Article from Reason by Reason Staff.

If you’re looking for a stellar example of teachers’ unions ongoing commitment to mediocrity or worse, then you need only look at their reaction to now-defeated California GOP gubernatorial candidate John Cox’s idea last month of paying top-notch teachers much higher salaries—perhaps even rivalling those earned by ballplayers and rock stars.

The unions, of course, pan the idea. One union official told The Sacramento Bee that “education should not be a competitive endeavor.”

Cox seemed to suggest in a statement to the newspaper that he engaged in some hyperbole: “Of course our teachers will never approach the pay of a Beyonce or a Lebron, but quite frankly, our classroom teachers influence, inspire and change the arc of more lives than even these music and athletic superstars.”

His idea of instituting a form of merit pay makes a lot of sense. Despite the naysaying, every successful enterprise is, to some degree, competitive.

Read the entire article at Reason.

Image Credit: By Pax Ahimsa Gethen [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], from Wikimedia Commons