Newsweek Columnist Speaks Out
For Higher Teacher Pay

Thank you, Anna Quindlen.

If this novelist, social critic, and Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist had her way, beginning teachers all across the country would be making $40,000 to start and receiving reasonable raises regularly after that.

Quindlen speaks out forcefully and personally in "The Wages of Teaching,"  her column in the November 28, 2005 issue of Newsweek.

The NEA's Professional Pay campaign launched this summer struck a positive chord for Quindlen, who writes,"The National Education Association has been pushing for a minimum starting salary of $40,000 for all teachers. Why not? If these people can teach 6-year-olds to add and get adolescents to attend to algebra, surely we can do the math to get them a decent wage."

The columnist expresses appreciation for her own teachers -- "I am a writer because of the encouragement of teachers" -- and says that surely most Americans feel the same kind of gratitude to the "women and men who helped them levitate just a little above the commonplace expectations they had for themselves."

She even takes time to debunk some of the most deeply held myths of teaching: short hours and lots of time off. "After a lifetime of hearing the old legends about cushy hours and summer vacations, they [new teachers] figure out that early mornings are for students who need extra help, evenings are for test corrections and lesson plans, and weekends and summers are for second and even third jobs to try to pay the bills."

The economics of teaching are pushing too many educators out of the profession, and Quindlen says it's time to address that issue directly. But she warns readers not to buy into some of the "fashionable fixes" that business people and politicians claim will help improve education.  

 "Instead of simply acknowledging that starting salaries are woefully low and committing to increasing them and finding the money for reasonable recurring raises," she writes,  "pols have wasted decades obsessing about something called merit pay. It's a concept that works fine if you're making widgets, but kids aren't widgets, and good teaching isn't an assembly line."

Quindlen has some intriguing ideas about funding higher teacher salaries.  "Since the corporate world is the greatest, and richest, beneficiary of well-educated workers, maybe a national brain trust might be set up that would turn a tax on corporate profits into an endowment to raise teacher salaries."

"The Wages of Teaching" is cogent and commonsensical too. But don't take our word for it. Read "The Wages of Teaching"  in its entirety.  Anna Quindlen's respect and appreciation for teachers come through loud and clear.

Anna Quindlen is the bestselling author of four novels (Blessings, Black and Blue, One True Thing, and Object Lessons) and four nonfiction books (A Short Guide to a Happy Life, Living Out Loud, Thinking Out Loud, and How Reading Changed My Life). She has also written two children's books (The Tree That Came to Stay and Happily Ever After). Her New York Times column, "Public and Private" won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992. Her column now appears every other week in Newsweek.