Our view: Give teachers their due, but hold them accountable

A wave of teacher strikes has broken out in Kentucky, West Virginia and Oklahoma. And today, teachers are expected to walk out in Arizona and parts of Colorado.

What’s behind this sudden outbreak of labor unrest? For one thing, teachers are a unionized workforce with considerable leverage. And job markets are a lot tighter than they were just a few years ago.

But the bottom line is the obvious explanation: Teachers are going on strike because they are underpaid. Last year, the average teacher salary nationally was $58,950. On an inflation-adjusted basis, that’s down nearly 5% from 2010. In the places that are striking, the averages are mostly in the $40,000s.

Teachers are vital to advancing a skilled workforce. High teacher salaries tend to correlate with robust average incomes and high-tech economies. If teachers are doing a good job, they should get their due, which is a good bit more than they are getting now.

In recent years, much attention has been lavished on people who serve in the military or in law enforcement. But teachers have rarely gotten the recognition they deserve. This is hard to fathom because theirs is one of the toughest and most complex jobs in the public sector. A good teacher needs a solid education, impressive communications skills, and deep insights into the egos and personalities of students, not to mention those of their parents.

To some degree, teachers have brought on their own problems. Their unions are notorious for making it all but impossible to fire underachievers. This has dramatically reduced the sympathy that good teachers would otherwise enjoy with the general public. Teachers would do far better if they were willing to accept more account- ability in return for better compensation, as they have in some places.

They should also walk out only with extreme caution and as a last resort. Their strikes disrupt instruction time for children and are a huge imposition on parents.

That said, the underpaying of teachers is largely a pennywise-and-poundfoolish move by state politicians. They don’t compensate teachers adequately because they don’t have the money to do so. And they don’t have the money to do so because they pander to constituents with unaffordable tax cuts.

In some cases, the lack of funds is also driven by public employee pensions that are overly generous, not adequately funded, or both. Teachers benefit from these pensions, but the biggest beneficiaries tend to be police and firefighters.

The teachers’ strikes are best viewed as a demand for states to reorder their priorities. States need to focus on a few core missions, of which education is probably No. 1, then raise the money needed to accomplish those missions.