The High Cost of Low Teacher Salaries
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Also, grading is a bitch. I left the profession mostly because of the insane hours you need to spend grading (well, high school anyway). Students will nickel and dime you for every point while comparing with their peers. "Sally missed the minus sign in step C of problem 4 but got the same number of points as me? WTF?" WTF indeed.
Silly waste-of-time after-school meetings about meeting standardized testing goals is also a complete waste of time as well.
Add to that, you have to be up and out of the house every morning by 6 am or so to be on time. If you have kids, forget about seeing them for breakfast before their school day starts. And that means giving up your evenings too because you need to be in bed early.
As an aside, I knew a teacher who "retired early" basically due to a mental breakdown from the stress. I suspect most teachers know someone who's done the same.
Edit: And if you're male, all it takes is an unsubstantiated claim of impropriety from a female student to end your career immediately.
Easily the worst and most stressful job I've ever had. And it really sucks because I was an excellent teacher. Got great reviews from observers and students. My students learned a ton. I really liked teaching too.
http://www.nytimes.com/1995/05/31/us/new-breed-of-teachers-b...
I am a teacher in private practice. I like teaching through my community nonprofit organization much better than I would like teaching with a lot of school bureaucracy, and I can give my clients better service too.
Also, I don't see how it helps the kids who's parents can't or won't pay for it.
I had a lot of teachers with serious personality problems when I was in public school. Not all, of course, and I'm not saying you're one of them - but the implicit suggestion you're making (side with the teacher by default, don't listen to the kid's side of the story) would be even worse than the way it is now.
>Also, grading is a bitch. I left the profession mostly because of the insane hours you need to spend grading (well, high school anyway). Students will nickel and dime you for every point while comparing with their peers. "Sally missed the minus sign in step C of problem 4 but got the same number of points as me? WTF?" WTF indeed.
Suck it up. I TAed a bunch of CS classes in grad school, including a couple proof classes, and yes grading can be a bitch (CS103 was especially rough). And believe me, Stanford students know how to ask for points back. But that's part of the job. If you can't justify the grades you give, and/or you can't grade consistently, then you deserve pushback from students.
>Add to that, you have to be up and out of the house every morning by 6 am or so to be on time. If you have kids, forget about seeing them for breakfast before their school day starts. And that means giving up your evenings too because you need to be in bed early.
I agree that schools start stupidly early in the US, but when your workday ends between 2:30 and 4:00, I don't think you can really complain about having to go to bed early.
I don't mean to dispute that teaching is stressful, and I'm all for much much higher teacher salaries (and the end of seniority, teachers' unions, ridiculous benefits, rubber rooms, etc.). But your complaints don't really seem reasonable.
If the professors in the course had to have done both teaching and grading, there's no way they could have sustained the level of instruction and assignments required by this substantial course. One or the other would have suffered. I assume the same was true for your courses.
My point: college courses with TAs don't neatly map to pre-college courses because in elementary, middle and high school, one teacher has to do it all.
And even though it's apples to oranges, I'll state for the record if I hadn't been taking three classes, working on my startup (which I launched during school), and (one quarter) interning at NASA, I think I would easily have had time to put together and deliver lectures in addition to the office hours/recitations/review sessions I was holding, problem sets I was grading, exams I was helping write, robots I was admining, class logistics I was organizing, and whatever else happened to fall under the umbrella of my TA duties any given week.
>Sure, if you had not been doing all of those other things, you would have had time for the remaining duties of a teacher. But you wouldn't have time for much else.
Again, it's beside the point, but actually I think I would have had time for quite a lot else. Do you really think working for NASA, starting your own company, and being a full time grad student at once take up the same amount of time as preparing and delivering a couple lectures a week?
As to your final question, to quote my freshmen year English professor, "Anything is hard if you do it well." The course I had in mind was relatively new, and as such its contents were in flux. The projects and lecture material were under constant revision. If the professors for the course I TAed had had the TA responsibilities as well, they would have had time for little else but the course.
> I had a lot of teachers with serious personality problems when I was in public school.
During my time teaching I didn't meet any. Not saying there weren't any, just that I didn't run across any.
You must understand, high school kids are kids. They do the same stupid things we did when we were kids. They try to push bad behavior as far as they can until there are repercussions. Teachers are adults and professional educators. We've seen the behavior patterns over and over and over again. We try our damned best to let and get the student to win, but some are determined to get themselves thrown out.
Teachers and students are not on the same level, and it totally undermines the teacher's authority for administration to even hint that they are (eg, by having them sit together and "referee" a discussion).
> > Also, grading is a bitch.
> Suck it up.
Hey, you want educated professionals to take teaching jobs? I'm telling you that it's a metric ton of grading work -- and it's not fun like programming or problem-solving; it's grinding slow repetitive work that makes you miserable. I've worked plenty of other jobs. I've worked outside in the summer heat. I'm telling you that grading -- and dealing with the fallout from grading -- is miserable, and if you want good professionals to stay in the career for more than their first year, you're going to have to find ways to make it less miserable.
