Lots of talk about education at the Thursday night debate between Fred DuVal and Doug Ducey in Tucson. It was scattered throughout the 90 minute forum. I’m working my way through the tape I made of the event, but I want to spotlight the boldest educational proposal of the night. It came from DuVal, about attracting more and better teachers to Arizona schools.
“I would go to the Board of Regents and say, any student who graduates in the top third from our universities and goes into teaching and stays for five years ought to have their student loans relieved. It is wrong for our smart students to leave university with a debt load that means they can’t make a responsible economic choice to go into teaching. We want the best of our students to go into teaching, because it’s the most important thing we do.”
College grads can into teaching with its modest salary and not have to worry about a significant chunk of their paychecks going toward paying off loans every month. If they stick around for five years, their loans are forgiven. It’s a terrific incentive for any college graduate with a desire to teach.
Focusing on the top third of the graduating class can have the dual role of encouraging prospective teachers to work harder in college so they can make it into the loan forgiveness group, and encouraging the best and brightest graduates to spend at least five years in the classroom. Some may leave before year six, but that’s still five good years they’ve given to Arizona’s children. Others will get hooked on the pleasures and challenges of the classroom, or decide to move up to the administrative level. It’s a win-win all the way around.
This article appears in Sep 18-24, 2014.
We can do better than that. Let’s give free homes to those that go into real estate sales. And new trucks to truck salesman.
Now that I’ve heard it, that makes a lot of sense.
No wonder the government is bankrupt. They keep giving away our money.
Mr DuVal is coming across, very quickly, as an idealist. Idealism improves humanity and society, but if wishes were horses, beggars would ride and he does not provide any suggestion for how to fund this idea. You are paying for a tremendous, intangible good, with a tangible cost. Many of my colleagues decry the lack of funding for our schools, while not giving our legislature thanks for making very difficult choices when faced with greatly reduced tax revenues.
I agree with the above comment, and who is going to pay for all of this? Well, one difference is DuVal wants to subsidize teaching with taxpayer money, vs. subsidizing defense contractors or people building stuff in Iraq that gets blown up. We got soaked big time on that. And those people did not employ large numbers of Americans in the US. They made large profits and, yes, some of the taxpayer money also came back to Hometown in pay us to make our own bombs and missiles, in stead of buying them from overseas suppliers.
Market forces will finally come home and kids will stop going into teaching, or college at all. Then there actually might be a real shortage of teachers (not just “good” ones). Then people might be forced to pay them more. Or we can do end runs around the whole process of educating teachers, and hire unemployed college graduates, give them a 2-week boot camp, pay them 2/3 of regular salary, keep them only 2 years, and call it Teach for America. and we can expect a perpetual supply of 2-year teachers at 2/3 cost. And we can expect that none, or very few of them, will stay in teaching and actually have a chance to get good at it, because they will be out the door in two years to make room for another newbie.
You get what you pay for. Yes, I am a teacher, and yes, I got a sizable stipend from Troops to Teachers. Guess what, I paid for my own master’s to get into teaching, I paid cash, and I didn’t need the stipend. I had savings because I am a cheap SOB. I was able to get a good education at a reasonable cost from NAU in Phoenix, and broke into teaching and after several years as a sub got one or two good breaks and now I am a teacher, and, ever so gradually, learning to be good at it. And I work for a great district in Benson.
Sorry for this Rat, but I’ve come to the conclusion that the teabagger world view is not political, it’s sociopathic.
Those kids are running through your trailer park again!
Don’t apologize for something you can’t figure out. Leave it to others more qualified.
Obama is preparing to announce a war tax. get your paychecks ready.
Truth be told, spending is a destructive addiction.
Rat T says: “Obama is preparing to announce a war tax. get your paychecks ready.”
We fought two wars…supposedly without raising taxes…and the national debt zoomed astronomically. Now the same people who got us into these wars are proposing all sorts of ways to cut Social Security or Medicare or military pensions in order to reduce the debt.
Wars are expensive, except for defense contractors who make gazillions of dollars. Unless you are a defense contractor you need to figure out a way to pay for the wars we have fought and will fight. Which do you want? The choices are “pay as you go wars” or pass crushing debt on to our children and their children?
Here are some working definitions for clarity:
noun, Psychiatry.
1.
a person with a psychopathic personality whose behavior is antisocial, often criminal, and who lacks a sense of moral responsibility or social conscience.
4.
Psychiatry. of or pertaining to a pattern of behavior in which social norms and the rights of others are persistently violated.
But since psychiatry is a left-wing conspiracy you can ignore this
Also heard those kids knocked over your jockey lawn-statue again
There’s already one of these in place. It’s called The Public Serice Loan Forgivement Plan. Any graduate student who works in the federal, city, state, county or teacher fields; for ten years has their loan forgiven. Provided, they have made payments on the loans for those ten years. Fred need to get with the program.
Back in the 60s, under LBJ’s programs, there was a teacher forgiveness of loans project for people who taught in a variety of places. Lots of good teachers were produced who have been working for a long time. Post WWII we all paid through the G.I. Bill for college educations for a great many soldiers who became teachers and worked for a long, long, time. What’s wrong with doing it now. And Fred DuVal will not be making decisions on how to fund the next war, nor on how to pay for the last two, when he is serving as our Arizona Governor. Stick to the subject, folks.
If all you can do is hurl personal insults you will continue on your path of improving nothing.
By the looks of it, when you state that reducing wasteful spending and returning earnings to the people that actually worked for and earned them is sociopathic….you have no ability to solve any problem. So you sit and wish that they force someone else to solve it for you.
You must have forgotten that the US debt has doubled since Obama took office…and he was ending wars.
Federal employees already have a forgotten loan program. They have defaulted on 98 million dollars of student loans.
http://www.studentloanforgivenessplans.org/?gclid=Cj0KEQjw7vmgBRDdnLPZp7aBlroBEiQA7_NmV0Ien2YCE5ks4HPrnySyiHfac2x3vIbt_Sjf3XcAYjUaAjGX8P8HAQ
“You could qualify for a $0 loan payment.”
I think it sounds like a great idea, and if a Republican had had such a sound, market-based idea (incentivize behavior) half of this comment stream wouldn’t be here. As to Duval being an idealist, what the &%^#% is wrong with that? Who do you want to go into politics, people who recycle old tired ideas that have yet to prove successful or people who actually dream and hope to make substantive change?
DuVal is just looking for the senior vote and of course debt ridden college graduates. I think it would be worth a side track of teaching for five years to payoff the heavy cost of college.
Seniors are finding the government coming after their Social Security checks to pay for the student loans they took out or cosigned for their children.
If you use your college degree to become a teacher and DuVal is successful in his bid to become Governor here is new way to get out of student debt before you retire.
We have allowed elections to become a promise “of how much can I get from this candidate,” and there will always be some ready to hand it out.
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the Public Treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits from the Public Treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy always followed by dictatorship.-Alexander Fraser Tyler
How right he was.