SC Can Now Say, Thank God For Alabama

From the Evolution blog:

What Teachers Put Up With

Category: Politics
Posted on: February 2, 2012 11:01 PM, by Jason Rosenhouse

Here's Alabama state senator Shadrack McGill explaining why it's a bad idea to raise teachers's salaries:

If you double a teacher's pay scale, you'll attract people who aren't called to teach.

To go in and raise someone's child for eight hours a day, or many people's children for eight hours a day, requires a calling. It better be a calling in your life. I know I wouldn't want to do it, OK?

And these teachers that are called to teach, regardless of the pay scale, they would teach. It's just in them to do. It's the ability that God give 'em. And there are also some teachers, it wouldn't matter how much you would pay them, they would still perform to the same capacity.

If you don't keep that in balance, you're going to attract people who are not called, who don't need to be teaching our children. So, everything has a balance.

To answer your obvious question: No, he has no problem with raising the salaries of state legislators:

Think Progress reports:

McGill found justification in the Bible for not increasing teacher pay, but he evidently found nothing in scripture preventing him from approving a 67 percent pay increase for legislators in 2007, which increased annual salaries for the part-time legislators from $30,710 to $49,500. He said that the higher pay helped to stop corruption.