Gov. Walker’s comparison between paying teachers and NFL players isn’t going over well

Walker thinks teachers should be paid based on performance

Not many liked Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s comparisons between how NFL players and teachers are paid.

At an invitation-only listening session in Coon Valley on Monday, Walker said, “If the Green Bay Packers pay people to perform and if they perform well on their team, (the Packers) pay them to do that.”

He went on to say that the Packers, and most businesses, pay people based on performance. 

It’s not going over well with anyone associated with teaching, from the very idea of comparing the two, to the specifics between how the NFL pay scale works vs. teachers.

“The irony that he picks the Packers, the Packers came out very strongly against the right-to-work legislation,” Jon Havlecic, head of the La Crosse teachers’ union, said. “The league minimum is like $400,000. Aaron Rodgers, he makes 20 times what a beginning player makes.

“I would be very uncomfortable making 20 times as much as another person who is teaching next to me.”

Havlecic disagrees with the very notion of being able to pay a teacher based on performance.

There are so many contributing factors – to really just how well does a kid learned and is this kid ready for college,” Havlecic said. “You just can’t (figure out) who did this and who did that. It’s just really impossible.”

Even if it was possible, where would the money come from. Havlecic says teachers, more than anything, just want to be paid fairly. 

“In part, it sounds OK,” he said. “But school budgets just don’t go up. Unless you’re going to increase their budget, they’re not going to be able to implement something like that anyway.”

Democratic state Rep. Sondy Pope said Walker’s comments show that he is “out of touch regarding the educational climate in Wisconsin.”

Pope calls his comments are an insulting disregard of professional educators and show he is uninformed about the profession.