How Teachers Can Make Millions of Dollars
Mary Shaw, the Philadelphia Area Coordinator for Amnesty International, decided to lead off her unoriginal web editorial with an unoriginal observation:
“Consider the following:
“Movie star Brad Pitt gets $17 million per film.
“Basketball star Allen Iverson makes over $16 million per season.
“Hip-hop mogul Sean ‘P. Diddy’ Combs scored $3 million just to endorse a brand of spot cream.
“And – get this – Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen are each worth more than $150 million.
“We are paying these people millions of dollars to entertain our kids.
“Meanwhile, according to the American Federation of Teachers, public school teachers (elementary and secondary) make an average of $44,367 per year.”
Why do athletes and entertainers make so much more than teachers?
Simple. Allen Iverson is an elite player among the more than 400 players in the National Basketball Association. Those 400 players are an elite group, chosen from among the thousands — hundreds of thousands — of college athletes who never made it to the NBA. And the college athletes are an elite group, chosen from a group of high school athletes who weren’t good enough to make their college teams. And the high school athletes were selected over a group of regular kids who tried out for the team.
Pitt, Iverson, Combs and yes, even the Olsen twins are rated by box office, attendance figures, CD sales, and a host of other measures of their ability to earn money for the products they represent. When they stop producing, they stop earning those big bucks.
When we have a system for teachers that differentiates the Iversons from the guys playing pickup hoops in the schoolyard, or the Brad Pitts from the actor/waiters in Hollywood bistros, we’ll see some teachers making stratospheric salaries. Will they ever make $16 million a year? Only when people will pay just to watch them at work, and follow their statistics in the morning newspaper.