> I agree that schools start stupidly early in the US, but when your workday ends between 2:30 and 4:00, I don't think you can really complain about having to go to bed early.
That's the thing: it doesn't really end between 2:30 and 4. There's meetings after school on many days. There's paperwork. There's parent contact that must be carefully maintained (which provides necessary documentation if the student fails). And then there's grading. And that's if you're not doing any coaching or other after-school clubs.
> (and the end of seniority, teachers' unions, ridiculous benefits, rubber rooms, etc.)
If it weren't for teacher's unions, then any time that administration wanted a teacher gone, they would be gone. Teach a government class and point out something bad about the current local gov't? Gone. Superintendent gets a complaint about you? ("He assigns my kid too much homework!"). Gone. Superintendent simply doesn't like you? (Regardless of how good a teacher you are.) Gone. Teaching any controversial subject that a parent decides to complain about? Gone.
Yes, the health benefits are good. Perhaps this makes up to some degree for the lower pay.
I've got no idea what you mean by "rubber rooms".
Okay, I agree with that, but...
>Teachers are adults and professional educators.
Where did you teach? I'll move there to raise my kids. Seriously - I grew up in a reasonably good school district (Livingston, NJ) and while there were some good teachers, many (I want to say most, but don't trust my memory to be undistorted) were atrocious. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livingston_Public_Schools
>I'm telling you that it's a metric ton of grading work -- and it's not fun like programming or problem-solving; it's grinding slow repetitive work that makes you miserable.
To be clear, when I say a proof class, I mean that I was grading 30 problem sets (8 TAs, 240 students - this was CS103) of 13-15 problems, around 10 of which were proofs, every week. And many of the students were learning how to write proofs in this class. Trust me, there's nothing as painful to grade as that.
>If it weren't for teacher's unions, then any time that administration wanted a teacher gone, they would be gone.
It wouldn't be perfect. But I prefer a situation with some false negatives to a situation with zero true negatives. That is, I'd rather have most bad teachers and a few good teachers get fired than have no teachers get fired. May be less fair to the teachers (if you're of the school of thought that would rather let 100 guilty men free than punish 1 innocent - depends how you define fair) but it would be far better for the students.
>Teaching any controversial subject that a parent decides to complain about? Gone.
It's not clear to me why this would follow from a lack of teachers' unions.
>I've got no idea what you mean by "rubber rooms".
Do you have no idea what I mean by "Google" either?
In any case, I'd appreciate knowing specifically which parts you thought were condescending, since I wasn't trying to be, and it's not obvious to me on a reread where I was. Would you still have found them condescending if I hadn't said "Stanford"?
Anyway, I have no personal gripe and am not trying to tear you down; consider this just a friendly reminder that a little humility and open-mindedness goes a long way, especially when you’re talking about an issue about which it’s clear your analysis is coming from outside and is mainly anecdotal, and the guy you were talking to is an expert speaking from first-hand experience.
* * *
For what it’s worth, on the actual subject at hand, the vast majority of my teachers (in public schools in a mostly middle-class/upper-middle-class suburb at the edge of Los Angeles county) from elementary school through high school were frankly quite excellent, and worked their asses off for their students, easily spending 60 or 70 hours a week on school-related activity.
> It's not clear to me why this would follow from a lack of teachers' unions.
The union sets up fairly strict protocols that the administration must follow if they want to fire a tenured teacher (the administration can, of course, let go a non-tenured teacher at any time).
The school administration is led by the superintendent of schools -- an elected position. The superintendent gets paid a lot of money and wants to get reelected. If parents complain to the super -- and they do -- then the super wants to placate them to ensure reelection.
Kids are kids, and they exaggerate (and often lie) to their parents about school. Parents want to believe that their child is telling the truth about mean Mr. Teacher picking on them, being too tough on them, grading them too harshly, or assigning too much homework. So parents quite often complain to the principal (who works directly for the super and is not part of the teacher's union), or even directly to the super.
At this point it comes down to what is the low hanging fruit? Of these problems what are the easiest (and/or best value) to solve? The biggest change I've seen is the relationship between teacher/school and student/parent. That same problem is all too often described as a "student's attitude" problem. But really the school administration and parents are just as complicit.
We all had the same ornery students around when we were in school. Arguably I was one of them. The way I remember it is we just had a much shorter leash. So, in the end, I was forced to just comply and "play the game". Which was a healthy life lesson. If I was given the options that these kids were, I'm sure I would have exploited fuck out of it. And I can promise I never would have learned that sometimes you just have to jump through all the hoops and "play the game" to get things done.
This is what comes from an over-reliance on GPA, which can be just as misleading as an over-reliance on standardized testing. We have the latter where I come from (Ireland): university placement was determined entirely on the basis of nationwide exit exam scores when I left school and my understanding is that little has changed. Your school grades are utterly irrelevant and have no other purpose than to help students, parents and teachers estimate the national examination outcomes. you could turn in no homework for 5 years, get Fs in everything, and be on permanent detention; it will have no effect whatsoever on your university admission prospects.
