The Case for $320,000 Teachers
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Teachers already love kids and teaching. What drives them away is a long list of negatives: little support from administration (especially when parents are involved), overbearing and/or micromanaging administration, way too much paperwork, too many meetings, and too much weight put on standardized testing. Large class sizes doesn't help either.
(And please don't tell me that teachers have summers off (technically, contracts end at the end of the year and start up again when the school year begins, so they are not employed during the summer). Teachers spend their summers doing professional development, getting prepared for next year (revising curriculum, tweaking tests/quizzes/homeworks), dealing with paperwork, recovering from the school year, and often doing something teaching-related for pay (running summer programs or summer school). )
I'm really not sure why you think the job needs to be made better. Teachers already work less during the year than other professionals [1], get 2-3 months in which they need to work only a few hours (if at all), get incredibly good job security and defined benefit pensions. That's an incredible comp package which most people in the private sector would love to have.
Do you have any idea how much time teachers spend grading and preparing lessons after the school day ends? If you teach 5 classes, with 20 kids per class (that's being optimistic), then every time you collect an assignment, that's 100 assignments to grade (same goes for homeworks, quizzes, tests, and labs -- holy freaking cow it's a lot of grading). And not only that, but high-schoolers will nickel-and-dime you for every point (and compare grades with friends), so you have to be painstakingly consistent. This is excruciatingly boring work, and it sucks hours of the teacher's time after the school day has ended (and most evenings).
Not to mention contacting parents after school (who believe every word their child says about how mean and awful you are (translation: you expect them to actually do work in your class and behave)), after-school meetings, hunting around for lab materials, and coordinating with the other teachers so you're all on close to the same page.
> Are you seriously comparing an easy 6 week continuing education course to full time employment?
When the school year ends, besides all the wrap-up paperwork teachers have to do, they have to deal with angry parents of kids who failed (and about whom they've been sending letters home from day 1). Anyway, after all that's done, teachers are standing in a large pile of material they've burned through throughout the year. All this needs to be organized, revisited, and made ready for next year. The school year is about Sept to June. That's, what, about 34 weeks net? Figure 2-3 homeworks per week, 1 quiz per week, 1 test every 3-4 weeks ... that's a boatload of material to edit/revise over the summer.
And don't discount recovery time. Teaching is mentally very difficult. Students are constantly testing your limits all year. Parents are forever questioning your teaching and complaining why their kid has to stay for detention or whatever. Sometimes you even have to attend meetings and explain in great detail to parents and administrators how you warned the student n times, how they knew the consequences, and how they decided to behave badly anyway. And this doesn't even account for the actual teaching -- which means being on performing in front of an audience every time (think how difficult it is to write a program with collegues or your manager looking over your shoulder). And they do it every day -- to the ring of a school bell even. And when that bell rings, you'd better be at that door, taking attendance, dealing with late passes and excuses, collecting homework, and getting the group into learning mode because you've only got N minutes until the bell rings again, they shuffle out, and the next group comes in.
No, the data I gave only lists time spent working (at home and at school), and does not break work down into specific tasks. So overall, I know teachers work 2.5 hours/week less than other professionals, but I don't know what they are doing while working. Why does this matters?
...that's a boatload of material to edit/revise over the summer.
For new teachers, sure. For experienced teachers, not so much. My first time teaching calculus was a lot of work, my second time it was pretty easy.
As for the customer-facing nature of teaching, I agree that it's not for everyone. I certainly didn't like it, but some people love being the center of attention. If you don't like customer facing work, find a different career. Don't expect brownie points for sticking it out in a career you are poorly suited for.
They can pay their best teachers more, as Pittsburgh soon will, and give them the support they deserve. Administrators can fire more of their worst teachers, as Michelle Rhee, the Washington schools chancellor, did last week."
There is a gigantic elephant in that room with "NEA" painted on its hide.
The issue is that they are very hostile to the educational administration establishment that has decided test scores are the ideal measure by which to base this.
Test scores, while they are good at measuring some aspects of learning, ultimately tie teachers' hands and force them to teach from only state-approved curricula. Especially scary if you live in a state where Thomas Jefferson has been struck from the books because the board of education has an ideology to push, and is unconcerned with teaching truth.
So if you ask most teachers, they support this sort of thing totally, and therefore the unions would too. But only if they receive assurances that standardized testing - an enemy of free thought - is a minimally important part of the evaluation system. Peer review is the ideal.
Now, this obviously still brings charges of cronyism, and it certainly will create cliques of teachers, but only rarely cliques of bad teachers. And I think it's worth knowing that we pass a widely varied bunch of knowledge onto our children, instead of only those facts that are deemed convenient and useful by powerful cliques in the state legislatures.
