[isired]

The problem with teachers is, how do you stop the good, long term teachers with higher salaries from getting replaced with new teachers with lower salaries when the budget gets tighter? This happens even now, it's what some of you guys are missing when it comes to teachers and public education, where every dollar is spent knowing there will be no direct financial return. I've seen it happen in schools my wife has worked at with teachers that are just short of tenure - they make more money than rookies, so when the budget axe swings, their skills in the classroom are not the deciding factor: if you've got 30 classrooms to fill and 28 teachers and you're at your budget, you've got to lose higher paid teachers and replace them with lower paid rookies. You can't have 2 classrooms full of kids with no teachers all day. So the quality of education suffers - not the teachers, who are still young enough to go elsewhere and make more money, see greater opportunities for advancement in the suburbs or private schools (the two that I know of are in great poisons now, one running a private list grade school and the other because principal of a suburban high school - they probably look back at it as the best favor they were ever done, but again, the students were hurt, neither of the rookies are still at the school, they were not half as good as the teachers that left, and it took several cracks to replace them). And this is at a very good NYC public high school, a school that gets more than 8000 applicants for a hundred slots every year. If/when the teachers that get cut are older, though, add they'll pretty much me able to count on getting cut once their salary reaches a certain point, and they'll be less attractive to fill the positions these teachers fill now.