A tale of two professionals

This is the story of a teacher and a cop.

The teacher teaches at a local high school.

The cop works for a local police force.

These two men have varying levels of education and experience. The teacher is now in his seventh year in the local school district. He might be "just" a teacher, but just a few months ago he was recognized as the very best teacher in the state. He's the reigning Idaho Teacher of the Year.

He's being paid $38,276 a year.

The cop is finishing his eighth year on the job locally. Prior to that he had almost a decade as a police officer in another state. Sadly, this officer was involved in a very negative, highly publicized event this summer.

He's being paid $71,074 a year.

How did they get to their current pay levels? That's quite interesting.

The teacher started work here in 2008 at the annual rate of $31,750, according to public records acquired by this newspaper. He did not receive a raise his second year on the job. He didn't get a raise his third year on the job. Or his fourth year. For all his youthful vim and vigor, his abundant resourcefulness, his ability to reach students on whatever planes they inhabited, no additional rewards came his way. Only lately has the matrix treated him favorably, pushing him to just over half the pay level of the cop.

The cop's pay history is quite different. According to public records acquired by this newspaper, he started work in Coeur d'Alene in November 2006 at an annual wage of $42,182. With the exception of 2009, he received at least one raise a year until last year. Then something astonishing happened.

The police officer received a 7 percent raise in June 2013, a 2 percent cost of living increase in October, a 5 percent merit increase in March of this year, and another 5 percent pay raise three months ago. That's four raises totaling 19 percent in a year.

Both men's pay is shaped by unions. Public unions love longevity and pay handsomely for it - using your money, of course. But reward systems structured primarily around how long someone has occupied a particular chair or podium or seat in a squad car seem to consistently miss the point. Taxpayers - the public servants' alleged bosses - tend to prefer rewards based on outcomes. Many would approve of paying an Idaho Teacher of the Year a six-figure salary, we suspect, so long as average teachers made average salaries and poor teachers found other ways to earn a living. And the same goes for cops, for firefighters, for street cleaners, for administrators.

The thing about public sector, union-supported pay scales is that sometimes, the most innovative and effective employees are punished while those who have merely survived awhile are richly rewarded. Sometimes, the vast remunerative gulf between professions and professionals within a single community is staggering.

But what's hardest to understand is why these archaic, unbalanced and counter-productive systems endure. That's why the story of a teacher and a cop is a tragedy.