VT: Court Backs Unqualified Education Chief

Vermont Governor Phil Scott installed an education chief of dubious qualifications over the objections of state legislators. Now the court is covering her butt. 

Our Story So Far

First, a recap of how the state arrived at this point.

Vermont had been short an education secretary for about a year when Governor Phil Scott got his heart set on Zoie Saunders, despite Saunders having a less-than-spectacular resume.

Zoie Saunders has barely any background in public education. She attended the Dana Hall School, a private girls’ school in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Her first jobs were in the pediatric health care field, then she went to work in strategy for Charter Schools USA, a Florida for-profit charter chain, in particular profiting from taxpayer-funded real estate business. CSUSA was founded by Jonathan Hage, a former Green Beret who previously worked for the Heritage Foundation and Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Florida’s Future. Here's League Education Chair Patricia Hall talking about how CSUSA rakes in the bucks:

Our shining local examples in Hillsborough County are owned by Charter Schools USA. My first glimpse of Winthrop Charter School in Riverview in November of 2011 was during a scheduled visit with then Rep. Rachel Burgin. When told the two story brick building was a charter school, I was mystified. The site on which it was built was purchased from John Sullivan by Ryan Construction Company, Minneapolis, MN. From research done by the League of Women Voters of Florida all school building purchases ultimately owned and managed by for-profit Charter Schools USA are initiated by Ryan Construction. The Winthrop site was sold to Ryan Co. in March, 2011 for $2,206,700. In September, 2011 the completed 50,000 square foot building was sold to Red Apple Development Company, LLC for $9,300,000 titled as are all schools managed by Charter Schools USA. Red Apple Development is the school development arm of Charter Schools USA. We, tax payers of Hillsborough County, have paid $969,000 and $988,380 for the last two years to Charter Schools USA in lease fees!

After six and a half years with CSUSA, Saunders moved into the job of Chief Education Officer for the city of Fort Lauderdale, a job that involved expanding education opportunities, including nonpublic schools.

 
Saunders took her first job in public education, chief strategy and innovation officer got Broward County Public Schools, in January 2024; her job there was the lead the district’s work to “close and repurpose schools,” a source of controversy in the community, according to the Sun-Sentinel. But her time as a school-killer for a public system was short, because Vermont was calling.

Once Scott announced his hiring choice (on a Friday), pushback was swift and strong. John Walters at the Vermont Political Observer, a progressive blog that has been all over this, noted that the lack of qualifications for the job was not the bad part:

The bad part is that her experience as a school killer and her years in the charter school industry are in perfect alignment with the governor’s clear education agenda: spread the money around, tighten the screws on public education, watch performance indicators fall, claim that the public schools are failing, spread the money around some more, lather, rinse, repeat. Saunders may not qualify as an educational leader, but her experience is directly relevant to Scott’s policy.

Objections to Saunders in the job were many, including her lack of any apparent vision for job. Add to the list the fact that she'd never run any organization remotely as large or complicated as a state's education department.

Saunders moved into the office April 15, but the Senate still got to have a say, and what they said was, "Nope." They voted her down 19-9, a thing which pretty much never happens.

And Scott went ahead and put her in office anyway.

Roughly fifteen minutes (okay--one whole day) after the Senate rejected her, Scott appointed Saunders the interim Secretary of Education, a thing that does not require any Senate approval and which he presumably doesn't have to move on from any time soon, particularly given she has announced her 100 day plan. Scott did not appear moved to appoint an interim during the year since Dan French resigned the post.

Scott characterized the vote as a "partisan political hit job," even though three Democrats voted with the GOP senators to approve. He characterized attacks on Saunders as "unfair," "hurtful," and "false."

Scott kept spinning in the aftermath, claiming that it was false to say that she only had three months experience in public education, even though she clearly only has three months of experience in the public education sector. As John Walters reported, Scott also tried to pin the defeat on "outside groups." Walters pointed out that Scott has previously said he favors "CEO experience more than public school experience," though Saunders doesn't have that, either.

In June, two state senators (Tanya Vyhovsky and Dick McCormack) sued the governor and Saunders for "purposefully circumventing" the Senate' authority to confirm or deny appointments. As reported by Sarah Mearhoff at VTDigger, another news site that has stayed on stop of the story:

“This is now no longer even about the secretary of education,” Vyhovsky told VTDigger in an interview. “It’s about separation of powers and the right of the Senate to do the job that it is constitutionally and statutorily given.”

So now...