This is good in some respects, flawed in others. Kids that don't fit in at high school but are smart and determined to do well academically can't be held back by discriminatory attitudes among their teachers, for example; on the other hand, those with a highly developed aptitude in a single area (eg math) or who are heavily involved in relevant extracurricular activities are at a disadvantage because such things carry no weight in the admissions process. Of course, kids that don't like high-pressure test situations are really screwed even if they consistently perform well in other contexts.
> This is what comes from an over-reliance on GPA,
Certainly true.
Also, it's necessary for when a teacher has to defend themselves for failing a student. If you need to fail a student, there is high pressure against doing so. Fail a student and parents and administration both complain loudly. You've got to have all parent contacts (throughout the year) documented (time, who you talked to, what was discussed), as well as all test and exams available for combing through by interested parties.
When NCLB hit, her school was unsurprisingly deemed "failing." The response was to focus exclusively on test scores, eliminating any program (art, sports, music) that did not directly traslate into better performance on the benchmark test. And yet, because the students still couldn't speak English, nothing much changed and the school was taken over by the state, which meant the principal and many of the teachers were fired.
How does this sort of thing make any sense? How are the teachers to blame for their unprepared students? These teachers are working in the hardest districts with the most students of greatest need, and our national response is to punish them.
It's distressing to see in many of these discussions exactly the attitudes described in the article: teachers are lazy, they're overpaid, they even get summers off! Never mind that their salaries are so low that many need to find alternate work for the summer to make ends meet, or that it is impossible to get all the work done during the school day, necessitating often long nights.
There are bad teachers, just as there are bad programmers and bad doctors. We should try to help them become better teachers, and fire them if that's not possible. But we shouldn't castigate an entire profession as a result, and we should acknowledge that if we actually wanted good teachers, we will have to pay for it.
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/03/05/why-we-must-fire-bad-teac...
Likewise, some places have very high academic standards, and in other places creationism is considered a valid element in science currricula. Academic quality is not strongly correlated to unions' bargaining ability, as far as I can tell.
First, teachers outside of pretty narrow bounds will never be more productive. It takes one teacher to teach 20 students. In 10 years it will take one teacher to teach 20 students. Thus there is no productivity growth while, if you want people to be teachers, you have to eventually pay them more. So assume you don't have a hard time firing teachers; I just found a cute way to save a whole lot of money! Fire everybody with more than 10 years experience, ie all your high salaried employees.
Second, I don't think you'll possibly get good employees without strong unionization. Who would be stupid enough to teach without a union contract? Real people want to do things like own homes, put down roots, start families, and have some job security; that's enormously risky in an area with monopsony employer(s). I'm a software engineer, so there are dozens to thousands of employers in reasonably sized cities, whereas there are typically only one public school district and perhaps a handful of private schools. That's a lot more risk for the employee, since if I have a personality conflict with my boss, there are plenty of other buyers of software engineering. What happens to a teacher if he or she has a conflict with his or her principal? It's not like there are tons of employers around, and if the answer is that employee is just sol, don't expect smart hardworking people with choices to become teachers.
The market can handle delivery of education just fine without complicated unions and pay scales. All we need to do is to ensure that every family can afford to send their kids there (vouchers, or whatever).
Saying, "At my school...." is sort of like saying, "I got a web server to work on my home machine and now I'm ready to handle Amazon level traffic." You gotta think about how it's going to scale. You gotta think about unintended consequences and whatnot. Pointing out an example of how one particular school worked and how it worked well is not an argument for nationwide policy changes.
When you include private education do you include private higher education? Do you include for-profits? Their overall expenditures per student aren't less.
Edison is a for profit company that run schools in Philadelphia. It used to, I don't know if they do now. Edison has run schools in other districts. Results are mixed as far as I know.
No Child Left Behind has provisions about tutoring and many for profit tutoring companies are making money off of the mandate. Incidentally, one of George Bush's brothers is involved in with a tutoring company. There is a drive to privatize education by going to a for profit model.
For profits (and non profits) don't provide busing. They don't provide school lunches for low income students. The U.S. has dreadful public transportation in most localities and the lack of adequate transportation is a major problem for poor people who get vouchers. For profits don't normally build schools poor neighborhoods. Actually, for profits don't build schools. They get the taxpayers to pay them.
For profits provide workers with sub standard pay and benefits. That's how they become more efficient. For profits provide the corporate leaders with huge salaries though. The realized savings don't occur when one factors in long term damage that will be done.
I found the monopsony problem you've pointed out on the employment end of the system quite insightful. Entering an industry with a limited number of employers generally isn't a great idea. However, there's a simpler solution to the problem than more unionization, which in practice requires non-voluntary membership to be effective. I think we'd all be better off if the government continued to fund education for those who can't afford it, but stopped actually running the schools themselves. I don't understand why voucher proposals find such limited support.
