How Much Is a Good Teacher Worth? (2011) | Hacker News Reader

How Much Is a Good Teacher Worth? (2011)

hanushek.stanford.edu

39 pointstokenadult62 comments

The fundamental issue I see with the conclusions/recommendations is that the primary blocker preventing raising teacher salaries isn't the union. From my own time as a grade school teacher and the friends I still have in the profession, I can comfortably say that there are very few teachers who wouldn't cheerfully toss out the entire tenure and pension systems (and honestly, probably the whole union) if they were offered a pay scale comparable to that of coders in their area. The unions aren't powerful because teachers are ideologically attached to unions, they're powerful because teachers have been screwed over and over again and unions are literally the only protection they have. The unions took lower and lower salaries over the years in exchange for pensions and tenure; now everyone still wants to pay poverty wages and they want to strip away the other benefits.

Teachers know who's good and who sucks, and for the most part, they hate the bad ones as much or more than anyone else. But the actual solution (a flat trade of salary in exchange for giving up their protections) will never happen, because too many people would rather nickel and dime the education system and then whine about why the ranks of a job that requires a college degree and pays below minimum wage aren't full of the best and brightest.

Good post. I'm curious about something else in addition. I've heard from friends in teaching that there has been a massive increase in administrative overhead and concentration of power both at the school district (superindents, sub-superintendent, deputy-sub-superintendent) and the school level (increased power and poorly targeted accountability for principals+other school officials). These friends have told me that this has made their job less fulfilling and that the union gives them a way to advocate for themselves in the face of these developments. Is that something you've heard as well and do you think pay increases would be attractive enough to alleviate those issues?

Also, I keep hearing that we're spending more per pupil than ever and yet none of that money seems to end up with the people who most deserve it: the teachers. How come? Is it all going to that administrative overhead? Or are things like operating costs for school facilities going through the (literal and figurative) roof?

Consider it an anecdote, but my direct experience is exactly what you have heard. Consider that the ratio of administrators to classroom teachers is rarely lower than half the union-specified maximal classroom ratio (e.g., <1:10 administrators to teachers versus >=1:30 students to teachers).

Administration is a big issue but is still probably not the origin of the problem. For that, look to No Child Left Behind and the abject pursuit of test scores.

A true voucher type system that made schools competitive would help with that. In the current system you either work for the district or you don't. A voucher system would include many employment options and even a reason for them to advertise and promote their teachers competitively.

Money does not show up from nowhere. A district that can't afford to pay teachers can't afford to subsidize private schools. The vast majority of private schools don't increase student preformance instead they reject poor performing students.

A more sustainable solution is to have rotating class schedules, so teachers teach year round even if students don't go to class year round.

You'd have to come up with the money to pay those teachers the extra days, though. In my mother's district, their contract is for 191 days - I can't imagine that the union would roll over and work an extra 25% without getting paid for it.

The assumption is by having 25% fewer teachers you can pay the remainder 25+% more. With the extra based on the idea you don't need to pay for health insurance again. 42k * 1.25 = 52.5k which is not bad with full benefits and a pension.

We have a voucher system in sweden and it sucks. It sucks bad. Schools compete to offer better 'test scores', so the test scores go up, while the quality goes down. Sweden has been on a downward trajectory in the Pisa rankings since vouchers were introduced. Finland do it right. No vouchers, pay teachers well, high status job. As it should be.

How do you know the quality goes down?

PISA scores

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_St...

Considering the cultural and ethnic similarity between Sweden and Finland as Nordic countries, PISA score trajectory based on voucher vs highly paid public professionals is really shocking.

If what you are saying is true, that is shocking about Finland vs Sweden. Both are fairly ethnically homogenous and share similar Nordic sensibilities from what I understand, and tend to be co-compared for where they are different.

Wow

From what I've read, voucher schools don't outperform public schools, despite having advantages such as freedom to attract the best teachers, and being able to kick kids out for disabilities, behavioral issues, and low test scores.

In addition, I'm of the opinion that a voucher school system still needs to be backed up by public schools, for a number of reasons:

1. To make up for capacity shortages. There's no evidence that voucher schools would voluntarily maintain a surplus of seats, and there could be entire regions with permanent under-capacity, leaving kids with no schools to attend.

