Re: Re: Do teachers make enough money?

Bigthink — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 22:14:15 +0100

The question here is just what sort of fulcrum one chooses to use to push the idea of higher teacher compensation. There is a tendency to talk about how poorly some teachers are paid, but for the mass of citizens who will vote to approve higher taxes for schools, that may not be the best sort of emphasis. I think one needs to focus over and over again on the costs associated with poor schooling: high dropout rates, low productivity of school graduates, possibly higher costs of social programs that attempt to make up for better schooling in the first place, and so on. The message should be: All of us are going to pay, in one way or another, for bringing kids into adulthood and into society, or- even more expensively - for failing to do it. So just suck it up and support good schools NOW. And supporting good schools means paying salaries to teachers that are high enough to attract AND KEEP capable, dedicated people.

We need powerful new metaphors for what community schools mean to each and every community, ones that attract attention and compel a response. I find some of them in local newspaper stories of teachers that have gone the extra distance to help their students, who work long hours and give a lot of themselves emotionally. Those stories need to motivate citizens, especially parents, but also older citizens, to get out and advocate when important votes associated with schools and teachers are immanent. It is not primarily the responsibility of teachers to do this advocating, in fact they cannot do it with as much moral authority as ordinary citizens.

What is moral authority?

Bigthink — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 22:09:22 +0100

Put the phrase "moral authority" into a Google search, and you will get back something over 670,000 hits. Clearly the expression gets used a lot. But what do people mean when they use it? Many people seem to think that it means the right to weigh in on discussions involving what to do about some tough issue. Other uses suggest that it is a measure of virtue; those who live exemplary lives have moral authority. Or, that one can gain moral authority by having been put through a trial: the John McCain effect. One simple definition is that moral authority is the capacity to convince others of how the world should be. This distinguishes it from expert or epistemic authority, which could be defined as the capacity to convince others of how the world is.

What do these simple definitions leave out?

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Re: Re: Do teachers make enough money?

What is moral authority?