HELP PLZ!

For starters, that's a no-no

 

realgm.com should probably have something to help you out. Just keep googling things like "athlete salaries" or "teacher state salaries" throw in words like "average" to spice things up. One thing most people forget, athletes provide a service that a national (and often global) audience takes in while teachers effect a very local audience. If you're arguing that athletes don't deserve what they get paid then you have to address the fact that sports generate so much money. If the NFL is a billion dollar industry why don't it's employees deserve a fair share of all that moola? I think if you're going to argue athletes are overpaid you have to point out that our society itself places a greater emphasis on entertainment and specatcle than the political sphere. Why else would Fox News kill C-Span?

 

Just do a google search:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=do+athletes+get+paid+too+much

I think result #4 is pretty good, at the bottom there is a bibliography noting other websites.

Keep in mind, I am not advocating plagerism (sp?) at all, though.

 

Instead of asking one of your teachers what they make -- a sensitive subject -- consult the Bureau of Labor Statistics (page 6). It'll look more impressive too. Don't forget to footnote.

 

I am so glad that I am through with school forever. I shudder to think what it would have been like having to come to the BBS for help.

 

instead of writing about whether they get paid too much, i think a better topic would be why they get paid so much.

well, that wouldn't make it persuasive but it would add leverage to your argument if you think they don't get paid too much.

 

Exactly, I would take the "why" side of the argumetn as well, it would make for a more interesting topic IMO.

For example: NBA talent is extremely rare (what is it, one in a million or something like that?). Also, the NBA is heavily connected to multi-national corporations who use stars and their reach/celebrity to market their expensive products to everyday Americans, something teachers don't have.

Hope this helps somewhat...

And that "helpz" comment was just a joke, I was missin' wit ya

 

I would definately use some quotes from Latrell about being able to feed his family.

 

You may want to also consider that some of the best teachers also do have outside income streams, similar to a athlete with endorsements.

Top MBA professors at business schools, for example, may be owners of some business that is also bringing in a lot of income.

Of course, if you are using that analogy, it implies that a top MBA professor is more skilled than a good high school teacher (like an NBA player is definitely more skilled than most who only played in high school), which isn't necessarily true.

 

An interesting intersection between big money athletics and teacher salaries occurs in the realm of high school sports.

I believe Texas enacted a law limiting coaches salaries to something like twice the highest rate for other teachers or something like that because in the early 90's there were coaches in Odessa/Permian making low 6 figures.

From USA Today

Millions of dollars pour into high school football

By Steve Wieberg, USA TODAY
Football teams in two Texas high school districts, Denton and Round Rock, are settling into gleaming new stadiums that cost more than $20 million — apiece.
Longtime Georgia power Valdosta High School just finished a $7.5 million face lift of its 10,300-seat stadium, where the Wildcats outdraw and very possibly outspend small-college playoff qualifier Valdosta State.

And in Indiana — famously basketball-crazed Indiana— Lafayette Jefferson High drew up a privately financed, $8 million building project that already has delivered a 6,000-seat football stadium, complete with a high-end video scoreboard. A 22,000-square-foot athletic complex will house locker, weight and training rooms.

Want to slap your name on the Jefferson weight room? On the football office? On one of the 335 lockers? For $750,000 to $30,000 to $750, respectively, you can.

"When we're completely finished with it," says Maurie Denney, a 1965 alum now the school's athletics director, "we feel it will be the premier facility in the state of Indiana. People who come in go, 'Jeez, we're at Lafayette Jeff College.' "

The college connotation is apt.

For a while now, such free-spending, major-college heavyweights as Florida and Texas have acted as provocateurs in an athletics arms race — bumping up coaches' salaries and the plushness of facilities, inciting competitors to keep pace. It's a chase trickling down to high schools.

USA TODAY found evidence from South Carolina to Michigan, from Louisiana to Minnesota, from Georgia and Indiana to the high school football holy land of Texas.

Denton and Round Rock are participants in a stadium-building boom in Texas. The state reflects a growing taste nationwide for fancy scoreboard and video systems costing up to $750,000. More and more high school coaches are drawing better than $80,000 salaries with a select few hitting six figures.

Meanwhile, the preps are more closely resembling colleges in how they cover those costs. Selling naming rights. Collecting $100 seat licenses that guarantee season-ticket access. Cultivating private donors and booster clubs.

The trend isn't as pervasive as it is among the NCAA's biggest football-playing colleges. There were 13,680 high schools playing 11-man football a year ago and officials maintain that a vast majority operate more modestly.

Still, during an annual 45,000-mile trek across 46 states, recruiting analyst Tom Lemming has noticed the high schools "are picking it up a notch, like the colleges are.

"Some states have free-transfer rules, where players can bounce around to different regions of a city, and that's where you see the new facilities come up," he says. "Particularly in Texas. Almost everywhere I go, it seems like everybody's bragging about their new facilities, how great they are."

Charles Breithaupt acknowledges as much. "Everyone wants to keep up with the Joneses," says the athletics director of the Texas University Interscholastic League, which oversees high school sports in the state. "We're no different at the high school level than Florida State and Florida and Texas and Texas A&M. When one has a stadium renovation, the other school does the same thing. ... It is an arms race."

It comes as USA TODAY and others have raised the stakes, plugging high school teams into national rankings and crowning year-end national champions. High school games are now televised nationally.

Football makes money

The spending spiral also comes at a sensitive fiscal time, as education funding is tightening in many states. Georgia legislators, for example, made $180 million in education cuts in the state's fiscal 2005 budget. Valdosta's city school system has seen $3.5 million in state funding reductions over the past three years, according to superintendent Sam Allen, and its class sizes and tax rate consequently have crept upward.