Yesterday, the two sides got to speak their piece in Vermont Superior Court in front of Judge Robert Mello. Mello was appointed by Republican Governor Jim Douglas in 2010. 

Mello promised a quick decision on Thursday, and sure enough-- he issued his ruling today (Friday).

Judge Mello dismissed the lawsuit:

To the extent that the Senators argue that the Senate’s decision to not confirm Ms. Saunders prevents the Governor from reappointing her, whether on an interim or permanent basis, the court disagrees...When the legislature has wanted to so limit the Governor’s appointment power, it has simply said so.

The reference is to legislative action that specifically forbid the governor reappointing someone to the Green Mountain Care Board after the Senate rejected them. Apparently since the legislature didn't specifically list another time that the governor is not allowed to overrule them, well, too bad. 

What comes next? We'll have to wait and see, but in the meantime Saunders can keep treating the job as hers, "interim" notwithstanding, because there's no sign that the interim is going to conclude any time soon. 

 

Power and Priorities

This week the Washington Post ran a story about the millions of Americans who do not control the thermostats in their own homes. It's a feature of a deal that many folks make-- in exchange for a cut on their utility costs, they let the electric company take control of the HVAC in their home. It's one more way that the US is finding to cope with a demand for electricity that is, a certain moments, outstripping the ability to generate and deliver the needed power. These deals are pretty commonplace; at my folks house, certain major appliances cannot be run during certain mornings of the week.

This is wrapped up in a larger issue--a power grid that is struggling to keep up. Experts have been sounding the alarm for a few years now. Our electricity supply is not infinite, and our ability to deliver electricity is not limitless. 

More humans means more demand, and as demand increases, the grid is more inclined to stumble. 

Which takes me back to the conversation that we aren't having about AI.

We talk a lot about the ethics of students using AI to cheat. We talk about the various techniques and methods for taming the AI beats by embracing it in the classroom. 

But we generally have these conversations as if there is no cost to the choices we make. And that's a false assumption.

Should a family do without heat or air conditioning for part of the day so that a group of seventh graders can cheat on their homework? Should a home go through a brown out so that someone can get AI to generate a picture of Donald Trump riding a unicorn? Should anybody have their HVAC turned off so that Google can generate a bad summary of search results that people ignore anyway?

Plus, you know what happens to a commodity when it becomes more scarce--it becomes more expensive as the folks competing for it bid the price up and up. Are we all going to pay more for electricity so that AI can crank out more mind-numbing content for internet advertisers? Is steady, dependable electricity going to become a luxury item only available to the well-to-do?

Meanwhile, Microsoft has made a deal to reopen the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, site of one of America's most alarming nuclear accidents, to help power their AI data center. 

AI is a big part of this, but Crypto also eats an awful lot of processing power. And for people who love their electric vehicle because it runs on cheap, readily available energy--well, that's what folks thought about automobiles for decades. 

And all of that is before we even start to talk about the other rare resource involved, used to cool the server banks that make the magic happen. AI is sucking up mega-gallons of water. 

Maybe clever people and market forces will sort all this out. But I would feel better if we were having an actual conversation about the cost-benefits ratio involved in using precious resources to create state-of-the-art CGI porn and help Junior whip up an Animal Farm book report. AI isn't a lot of things, and one of the things it isn't is free. 

Regulation Via Phone Call

This week Leslie Postal wrote a piece for the South Florida Sun Sentinel covering the new edict from the state sex education in Florida must henceforth be non-sex education. 

Florida has told school districts around the state that they may not teach teenagers about contraception, show them pictures depicting human reproductive anatomy or discuss topics such as sexual consent and domestic violence, according to district officials and an advocate for comprehensive sexual health education.

This is all sorts of a mistake for which future generations of Florida men and women will pay a price, but there is something else worth noticing in the story.

As several folks on Twitter have pointed out, the story indicates in several spots that the state's instructions were delivered via phone calls and discussion. In other words, not via anything actually written down. 

That's a problematic choice in Florida, where the government's most common reaction to complaints over a new law or policy is "You just didn't understand it right." The "don't say fay" law wasn't saying that at all. The book not-really-bans were being implemented so bizarrely and haphazardly because people were misunderstanding it or even trying to deliberately make it look bad. Or that chaplain law, where DeSantis was thrown off by the actual words printed in the law. 

It gets hard to keep reinterpreting rules on the fly when they are actually written down. So why not simply avoid leaving a paper trail at all. Deliver your edicts verbally so that nobody can prove that you said something in particular. "What?! Well, we never. Clearly these folks misunderstood the instructions we gave them." 

