Wounding Children by Degrees

Ten Georgia public school teachers bought fake graduate degrees from a sham college in Liberia in order to con taxpayers into raising their salaries.

In virtually every public school district in America, teachers' salaries are almost exclusively a function of two factors: degrees held and time served. Long time teachers get paid more than new teachers (assuming they have the same academic pedigree), and teachers with masters or Ph.D. degrees get paid more than their colleagues who lack them (assuming they've been teaching about the same length of time).

Neither of these factors has any necessary or direct relationship to teaching ability. Human nature being what it is, some public school teachers naturally try to work this system to their advantage. The most common way of scaming the system is for teachers to enroll in masters programs at BSUs (Bull S--t Universities). Sometimes these programs are correspondence courses, sometimes you have to show up in person. What they have in common is that the course work is light, the grading easy, the degree virtually guaranteed, and the usefulness questionable at best.

The Georgia teachers who went ahead and bought their degrees outright, without doing any course work, have not done anything essentially different from their peers who obtain BSU degrees. In neither case is any effort made to ensure or even to ascertain if the degree leads to improved student performance.

This tying of public school teachers' salaries to what are often meaningless or bogus degrees is a travesty that cruelly harms our children's futures. Based on the results of the International Adult Literacy Survey conducted in the mid 1990s, a quarter of all U.S. 16 to 25 year olds are functionally illiterate. After 10 to 12 years of public schooling, at a total cost over $100,000, nearly one student in four is locked out of the modern economy!

Folks, it's time to reintroduce market forces to American education, to allow all families to participate in an open education marketplace in which schools are obliged to compete for the opportunity to serve our children. We need a system where schools have no choice but to pay teachers based on their actual classroom performance instead of basing salaries on some potentially worthless piece of paper, or on the length of time teachers have been employed.

Or we could just stick with the status quo, and sacrifice another generation of children on the altar of our own indifference and fear of change.