We would end up with a worse two-tiered system than what we have now.
On the other hand, poor neighborhoods can be more dangerous and involve greater academic and social challenges. The solution is not to measure schools in poor areas against those in good ones and declare them worse because they perform more poorly (due to circumstances beyond teachers' control), but to measure students' baseline ability and then fund and reward relative improvement, rather than on the basis of absolute outcomes.
For example, say you go into a neighborhood on the first day of school and find that only 50% of 10th graders meet expectations for literacy. The best teacher in the world is not going to be be able to bring that up to the 95% level in a wealthy area on the other side of town, but if the proportion of students who are literate rises to 75% by the end of the 12th grade (correcting for dropout %ages), then that's a huge improvement. In economic terms, it's worth adding more funding right up to the point where marginal net gain falls below zero.
There are obviously willing and committed teachers willing to take on these important challenges. Maybe they would do better by setting up nonprofits and applying for funds to establish charter schools instead of abdicating their negotiation power to the national unions.
There is no system you can devise within the bounds of a capitalist society in which people with greater means don't achieve better educational outcomes.
A traditional stumbling block (though not the only one) is the question of religious schools. Voucher proposals have historically been seen as ways to get the government to fund religion, leading to various backlashes dating back to the 19th century: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaine_Amendment
A solution could be to only allow vouchers to be used for secular schools, but that runs into opposition from religious conservatives, and it's also unclear if it'd be permissible to exclude all schools run by religious organizations from an otherwise generally available program. I suspect conservative support for school vouchers that allowed religious schools would take a huge nosedive as soon as Islamic schools started taking advantage of them though, which is currently what's causing the Netherlands to rethink its voucher program.
News flash. The government isn't funding anything. The government produces nothing and their only source of income is theft from productive individuals who do produce things.
Regarding personality conflicts, having some teachers fired because they can't get along with their boss is a small price to pay to get rid of the worst teachers easily. Principals should be incentivized to keep talented teachers, and thus discouraged from firing them for petty reasons.
No? Well then I guess we're going to have to pay people more as they have more seniority, just like virtually every other industry.
Where my wife grew up, it took one teacher to teach 60 pupils. A class size of 50 was an exceptionally small class size. Several of the countries that best the United States in academic achievement
http://timss.bc.edu/PDF/t03_download/T03_M_Chap1.pdf
have much higher class sizes per teacher than the United States has. It is definitely possible to improve teacher productivity over the low level maintained in the United States. There are whole books on the subject.
http://www.amazon.com/Learning-Gap-Schools-Japanese-Educatio...
http://www.amazon.com/Smart-Schools-David-Perkins/dp/0028740...
http://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Gap-Improving-Education-Class...
http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematic...
Actually, there are lots of a cases where underfunded schools improve student performance with more money. There is a strong correlation between school funding level and student test scores.
I'd be happy to look at the examples you can find citations for. In my state, Minnesota, school funding was largely equalized statewide in the 1970s. That political feat was lauded as the "Minnesota miracle," and got our then governor on the cover of Time magazine as a can-do, innovative governor. With special funding adjustments for high-poverty areas and special funding for school districts to promote racial integration, the inner-city school districts of Minneapolis and St. Paul, the two largest school districts in Minnesota, actually get MORE funding per pupil than most other school districts in the state.
But after a generation of this experiment, the results are disappointing. On the whole, schools anywhere in Minnesota are probably better than schools in most places in Mississippi, which is why many observers are guessing at the macro level that funding makes a difference.
But within Minnesota, both the Minneapolis and St. Paul districts are laggards in academic achievement, and most disturbingly to people like me who hope for all school pupils to learn and thrive, the "achievement gap" between "white" pupils and "pupils of color" is wider in Minnesota than almost anywhere else. That last observation is especially disturbing because Minnesota has no history of de jure school segregation or of impairing the civil rights of black people. (The first black graduate of the University of Minnesota graduated before my late grandfather was even born.) Something is seriously awry in the Minneapolis Public Schools, despite adequate funding, and when I read in the local newspaper, as I did a few months ago, that a union-endorsed candidate for the Minneapolis School Board has NEVER lost for as long as the schoolteacher union has been organized as a collective bargaining unit, I think that more than just funding levels are a problem here.
There are obvious downsides to a seniority system. Younger teachers tend to get offered poorer contractual terms during collective bargaining, be handed the worst assignments (when they have the least experience), and are sometimes even bullied by older teachers with much greater authority and job security. I feel this is true of seniority systems in general, but in education the potential consequences have particularly wide-ranging implications for society. While we don't want to lose skilled veteran teachers, we don't want to raise the barriers to entry too high for new entrants to the profession either. Over longer periods, that leads to a succession problem.