2. To bail out voucher schools that fail. At the very least I'd like to be assured (via legislation) that no public money will be spent to pay the debts of charter schools that are taken over by the state or by municipalities.

3. To educate kids who can't get into a voucher school.

Expecting healthy competition, after experiencing passenger aviation, cable TV service, or consumer banking, seems like a pipe dream.

An additional concern, which I don't know how to analyze: The number of passenger miles per day spent transporting kids to far-flung schools.

It creates constitutional issues that end up raising costs. Essentially, a school that is parochial, in order to take the vouchers, have to do crazy things like run as 2 separate corporations under the same roof, with all the headache that involves

What essentially ends up happening is long term refusal of the vouchers, private school prices go up, or you see alternatives that are even less constitutional (I'm looking at you Kirat Yoel) in order to replicate the same extra funds without the voucher headache on the private school school side.

Interestingly, in order for them to actually compete, you actually have to massively fund the school district as a public school, a la Great Neck North/South, or some of the suburbs of San Francisco, where you regularly hear about crazy good private and public schools with about equally good outcomes for their students

competition improves the gambling skills of administration it strangles those free spirits by forcing them to train the entrusted to perform under "circus-conditions" useless tricks.

Allow for a earning of teaching freedom by performance of student in reallife (aka student-tests, work-archievments). Allow teachers to take risks, aka bend the rules (skip circus-tests) by betting parts of there paycheck/benefits on there late-game-performance.

What's more, those teachers would actually often still do the job for those poverty wages in spite of the diminishing benefits for the love of their students and the job. I just watched a local school's entire population of teachers ranked as "distinguished" leave this year (8, my spouse included) because the administration and overhead simply aren't worth it.

Oh sure. Lots of teachers stick with it, live with roommates until they're in their mid-thirties, eat lots of beans and ramen, drive 20 year old cars, the works. My heart goes out to them; I wasn't able to make those kind of sacrifices. But I hate the idea that the people to whom we entrust our children on a daily basis have to make those sacrifices to do the job.

>I hate the idea that the people to whom we entrust our children on a daily basis have to make those sacrifices to do the job.

Yea anyone who deals with children , eg: school bus drivers, nurses, teachers aides ect should be paid atleast (if not more) coders in the area ( like gp suggested) .

It's too bad teachers don't get the sweet deals and salaries and pensions that school administrators and police officers get.

teaching in most schools is babysitting. That's why the pay is so low. For the schools where the primary purpose is not babysitting, the salaries are pulled down by the majority of ones where it is.

We require a college degree to assuage our consciences that schools are not about babysitting and to mask the gigantic class differences between the school districts in high property value areas and the ones in low property value areas.

Few white collar jobs have unions. The teachers do because though they may not be blue collar workers they are in a very blue collar/laborer field - babysitting.

This is not the fault of the teachers. But due to many historical artifacts, political maneuvering and societal dishonesty they are the ones primarily responsible for bridging this unfortunate civilization-wide reality gap

> teaching in most schools is babysitting.

[Citation Needed]

...but seriously, if you think most teaching is babysitting, you have a woefully narrow view of what goes on in classrooms.

No, he's correct for many schools. I had to attend a few of these schools when I was young (this was back in the 80s BTW). Even in one of the top-ranked and best-funded middle schools in my state, I had an English teacher who just gave us some busywork and watched soap operas on her portable TV. In the crappier school I went to before that in the poor part of town, most of the classes amounted to babysitting.

I don't know how it's changed since then, but I doubt it's gotten any better, though this was before the days of Common Core and statewide testing and all that. From my perspective of what I saw as a kid, some teachers were good and really tried to teach kids well, other teachers were terrible and did the absolute minimum, if that. There was no consistency, though the schools with poorer kids did seem to have more bad teachers. So from my perspective, the problem seemed to be two-fold: incompetent administrators, and crappy teachers who couldn't get rated on job performance and fired. The good teachers hung in there despite the institutional and systemic problems.