Delivering directives verbally also allows a level of tone that the printed word does not. It's a way to go if you don't think a memo is intimidating enough.

If this is the new SOP for Florida's department of education, there are more difficult times ahead for educators trying to do their jobs and keep their butts covered at the same time. Good luck to them playing a political game of telephone.

 

Why These Sex Scandals Matter

I'm old enough to remember when you could have a reasonably civilized conversation with Corey DeAngelis on social media, and everyone is old enough to remember when his main social media function was to lead a small army of trolls against anyone who dared to oppose the right wing school privatizing culture panic crowd (we can all remember that because it was as recent as about a week ago).

Those days are gone, of course, now that DeAngelis has become the sixty-gazzilionth person to discover that the internet is not a private place, as he's been outed as a featured performer in a bunch of gay porn under the name Seth Rose. Since the story was broken (in a far right website of all places), DeAngelis has been erased from several websites of the many thinky tanks and advocacy groups that employed this chief evangelist for choice. 

The pro-public school crowd has been largely quiet about the news, and big time education media hasn't picked it up yet. Andy Rotherham has a piece about it, which is appropriate-- Rotherham and Bellwether have been unique in the right-tilted reformster edusphere in not jumping on the culture panic bandwagon. 

There is no reason for any of us to care what an adult human person does. Lord knows we could have some more useful conversations right now if folks weren't wasting so much time panicking over other peoples' business. 

And yet this parade of personal scandal-- the Zieglers, Mark Robinson, Seth Rose--matters for several reasons. 

For one thing, whenever someone puts on a public display of super-strong beliefs, the question always hangs in the air-- is this person a true believer, or is this all just a performance. As Rotherham writes, "it's not the heat, it's the hypocrisy." At a minimum, the hypocrisy shows us that there are extra qualifiers in their belief system ("Gay stuff is evil and bad-- except when it involves people I know personally"). At most, it shows us that they didn't believe a word of what they were saying and were just launching opportunistic attacks. And if even they don't believe in it, why should anyone else?

But that in turn reveals another problematic layer, which Rotherham touches on here:

As is often the case with this sort of thing it seems like this is probably a deeply troubled person in one way or another. Corey may have been lacking a fully functional empathy or compassion gene, that doesn’t mean you should.

It is one thing not to feel empathy or compassion for people who are different. But what sort of empathy deficiency does it take to avoid empathy for people who are, in fact, like you? What does it say about you as a human being when your private personal life does not inform your public life in some positive way?

There are layers to consider here. How can we live in an era in which it is so easy to dig into someone's background, and yet vetting seems to be failing so often--particularly when this same culture war story is repeated over and over and over again? What's the bench strength like in the privatizer world-- will a new chief choice evangelist step up soon? 

I don't wish DeAngelis ill, even though he so often wished people ill straight to their faces. At the same time, I don't wish him to be spared the karma that he has so richly and ambitiously earned; he used cultural panic over LGBTQ persons to help him sell vouchers and troll armies to try to silence anyone who dared to disagree with him. He had a choice to pursue his ambitions without being awful to other human beings, and he chose being awful. And you can't spread toxins all around you without getting soaked in it yourself. 

All of these folks are young enough to have a second act ahead of them. Maybe time will pass and their patrons will declare them born anew, and they'll be back at the same old grift. Maybe they will take a moment to look inside and come to some sort of peace with themselves; living a lie is really exhausting. Maybe it's just a chance for the rest of us to practice grace, a quality far too rare in our culture today, thanks in part to folks like DeAngelis.

In the meantime, voucher debates and culture panic will rage on and we will all have to continue sorting out people who want to have serious conversations from those who just want to play games for personal ambition.

Read To Read

Back in high school, our band director offered a piece of advice to us. When someone offers you a gig, he said, take it, no matter what it is. Playing leads to more playing. 

The Board of Directors has been bitten by the reading bug. This is not a surprise; we have read to them daily since birth and still today, even though as wild old second graders, they read independently. They are surrounded with books. There are all sorts of conditions attached to getting items like toys or Pokémon cards, but they get books often. I pulled this same trick with my older two children, the idea being to raise them thinking that of course every livable home has food and shelter and books and music in it. 

So it's pretty cool that they will read, unprompted, as a high-ranking leisure activity.  