I'm less convinced by your argument about monopsony. You mention that there are thousands of employers in cities (plural) for software engineers, but then refer to a single public school district with a handful of private schools, as if teachers were chained to the first city they work in. On the other hand, there are about 6 million teaching jobs in the US, vs. maybe a million software engineering jobs (going by memory from BLS data). And since, as you say, k-12 education necessarily involves a fairly low student-teacher ratio, the demand in that job market is very predictable based on demographics. While instructional methods may be disrupted by technology (and ought to have been disrupted far more than they have been up to now, if you ask me), a good part of junior education is about social skills and learning to find and function as part of a non-familial social group. Even if we could put a holodeck in every classroom tomorrow along with all other pedagogical disiderata, teachers would still be needed to manage kids' behavior and needs in more or less the same proportions as today. I think that number can be a bit higher than 20 (I grew up with class sizes of closer to 30, and it was fine), but there are only so many children that an adult can supervise and assist effectively.
The idea behind this is that one should consider that a bad teacher is far more likely to fail his students (as lon as he doesn't control the exams), while a good teacher will send his students to the best univerisities/high schools/jobs availiable.
It takes a few years to get tenure. Also, note that teachers sign an employment contract for each year they teach. This means that the administration has 3 chances to simply not renew a new teacher's contract if they don't like them.
So, it's only difficult to fire teachers after you've had them working for you for a few years.
And even then, the district can make your life miserable without firing you. They can have someone from the central office sit in and observe you every day. They can give you a lousy schedule, give you too many preps, move you between crummy rooms, or a number of other things to get you to leave.
Teachers work as hard as any human being can, and directly affect the lives of everybody in the country - and yet they're routinely despised and asked to sacrifice just a little bit more. It's no wonder so few people are still willing to do that work.
The same applies at the university level, of course, with increasing reliance on no-benefits adjunct workers paid chump change for a chance to "get into the profession" (as if there will ever be well-paid positions afterwards), and even full-time lecturers are not exactly paid huge amounts of cash - my wife has a PhD in physics and was just paid $35,000 for a one-year visiting professorship.
Argh.
Moving to yearlong schooling with a shorter summer break and a longer winter break, plus longer breaks between each quarter would be better though. Students who aren't exposed to reading and writing English at home wouldn't slowly fall behind year after year due to the long summer vacations.
I have to agree with you though. The policy makers do more harm than good, but the truth is that by setting some bureaucratic benchmark, they feel they can wash their hands of any responsibility on the matter without spending more money on education.
The problem with these standardized benchmarks is that they only punish students and schools for cumulative educational deficiencies instead of allowing them to slow down and address them, so as students go from grade to grade, they're gradually robbed of the education they should have had.
I think the current educational goal of having all students meet some standard benchmark of academic achievement is flawed. Instead, we should simply try teaching students as much as they can learn at the pace at which each student learns best, or better yet, teach them a love of learning and the ability to continue learning on their own. If that means slowing down the curriculum for some students, then so be it. It's better that they master what skills they can in the given time they have in school than to force them into more and more difficult material with an ever poorer and poorer foundation to work off of until they give up.
Honestly, we should only provide standard individual benchmarks to assess where an individual student stands in their development so that teachers can adjust the curriculum to match each student regardless of how well they know that student or where they came from. And then we should also give teachers the freedom, time, and flexibility to adapt to their students' individual needs.
The way it is now, we force teachers to treat students like products in an assembly line. The benchmark-based punishment and reward system we have now even incentivizes this treatment of students. It's sad.
I have to ask since I was describing the extra summer work in the context of what they're paid to do, not what they do in their free time.
I expect most good teachers already spend their own time, especially during the summer, planning and preparing things for their students, but I'm arguing that it should be institutionalized and they should be properly recognized and compensated for their work.
If it's already like that then I think my local school district must be different. The high school parking lots are empty whenever I drive by during the summer.
Operating an entire school building just to give teachers a continuous workspace and the ability to easily talk to their coworkers would be wastefully expensive anyway.
When it comes to schools, I don't think you can talk about pay or costs without also focusing on the administration. It is a system. Requiring a part of funding to go to teacher salaries would allow upping just that part of the equation, if need be. If this requirement already exists, and pay plus benefits are poor, then something higher up the food chain is broken and should be what is focused on.
I've been a teacher for many years. I'm an average teacher. Not great, not horrible. Some students really like me and others not so much. As far as I can tell society wants three things:
1. Almost everyone to have access to a great education. 2. Almost everyone to pass. 3. Almost everyone who passes to know the material.
The fact is, you can have any two of these but not all three and society is not willing to come to grips with this reality. Society is also not willing to come to grips with the fact that the truly great teachers are, well, truly great. A rarity and it will always be this case as long as truly inspirational people can better be fulfilled doing something other than teaching.
Think you know the answers? Then get into a classroom and lead the way. What? The low pay, lack of respect, long hours, emotional stress aren't worth it? I see.
Harvard gets great results but they select who enters the university. If you want almost everyone to pass and to know the material then some sort of pre-selection criteria must be met.
