Well on the flip side,in NYC the teacher's union is an all-powerful institution. Money was poured into the education system from the high taxes New Yorker pay.Starting saleries for teachers are about $50,000 and they can make up to $80-90K. But that hasn't raised the level of quality education. The union is more interested in protecting its members than the interests of children.Once tenured,its impossible to dismiss a bad teacher.They're just shuffled around and get their pay even if they no longer teach classes.Every week there are news stories of sexual predator teachers and physically abusive teachers.Test scoring has not climbed and drop out rates are still high.This despite 2 decades of immense growth in the money spent per child for education.The union spends its time fighting charter schools rather improving education.Teachers are not allowed to be accountable for the quality of their work
Bottom line is,just throwing money at a problem is not the solution.

That's what's so frustrating about the education system. How do you improve it, cause you're right, throwing money at it isn't the answer. 

No money isn't all. As there are teachers teaching here in Oklahoma despite making less than a 7-11 clerk. People excel at the person they are. But spitting in their faces in favor of a greedy industry really shows how dysfunctional our government operates.

A quick Google search shows an average starting salary of $31,600 for teachers in Oklahoma. The 7-Eleven clerks there must be raking in the dough.

Not that I have anything but respect for teachers -- the great-aunt who pretty much raised me taught for 50 years, going without pay during the depths of the Depression, & I'm sure her sister (43 years in education, including a few as a school principal) did the same during that period, & when my mother's mental problems allowed her to work, she was a teacher as well -- & I agree that they're criminally underpaid in general.

Still, sounds like salaries have improved considerably over the last few decades. A few years back I came across a pay stub for my mother from the mid-'60s, & it translated into a yearly salary of something like $6,000. I know the cost of living was a lot lower back then, but still.

From my own perspective, $31K & change is about where I started in my current job, which I came into with about 19 years of professional writing & editing experience (though at the same time, it was maybe 56 percent of what I was making in 11/02 when I was fired as metro editor here) ... so yeah, that doesn't sound particularly horrible, really.

Throwing money at the problem is not a solution to the problems in education, but a lack of money is the cause of many of the problems. It's how the money is used, and a lot of problems are in infrastructure, class size, student support, resources available etc. not in employee salaries. It's how the money is used no the presence of the money that determines success, and no one has a clue. The problem is everyone is looking for short term solutions for problems that have developed for decades because school boards are elected and replace key positions after every election and if people don't get immediate results their plans for long term solutions are scrapped by the next group coming in who institute their own plans (eating up money) which in turn are scrapped before they reach any fruition by the next group to come in. 

For any real change, and entire cycle of grades 1-12 almost need to be changed, because the changes needed have to be instituted at Kindergarten and follow through each successive year of grade school. Unfortunately, a student's success and reading capability is usually determined by development before children ever get to pre-school-patterns of behavior are usually imprinted and entrenched before a child ever becomes a student and meets a teacher. Children from homes where parents don't read themselves and read to children at an early age traditionally perform much worse in school than children from homes where they do. 

Money for programs to help kids learn when it will do the most good will never really fly though, and no one wants to be the one who suggests that there's not a lot to do to help students already in the system and to create the types of programs to help them are prohibitively expensive. It's easier to say we'll give raises and put money into testing and hold teachers accountable-except the issues which lead to poor test scores are inherited by the teachers in the testing years. Instead we get "experts" paid by politicians to come in and tell teachers students learn better in an rderly environment, so make sure all your desks are in neat rows (no lie, he collected $5K for every school he went to give his presentation in, and that was his most cogent suggestion, and sadly the local school boards in the region had him booked for 2-3 appearances every week throughout the system for the entire school year, because his methodology had shown the potential to increase testing scores (the way it did was to get the lower performing kids to drop out so they didn't take the test and lower the average scores, but hey, it's results right... )

It's a giant clusterf*ck and the fact it gets mixed with politics and people who spend no time in the trenches are making decisions based on cost benefit analysis rather than actual learning strategies that work, who are more concerned with getting re-elected and maintaining the status quo and keeping unions happy than with making real effective changes needed to improve educational opportunities for the citizens only assures it will remain a clusterf*ck for decades to comes. 

So yeah, throwing money at the problem won't solve anything, but if they had spent money wisely decades ago, a lot of the problems would not exist. But alas, it didn't happen and we are poorer for it. 
-M

I don't think fifty grand starting wage is unreasonable for an educator. I know of jobs that pay more after eight weeks vocational school.