Automatic Arguments: Teacher v. Athlete

I have a lifelong buddy named Shawn D who definitely won't read this entry due to his dedication to Budweiser products instead of Microsoft products. It's too bad, because I'm correcting one of his worst arguments.

Stop me if you've heard it, as it is one of the most popular and pathetic of the "automatic arguments": Teachers don't get paid enough, they should be paid more, and look at what athletes make, it's not fair.

This often comes in the form of "Look at what they pay teachers! It's a disgrace! I mean, why do they pay athletes so much while teachers are so underpaid!?"

The above bold represents the problem: They. Who are they? Well, they are us, and we "pay" them in very different ways.

In this automatic teacher v. athlete argument, we are talking about public school teachers. These teachers are paid using tax dollars and enjoy strong union support, summers off, and are part of the intrinsic structure of a community. They do perform a tough job and a necessary one, but they cannot be paid much more outside of what a particular community determines, and this is why the mindless comparison to athletes makes no sense. Teachers don't generate funds directly based on the function of what they do on a daily basis. They are paid from public funds, and aren't making money for a company, so their value is not measured monetarily by their contributions to the growth and profit of a business in a free market.

Pro athletes generate massive sums by belonging to leagues that draw huge television ratings and therefore advertising dollars. We don't pay them directly; we consume the products sold by the advertisers and buy tickets to the games and concessions and team apparel and other goods. Successful professional sports leagues enjoy huge revenues that are split between the league, ownership/staff (including coaches) and the players. The last figures I remember reading a few months ago showed that athletes in the NFL, for example, take about 60% of the revenue a team gets, compared to 40% for ownership. That seems fair; after all, the athletes are risking sometimes major injury and are the stars of the show. Owners are generally fat, supremely rich white men who usually sit numbly in a glass box watching the profitable action.

It wasn't always this way; before free agency owners had players over a barrel. Curt Flood changed baseball by forcing free agency in 1970 and professional sports leagues haven't been the same since. Which is a very good thing, as it comes down to a simple question: Who do you want making the most money - the players on the field who are doing all of the work and taking physical risks or the owner of the team who is doing no work and taking a minimal financial risk? I think the answer is clear.

Teachers are part of the public sector and funds must be allocated on a scale determined by several factors, none of which is related to competition in a free market. We don't buy tickets to observe them teach in person, and we don't watch them teach on television. Of course this is where the comparative aspect of the argument falls apart, even though it really wasn't together in the first place and never made much sense. But it's easy to make, you see, so it's made. The problem is, people just stop with the athletes/teachers comparison, everyone gets huffy about how wrong the whole thing is, and the discussion ends. What should happen is a discussion of how communities can find ways to pay teachers more, fire bad ones and use incentives to draw good ones. Discuss the pros/cons of the union and how both communities and teachers would be better served by higher pay and stronger incentives and how to achieve those things. Talk about how nurses and doctors are compensated compared with teachers, as this would actually be related to the conversation. Oh wait - that would take intellectual effort.

That sort of back and forth could actually be constructive and educational, while automatic arguments which don't go anywhere and cause people to agree on the obvious "wrongness" of something are as useless as complaining about the weather. It's time to retire this teacher v. athlete argument with regard to salary, which would automatically elevate any such conversation on the subject to at least one level above stupid simply by its omission.