Of course there are bad teachers.
The onus of learning should be on the students? Sure. But then you aren't going to get almost everyone knowing the material because most people don't want to learn.
2. Almost everyone to pass. 3. Almost everyone who passes to know the material.
unless we exclude them from the system. Property 1 was that almost everyone goes to school.
People are fired because some boss decides to fire them. We're given no reason to assume that this is the same thing as firing based on incompetence. But it is clear that the bosses want their subordinates to have less job security and decisionmaking power. That's why bosses understandably go on offensives against unions.
Teachers' bosses for some reason go unnoticed. Teachers have managers ("administrators"), and the top bosses are the government (meaning we look at the distribution of power in society, to see whose interests are likely served by the educational system).
I'm certainly not a fan of most schoolteachers I've met. Being admitted into an unhealthy institution, and thriving within it, is not a hopeful sign. But they're better than their bosses, and the real flaws of the system lie elsewhere...
Giving LAUSD more money to manage seems like a bad idea to me.
http://www.mckinsey.com/clientservice/Social_Sector/our_prac... [Sept 2010, 2.2 MB]
http://www.mckinsey.com/App_Media/Reports/SSO/Worlds_School_... [Sept 2007, 10 MB]
1) The thought you can rid yourself of all or even most bad teachers is absurd. You can't easily chop off the bottom 10% each year and bring in an additional 500,000 new teachers.
2) With a population that large the quality of teaching will regress to the mean. We just realistically can't expect an all-star team of 6M of anything.
So what do we do? The first thing is to realize the big problem is in the inner-city and rural areas -- in underserved communities. And honestly, I think we need to focus a bit more on the community and less on the classroom proper. Like I'd really like to see summer reading programs in these communities, with some strong incentives. I also think things like Khan Academy would actually really help. I'm probably overly optimistic, but I think getting kids to listen to lectures is easier than getting them to do homework at home.
My experience is that good schools and good students actually do quite well. The biggest thing that probably will get overlooked, even by what I'd like to do, are bright students at poor schools.
Yes you can. You just have to offer high enough salaries.
So even if we hired every engineering graduate from US schools every year, we wouldn't fill the gap, by a long shot.
My point is that for a population this huge you're not going to be able to backfill for any reasonable dollar amount or you have to significantly lower your standards, in which case you're probably hiring people that will largely fall into that same bottom 10% next year.
Eric Hanushek shows steps of reasoning, based on facts, in one of his published articles,
http://www.stanfordalumni.org/leadingmatters/san_francisco/d...
suggesting that if the United States systematically persuaded the bottom 5 percent of teachers to leave teaching for some other occupation, year after year after year, it wouldn't be long before the academic achievement outcomes in United States schools would be as high as those in schools anywhere in the world. The issues he considers in his article are quite interesting, and show that he has thought a long time about education reform and side-effects of education policies.
As for the claim that the bottom 5 percent of teachers leaving the occupation couldn't be made up numerically (you mentioned 10 percent, but I am following Hanushek's figure), I disagree with that claim on several grounds.
1) Previous studies of the issue have shown that there are many credentialed teachers who are not currently actively teaching full-time. Again, I am still Googling for studies as I post this (this is a fact I read in books years ago), but it's fairly widely known that there are teachers with credentials who currently don't participate in the teacher labor force.
2) On the basis of international comparisons of class sizes, and on the basis that a bottom-5-percent teacher probably does more harm than good, we might just as well persuade the worst teachers to do other kinds of work, and have the top 95 percent of teachers divide up the students for slightly larger class sizes each, and perhaps a share of the compensation packages formerly allocated to the worse teachers who have left the occupation.
3) Supply of labor is generally elastic with respect to demand (especially in the current United States economy, with high unemployment). If schools around the country announce that they are dismissing teachers who don't perform well, and still sticking to the same class size targets, something else will change (perhaps the prestige of the occupation of teaching, as it becomes known as an occupation that doesn't tie the fortune of competent teachers to pay scales designed for incompetent teachers) and new workers will be attracted to make the investment, whatever that is, to enter the occupation.
See Hanushek's article for more details. I think this is an important issue to discuss, and I'm glad you joined issue about what is possible, and what should be done.
The biggest thing that probably will get overlooked, even by what I'd like to do, are bright students at poor schools.
I'm glad you mentioned that issue at the bottom of your post. That is an issue of great concern to me too. My reply to the article submission in this thread, with a link to an article by Kenschaft on mathematics teaching,
http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf
is motivated by that concern. Best wishes for finding people to collaborate with to help improve education for able students from low-income backgrounds who currently can't afford to shop for schools.
Also, in some of the analysis I've seen the US already does relatively well when you control for various relative socio-economic strata. The point being that the problem isn't really in a lot of schools. But there are very targeted schools where the problems run really deep. Cutting 5% of the teachers from Overlake HS in Bellevue is probably worthless (and even counterproductive). And, at least based on the numbers, you could fire everyone at Oakland International.
