Bill Richardson Quotes

To encourage more top-caliber students to choose teaching, teachers should be paid a lot more, with starting salaries more in the range of $60,000 and potential earnings of as much as $150,000.

Paying teachers more improves student achievement.

Israeli teachers are not required to hold an academic degree, and their salaries are the lowest in the Western world.

In many ways, education is a lousy business. Teachers are not normal economic actors; almost all of them work for less money than they might fetch in some other industry, given their skills and advanced degrees.

We can not wait until we have enough trained people willing to work at a teacher's salary and under conditions imposed upon teachers in order to improve what happens in the classroom.

Given the professionalism of Michigan teachers, I think they're not teaching because of the financial rewards.

I think teaching should be a vocation, and they should be paid more for it.

I think good teachers are underpaid.

If we freed up all the money in the certification process, think about how much more money we'd have to put into teacher salaries.

If teaching isn't rewarding and challenging, we're going to continue to lose our best teachers to work in other fields.

We can pay teachers a hundred thousand dollars a year, and we'll do nothing to improve our schools as long as we keep the A, B, C, D, F grading system.

To get enough of the teachers we need, teaching has to be a great job where talented people are supported and rewarded.

It is vital that teachers can be paid more without having to leave the classroom. This will be particularly important to schools in the most disadvantaged areas as it will empower them to attract and recruit the best teachers.

Teachers make a difference, and we would serve our students better by focusing on attracting and retaining the quality teachers by raising teacher pay.

I am deeply concerned with the diminution of the teaching strength of the country as a result of the disproportionately low salaries that are paid to teachers throughout the country.

Would you make it [teaching] more lucrative, increase the salaries of the women engaged in the noble work of educating our future Presidents, Senators, and Congressmen.

Teaching is the profession that makes all other professions possible and yet we do not treat teachers as professionals.

We don’t get the quality of people going into teaching that other nations do…. When people go teacher bashing, they are making the problem worse.

There are teachers' unions around the country realizing they want to improve standards of the profession, improve the quality of their profession, and ultimately attract the best and the brightest to their profession. The vast majority of teachers are dedicated and committed.

We don't look at teachers as scholars the way they do in Europe. In Spain you're called a professor if you're a high school teacher, and they pay teachers - they pay teachers in Europe.

As a former teacher, it pains me to watch such an essential and rewarding profession suffer due to government neglect.

In education, I'm going to try to find what works. One thing I want to do is improve the quality of teachers. There are a lot of people who want to go into teaching; it's fundamentally a very fulfilling profession. But people don't feel they have financial support. We pay starting teachers in particular too little to attract the quality people that we need. I want to make it easier for good people who want to go into teaching to do that.

Unionized teachers have destroyed much of the state school system.

Our teachers at the public school level are the most underpaid for the importance of their job in America.

There is no education system in the world - none at all - that's better than its average teacher.