degree to earn that kind of money in the first year of any career, and I can say that, three-quarters of the way through my degree, that there is nothing specialized about it. It's a good degree, but not the kind that's worth $40,000 a teacher's first year.

I love teachers. I look forward to being one. But teacher's need to be reasonable. Let's begin by telling Reg Weaver that perhaps, just perhaps, he's off base about this whole "starting salary" idea.

# posted by Farid Rushdi @ 7:05 PM