Plus it just doesn't pass the sniff test to me that you can simply get the 6 million best teachers in the US and inner city Detroit starts scoring like Singapore. Just doesn't smell right, unless we deal with some of the larger issues.
Lastly, I just don't think you can fire 5%, or 300K/year, and realistically fill those spots. And unlike the private sector, no one is going to pin their hopes on a profession where a bad year, likely ends your career (since firings of gov't positions are public record).
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/opinion/13kristof.html
(Kristof included a link to the McKinsey report, http://www.mckinsey.com/clientservice/Social_Sector/our_prac... , and supporting material can be found at http://www.mckinsey.com/clientservice/Social_Sector/our_prac... .)
Previous HN discussion:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2008-05-06-teachers-t...
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41956922/ns/nightly_news/
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2011/0414/Why-N.J.-te...
which exceeds the job security of almost all other forms of employment in the United States
http://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/28/nyregion/teachers-and-tenu...
http://www.schoolmatch.com/audit/jacksonville/articles/teach...
whether or not the teachers are able to teach the subjects they are hired to teach.
http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf
http://educationnext.org/evaluating-teacher-effectiveness/
Education reform is not a simple issue, and much basic research still needs to be done and assimilated to bring about improvements.
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2066577,00.ht...
But to begin to get United States schools on track to meet the standards met in other countries, policy analysts in the United States have to be honest about what the overall framework of regulation now is, and just exactly what teachers are accountable to do, for what level of compensation, under current contracts in most school districts.
P.S. I should make clear that an effective teacher is worth the teacher's weight in gold, and currently the best teachers in the United States are mostly substantially underpaid. But they are underpaid, in large part, because they haven't mobilized their own political participation to unshackle their pay from the lockstep pay scales that also are granted to ineffective teachers. That's why I do my teaching on a contract basis with public school districts or through my own nonprofit organization, so that I can deliver quality lessons without bureaucratic interference and gain professional recognition for the results of my teaching.
Most professionals do get health coverage and some sort of pension coverage (usually 401K matching funds). I don't think it's fair to include these things when talking about teacher pay unless one does this for non-teachers as well. As a society we usually don't include these things when talking about non-teacher pay. Heck, most people think that they only pay half of FICA and that the employer pays the other half.
Given the hours worked, emotional stress, and grief that many teachers experience I think teachers are underpaid. Very much underpaid. I'm a teacher and have an obvious bias. At my school our contracts are being negotiated right now. It's clear we are going to take a pay cut. I haven't had a pay raise in 2 years and will be taking a pay cut over the the next two years.
The job is becoming less and less desirable. I strongly encourage anyone who will listen to me to not go into teaching. It's a bad career choice in my opinion.
I believe that statement is untrue. Regardless, let me rephrase my question: are you guaranteed a certain retirement benefit regardless of market performance?
It is my understanding that pension programs typically guarantee some percentage of your highest salary, with a multiplier for length of service.
There is a push by some politicians to get states to declare bankruptcy so that they will be able to renege on their guarantee.
Social Security, as mentioned in the Wikipedia link. Additionally, there is no reason a private pension couldn't be directly funded.
I'm in a defined benefit pension system and regardless of how the stock market does my benefit is guaranteed by the state
Which is what I meant when I asked about being invested in the stock market. While your pension may be funded via stock market investments, for all intents and purposes, your pension is unrelated to the market. With my 401k, I am very much at the whim of the market. If I hit 65 and my anticipated returns don't materialize, there's nobody for me to sue. Thus, pensions are not directly comparable to 401ks.
There is a push ... guarantee.
Given the unrealistic contracts that were agreed to, in light of our near-term economic realities, bankruptcy or mass firings and re-hirings are literally the only way this problem can be addressed.
To be fair, they're required to take such classes by law. At least, when my mother was alive, she needed to take so many credits per year to retain her teaching certification.
Your argument is effectively responding to the idea that "we don't find that pay package attractive enough to make us want to be teachers" by saying "but you're using the wrong word- you should look at compensation." Okay, then "we don't find that compensation package attractive enough."
I certainly don't think that just paying teachers more is going to fix anything. But the vilification of the profession, which the article laments and you effectively condone, is in my opinion a big distraction. I agree that tenure is not a perfect system, but neither is it entirely without its benefits. Until more progress is made on a more comprehensive response to education reform, attacking the teachers for not giving up their long-held rights seems a bit unrealistic.
The challenges of professional recognition, accountability and performance measurement which you aptly highlight are very real. I may be interpreting you incorrectly, but you seem to blame teachers for those issues. My thought is that teachers recognize that the broad challenges facing the industry, and recognize that a comprehensive solution will probably require some significant reforms. But I imagine they also believe that just giving up some of their current rights will not be a sufficient solution without more comprehensive reform. So in the meantime their better off with the status quo.
