Heritage Foundation & American Enterprise Institute call teachers stupid and overpaid

[proud2BlibKansan]

The Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute have put out a report purporting to show that public school teachers are overpaid. It's 23 pages of elaborate statistical justification of right-wing beliefs, all built on a foundation of right-wing assumptions. The basic claims are that while teachers are underpaid relative to other people with similar levels of education, in fact they are overpaid because education programs are easier than other majors and also, teachers are stupid; that public school teachers earn more than private school teachers and this shows they earn more than the market should support; and that people who leave teaching earn less while people who enter teaching earn more, therefore teachers are overpaid.

Each of these claims deserves more extensive attention than I can give it, but let's take a look at a couple of points that jumped screaming off the page at me. We get a sense of where this is going when the report's authors acknowledge that comparing teachers to people with similar educations shows that teachers are underpaid, but argue that they need to look deeper because (PDF):

If we added an indicator for architects to the regression, for example, we would find that architects receive a wage premium over similarly skilled workers. Yet few people would immediately conclude that architects are “overpaid.”

Got that? Architects aren't overpaid because ... they're architects! Who could think such a thing? Not a bit of inherent class bias operating there. Teachers, though ...

more . . . http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/11/01/1032086/-Heritage-Foundation-andoverpaid

[Scuba]

1. After carefully considering the Heritage Foundation report...

<a href="http://imgur.com/T3WSy"><img src="" title="Hosted by imgur.com" /></a>

[hobbit709]

2. And I say the idjits at the AEI and Heritage Foundation are

Extremely stupid, arrogant and vastly overpaid.

[JDPriestly]

3. Funny. Back in the 1960s when I went to university, we considered

business majors to be the least intelligent. Accounting and economics were OK, but business? Takes not smarts at all.

And, of course, it's the business majors of my time who fund a lot of the research and rubbish published by organizations like the Heritage Foundation today.

I someone trying to avenge all the jokes that were told about them way back when?

[proud2BlibKansan]

4. Same here. I was in college in the 70s.

The guys who didn't know what to major in were in Business. And it was mostly guys. Don't even remember any women.