Valdosta nonetheless budgeted $319,000 for football a year ago. By the time the Wildcats played their way to Georgia's AAAAA state championship game, the school actually had spent a little more than $419,000 on the sport — not counting another $100,000 in booster-funded renovations to the weight room and a multimillion-dollar stadium project.

That dwarfed the outlays for nearly all of the nation's top 26 high school programs, as determined by a composite of USA TODAY's year-end football rankings, which started in 1982. West Monroe (La.) puts close to $300,000 into the sport a year but the rest of those schools average about $61,000.

All but two of the schools provided spending information, though precise comparisons can be difficult because of bookkeeping differences from school to school.

Allen and others at Valdosta, which was No. 2 in the composite rankings, can draw another parallel to big-time college football: The program more than pays for itself, accounting for $469,000 in revenue and a $49,600 profit that helped subsidize the high school's 15 other varsity sports during the 2003-04 school year.

"We hear it all the time. 'We can't understand why you're spending so much money on athletics, on football. Why are you building a new stadium when they're cutting back funds for education?' " says Terry Daniel, the school system's athletics representative and keeper of the athletics budget. "I don't know how to respond to that other than if we do away with football, then you do away with all sports."

There and elsewhere, parents and other school patrons are signaling their athletic sentiments in the voting booth, endorsing local tax and bond measures. Or they're furiously fundraising. Or both.

Valdosta's stadium upgrade — spelled out in advance, along with a new fine arts center for the high school and replacement of a local elementary school — was financed by a 1% sales tax earmarked for capital improvements in education.

Suburban Detroit's Farmington Hills Harrison, No. 14 in the composite rankings, has a relative pittance of a football budget: $15,000, bolstered by some $30,000 a year from its booster club. But the school district is heavily into the better-facilities-by-taxation game; voters approved a $25 million bond issue in August to improve outdoor facilities at four middle schools and three high schools.

Harrison High will get new baseball and softball fields, synthetic turf for both its football stadium and practice fields and a football complex with a state-of-the-art locker room and training room.

Incentive comes from surrounding districts with open enrollment, giving Harrison competition from public as well as private schools for students. "The bottom line," says assistant principal Bill Smith, who oversees the school's athletics programs, "is that every student who leaves you is $8,000 less you have to spend (because of a state-funding formula based on enrollment).

"One of the things we pride ourselves on is that we offer so much in such a variety of areas that our kids will stay. But if facilities don't improve in your building or your district, sometimes that's the fine detail. ... If your band program's successful and your football team wins, that's the image your school has, even though your standardized test scores may not be the highest. People will come to your school instead. It's a shame, but it's the rules we play under."

The rationale is similar in Minnetonka, Minn., where the school decided three years ago to upgrade a football program overshadowed by powerful Eden Prairie just 15 minutes to the south. It now has a state championship-winning coach, a beefed-up booster club and a protective inflatable dome for its football field like Eden Prairie's.

Video scoreboards, too

Of course, no place does football fields like Texas.

Denton, in the Dallas area, just finished a 12,000-seat, $21 million facility being used by two high schools (with a third opening next year). Round Rock, near Austin, put $20.5 million into an 11,000-seat football and soccer stadium that's home to two district high schools and two middle schools.

Last month The Dallas Morning News listed 15 new or pending high school stadiums in the Dallas area alone with a combined price tag of $179.2 million.

That's not all for steel and concrete. Denton and Round Rock are among nine Texas high school districts that have gone to scoreboard and video system manufacturer Daktronics for top-quality video displays in the last four years. Mesquite bought two, comparable to units installed at Southern University and other second-tier football-playing colleges, for a combined $1.5 million for two stadiums.

Nineteen school districts nationwide have invested in Daktronics video systems since 2000, the overall number of units sold going from two in 2001 to four in 2002 and 2003 to 12 this year, according to the company's marketing and sales support manager, Mark Steinkamp.

In most cases, revenue from scoreboard advertising eases the financial burden.

While Valdosta-sized football budgets aren't the norm, Georgia High School Association executive director Ralph Swearngin estimates six to 10 schools in his state "would be in that neighborhood."

The AD at Athens' Cedar Shoals High, Charles Turner, so weary of trying to keep up, retired in May after 13 years on the job.

"It was getting so tough," Turner says. "Three hundred fifty thousand (dollars) for a football program? Hey, our whole athletic program doesn't operate on $350,000.

"It's not a level playing field, there's no question about it. Everybody knows the problem. The solution is the thing that's so difficult."

Some efforts have been made. Cincinnati's Greater Catholic League, whose four-school membership includes rival powers Moeller and Elder, limits the size of coaching staffs and regulates coaching stipends.

In Texas, which has seen cuts in health benefits for teachers and funding for textbooks, the UIL's Breithaupt says, "Taxpayers go, 'Wait a minute. You say we don't have enough money, but we've got these huge stadiums and we're paying these great stipends to coaches.' Those issues come up in front of the legislature from time to time, and it's important for our schools to take note of that."

At the same time, Frank Kovaleski, director of the Indiana-based National Interscholastic Athletic Administrators Association, sees much of the spending as parent-driven, and not just focused on sports. "Parents wanting grand athletic facilities want an outstanding academic program at their school, as well. ... They want the best for their kids," he says. "I don't have a problem with that."

Yes, he says, the athletics arms race "probably has trickled down. (And) I think it could grow, just like at the collegiate level, where you can have parents in this community wanting what the parents got in the neighboring community."

In effect, he says: So what?

"Are you proposing we have a philosophy where everybody would have similar facilities?" Kovaleski says. "We've not had parity at the high school level ever, nor at the college level ever. And I don't think we ever will."

 

SBISD Has Teacher Pay Scales on their Web Site.

And "position pay" bonuses for being a coach or other "special teacher".