But, lordy, the stuff they read. Some of it's pretty unobjectionable (if you have kids in this age group, I recommend the Branches imprint of Scholastic ). The Investigators are a fine time (got that pick from my grandchildren). But they've also latched onto Dog Man and golly bob howdy but those are hard to take, from the sort-of-humor to the failure to observe some basic grammar of comics (e.g. a page is a paragraph). But it's aimed at a particular audience, and boy does it hit that mark.

I don't really care about any of that. Because reading leads to more reading. 

Every one of us who is a reader has the stories. I read every Hardy Boys I could find and then I found out that Nancy Drew mysteries were cranked out by the same syndicate. I read adventures and someone handed me The Lord of the Rings and then someone saw I was reading that and handed me Gormenghast. You get older and you find your own ways to find The Next Book. Some don't click (there was this gorgeous copy of Black Beauty but I could never get through it). Some are hard to find, or were, back in the day. You keep looking. Reading leads to more reading. 

I think of all this every time I come across someone arguing that students must read certain things in a certain, like the libraries where students are only allowed to take out books that are properly leveled, or the yahoos who still insist that reading a graphic novel doesn't count. Reading leads to reading. 

I also think of this when I find people (sadly, sometimes teachers) advocating for audiobooks or summaries or excerpts, which are sort-of-reading, but not actual reading. Skimming and scanning for answers to a dumb question on a pointless quiz is not reading. Drilling discrete "skills" that are supposed to be components that can be slapped together like an Ikea bookshelf to form actual "reading"--those are not reading. 

Do we scaffold, hand-hold, help them get over technical bumps in the road, or otherwise support students as they read? Sure. But not-reading and sort-of-reading do not lead to reading. Reading leads to reading. 

Am I speaking from the place of privilege as someone who was raised in a reading house? Sure. But I am also speaking from a place of 39 years of teaching students, many of whom were not "natural" readers (nobody is a natural reader--we naturally learn to speak but nobody naturally learns to read). If you can clear out whatever obstacles are in their path, from trouble decoding to a lack of background knowledge to disinterest to a reluctance born of a history of failure to etc etc etc and get them to read--reading leads to reading.

Reading programs (scientific or not) can wander into the mistaken idea that the purpose of reading instruction is to get students to score well on reading tests. But reading tests are not the path to reading. Reading-- being on the receiving end of ideas, emotions, and information put into the world in written form-- is the one thing that reliably leads to reading. Do what you have to do to facilitate that, to make sure that students can read successfully. But do not forget that the point is not testing, but actual reading. 

ICYMI: Black Cat Nazi Porn Election Edition (9/22)

Well, that was a heck of a week for news. If you somehow missed it, God bless you--I'm not going to spoil it for you. In the meantime, here's some reading from the week.

How AI Detection Software Turns Professors into Cops, Tech as Systems of World-Making, and More

From The Markup, an interview with Maywa Montenegro about AI in the (college) classroom. Worth it for just this paragraph alone.

Even if you believe that the machine is learning, your brain is not learning. And you might be in debt—tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars—from your education. Do you really want to walk away without having given your brain, your mind and intellect, the gift of that learning, even if it’s a struggle? That blows my mind. Why would we do this? Please don’t.

English teaching, AI and the thermostatic principle

Julian Girdham with what amounts to one quick thought about AI, but it's a worthwhile one for combatting hype.

Why Teens Across the Country Are Acquiring Brooklyn Public Library’s Free Digital Cards

Who's using the Brooklyn Public Library e-card, and why? Kelly Jensen at Book Riot has stories and charts. 

Why ‘School Choice’ is on the Colorado Ballot This Year — and What You Should Know About It

Mike DeGuire with plenty of details and background on an attempt to get school choice enshrined in the Colorado constitution.

Trojan Hearse? A Right-Wing Think Tank Aims to Abolish the Miami-Dade Teachers' Union

I'm not sure I would call the Freedom Foundation a think tank; they're more of a dark money hard right anti union activist group, and at the moment, they have targeted a major Florida union local. Francisco Alverado has the story for Miami New Times.

Alabama teacher poisoned by students, unable to work: Lawsuit

It's like Alabama state and local authorities tried to fine the best way to shaft a teacher who was already in a mess thanks to students. Trisha Powell Crain has the story for AL.com.

Using Learning Science To Analyze the Risks and Benefits of AI in K-12 Education

I don't think I buy everything here, but it covers a lot of ground with some actual nuance and sources, even if it is from the Center for American Progress.

Middle School Prepares Us For Social Science Thinking Too

Jose Luis Vilson is as always thoughtful and personal about education. In this case, some of the special features of middle school.

