Earlier this year, Envision Utah announced that it was going to study the teacher shortage and come up with recommendations. Envision Utah released the results of their study. Pay teachers a starting salary of $60,000. Veteran teachers would be paid as much as $110,000. Estimated cost? $500 million! Annually!
And how is this visionary? You can’t tell me that there wasn’t anyone in the room that looked at this idea and said, “This has absolutely no chance of passing?” Where is the innovation? There was no thinking out of the box. I had expected more, given the brain trust that made up the group that Envision had put together to try to solve the problem.