The problem with that arguement is that teachers are hostile to every form of evaluation that has been proposed and are unwilling to propose anything that they'd find acceptable.
> Peer review is the ideal.
No, it's not. That's like asking ford to review chevy. It leads to backscratching.
> it certainly will create cliques of teachers, but only rarely cliques of bad teachers.
You clearly don't have any experience with teachers.
> those facts that are deemed convenient and useful by powerful cliques in the state legislatures.
Those facts have the interesting property that they're at least nominally under the control of the folks paying the bills.
When news came down the pipe that Virginia was going to have a "Standards of Learning" type exam for colleges, the first thing I did was jump on board to help scope (and my plan was to help author) the test (I was physics faculty). I'm no fool: if we're going to give the administration a vehicle this powerful, I'm driving.
On the other hand, when the Standards of Learning for K-12 schools were first implemented, a remarkable thing occurred in education: teachers started talking about teaching again. Until then, every conversation with them was about how bad the administration was, how difficult parents were, how unprepared and unmotivated the kids were, etc. When those tests went in the conversation turned to: how in the world am I going to teach all of this?
How in the world, indeed.
You are also correct that the way peer review is implemented leads either to back scratching or very poor morale. The way to do it is to get folks from one institution to review folks (as a team) from another. That would place a huge demand on the personnel, though, and I think you would have trouble getting it in place.
Teachers aren't even evaluated at the level of "more exams passed than last year" or overall results relative to comparable schools.
Sort of the same way that companies do it, really. Engineering firms, or good ones anyway, rely more on subjective judgment of management ("so-and-so is a [terrible|great] engineer") than they do on code metrics. I think they'd have some of the same morale problems if they were heavily metrics-based as well: imagine if every year your company ran a script over their VCS+bug-tracker with whatever metrics were currently in place, and fired everyone who scored in the bottom 5%.
Also, have you ever written software for the government? I think if you had, you'd yearn for an objective evaluation procedure as accurate as standardized tests. For your proposal to work, you'd have to carefully set up incentives for the judges and try to figure out how to keep the politics to a minimum.
If "teaching to the test" is a bad thing, that just means you have a bad test. With varied enough questions, the easy way to prepare for a test is to understand the material. I agree that teachers shouldn't be judged directly by the scores of their students, because not all students have equal background and ability. But any time you have an opportunity to measure something objectively, jump at the chance. That goes for software, too.
You can judge most of the goals in retrospect, say 20 years out: what proportion of kids ended up in jail, what proportion ended up with good jobs, what proportion are informed citizens capable of reading the news and participating intelligently in the political process, what proportion are able to handle their personal finances, nutrition, health-care, etc. successfully, what proportion won prestigious awards or started successful businesses, and so on. But writing a test for 18-year-olds to take that predicts all that accurately is pretty hard, and as far as I know, no tests have shown even plausible evidence of their predictive power in that respect, especially when you control for demographics.
Look at it this way: We do not want students to all know the same things. We want to increase the amount of learning, but ideally, only 30-50% of the knowledge kids learn should be held in common. In a perfect world, the remaining 70% would be different from classroom to classroom. Varied experience is crucial to making our society function better.
So if we take varied experience as a value we want to encourage in our classrooms, you cannot have a good standard test, because the standard is more amount and quality of knowledge than a predefined notion of what knowledge is necessary to get by in the world.
And likewise, because this is how I value it, I would prefer that standardized testing be around one-third of the evaluation score, if not 20%. I want teachers and school administrations to be free to take big risks like teaching everyone computer science instead of math - because teaching a well-thought-out course of study is not a risk. Classrooms should definitely do instruction in ideas of the past (history is always vital), but more than anything they should be incubators for new ideas.
Now, the current system focuses on meeting minimums, and most standardized tests quickly hit a ceiling. I'd much prefer to see tests that attempt to gage the entire breadth and depth of student learning. Practically, that's going to require different questions asked of different students, or you'll end up with a 10,000 question exam. But I still consider it standardized testing. The SAT and AP exams are great - we should do more of that earlier.
Sure they are, but to what degree do they really reflect on the teacher? A teacher can be doing a fantastic, patient job with a student, and make zero progress all year with a student. That work is meaningful, but its effect could take years to show up. Can we measure this? Sure. But it will be very error-prone, and ultimately less effective than just asking the other people in the building who is worthless (everyone knows except the worthless themselves.)
