College Board President Gaston Caperton on the importance of teacher salaries.

Question: How important is teacher pay to teacher performance?

Caperton:    VWhen I spoke a little earlier, I was talking about how important women were when I was in school, because it was really the only jobs they had and thank gosh that’s, you know, that’s changed, but I think that when they had less opportunities, what you paid them was easier to do.  Now, you’re competing for that quality of person and we’re not competitive in the teaching field.  So, I think that how we pay teachers is extremely important.  I think that there’s also, the other side of it is that what does a, you know, what does a day in the year look like in its teaching schedule?  I think we have to have students longer [at task], which means teachers have to be longer [at task].