Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!watmath!watcgl!lrbartram
From: lrbartram@watcgl.waterloo.edu (lyn bartram)
Newsgroups: ont.general
Subject: Re: Community College Teachers on strike
Message-ID: <12309@watcgl.waterloo.edu>
Date: 16 Nov 89 02:35:30 GMT
References: <606@alias.UUCP> <12258@watcgl.waterloo.edu> <7470@cognos.UUCP>
Reply-To: lrbartram@watcgl.waterloo.edu (lyn bartram)
Distribution: can
Organization: U. of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 56

In article <7470@cognos.UUCP> rayt@cognos.UUCP (R.) writes:
>
>Also, based on the quality of the students I have met coming into university
>from secondary school, a good chunk of these $50K secondary school teachers
>are incompetent (i.e. only worth $20K). Perhaps, though, these community
>college teachers are the hidden stars of our educational system. Dubito.

>
>For your amusement I have appended a table showing where Canada ranks
>internationally on public educational spending (1987).
>
>United States ...................... 4900 per pupil
>Canada ............................. 4700 per pupil
>West Germany ....................... 3200 per pupil
>France ............................. 2900 per pupil
>Japan .............................. 2900 per pupil
>Britian ............................ 2300 per pupil
>
>In US dollars (+/- $100/pupil)

	These are interesting figures, especially when you consider that
the average salary for a US high-school teacher with 8 years experience is
in the mid-to-high twenties.  Let it be pointed out that in a national exam
administered to US high school teachers in 1987-88, an exam based on the
Grade 9 curriculum, fully 25% failed.  In the US high school teachers come from
the bottom third of the class.  After all, why would an ambitious college 
graduate want to work for$ 20-30 K in a profession accorded little respect and
much responsibility?  Paying low salaries is a prime deterrent to the
bright and the competent.  So where is all the US money per pupil going? Is
it analogous to the medical system, where the well-off (in this case,schools)
have it very very good, and the poorer have it horrid?

	Note also that in a recent survey, US students ranked at the bottom
of a long list of developed countries in such skilled tasks as finding their
own country on a world map.  They ranked way below such powerhouses of
education as Britain, Portugal and our own country, but shared the lowest rung
of the ladder with none other than the Soviet Union. (A nice twist of
political irony.)  Sweden of course came first.  I don't remember the exact
issue that published these figures, but they were in an article in the
Economist, a conservative British magazine.  This same conservative British
magazine published an article a few months back relating Sweden's exceptional
worker productivity to its education programmes. The view of the article was
both admiring and a touch surprised.  I believe the point here is
	"you gets what you pay for",
although my favourite such quote comes from the Rector of Concordia University 
in Montreal.  A few years back, when Bourassa decided to cut yet more funds from
the Quebec universities, on the grounds that they were "too costly", while
meanwhile forbidding them to raise tuition, the head of Concordia wrote an
open letter to the Premier, in which he said:
	"If you think education is expensive, M. Bourassa,
	 you should just try ignorance for a generation".

Underpaying our teachers is like paying slave wages to child care workers. 
We're shortchanging our children, just because we may have been shortchanged.
What's the point of that?  
Montreal