I cannot agree either about your comments on flattening the compensation scale. Simply put, 50K a year for someone with at least five years of university education and 34 years of solid professional experience is a derisory salary. It is not sufficient to support a middle-class family or lifestyle, and its mere suggestion represents the sort of grinding economic and social attrition facing middle class Americans. Public school teachers represent one of the few remaining vestiges of mainstream, middle class life in the Elgin area. When they go, what will be left?

For all my comments, I’m no unqualified supporter of teacher’s unions or the sort of NEA-IEA drone that constantly demands that everything will be just fine if teachers just get more money and are never held accountable for their products. Nevertheless, it is particularly galling to see that these attacks on public school teachers and their compensation are coming from the direction of the grossly-rich Roesers. This is a family that is reeping huge profits while poisoning our communities through their greed and destruction of middle-class wage scales and environments. But don’t take my word for it. Anyone wondering why the Fox Valley is an increasing wasteland of crime and poverty should read the article “Our Town” in the New York Times Magazine of August 5, 2007. Just google it, it’s online. You’ll learn how Tom Roeser pays even 28-year employees only $10 an hour because that’s all factories like Otto Engineering need to pay when they have such ready access to cheap Mexican peon labor. In the meantime Roeser drives around in an Aston-Martin. If you haven’t been in the market for one recently, they start at around $110,000. Obviously, “flattened” wage scales are very profitable for a few Americans. But is that the kind of economic and social structure we should be encouraging?

In most industries, you will not see this. In industry, people who make 4x more than the guy just starting out tend to be managers. They’ve moved up the hierarchy. Generally in the private sector, you don’t get rewarded just for having been around a long time.

Experience is worth a lot, but is it worth 4x as much. I think that’s what we have to ask.

And sticking around should be rewarded, but the pension plans of teachers are typically far better than the unfunded pensions that you see in the private sector.

So teachers fare very well if they stick around. They get good pensions and their salaries can rise to 4x that of starting-level teachers. And of course, unlike the private sector they have job security.

I’m no compensation expert, but I think a flatter compensation structure in this situation makes more sense. Reward people upfront to attract good teachers into the system. Raise the starting wage from $30K to $40 or $50K, and after that, keep it adjusted for inflation but otherwise steady. Use the pension to reward people for sticking around, rather than using raises.

Just some half-formed thoughts…