Teachers Salary

there's no doubt that the compensation teachers get is directly related to the quality of people who would stay in Louisiana to teach, the quality of teachers we could attract to the field, the veteran expertise of teachers that would remain teachers, etc....

Louisiana loses a lot of teachers to Texas each year - I was one. Once I got my Masters from LSU I made a beeline for Texas and after a couple of years I was making more than my mother who has been teaching in Louisiana for over 20 years.

And once I went to Texas, I worked very hard and managed to distinguish myself as a teacher. I am egotistical enough to say that Louisiana missed out on keeping me and a number of my colleagues who were also teachers from Louisiana.

I never had an entire summer off. That' more mythical than any other teacher notion - at least for me. I was constantly attending seminars, going to week-long or longer conferences. Planning for the upcoming year. Reading the summer reading novels for the upcoming fall. And during the workweek, I put in well over forty hours per week. Most days meant 2-4 additional hours with a few hours of work on the weekend to boot.

Perhaps it's because I taught literature and made my students write a great deal so I always had a stack to grade.

But I put in too many hours for the pay I was getting in Texas - there's no way I would settle for what Louisiana was offering.

I look here in Ontario where teacher pay and benefits are pretty good. - much better than in Louisiana. Much better pay (tens of thousands of dollars difference per year). Better insurance package and benefits (yes, above what Canada offers through their socialized care). The pension is phenomenal. They school day is shorter and makes more sense. The curriculum is more organized and less meticulous and tedious in credit-earning for diplomas. I could go on and on.

But the standards for teachers are much higher. There is no alternate certification process such as there is in the US where you can get a teaching degree without having to go into a classroom to teach or earn anything more than a handful of credit hours.

SUBSTITUTE teachers must have a teaching certificate from Ontario in order to substitute.

The job market is tight because the profession is such an attractive one in many different ways. I've never seen this quality pool of teachers and people going into teaching.

And guess what - the education system, the quality of learning and teaching, and level of student achievement far eclipses what I saw in Louisiana when I was interning at 3 schools in Baton Rouge and when I was teaching in Katy, esteemed to be a high achieving district.

Teacher pay is obviously only part of that - with the teachers who are in classrooms now, too many of them don't deserve what they are earning, much less a raise. And tying bonuses to test scores is the most backwards way of going about it.

I was almost always the last one to leave each day and wondered why I did it when I could go home when the slackers did and take home the same pay.

A LOT would have to change to turn things around, and pay is among it. But first, you'd have to rework the system to ensure that the teachers who are in the classrooms are doing their best and deserve the raise in the first place.