Teachers on Strike

“It’s true that in states where strikes have occurred, teacher pay and school spending trail the national average. Even conservative education reformers, like Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, advocate finding ways to compensate good teachers better. ‘But there’s a problem with simply funneling those dollars into existing arrangements because school systems spend a lot of money in ways that don’t make a lot of sense,’ Mr. Hess wrote earlier this month. ‘We have exceptionally expensive benefit systems that mean a big chunk of school funding is going to pay retirees rather than today’s teachers. Schools have added non-instructional staff at a pace that has massively outstripped student enrollment.’”