The Choice Channel

“When Mississippi lawmakers arrive in Jackson in January, they will be greeted with a familiar request: a pay raise for schoolteachers. Hank Bounds, Mississippi’s superintendent of education, says that keeping salaries competitive is absolutely essential to easing the state’s teacher shortage. That’s hardly a new argument. Dating back at least to the early 1980s, when Mississippi began to address the gap between teacher salaries in this state and the rest of the Southeast, proponents of pay increases have continuously said that schools can’t keep classrooms filled with qualified, competent teachers unless salary scales are raised considerably.” (12/02/07)