How silly to trumpet with alarm that as a group, driver’s ed teachers are the most highly paid. All that the group salary figure tells you is that young people are not choosing to become certified to teach that subject, thereby pushing the average age and experience level and, therefore, salary higher.
More troublesome to me, however, is the humiliating slap that you give to people who are literally responsible for the very lives of our high school students, suggesting that what they teach–vital information about driving legally, responsibly and knowledgeably–is inherently trivial. They take their jobs seriously and, like other teachers, deserve fairer treatment.
As an English teacher, I’m fully convinced that teaching sophomores how to analyze Julius Caesar and how to use a possessive apostrophe is worthwhile. But it’s fruitless to try to quantify how much more or less important those skills are than the essential daily skill of safely driving a car. It leads to ridiculous discussions over whether teachers should be paid more to teach about World War II, the laws of motion, Spanish verbs or target heart rates. If a subject is important enough to teach, it’s important enough to require a well-paid professional. If you drive to work today on icy roads or in blinding rain, I doubt that you’ll care whether the drivers you meet can diagram a sentence or not. Instead, you should be profoundly grateful to the driver’s education teachers who are helping to keep you safe–even alive.