'Educational' Screens In Classrooms Do More Harm Than Good

Clare Morell at Newsweek suggests that while we're having the big discussion about cellphones in the classroom, we might want to talk about those other omnipresent screens.

School voucher and hospital groups top lobbying spending lists for 2024 TN legislative session

If Betsy DeVos weren't rich, she would sure be broke by now. A breakdown on who's trying to buy their way to policy success in Tennessee.

Exclusive: Watchdog finds Black girls face more frequent, severe discipline in school

Claudia Grisales reports for NPR on a study from the General Accounting Office, and boy these numbers are ugly.

Some Missouri schools arming teachers in the classroom

Yeah, that's going to help. Surprisingly, at least one feature of this program doesn't suck.

Under Tennessee’s stricter school library law, some books quietly disappear

Tennessee has been a big state for panic over Naughty Books, and Marta Aldrich is reporting on how bad it's getting.

Students prefer teacher feedback over AI feedback, research finds

Behind this completely unsurprising headline, some interesting details from a study of AI paper feedback. Reported by Tanya Peterson.

In an Unprecedented Move, Ohio Is Funding the Construction of Private Religious Schools

Want your taxpayer dollars to go to a private religious school so they can build new facilities? Ohio is the state for you. Eli Hager dropped this surprising story at ProPublica.

Can It Be Constitutional for the Ohio Legislature to Spend our Tax Dollars to Help Churches Build Religious Schools?

Jan Resseger is asking the question, and while the answer should be obvious, certain privatization groups would like to pretend otherwise.

Former Oklahoma teacher says board used 'profoundly stupid work of fiction' to justify revoking license

I wrote about the latest news in the saga of Summer Boismier, but since then she's had a few things to say herself. I think it's safe to say that this whole business has not shut her up.

Does expertise protect against overclaiming false knowledge?

A research paper to prove what you already knew-- people who actually know what they're talking about don't try to pretend to know what they don't know, but people who don't really know what they're talking about will extend their expressions of faux expertise all around the block and back.

Turmoil at Lionheart Academy Endangers Charter School

Lionheart Classical Academy was meant to be the Hillsdale toe in New Hampshire, but it has turned out to be a mess that is in danger of financial collapse according to Damien Fisher at NH Journal. But also--

Who is the mysterious Florida-based landlord and philanthropist of a charter school under scrutiny in Peterborough?

Lionheart's troubles include an investor who's also their landlord, who's in Florida and who nobody has really met. Jeremy Margolis in the Monadnock Ledger-Transcript.

The Haitian Community and What We Teach Ourselves

Jose Luis Vilson again. He's on a roll this week. Here he looks at our problematic relationship with immigration and schools and society.

‘A violation against free speech’ | Penn State removes Collegian newspapers from campus

Penn State is trying to pick a fight with the student newspaper The Collegian. As the father of an alumnus, I am not impressed by the school.

Bomb Threats in Schools

Nancy Flanagan looking back on one of many teachers' less beloved memories--the bomb scare. And here we are again, for even worse reasons.

People thinking without speaking, part three

Benjamin Riley talks to an MIT neuroscientist about language and thinking and consciousness and this may make your head hurt a little, but it's cool stuff.

The Hidden Factors Influencing College Admissions Decisions

Akil Bello really knows this stuff. Here's some real advice about getting into college, from Word In Black. Plus Bello does this really cool thing where he publishes on his blog the stuff that got cut out of the original-- so you can get the rest of that piece right here. 

Watch and Share This Video.

If you haven't yet seen the Schoolhouse Rock style video for Project 2025, Sue Kingery Woltanski has you covered, plus some commentary. 

You can join me on substack for reliable appearances of my stuff in your email inbox.

Does Teacher Pay Matter?

Over at her substack, Anne Lutz Fernandez has an excellent piece entitled "Yes, What We Pay Teachers Matters." Like most everything Fernandez writes, it is absolutely on target (you should be subscribing to her if you don't already) and I just want to underline it, then wave my arms and holler "And furthermore...!"

Fernandez is looking at a new report from Sylvia Allegretto at the Economic Policy Institute that shows, among other things, that the teacher pay penalty-- the gap between teacher pay and pay for similarly-educated professionals-- has been growing over the last three decades to reach an all-time high. The gappage appears to have accelerated in the mid-90s.

Some, like the folks at Reason magazine cited by Fernandez, argue that it's not so bad because blah blah blah shuffling numbers around. But considering averages and other benefits does not improve the picture. 

