SM Daily Journal: Battle over teacher pay gets worse

The latest news on the local K-8 San Mateo-Foster City School District’s salary dispute is in today’s San Mateo Daily Journal at:

http://www.smdailyjournal.com/news/local/battle-over-teacher-pay-gets-worse/article_deebe4a6-c50f-11e7-a627-07275e2bcb98.html

I posted the following comment which appears after the article there.  The libertarian bots are also already replying with anti-tax calls.

Instead of comparing average salaries between the districts, one should look at the salary scales that are posted online at each district’s website.

We need to funnel more money to the teachers who are starting out in the profession, not those who are at the top of the pay scale and on the verge of retirement (which will mainly top off pensions, not benefit students). New teachers are the ones who are struggling to find housing; their elders are much more likely to already live in the area.

The current practice is to give everyone the same percentage increase. This funnels the most money to the people at the top.

Instead, the district should increase the salary tiers to be competitive with neighboring districts. I have written about these problems at length in the following articles:

https://eduissues.com/2017/06/09/smfcsd-budget-and-measure-y-postmortem

https://eduissues.com/2016/11/19/raising-teachers-salaries-part-3-initial-cost-data

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Author: David Kristofferson

Retired Ph.D. scientist, teacher (after retiring from industry, taught in private and public high schools and then worked a decade in my own private tutoring business), bioinformatician (managed both the NIH-funded GenBank National Nucleic Acid Sequence Databank and the BIONET National Computer Resource for Molecular Biology), IT director at Eos and Raven Biotechnologies, software product manager, AAAS Fellow, avid cyclist, and backpacker! View all posts by David Kristofferson