Tom Izzo, the World's Greatest French Teacher and Cutting Costs in Education
Regular readers of Teacher in a Strange Land know that I loathe sports/education analogies. Equating theCommon Core to "having the same goalposts," for example, or the desirability of "box scores" for teachers--it's all Grade A ball-park baloney. Hot-ticket sports are entertainment and education is something else entirely. Both fine in their own right, but really--apples and watermelons.
So it was discouraging to see this headline: Right to work explains why Tom Izzo makes more than a French teacher. And even more discouraging to read the piece, by political strategist Ken Braun, which suggests that Michigan State's Tom Izzo is worth every penny of his $3.5 million dollar salary and Michigan's new RTW legislation opens the way for teachers to start raking in six figures. His example is the "best French teacher in the country"--call her Ms. LePew--who could start her own online video-lecture franchise, hiring cheap and replaceable face-to-face underlings, providing schools what they need, French-wise, just as Izzo gives Spartan