> this was back in the 80s BTW

I'll see your 30-year old anecdote and raise you my own 10-15 year old anecdote: that didn't go on in my school at all.

As an adult, involved in the local schools, I see something different. I'd invite you to consider it through a fresh perspective, not 30 year old memories of what your life was like as a kid.

I also went to different schools in different places, and another thing I noticed is that they're all very different.

Schools are administered at the local level, not the state or federal levels. So they can be run in totally different ways. Schools in richer districts tend to have pretty good reputations, whereas schools in poor ghetto districts are notorious for their bad teaching and conditions.

I feel safe in assuming that your 10-15 year old anecdote, or whatever you're seeing in your local schools, does not jive with the experience that some poor kid in Detroit public schools is getting today.

I was a physics teacher immediately after undergrad. I think I was a good teacher,as my students seemed to enjoy class, and excelled in physics later, in college.

When I left after year 3 I was making $42k a year. While that is a good salary, I didn't see myself able to support a family on that salary. So I left, went to grad school, and now work in industry.

It may sound vain or materialistic, but had I made $80k, I likely never would have left teaching. I really enjoyed being in the classroom.

In order to get great teachers, you don't necessarily need to make teaching lucrative, but you do need to be able to provide a salary that enables the teacher to support a family.

I strongly suggest reading Adam Smith on wages.

First: all work must support raising a family.

Second: he enumerates a set of five factors, remarkably enduring, which should account further for wages paid various sorts of work, based on the pleasurability, training, regularity, risk, and trust required.

https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_...

> First: all work must support raising a family.

Really?

What about the work of a Twitch streamer? Or a rock musician?

Neither of those are standard work.

What work is standard?

I don't know what Adam Smith meant by all work, other than the plain language, but I think it's reasonable to say that all work for the government ought to support a family.

The government shouldn't engage in work that isn't worth supporting the employee's family.

I would define it as work that should be reasonably expected to provide value to another human. All work of that nature should pay a living wage on which someone can raise a family.

Read Smith for the argument.

Unless you'd prefer me to read it to you over the Internets.

I think your decisions were reasonable.

Would you consider a part time teaching job now?

If so, how many days per week and at what salary?

My day job is pretty all consuming. My plan is to make enough money in the first half of my career that I could afford to teach (either high school or adjunct in college) while still living the lifestyle I'm happy with.

I've been participating in Hour of Code stuff, and still try to find ways to volunteer when possible.

> $42k a year

Any comparison of teacher pay needs to use total compensation (which includes the value of benefits). With teacher pay, the fact of summers off also needs to be accounted for.

A more elusive construct is that traditionally public school teachers were paid less, and received in return much more job security than in the private sector.

This is definitely fair. The teachers at the top of the pay scale made $97k, and got a pension equal to about 90% of their last year's salary.

But banks don't accept a great pension and summers off as downpayment on a house.

This article makes a fundamental error, and its sad they never even acknowledge it.

You can't talk about the value of a good teacher without mentioning supply or demand. Yes, I know, here we go again. But this is basic economics. If the United States decided to train 100,000,000 good teachers, you can bet that the 100,000,000th teacher will not add the same value to the country as the first. There likely won't even be anyone for the 100,000,000 teacher to teach! Yet this is what the author here assumes. That the value add of a good teacher is constant. No mention of supply or demand whatsoever.

Fortunately, there's a clever trick we use to incorporate supply and demand into value-determination. It's called the market.

Unfortunately for students, teachers unions have done their best to destroy a free market for teachers, school are usually not even allowed to pay better (in the schools eyes) teacher more as per union contracts. And this country has no doubt suffered for it. All for a few extra thousand in the average teacher's pockets, its sickening.

If this was the case, then why do private school teachers get paid less? Private schools are the free-market and are ununionized.

In case you're curious, the reason is that teaching at a private school is easier, so people who love teaching are willing to take the pay cut.

Your reasoning about why private teachers make less is completely wrong, im afraid.

First, realize that if teachers were not unionized, their salaries would without a doubt go down. Unions function very similar to monopolies in that regard.