Fernandez also notes the other perennial argument against paying teachers well-- teachers don't care about money and they aren't motivated by it and boy do my old fart hackles raise at every similar argument posted by someone who also posts that damned stupid "Teachers do it for the outcome, not the income" meme. 

Teaching is nor supposed to be some act of self-sacrifice, immolating yourself so that you can illuminate the lives of students. For one thing, it's not sustainable. It's not even functional, because (as they don't tell you in teacher school), you can give every last atom of yourself and it won't be enough. You will burn out early, and--bitterest of ironies--you won't even be very good at it, because what can a person who has no life of their own teach students about life?

Don't get me wrong-- teaching is absolutely a noble and supremely worthwhile profession of service. But that doesn't mean teachers shouldn't be paid well. 

But paying teachers more doesn't raise Big Standardized Test scores, some will argue (well. instead of "raise test scores" they'll say "improve student achievement" or "increase teacher effectiveness," but that just means "raise test scores"). But nobody who is serious about education will argue that the only and most important function of a teacher is to raise test scores.

The "teacher shortage" is the least mysterious issue in education. Here's Fernandez:

Of the ten states with the worst teacher shortages, the majority have pay penalties worse than the national average. But across the nation, shortages are worst in high-poverty schools, where teachers tend to be paid less. Given that these are the schools serving some of our most vulnerable children, teachers in them should be paid more—a lot more. Instead, we have had decades of chronic underinvestment in schools, particularly in urban and rural areas. This is the case in red states and blue states, as decades of austerity have denied lower-income neighborhoods and towns the resources for decent infrastructure and staffing.

Teacher shortages are both a recruiting and retention problem. The solution is not either/or: Keeping the best teachers requires competitive pay and better working conditions. I’ve written elsewhere about some of the bad ideas going around about how to solve the teacher shortage and about how some working conditions can be improved so teachers can teach more effectively. The only evidence of teachers being paid and treated poorly is not the sound of doors slamming behind them. We should be at least as worried about the effects of teachers working under stress or moving between schools as we are about them quitting the profession.

Exactly. Nor do teachers who are struggling with their professional situation make a great advertisement for the profession. I don't think it's any coincidence that the number of people choosing to enter the profession came about when students graduated from high school after twelve years of test-centered schooling had stripped autonomy from teaching.

Look, nobody enters teaching hoping to become super-wealthy. But money is power and choice. When you're twenty-something, maybe you are less bothered by having less power and choice about things like where you live and what you drive. But eventually that lack of power over your circumstances may start to chafe. And it's one thing to say, "Well, I can manage doing without some nice clothes because I'm doing noble work" to yourself and quite another to tell a spouse or your children that they have limited options because you're teaching.

And while teachers have been losing economic power, they've also been losing professional power. Not that it was ever great for some folks--it's not hard to find teachers who can tell stories of being treated like one of the students instead of like a responsible grown up professional. Add on NCLB and Common Core, both predicated on the idea that 1) schools were packed with terrible incompetent teachers and 2) we'll assume you're one of them until you prove otherwise. Teach to the test. Implement these materials with fidelity. Align your instruction strictly to these standards created by people who 
have never done your job.

Sometimes, money isn't just money. Look at the very rich--they don't need to make a few hundred thousand more because they need to be able to purchase more stuff. But money is a way for them to keep score-- "I made money on this, so I must be right and smart and winning!" 

I'd argue that in the context of a profession that has been stripped of power and autonomy, low pay becomes just one more poke in the eye. That's why increased pay, while it would certainly improve conditions, would not by itself be a complete fix. Paying people more while you keep treating them poorly will not turn the tide.

There are credible arguments that the "teacher shortage" is Not That Bad, though at least in my neck of the woods, superintendents would disagree. Some teachers are making a decent living, and some schools are doing okay with staffing. Some states are doing well at recruiting, and some are doing well at lowering the standards for the profession.

But the teacher pay penalty is one more symptom of two issues that are fundamental to so many of our education debates-- the desire to avoid paying one cent more than we absolutely have to for public school funding, and the desire not to pay taxes to educate Those Peoples' Children. Both of those desires are getting full expression in the privatization movement. 

Better working conditions for teachers would lead to a better education system. Better working conditions lead to more interest in the field, which means school districts can be more selective. Those better working conditions include a broad collection of factors, including better supports, better disciplinary backup, better curricula and instructional materials, better physical setting, and yes--better pay. It could be done. But I'm not going to hold my breath.