Base Teacher Pay on Tax Returns

Faculty at schools and colleges only work nine months a year for their base salary.  It’s a part-time job in this sense, so comparisons to year-long, full-time positions tend to be misleading. Teachers and professors can all work during the summer, making money that matches their skill sets with market demands.  Some teach “summer school,” others work at seasonal jobs, such as in the tourist industry.  Tax returns tell the real story.

      The federal government channels a lot of money into the pockets of faculty members during the summer and throughout the school year.  Grants from federal agencies such as the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Science Foundation keep teachers and professors busy with designing and implementing national programs and priorities.  Central planning has worked this way at least since World War I.

      Local people pony up the money when they pay their taxes, especially to the IRS.  The ideological bent of the federal government imposes its own will as it trickles money back to state and local middle managers.  For example, what may have started out as a well-intentioned effort to teach “World History” is now solidly in synch with anti-colonial or underdog or whatever sympathies of establishment politicians in DC.  The money has been ideologically laundered thanks to faculty who are paid to design curricular and other educational programs.  Only proposals that reflect this politically correct way of thinking are funded.  Left is welcomed, right is pariah.

       This is true even if a state humanities organization manages proposals and grants for the NEH.  The same with the National Education Association’s common core curriculum.  South Dakota’s Gear Up dream program is as good an example as any—seemingly well-intentioned, but ideologically tainted, inept, and corrupt.  The emphasis for faculty proposal writers is always pedagogical rather than content-oriented for this reason.  Gone is the faculty member from long ago who might have been supported to explore more knowledge and background connected with subjects being taught.  You could always tell content faculty because independent learning made them intellectually alive with their subjects, rather than dispiritedly paid to teach the unmotivated and intellectually unfit.

      Most taxpayers instinctively know that simply paying teachers more money in this mixed-up governmental system will not make a difference, especially if being “better” teachers simply means better proposal writing skills.  Already the disclaimer is inferred that intellectuals and well-rounded book readers need not apply.   The very idea of what makes a good teacher has been subverted.  But who cares so long as students seem content with fun-type activities?  It’s not just salary that makes for unhappy teachers, but the absence of intellectual freedom from too much top-down control and distrust.