Margaret Wente, Globe and Mail
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In Ontario, the average teacher makes $83,500 a year. An experienced elementary-school teacher tops out at more than $92,000 a year. That’s a lot of money for teaching Grade 3 in Thunder Bay. Benefits are generous, and the cost is typically paid entirely by the employer. Then there are the summers off, the job security and the guaranteed pension that begins as early as 55. Someone who qualifies for the full amount will collect $63,000 a year (including CPP), which is considerably more than the average salary for experienced teachers in the United States ($56,000 in 2010-2011).
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Neither the government nor the unions levelled with the public about how fast teacher salaries were going up. The official line at bargaining time was that they’d held increases to, say, a modest 3 per cent. They neglected to include the effects of the salary grid, which ensures that less experienced teachers get raises just for sticking around.
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But in the long run, I’m not too worried. As the old alliances between politicians and public-sector unions crack up, new arrangements will take their place. Think of what our schools and teachers could do if they were liberated from the dead weight of the education bureaucracies and the unions. Sometimes a breakup can be the best thing that ever happened.