So just intuitively we would expect in a freeer market that teachers salaries would go down. That said, even in the private sector teachers are still unionized --its hardly a free market -- so why haven't private teachers been able to negotiate as high of a pay as public sector teachers?

> why do private school teachers get paid less?

Because public sector unions have much more negotiating power. It's really that simple.

Unions don't have infinite power, the can only negotiate as much as the 'pot' allows. In the public sector, the pot size is all tax revenue. There are almost no limits on how much public sector teachers can ask for.

This is exactly why FDR opposed public sector unions.

In the private sector, schools have to deal with remaining solvent. Teachers can only ask for at most -- the whole pot of revenue. And that pot is smaller in the private sector. The national average private school tuition is approximately $9,518 in 2015. Way less than the public sector at $12,922 per pupil in 2008.

As such, private sector teachers cannot demand as high wages as the public sector teachers can.

I agree with most of this. However, teachers' unions have done their best to prevent schools from paying teachers with less common skill sets (like STEM) more than teachers with more common skill sets (like PE). It's this aspect of lack of free market and supply and demand dynamics that prevented me from staying in the classroom.

Eh, nowadays a good teacher can film his lecture and reach millions? So, school teaching doesent scale.

As the child of two teachers, my parents always told me "do whatever you want in life, don't be a teacher".

Both of them got into the profession out of a desire to teach, both ended up in administration roles out of a desire not to be poor.

The problem isn't just we "under pay" it is that we "over ask".

For those of you who haven't visited a school recently, getting into the building is more of a hassle than getting on a plane. Want to volunteer at your school, go get fingerprinted and give up your SSN to and underfunded and over worked staff and hope they don't let that amount of personal information out. Want to send your kid to school in CA, well you need to get them vaccinated, and tracking that has fallen to schools (what ever your position about this, shoving it into the department of education makes NO sense). Hell the paperwork to just enroll your kids is monstrous, its easier to register to vote, than it is to register your kids. I won't even cover sports > art(s) when it comes to budget: http://thinkprogress.org/education/2013/08/05/2412381/public... is a good read if your interested.

Meanwhile, how much of a teachers job has become acting as an extension of an overzealous CPS/child saver environment? Well the leadership at institutions is doing stuff like this: http://www.fox26houston.com/news/117783912-story and if you think insanity at this level is isolated, you just haven't looked. There are schools who have gone so far as to "ban peanut butter", for the safety of other students: your more likely to get hit by lightning than die from peanut butter.

You want to fix pay, and quality of education... give more money to hiring teachers to do NOTHING BUT TEACH. Lets pass a law that says you have to spend as much on students as you do on prisoners: http://money.cnn.com/infographic/economy/education-vs-prison...

Schools are now a direct path to jail: https://www.aclu.org/fact-sheet/what-school-prison-pipeline

>> your more likely to get hit by lightning than die from peanut butter.

In a school of 1000 students, there are students who could die by eating a shared peanut butter sandwich[1]. It's not many, but more than would be killed by lightning...I wouldn't say that warrants a ban, but I could see how some would think that.

I'm glad I'm not going to be raising kids in the U.S.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peanut_allergy

tl;dr The way to close the achievement gap between the US and stellar foreign nations (here compared to Finland) is by increasing the number of average and above teachers. Classroom size, homework, or any other measure is only weakly related to performance. Nothing beats a stellar teacher.

Proposed fixes are a probationary period for new teachers and removing the fixed pay scale that dominates the teaching profession.

Try to edit the TDLR: to tl;dr for the HN friendly crawlers out there :)

Thanks! Updated :)

> Classroom size, homework, or any other measure is only weakly related to performance. Nothing beats a stellar teacher.

I think you'll find that the impact of teacher quality on student achievement is dwarfed by the impact of student quality.

Do you have evidence for this statement? The author of the article submitted here is certainly aware of that claim (he has been researching education reform for many years), but his claim, with evidence shown, is that teacher quality matters more. I think so too, partly because good teaching can change student behaviors toward learning.

I don't see any claim in the article that teacher quality matters more than student quality. It's about interpreting teacher quality relative to the quality of other teachers as a dollar value.

