Two of our most important and vulnerable needs are educating our children and obtaining healing comfort when we are sick. Yet we pay our teachers and nurses a barely livable wage and deny them the support and materials they need to do their jobs – jobs we are keen on being done well. We are quite vocal about the bigger picture of education and health care, but silent about their front lines. Why?
The easy answer about teachers is that we budget too tightly so as to keep a lid on taxes. The American public knows that raising teachers’ pay will result in increased property taxes because that is how education is funded. So what, just do it. What is more important, better education for your children or a new car? And don’t just think a 20% increase will do it. Considering their role in society, teachers should be paid twice or three times what they are currently paid. That will attract more talent and allow schools to demand good performance. Give higher pay and develop merit-based performance requirements, not tenure. Offset the cost by dropping the outdated pension approach. The irony about teacher compensation is they put up with stinky pay in their working years to get the reward after retirement when it’s almost too late. Put the money in real time and demand real results. Oh, and also, hold administrators to similarly real-time, stringent performance standards. That will improve education dramatically.
So if we pay the front lines well and demand their performance in return, who holds their feet to the fire? Your local school board. It is the most important vote you can make for your children in our democracy. Forget the US Secretary of Education, she is irrelevant. If there is one thing Trump can teach us it is that our best democratic governing can be done locally and by our states. Forget the national debates about charter schools and testing. Treat you school personnel respectfully and professionally, vote in competent school boards, and you will get results.
Nurses also get a bum deal but for entirely different reasons. It is mainly because our health system is so corporate that the money is upside down. Just as the executive-worker pay ratio is so outrageously high in many companies, it is the same with health care. Insurance companies, hospital administrators, and the new money-gutting insurance middlemen get fat like hogs while the healthcare front lines struggle to feed their kids and get their patients enough blankets. Yet the adage that “pigs get fat but hogs get slaughtered” is unlikely in health care because the pigs and hogs own 18% of GDP. Consumers think that we can’t pay nurses better because health care is already so expensive. It seems however, that there should be a way to double our nurses and their salary if we could only figure out how a hospital must charge $30 for a Band-aid.
Teachers and nurses are so highly skilled, yet they live at the borderline of poverty and get so little respect in our society. That seems ironic and, perhaps more importantly, unsustainable. Not only is America’s physical infrastructure in jeopardy, so is it’s human infrastructure.