Why Alex Rodriguez Makes More Than a Teacher

By Adam at August 11th, 2009.

A favorite philosophical question often asked is, “Why does your average teacher earn a little more than one percent of what Alex Rodriguez does in a year?” There’s a simple market-based explanation for this. Alex Rodriguez can play the game of baseball like few other people and his services come at a premium in a free market.

However, Alex Rodriguez would earn far less if only the Major League Players were represented by the National Education Association and they applied the same principles of labor to the Major Leagues that they do to education.

Every baseball player would be paid based on a union scale of what a shortstop, third basemen, pitcher or second basemen was supposed to make based on their years of experience in the major leagues without regard to performance. If you proposed to give a player a bonus for making the all-star team or hitting fifty homers, you’d be denigrated for discouraging teamwork and not recognizing that because of their ballparks, players behind them in the batting order, and even factors such as height and natural hitting talent, not every player could achieve these goals, so the incentive would be unfair.

By this same standard, unions would protect players, managers, and even GMs from retribution for a team having a losing season. After all, there are a lot of factors that can’t be controlled by any single individual that can affect wins and losses.

In addition to this, we would have baseball tenure, which means that after a few years in the major leagues, you could not get rid of a player who couldn’t hit, couldn’t field, and showed no interest in making an effort at a job where there was no reward for excellence and no risk for failure.

We’d create a game full of .250 hitters because we would no longer reward excellence. Top players who could switch sports or play overseas would. Fans would refuse to tolerate it. They would turn away in disgust from a system that rewarded mediocrity.

If we wouldn’t take this from a major sport, why do we accept it from the people who are sent billions of dollars to educate America’s children?

Teachers should be paid like Alex Rodriguez. On the merit of their abilities. This must happen for America to have a Major League Education system.

Photo licensed under Creative Commons 2.0/Flickr.

Tags: Alex Rodriguez, featured, National Education Association, Sports Salaries, Teachers