Teachers Offer the Wealthy an Escape from Poverty
The following is from Anthony Cody’s excellent critique of the education portion of Obama’s state of the union speech. In a nutshell, if a teacher really did increase the lifetime income of a classroom by $250,000, so what? Spread out over the 40 years of each student’s career, that would amount to only $250 per person per year, enough for a nice date, Sunday afternoon beers or some practical work clothes, but nowhere near enough to bring poor kids into the middle class. And if he really wanted us to not teach to the test, he wouldn’t tie our evaluations and salaries to students’ test scores.