Blaming soldiers vs. teachers:
Soldier quality is more difficult to assess (all of us have gone through school; few through the military), soldiers have significantly less autonomy in decisions, and soldiers (like police & firefights) get some slack because they risk their lives on the line.
"Teachers make 14 percent less than professionals in other occupations that require similar levels of education" As parent noted, tenure issues are huge. Professors also don't make much, but tenure (once they get it) really makes up for it. Also, 14% isn't bad given that many teachers have 2 months off.
School administrations try (and fail) to determine "teacher quality" by looking at standardized test scores.
Quality of teaching is easy to assess however: you just have a few experienced teachers pop in and observe a class or two, and it's obvious to them if the teacher is good or not.
> Also, 14% isn't bad given that many teachers have 2 months off.
It's not 2 months off, it's 2 months unemployed.
When they hire you as a teacher, they ask you ahead of time if you want them to reduce your paycheck amount so that you can receive checks during those 2 months.
So, if there's a salaried teaching position for 50k, said teacher actually gets paid 41.6k (50k * 10/12)? Unless a stated salary is quietly reduced by 1/6, then it most certainly is two months off.
When someone says, "teacher $X makes $Y per year", it means that $Y is that number written on the contract for the school year.
Note, given that
* most teachers spend a couple of weeks after the school year ends tying up loose ends from the year and organizing themselves for next year,
* and then simply need time to decompress from dealing with a large number of kids every day for so long,
* and also that they spend the weeks before school begins prepping for the new year and doing professional development,
there's not really much time in between to get another full-time temporary job to supplement their income.
Is that true in tech circles (or among professionals in general)? In the circles I move around in (acoustical/civil/mechanical/environmental engineers) professional development costs are pretty much always covered by the employer, especially in cases where CEUs are required to maintain certifications.
The cause for this stagnation is obvious: the education industry is controlled by people who have a strong interest in keeping the education process inefficient and labor intensive. When was the last time you heard a teachers' union or a department of education support a technology that promised to reduce the cost of education and the number of teachers? Instead, the public education industry is focused on making education more inefficient: requiring teacher certification, reducing class sizes, increasing funding, etc.
The most promising recent developments in education have come from outside the establishment. Wikipedia makes it possible to get a fairly good understanding of any subject quickly and for free. Khan Academy features thousands of ten-minute long micro-lectures covering most of the math and science taught in schools through high school along with software to test mastery and help students tutor each other. Flash card sites help students memorize. These are the "bulldozers" of the education industry which will enable one person to do the work of hundreds. These are the technologies which will "fix" education.
First, is there really a large group of people who think that teachers a.) are whom to blame for the state of American education; and b.) are paid too much? The only time I hear about people making such arguments is in op-eds like this one that try to refute them. I think such op-eds are battling straw men.
That said:
1. If you look at total compensation broken down by per-hour-worked (which I think is a fair metric), teachers are paid within the norms for their level of education, etc. There is a reasonable write up on this here: http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/hate-the-deception-not-the-te...
2. I think a growing number of people are outraged at Teachers Unions, and Teachers Unions try to associate themselves back to just being "teachers". It's a dirty trick. People don't want employment contracts dictating how their kids are taught. They want teachers to be able to work longer hours if they're inclined to, try creative strategies, etc. They want to attract and keep the best teachers by paying them more than less effective teachers. Many (most?) union contracts dictate terms that disallow this kind of stuff. People are upset at the obstacles the union is putting up, not with the teachers that often are forced to have to join that union.
3. I am upset that we, as a country, continue to spend more and more per-pupil on education and have stagnant-at-best results. Something like only 40 cents per dollar spent on education actually make it into the classroom ("citation needed", I know). I'd like to see education spending done more effectively. If this means moving dollars spent on bureaucratic waste into higher teacher salaries, I'd welcome that change.
http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/03/james-heckman-educ...
(Ignoring for the moment that spending people's tax dollars on better teachers is politically more acceptable than spending it on targeted interventions.)
Not to my knowledge.
Ask any teacher (and they are the ones who know) what the main problem is, and they'll tell you that the problem isn't necessarily the schools, or teachers, or administration -- it's the parents. If parents do their job and make their kids' learning a priority, that would make the biggest improvement to the situation by far.
The reason this is done is because they are children -- not adults. They are immature and may be making bad decisions. They might have a rotten home life with bad role models. The point is, you try to help them anyway in case they do indeed see a reason to turn their life around.
Why do you think schools have so much sports education? One reason is because it keeps some kids around who otherwise would simply drop out. And every good teacher knows that you can often get a problem kid in your class to focus and learn something by having one or more of their coaches get on their case.
Because:
(A) in high school they're still kids, and
(B) one main goal here is to have an educated citizenry, and this means educating all kids as well as we can, whether the kids themselves think it's a good idea or not. :)
It's a good thing our military isn't unionized.. мы все были бы говоря России.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/opinion/13kristof.html
Previous HN discussion: