Teachers are not going to get paid more

I agree completely with Ezra from Pandagon that it' s a crying shame that tax breaks for teachers to help them buy school supplies have to be cut in order to pay for more corporate giveaways. But I do have to quarrel with this:

I remain convinced that a smart presidential candidate could win an election simply on a plan to make teaching a princely profession; there's a large constituency for such a shift (not a parent in this country would object to a massive effort aimed at attracting better teachers for their children) and, to be quite honest, it'd probably be one of the most effective programs we could create to grease the tracks of social mobility -- you attract good teachers to poor districts and you've suddenly made the educational ladder much easier to traverse. Make pay inversely proportional to the economic conditions of the chosen district and impose strict standards for accountability and you're golden.

Teachers are one of the favorite targets of red-state vitriol, and offering pay raises for them is less popular than you would think. Conservatives always counter pay raises for teachers with a pile of sexist, racist garbage that sadly convinces large numbers of people, including a few school teachers I've known.

Despite all evidence to the contrary, it is still a cherished, Norman Rockwell belief that school teachers are darling young women working for pin money and/or until the right man comes along. Therefore, it's felt they don't "need" more money. Anyway, they do it because they love the work, so it's not like we're going to get better teachers with more cash. (Why they reject this argument when it comes to doctors, I couldn't tell you.)

As for using money to attract good teachers to poorer districts, you can imagine how well it goes over in suburbia to argue that their tax money should go towards getting poor people, imagined always as some other race to boot, into college to compete with their children. Well, I can tell you, from a state that has constant screaming from the 'burbs about "their" tax money going to pay for "urban" schools that they resent every single dime spent on children that aren't theirs. It makes me furious, of course, since they expect people like me who don't even have children to pay taxes to educate their babies, but what can you do?

I wish we could make people smarter about education and better people altogether, but that's not going to happen. In the meantime, I don't think you can hang your hat on an election plan unless you can explain it to the suburbanites as benefitting them above all others.