The plural of anecdote is not data. And the singular of anecdote is definitely not data. The GP does not, of course, have any idea whatever about whether Chicago teachers care about kids.

Also, shouldn't teachers be highly paid? How much do you think they should make? Should they not be making "salaries comparable to others with their education and experience"? That quote comes from the list of 10 points from "The Schools Chicago’s Students Deserve" at http://www.ctunet.com/quest-center/research/the-schools-chic...

Do you honestly think that if the teachers don't get a pay raise but do get the other 9 points from that list of 10 then they will continue to strike?

What the market is willing to pay them.

I'd rather teach history but I get paid more as a programmer. Let the free market decide their pay.

But since you like the free market so much, isn't unionization part of a free market? Aren't strikes a perfectly valid free market way to achieve the goals of the members of the union? Or is a collection of workers, organized into a union, not part of the same free market as a collection of owners, organized into a company which protects them from personal liability claims?

And therefore aren't laws preventing certain labor actions, like Taft–Hartley's prohibitions on certain types of strikes, also a piece of anti-free-market legislation?

I disagree with the argument that teachers should get paid as much as software developers because some view them as having more worth to society. The market should decide what someone is worth.

The market isn't great and sometimes sucks big timetime, but it beats the ivory tower.

Does the single non-union person have the free choice to work in a shop without being in a union? Do the other 150 people have the free choice to demand, as part of their work contract, a closed shop? Do the union members have the free choice to strike, should a non-union employee be working there?

In so-called 'right-to-work' states, the answer is that employees do NOT have the ability to require a union shop, and do NOT have the right to strike in that case. No one in those states has the ability to choose to work in a union shop, or even to buy from a union shop instead of a open shop.

Closed shops can appear in a free market. Laws prevent closed shops. The government has "chosen" the winner, and done so in favor of non-union businesses.

Are you a big enough fan of the free market that you want to take away existing prohibitions on union power?

For the matter, the free market allows child labor. It's those silly labor laws which prevent people from having the choice to send their children to work in the fields and bring in some money. Indeed, anti-truancy laws say that we don't even have the choice of letting the children stay home during the day.

Are you a big enough fan of the free market that you want to take away existing prohibitions on child labor?

No. In fact I'm voting for Obama because I think we're at risk of losing the middle class.

I wrote what I did because I don't think comparing public teachers to private sector jobs is an apples to oranges comparison, and partly because I like to play the devil's advocate ;)

So what is the middle ground?

Or, if we are feeling ambitious, something new that works better?

Also, given that teachers are a highly desired resource with strong limits on growth, at least in the short term (i.e. it takes ages to properly train a teacher), I suspect that a completely free market would result in lots of tutors for the very rich and a few schools for the wealthy. Which historically seemed to be the general pattern in countries where education was not socialised to some degree.

"...we found that the average weekly pay of teachers in 2003 was nearly 14% below that of workers with similar education and work experience (p. 13), a gap only minimally offset by higher non-wage benefits in teaching. Though teacher earnings have fallen below that of the average college graduate in recent decades, we showed that teachers lost considerable ground during the late 1990s, as earnings of college graduates grew 11% relative to 0.8% growth in teaching."

Okay, so you don't want any teacher making 60K plus. Of course, a teacher is often required to have a bachelor's degree and many have graduate degrees. (I see that 60+% of Chicago teachers have at least a master's degree.)

The market says (from a 2011 CNN report) "Students who will graduate this spring are receiving job offers with starting salaries averaging $50,034 per year, up 3.5% from last year, according to a survey from the National Association of Colleges and Employers." On the low end of the listed salaries, "Offers for business administration/management graduates slipped slightly to $44,171."

So someone with no work experience but with a college degree can make $44K/year, and you want the upper limit, even after 25 years and for teachers living in an expensive city, to be $60K/year. This is not reasonable.

Ahh, but you say that teachers "spend time talking about interesting things", while you don't, and those joys in life should be sufficient compensation for not pulling in the big bucks. The average salary for 'Programmer V', with 8-10 years of experience is $104K. Do you think that being able to talk about Hemingway is worth $40K/year in lost wages? Don't you think that grading papers, and preparing curriculum around standardized tests, and dealing with misbehaving students is the actual comparable to 'Out of Memory' errors?

And as for complaining about unstable job security in your field - if you're that jealous of what the teachers have managed, why don't you unionize and advocate for more job security in your own field?

Also, you only do programming for the money? Strange. I started programming because it was fun, and only later did I find out that people would pay me a lot of money to do things I found fun. Like tracking down bizarre segmentation errors. I guess I should take a pay cut because I find my work to be interesting.

What? To say that I want them to make no more than 60K shows you're not even reading what I wrote.

>> I guess I should take a pay cut because I find my work to be interesting.

What again? You clearly don't get that what I'm saying, which is that people in ivory towers should not be making decisions on what people make, the market should.

I am replying specifically to those points. Okay, you're complaint is that they are complaining that they don't make enough as you do. Well, cry me a river. They can complain all that they want. Part of the free market says that they can use whatever strategy they find most effective. If one of their 10 complaints is to point out that by paying under market rate means that the best and the brightest are more likely drawn into dumb-ass programming jobs where people moan about memory leaks all day, rather than help teach the next generation of citizens what it means to be a citizen, then I say fine, they should go for it.

Yes, you get to complain all you want about their complaints. But as you have no evidence to back up your claims that listening to teenagers talk about Hemingway is part of the job satisfaction worth a $40K difference in pay, then I don't see see the problem, and you aren't worth listening to.

They are doing a much more useful job than almost any of us here.

Read all of it, is only ten items. Increased salaries was eighth on that list.