Pay Teachers More

I just got a part time job teaching college algebra at a school that mostly teaches nursing and massage therapy. The pay is ok.

The reason I got the job is that the state and regional accreditation boards require that anyone teaching college level courses must have a Masters degree and at least 18 graduate credit hours in the subject.

The previous teacher they had to let go has a bachelor's in math. I've got an M.S. in EE. I sat in on his classes my first few days on the job; he's an excellent teacher.

So what ended up happening is this school, which can't afford to pay much, now can't find anyone with an M.S. who's willing to teach algebra full-time. (surprise, surprise)

While the board has the intention to raise the standard for algebra teachers, the rules have the opposite effect since they limit so strictly who can teach that the schools have to hire anyone who meets the criteria whether they're good or not.

It's not so much the pay but the unbelievable amount of hoops you have to jump through to teach. I'm sure a lot of smart people would love to teach part-time if it didn't take years to get certified.

I really, really wanted to teach high school physics. I fell in love with physics, and I fell in love with my high school physics teachers. I've always liked kids.

My Sophomore year of high school, I really thought about getting the teaching physics degree. It was basically a teaching degree with a Physics minor. I went and talked to my high school physics teacher, and he told me this:

Don't. We went over all the salary benefits, and all the possibilities. I'd be starting at 29k (Utah), about 4k more than I would make fulltime working at a grocery store. The max salary was about 55k if you'd been there a while and had a Masters I believe. We also talked about student loan forgiveness that comes along with teaching at a Title 1 school.

He told me to do this: Go into physics. Get a real degree, maybe a masters. Work in physics, make some money, save some money, live your life, etc... He said I was a smart enough person that I won't have any problem with this (kind, encouraging words)

He told me after I did this, if I still want to teach, not only would I be in a better position to teach, but I'd be a better teacher from the real world experience.

So, someday in the future, I plan to teach. Right now, I have a degree, a job, and I'm paying off student loans and saving up money. Someday, I'd still love to teach. I got a taste of it being a TA for a bit in college. I still talk to this teacher once a year or so.

Numerous studies show that education majors is the US have among the lowest composite ACT and LSAT scores of any major.

http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2006/02/ranking-sc...

There have been various explanation for this phenomenon which started in the 1970s and grew since then. Among the most interesting hypotheses is that traditionally smart women went into teaching as one of the few careers available to women who did not want to become young mothers and housewives. But this century, with more opportunities available to women, smart women become doctors, psychologists, screen writers, etc. Yet teaching is still a career dominated by women, leaving the less qualified students to take the available positions.

One of the startling factual claims in the article is that there were times in the United States, and are now places in the world, where lawyers make little better compensation than schoolteachers. Really? I recall reading in the 1990s in a book about education policy in the United States that schoolteachers are more numerous than doctors, lawyers, scientists, and engineers COMBINED. If there are that many more schoolteachers than doctors and lawyers, it would be surprising for the schoolteachers to be as well paid. Kristof makes the interesting point that one way to get teachers more pay, which does seem to be borne out by international comparisons, is to allow good teachers who can handle that to teach larger classes. When my wife grew up in Taiwan, the typical elementary school class size was sixty pupils--an especially small class might be only fifty.

A friend of the family, an ex-engineer, in retirement decided to teach to give back to the community. She was teaching the remedial students at the local high-school. Her students did better on the standard tests than regular students, her first year.

She was called in, and told to stop making the other teachers look bad or be fired. She quit.

This same high-school gave the teacher of the year award to which ever teacher had the most complaints against them...

Unfortunately, when I have told this story to other teachers in different districts, they have not been surprised.

This is so broken.

Before you get worked up over this topic, realize that there are some teachers who are exceptional and others that are quite bad.

The main difference between teaching and other fields is that once a teacher is hired, it's very unlikely he/she will ever be fired for poor performance.

As a result, many schools contain both a few exceptional teachers and a few real duds. Sadly, the exceptional teachers are paid based on seniority just like the duds are, and some duds have been there a long time and are earning decent salaries and very generous pensions.

I don't think anyone would object to paying exceptional teachers more... the problem is that we all know of some really horrible, lazy teachers whom it would be a travesty to pay more.

Sure, if someone waved a wand and doubled teacher salaries, the quality of new teachers entering the profession would increase, but this would not address the vast majority of existing teachers.

It's not complicated... the only reason any firm is able to hire and retain skilled employees is because skill is rewarded compared to mediocrity. This is not the case for teachers, except in the form of non-monetary rewards (often exceptional teachers are greatly respected, but this doesn't pay the bills).

As long as we pay teachers based on seniority and other backward measures, we'll have people who are just not cut out for teaching responsible for educating our children.

I'm not advocating any sort of across the board measurement of what constitues success. This should vary by district. The important thing is that just like any other profession some people should fail to make the cut and should find work they are better suited for. As it stands, we give these people an incentive to continue teaching our children. It's no wonder they resort to trying to strengthen their union... they certainly aren't getting any rewards from being bad at what they do.

Note, I'm talking about the 20% of teachers who could be considered poor. I'm not all that concerned about the ones who are average or above average, since they are not the problem.

The issue of pay is a red herring, btw.