There are two paragraphs, early on, that address or interestingly fail to address student quality. The first fails to address it:

> The quality of the teachers in our schools is paramount: no other measured aspect of schools is nearly as important in determining student achievement. The initiatives we have emphasized in policy discussions—class-size reduction, curriculum revamping, reorganization of school schedule, investment in technology—all fall far short of the impact that good teachers can have in the classroom. Moreover, many of these interventions can be very costly.

Replacing the students with better students is an easy and effective way to see much larger gains in student achievement. It is not proposed as a policy reform for the obvious reason that it doesn't do anything to help current students; it serves the needs of the school, not the students. (Imagine giving some parents who are trying to get their son to pass calculus the advice "toss out your son and get a better one". This works if "your son" refers to "whoever happens to be the son of this fixed couple, which may vary day-to-day", but not if "your son" itself refers to a fixed person.)

The following paragraph reports the range of teacher-to-teacher variation in quality (emphasis added):

> Indeed, the magnitude of variation in the quality of teachers, even within each school, is startling. Teachers who work in a given school, and therefore teach students with similar demographic characteristics, can be responsible for increases in math and reading levels that range from a low of one-half year to a high of one and a half years of learning each academic year.

That clause I've emphasized is an admission that the impact of student quality is high enough to make measuring the effect of a teacher difficult.

Anyway, according to this article, the difference between getting the worst teacher at a school (-0.5 grade levels) and the best (+0.5 grade levels) is one grade level of achievement. Fifth graders differ among themselves by much more than five grade levels of achievement.

> his claim, with evidence shown, is that teacher quality matters more [than student quality]

What evidence are you referring to? I see several estimates of the size of the impact of teacher quality, and not even a mention of the size of the impact of student quality.

The chetty paper is a classic. They claim that raising a teacher from -2sigma to 0 adds 1% to a student's earnings.

http://www.rajchetty.com/chettyfiles/value_added.pdf

If you scroll to table 3, you'll see how huge an effect non-teacher quality factors have. Table 5 shows huge specific roles for parent income and minority vs non-minority status.

Perhaps a simpler way to think of it: if teacher quality dominated everything else, then a teacher getting poor scores out of a class of poor black kids, relative to another teacher getting great scores out of a class of rich asian kids, would be entirely to blame. Do you really believe this?

> if teacher quality dominated everything else, then a teacher getting poor scores out of a class of poor black kids, relative to another teacher getting great scores out of a class of rich asian kids, would be entirely to blame.

Well, using the weaker-but-still-absurd claim that teacher quality matters more than student quality (but isn't necessarily the only thing that matters at all), that teacher would only be almost entirely to blame.

However, switching the teachers around should cause the poor black kids to start outscoring the rich asian kids.

A good teacher with a smart class can do wonders, while the same teacher with a dull class can barely tread water.

In small school districts like the one I grew up in, your district can bounce from A+ in the test score rankings with one class of above average intelligence students, to failing the next year when you have a class full of SPED kids, then back again the next year. I've seen it happen, it is what it is. Try as hard as you may, you can't make chicken salad from chicken shit...

Embryo selection would be cheaper and easier.

Another fix would be to train teachers better: give them actual training in classroom techniques. See "Building a Better Teacher (NYT)[0] & Teach Like a Champion 2.0 [1]

[0]http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html...

[1]http://smile.amazon.com/Teach-Like-Champion-2-0-Techniques/d...

Another fix would be to let parents choose who teaches their children. Let the bad teachers wither away.

Agree with much of first paragraph; will also point out that Finland (for instance) adds in

-- time to run around every hour for littler kids

-- hearty lunch cooked from scratch at school every day

-- social services that ensure your family has health care no matter the parental job situation

-- a school social worker and psychologist who will help you and your family.

Examples: http://www.theguardian.com/education/2011/nov/21/finland-edu... http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/10/the-joy...

Note: Interestingly enough, teachers in Finland (the country US is being compared against in the article) are fully unionised: 95 % of teacher workforce are members in the main union, OAJ.

source: http://www.oaj.fi/cs/oaj/Tietoja%20OAJsta (in Finnish)

As others have said, the problem is union contracts.

