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Secretary of Education Arne Duncan addressed the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards on Fri., July 29 and advised the beginning revenue for educators should be $60,000. Experienced teachers, he said, should have the capacity to earn about $150,000. Bet those remarks were well received.

Just a week before, PayScales’s yearly report concerning median mid-career incomes of university graduates was published. As reporter by report, which researched data of graduates who had more than ten years of experience in their fields, graduates of Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California, have a median salary of $126,000 per year, highest in the country. What sounded like great pay on July 22 does not even come near to what teachers should earn, according to Secretary Duncan’s comments a week later. Hey, kids, wanna earn masses of cash? Forget about engineering and science. Become a public school educator. You will leave those guys from Harvey Mudd, Princeton, and Cal Tech in the dust.

As a retired teacher, I am comfortable saying that teachers make a good wage but aren’t often thought to be among the highest paid pros. The median pay for Harvey Mudd grads with ten years experience in their field is $126,000. If Secretary Duncan is to be taken at his word, he wants experienced educators to earn almost 20% more!

But why let reality slow you down when you can win friends in the field of education by suggesting things that have less likelihood of happening than a snowball’s chance in hell?

The policies of Secretary Duncan regularly demonstrate that he’s no friend of teachers. More shocking is the fact that he appears comfortable to curry favor by making remarks that any reasonable person knows is unrealistic. When a person commends something that seems both impractical and too good to be true, beware. You are about to be snookered.

By Bob Sullo. Bob has been a British teacher, school therapist, college change advisor, and college administrator. He's also a regular contributor to education, curriculum, and learning resources site Funderstanding . He's a specialist of choice speculation