I think it's interesting to tie this to recent news about Khan Academy.

According to various talks by Sal Khan, many kids used the free videos to educate themselves about math etc. to a level better than most kids achieve in a school.

Better eduction, without teachers, for free.

If you look at YouTube's numbers for how often those videos are watched, it's in tens or hundreds of thousand of views.

I assume that most of those are from kids who watch them to learn something (I can't fathom a different reason for watching a video on multiplication).

That means at least tens of thousands of kids have been educated - the model works as a mass education medium.

I think that the current school model is broken for many reasons and lack of quality teachers is only a small portion of it, so discussing how to rise quality of teachers by paying them more misses the larger point.

We should be thinking how to fix all of the problems.

It just happens that Khan Academy model is the only realistic way (that I can see) to actually fix the system. The fix is by inverting the traditional model. Instead of one person (teacher) lecturing 20+ kids (who all differ in their current understanding of topic and how quickly they can learn new information) for an hour and giving homework assignments, the kids learn from videos, at their own pace, and teacher are there to assist when a kid reaches a stumbling block.

The above description doesn't fully convey how this works but you can find out more via videos on http://khanacademy.org. Khan Academy is already doing pilot studies with some schools and results (unsurprisingly to me) are promising.

We could pay teachers more if they removed Tenure and Teachers that don't preform. In what other industry does it pay you for not preforming. I am tired of thinking you need to throw more money at the problem. You need to remove the biggest problem. Those that don't preform. If you remove the teachers that don't preform, not only would you have more money, but have better preforming students. I am tired of this overall. Its not a money thing. Its a Union thing. Wisconsin is right to remove the gross weight behind union negotiations.

I am a tad bit tired of articles like this that fail to point out private school teachers are actually paid less than public school teachers. So, if your doing comparisons of similar positions, government workers are making more and have better job security.

That said, I would be happy to pay teachers more for a 9 month position if they had a 4 year BS in Math, Physics, Chemistry, etc and a minor in Education. The general Education major for 7+ grade teachers is a joke and doesn't give our students someone who knows the subject.

Paying an English teacher and a Math teacher the same is also wrong. One degree has a higher market value and we need real Math teachers, not general Education people with some Math classes. I guess I'm saying I would like the Education degree removed for a minor or certificate program for High School.

The article's examples of other countries seem a bit cherrypicked. Finland is a wild outlier among western nations.

http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-abou...

Singapore and South Korea do a pretty good job of educating Asian cohorts. But there are actually several Asian cohorts that do quite a bit better - for example, Asian Americans in Texas or Connecticut.

http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2011/01/how-well-do-above-...

So it looks like the huge amounts of respect and pay given to Singaporean and South Korean teachers aren't really buying a lot in terms of educational output.

My four point plan for decent education:

1. Eliminate credentialing programs and requirements: complete waste of time and money, plus they weed out the smart people who can't abide the thought of wasting 1-2 years of their life.

2. Eliminate tenure and fire the worst 5% of teachers about whom there is a consensus that they suck.

3. Go back to traditional curriculums: lots of homework, lots of memorization, lots of reading the classics, lots of writing.

4. Zero tolerance for bad behavior in the classroom --kick them out of school, make it the police's problem that there are thugs on the street without babysitters.

This is how good private schools do it.

the problem with a publicly subsidized education system and semi-monopolized teacher system (credentialism) is that market forces are not shaping teaching compensation. the decision of how much to pay teachers handed down from on high whether that be from unions, legislation, public policy what have you will ALWAYS be less efficient than supply and demand.

Isomorphic alternate: stop padding school payrolls with overpaid, administrative, non-teaching staff.

The core message of the column makes perfect sense.

Expensive technology and boutique classrooms don't improve student performance without great teachers.

Just like a business, you can't buy excellence with furniture and computers - you can only hire excellence with great people.

I would fully support tripling teacher pay in general, with merit-based payscales and greater accountability.

Find the money by changing the student-teacher ratio and getting rid of expensive technology in the schools.

Where would you rather have kids go to school - in a large classroom taught by Richard Feynman or Bucky Fuller, sitting at wooden desks with a blackboard; or in a small intimate setting with iPads and Cisco Telepresence systems, but taught by Gladys from the DMV?

Let's try a thought exercise. If we pay engineers more, we'll get safer buildings. If we pay police officers more, we'll get safer streets. If we pay doctors more, we'll get better care. You see how this works? More pay attracts higher quality individuals, but it's a zero sum game. Those people are coming from some other industry. So if you'll pay teachers more, you'll have a lower quality of service elsewhere. That low-quality teacher just became a doctor and the doctor became a teacher. Not good. I want the best and brightest doing the most critical work, not babysitting children.

it should be "Pay Good Teachers More, Fire Bad Ones"

I never understand why people get overly emotional about teacher salaries but not other public positions like fire, police, military, etc. While I empathize (my mother and 2 sisters are teachers), they do only work 9 months out of the year, and less than 40 hours per week. And teachers insist on remaining unionized, basically ensuring bad (non-criminal) teachers can't be fired once they get tenured after 2-3 years in most states. And the degree needed isn't difficult or technical to earn compared to laywers, doctors, engineers, etc. So I think their salaries at their current levels are justified.