Pay Up, Mr. Chips

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, October 06, 2021

 

The Biden administration has announced that it will expand its loan-forgiveness program for teachers and other public-sector workers, once again demonstrating Washington’s commitment to the people who are really struggling in this economy: relatively high-income college graduates with job security.

 

Contrary to everything you have probably ever read in a newspaper, public-school teachers are, as a class, relatively well-paid. The so-called teacher-pay gap that figures in our political conversation is a statistical invention arrived at by treating all college degrees the same, as though we should be shocked and scandalized by the fact that a graduate with a bachelor’s degree in computer science who works as a programmer at Google out-earns a graduate with a bachelor’s degree in education who teaches kindergarten, or that a law degree or an MBA on average goes along with a higher income than a graduate degree in education.

 

In Texas, which is not unusual among the states, the average teacher wage is slightly higher than the average wage for all full-time workers, but teachers enjoy a much higher level of real compensation once you account for their unusually generous benefits and the fact that most of them work only nine months a year. Texas, like many other states, has a surprisingly high number of public-school teachers — not administrators, but teachers — who earn more than $100,000 a year.

 

As it turns out, Greg Abbott’s savage backwater is a pretty good place to be a public-school teacher.

 

There are many reasons to believe that teachers are more than adequately paid. One of them is the fact that we do not see very many teachers leaving their posts for better-paying jobs in other fields. The message from the labor market seems to be that teachers are doing alright. This really shouldn’t surprise us. Teachers will not thank me for the observation, but the standardized-test scores of undergraduate education majors reliably rank among the lowest of any field of study. (Even journalism majors have higher scores! Barely.) Grade inflation among future educators is even more rampant than among undergrads in other fields.

 

We are not dealing with a group of people whose next-best choice was Wall Street or Silicon Valley.

 

In fact, the Biden administration has felt compelled to simplify eligibility for loan forgiveness because, between them, the brilliant people who administer the program for the federal government and the unappreciated geniuses who teach English in Milwaukee couldn’t figure out how to make the original loan-forgiveness scheme work.

 

On those blessed occasions when one encounters competency and energy in the public sector, it is possible to imagine, if only for a moment, what a different world it would be if Americans were as good at bureaucracy and public administration as we are at engineering and writing algorithms. Naïve libertarianism notwithstanding, the public sector is entrusted with useful and necessary work, including the vital work of education. But the public sector is also in effect a vast secondary welfare state for people seeking an easeful and predictable place somewhere in that vast swath of the working world between landscaping and law school.

 

They constitute la moyenne bourgeoisie of the early 21st century, and as a class they have considerable real power, including the power to command modest income premiums at the public expense. But money isn’t everything — they desire status, too, hence the myth of the heroically self-sacrificing teacher. They are sanctimonious and they vote, and so we have government by sanctimony.

 

Loan-forgiveness is a financial act, but it also is a symbolic act — a tacit admission that the work being done by teachers and other government employees is so important that we as a society were horribly wrong to ever charge them college tuition in the first place. Because our very strange country has a bank where it should have a state, loan-forgiveness is a kind of republican answer to royal honors, an Imperial Service Order for persons in Democrat-approved occupations.

 

In a vague way, we understand that there are truly poor people who have terrible debts, too, and that for the most part they didn’t get them while acquiring college degrees that opened the door to well-paid jobs with splendid benefits and comfortable retirements. You know — the poor, dumb bastards who work during the summer months. And for la moyenne bourgeoisie, it isn’t enough that these sweaty taxpayers make good on every last penny of their debts — they must also be grateful.