We're not looking to find the best and brightest - we as a society have made the decision that we're not going to pay that much. We just want to get rid of the unequivocally awful.
There needs to be some attempt at normalization between teachers and school districts, of course. But there's room for qualitative measures instead of quantitative ones. Especially when the tests seem (unintentionally) designed to punish teachers for teaching poor/minority/ESL students.
Especially when the tests seem (unintentionally) designed to punish teachers for teaching poor/minority/ESL students.
This is utterly false if we reward teachers based on deltas rather than absolute values, that is we compare actual performance to statistically predicted performance and reward/penalize teachers when actual performance exceeds predicted performance.
Isn't there a DailyWTF about a company that did just that and found that the testing people conspired with the developers to invent bugs, locate them, and then collect bonuses for fixing them.
Why should they want to work under a system like that?
What independent agency would you want devising metrics to figure out how good you are at your job while knowing nothing about the specific challenges you deal with?
The independent agency which currently devises metrics to figure out how good I do my job is the stock market. My bonus = % of profits.
When I was a professor, I favored (and suggested to the department) that some higher authority should devise midterm and final exams. It would a) allow us to measure teacher performance, as opposed to student opinion [1] and b) allow comparison of student performance across classes.
[1] To get good student evaluations, all you need is easy tests + jokes + good looks.
Public education isn't a market good, it's a public good. Toilet paper and oatmeal are market goods.
The labor market for teaching is in fact a free market. Any given municipality can pay whatever they want to pay, and get the talent they're paying for accordingly. The fact that teachers are getting laid off in something like 80% of municipalities the last few years means you don't even have to scrape the bottom of the barrel.
Agree on the statements about professors. All the same. If you were working on something more qualitative as part of a team, and not a lone trader, we both know there's no quantitative way to assess your work. Lines of code is a joke and other metrics invariably bring in subjective measures.
EDIT to add: If you're pro-free market, shouldn't it be up to municipalities to choose which teachers they want to keep or fire as they see fit, without some bureaucrat telling them that according to some BS test scores they have to do such and such?
Also, the labor market for most govt employees is not remotely a free market. Unions keep out the competition, essentially getting no-bid contracts to supply labor. They play politics to elect politicians who will give them what they want - in many cities the teachers unions essentially control the political system. You might as well call Halliburton's no-bid contracts in Iraq a "free market". It's a "free market", closed to new entrants, with no negotiation between the buy and sell side, but with the buy and sell side colluding to rip off the public.
In any case, just because it's tough to quantitatively measure some development does not mean it's tough to measure teacher performance. Students either know the material at the end of the term or they don't, simple as that.
All the whining about how it's impossible is really just an attempt by teachers unions to avoid accountability. I'm sure Halliburton would love to avoid accountability for their performance in Iraq and elsewhere too, doesn't mean we should take them seriously.
In almost no city does the teacher's union essentially control the political system. The police union is always, always more powerful, for one. They're just more politically engaged, people who are driven by power. Several private unions will be more powerful. And that's leaving out every power broker that isn't a union (representing most of the power).
"All that whining about how impossible it is to measure programmer productivity is just an attempt by developers to avoid accountability." You might consider that you don't know a single thing about teaching in a non-college or lower-class environment. No offense. I don't claim to, either. But I'll at least listen to what every teacher I've ever met says about the matter.
So what's the analogous mechanism going to be? Are you ok closing entire schools if they have lower than average test scores in their class (whatever this means)? Otherwise, how do prevent the whole system from devolving into politics and cronyism?
Even if you are exceptional in this regard, the average person will not do well. And I have read a lot of reviews in my life from college students.
Until you know the subjects well, you are only evaluating whether or not you liked it.
That's a big if. From what I've seen, this is practically never done - absolute values are the norm.
As an aside, pointing out that something is bad does not put the onus on me to invent something better. The sensible conclusion is to not do anything until something good has been worked out. The alternative is to do something just for the sake of appearing to do something.
But that is the point! If the union makes it impossible to fire a bad teacher, you must try to limit the damage that teacher can do, hence the set curriculum. If the union makes it impossible to single out bad teachers for this kind of prescription, then you must do it to ALL teachers.
Get the union out of the picture and the situation becomes self-correcting.
In fact, it seems like you're just taking it as a given that unions are the problem and everything will be made better if you take away the teachers' first amendment rights to assembly and petition for redress. Which has nothing to do with teaching students, which is the problem at hand.
Anyways as long as they're the only one that actually sticks up for teachers then they'll have a place in the world. You just have to smack them around once in a while when they're totally wrong about something, like their resistance to the Obama admin's effort's at merit pay.
EDIT: From the article, kindergarten being the most predictive grade is fascinating.
Who is sticking up for teachers there? The NEA, which supports age over talent? Or the charter, which is focused on attracting and retaining good teachers?
I said that, in black and white, right there on the page. Or gray, because it's being downmodded because people who don't like the implications of it.
Anyways, yeah. Charter schools. Whole other bag of worms. I like them in theory, in practice the way they're funded usually tends to be crooked -- quick example, in the town I was a Selectman in, a charter school started up. It cost us about 7k/year to educate a student, round numbers. Cost the charter school, say, 9k. Every student that left us for the charter school, 9k was taken from our budget and assigned to theirs. To add insult to injury, we actually had to pay to bus the kids there on top of it, plus additional unitemized strains on the police budget, etc. That's not exactly kosher.
Not defending, just explaining. I'd love to throw the NEA under the bus - the problem is, nobody else stands up for teachers.
Argue with straw men much?
It's not a straw man. State and local budgets have been strapped since 2002-2003 or so, all the way through the supposed "boom", and it got worse after the collapse.
The stimulus bill, for example -- it was like 40% tax cuts, had a bunch of earmarks, but the local aid that would've helped teachers was what got stripped out in order to get the last couple votes. Congress can reduce the deficit by cutting state aid. States can balance their budgets by cutting local aid. School districts get stuck with the lack of funding from their congressman's admirable devotion to balanced budgets. In between voting for putting 2 wars and a $50 million senior center for his district on the credit card.
I'm just giving you the truth - you can accept it or not.
I dispute the term "everyone else" - most people who criticize teachers for being overpaid and underworked (which is uncommon) also criticize pork barrel spending.
Regarding my original point, that nobody stands up for teachers.. I mean look at that stimulus bill. Teacher pay makes up a huge portion and often an outright majority of local budgets. When local budgets are crunched, and it's either lay off teachers or raise taxes, guess which way the local populace usually goes?
Everyone wants something for nothing.
http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf
They are also overpaid, particularly if you account for the value of all their fringe benefits, including summer vacation, tenure, defined benefit pensions, early retirement and gold-plated medical care (all of which are very expensive). In fact, they are usually paid right on the money if you look at salary alone - a 45 year old teacher with 20 years experience in NYC gets $83-95k/year (equivalent to $99-114k/year if they worked all year). That's not bad even for NYC.
http://schools.nyc.gov/Offices/DHR/TeacherPrincipalSchoolPro...
It gets even worse when you realize teachers tend to be low human capital individuals, at least compared to other college grads. Most likely they would be below average if they pursued other professions: http://www.ets.org/Media/Tests/GRE/pdf/gre_0809_interpreting...
You're proving my point: everyone wants something for nothing, and nobody stands up for teachers.
Is this surprising to you?
Look at many of the discussions about piracy. Many people feel it is their "right" to download and use software that would otherwise cost them money. It doesn't surprise me that people would have this same mindset for other things in their lives.
But in the long run, it's going to make you stupid.
A new study finds that "[s]tudents who had learned much more in kindergarten" did better in later life.
"The economists don’t pretend to know the exact causes. But it’s not hard to come up with plausible guesses."
"Mr. Chetty and his colleagues ... estimate that a standout kindergarten teacher is worth about $320,000 a year."
Voila, "The Case for $320,000 Kindergarten Teachers!"
Thank you to the teachers out there.
Perhaps the answer will lie in something like The Teaching Company attracting the best and brightest teachers and selling their lectures for the expository parts of instruction, and your average teacher will be reduced to a glorfied Teaching Assistant (TA).
I'd like to see the details of the study before jumping to conclusions. There are just way too many variables.
--Henri Frederic Amiel
What absolutely kills me is that we have all of these super smart people dedicating their careers to this, and billions of tax payer dollars spent, and the education system that will eventually become the consensus is going to resemble the earliest modern education system in 19th century Germany/Prussia. (It's a fascinating history itself—the US public school system was originally designed as clone of the German system.)
Oh and after incentiving and selecting teachers for teaching talent based on performance becomes the norm, here is the next question that the education system will confront:
Are great teachers who get to spend one academic year with their students much less effective than even greater teachers who instead stick with the same group of students, and teach the kids for several years of k-12?
After a million studies, experimental schools, and policy debates by people who don't even know what they're talking about, the new consensus will be yes, the greatest teachers are the most effective when they can become semi-permanent tutors for kids over longer periods of time. And then we will have arrived back at the original German system of grad-level teachers who are state-funded, private full-time tutors for small groups of kids.