Teachers In The House…And One-L’s Choice Fetish!

AFTie One-L asks an interesting question about housing incentives for teachers (and inadvertently outs herself as a big fan of choice, perhaps she would benefit from reading the AFT’s position on vouchers!). I tend to agree with her that all else equal, just pay teachers more if cost of living is a big hindrance to recruitment. However, at the extremes of the real estate market, I don’t think you can pay teachers enough to overcome really high-end real estate prices. The obvious examples (and outliers) are places like the Roaring Fork Valley (home to Aspen) but it’s also a problem in other resort/vacation areas and in places like San Jose and San Francisco, as well, where housing prices are just extremely high. In those situations targeted incentive programs make more fiscal sense and are a more efficacious solution. Some good examples of solutions are public private partnerships with local employers whose employees need good schools (paper company Kimberly Clark did this in CO) and forgivable loan programs like what San Jose Mayor Ron Gonzales is doing.