Unions, have negotiated to not pay teachers based on performance. And unless we reduce union rights, I'm not sure that's ever going to change....

The advice in the article talks specifically about the US, but I've seen the exact same issues come up in a lot of other countries (and to an extent other jobs too).

Good teachers need to be paid more, and for that to happen, normalized salaries should simply disappear. They look nice on the surface because you can pretend everybody is getting equal treatment, but the harsh reality is that people don't perform equally. I see the same issue first-hand in public healthcare: no matter how well (or poorly) you perform, you get compensated the same, which can considerably reduce incentives. Since this is generally organized through unions and collective agreements, there's also quite often considerable overheads associated with managing all of this. I think there should be base salaries that can then be re-evaluated based on performance, as a lot of other professions have done for a long time. (not saying unions themselves should go away, but I believe they should definitely rethink the approach)

At least in public settings, a lot of parents need to stop acting like they're customers ("always right"). It always baffles me to see parents offload absolutely everything on teachers, including responsibilities that should at least be shared (e.g. sex education) or downright theirs (e.g. manners). I've seen parents blame teachers for their kid having a foul mouth or for beating up other kids and whatnot, if we expect teachers to do actual education, we can't have them also play cops, it's your responsibility as a parent. Parents who fail at this should also be educated, as part of the overall education program (I'll admit that identifying failure can be a hard one, though a lot of social programs do similar things).

Not everybody needs to go to school until 18+, seriously. It doesn't help anybody, it spreads resources thin and it perpetuates the same stupid incentives (e.g. by extension, not everybody needs a college degree to end up being a manager at Starbucks...).

Stop trying to push normalized education, it's a complete disaster. Not all teachers teach the same way, not all students learn the same way (and combinations thereof), not all regions have the same culture or the same needs, etc. and it's fine, let each class adapt as it needs to, just make sure you provide equal opportunities. I get the point of systematization for assessing grades on country-wide and international levels and such, but when we get to the point that tests have become the end-goal rather simply a control, we've messed up, badly.

And I could go on... The state of Education as it is saddens me: the general population seems to assume schools will just take care of everything, teachers either end up simply not caring, burnt out or depressed (not necessarily exclusively) and many politicians have forgotten that there are actual people behind the numbers they've worked so hard to game.

I firmly believe Education, once essential needs are met[0], is the biggest factor in a successful and caring society. If we spent a fraction of the money currently spent on fixing the after-effects of bad education (e.g. policing), we'd all be better off for it, on all fronts.

[0] One could argue that basic education is essential to covering basic needs in the first place.

> At least in public settings, a lot of parents need to stop acting like they're customers ("always right"). It always baffles me to see parents offload absolutely everything on teachers

Absolutely right. The sense of entitlement there is ridiculous.

Guess what, big mouthed parent - not all precious snowflakes are above average, or deserve above average treatment. Deal with it.

Pay solution:

Since teaching quality increases when classes are small and decreases when classes are large, we can adjust class sizes to equalize the quality delivered by each teacher.

Having equalized the quality, we now simply pay teachers for the number of students they teach. A good teacher might deliver standardized quality to 90 students, while a bad teacher might deliver standardized quality to 5 students. The good teacher gets paid 18x as much as the bad teacher and the students all get standardized quality.

The main difficulty here is physical classroom dimensions.

My understanding is that research does not in fact show a strong correlation between outcomes and class sizes, so I doubt that this would work.

> It always baffles me to see parents offload absolutely everything on teachers, including responsibilities that should at least be shared (e.g. sex education) or downright theirs (e.g. manners).

There are strong social benefits to having sex education & relationship education provided by schools.

Most parents leave it to late. Their information is out of date or incorrect. They don't cover the relationship stuff, especially the consent stuff. And they tend to avoid the newer problems or they give simplistic prohibitionary advice. (An example of a newer problem is "sexting". If parents do talk about this they tend to say to girls "just don't do it"; they tend not to say to all children "don't ask other people to send you an image" or "some people are visual, but other people aren't" or "don't send unsolicited dick pics". Some people describe this as weird social conditioning, but frankly I'm okay with conditioning people to not send unsolicited images of their genitals to random strangers.)

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