I've been a big Rush Limbaugh fan for 20 years, and I seem to agree with him 99% of the time, but when it comes to teaching and public education, he's way off-base...again.
Earlier in the year I posted about a previous segment of his I thought contained serious errors, and when I went to check his web site today (as I do every day), there was a story on how teachers are overpaid. Rush quotes from a study from the Heritage Foundation regarding their findings:
We're supposed to thank all of these public sector teachers. We're supposed to thank these people for the hard work they're doing educating our students -- and we're expected to say that we wish they were paid more. We are expected to say that they are being taken advantage of by the rich, evil 1% who aren't paying their fair share. That's the accepted narrative: "Teachers, principals, administrators rebuke are underpaid, underappreciated; we don't say thanks enough for all the hard work they do. Instead we're overpaying athletes and bankers and everybody else." When in fact the takers and losers that make up the Democrat Party base never say thanks for anything. All they ever say is, "It's not enough," and that's what these guys, Richwine and Biggs, have done at AEI and Heritage.C'mon Rush: I feel plenty appreciated. Lots of people tell me thank you for what I'm doing. I didn't get those comments when I worked in television, or even when I was in the military. And I'm not demanding a raise, even though you can compare what recent graduates from business and engineering schools make versus first-year teachers and tell me who you think is underpaid. And please, please substitute teach just one day, and then tell me what you think about teachers.
Fortunately, I'm not alone. One of my favorite education writers, Valerie Strauss, wrote an article about the same study. I'm not sure she ever taught, but she at least "gets it" when it comes to this issue.
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