Breaking the Greed / Virtue Dichotomy in Teacher Pay

Commenting on the new issue of Quality Counts, which compares states on teacher pay measures and suggests that teachers make less than comparable professions, AFTie Ed says:

It leaves open the question of why people go into teaching. As the song says "it's not about a salary, it's all about reality, teachers teach and do the world good..." I think the results here should concern people whose main focus is on incentivizing the current pay structure. If fiscal incentives matter, the first decision for a lot of people is going to be to go into a different field. People motivated by salaries will, rather than wanting to climb to the top of 88 cents on the dollar, go get the dollar itself.

This is a variant on the baseline teachers union position on money, which is, "We're not in this for the money; give us more money."

Let me be first to say that this isn't actually an absurd concept on its face. There's no good reason that people should be forced into penury just because they're doing socially valuable work in the public sector. Quite the opposite, in fact.

But it's not the strongest rhetorical case, and more to the point, it's not necessary. Look at the two doctors on the front page of the Post this morning, identical African-American twins from PG County named Vince and Vance who look just exactly like you'd think a Vince and Vance would look, and also happen to be Army reservists who volunteer in Afghanistan. They're clearly not doing that for the money (although I'm guessing the elapsed time between the story hitting the newstands and getting optioned for TV/movies could be measured in fractions of a second), but as a cardiologist and urologist, I'm guessing they have plenty of money. In medicine, you can do good and well at the same time.

But you've also got to go to medical school, which as we discussed here a few days ago, was thoroughly Flexnerized almost a century ago. Much higher, more uniform standards, longer, more difficult to get into, extended clinical induction model, etc. etc. Also, fewer practitioners and less organized labor. I don't know if all those factors necessarily have to go together, but the fact that they do in medicine has to be meaningful on some level.

The problem with the "we do this for the children not the money" line is that it paints teachers as the kind of professionals that provoke admiration but not aspiration -- people appreciate them but are glad someone else is doing the work. Ed himself goes on to say that "I'm of the belief that we're going to have to make changes to how teachers are paid in order to raise compensation broadly. And that this could be a really good thing for education overall." I wonder he's thought through just how much things would have to change for that to become true.