Simple: offer salaries that compete with the private sector. Of course, this involves raising tax revenues which is incredibly unpopular politically. But we get what we pay for and as long as public sector pay remains a joke compared to the private sector, we are always going to have this problem.
Government organizations are going to be held to the highest standard for equity, transparency and governance (and ideally security, but...). Building a product with artifacts that demonstrate and/or attest to all of these things creates incredible friction. I'm just coming out of a seven year stint at one of the largest banks in the world, and despite loving the people I work with I couldn't take it any more. I've on the other side of the summit in my career and I don't really want to have navigating bureaucracy be a major component of my professional efforts for the remainder of it.
Give your dad a fistbump for me, it's tough, but once he finds the right customer he'll be off to the races. I've been there before and I've been thinking about doing the same myself.
The thing is, just giving everyone raises doesn't work. It needs to be based on merit.
I've proposed a system where teachers get a base salary, plus a substantial increment for every student in their class that meets grade level expectations at the end of the school year.
Don't be surprised when all of a sudden almost every student magically 'meets grade level expectations' and teachers get their large bonuses, and yet many of the students can't actually read when they graduate. Unfortunately, this is just an incentive to inflate grades and fudge results to make them look better.
I am not opposed to the idea in theory, but don't see any way to honestly make it work. Also fairly certain almost every teachers union will oppose it - and I say that as someone who has the experience of negotiating teacher's union contracts from the other side of the table.
> Also fairly certain almost every teachers union will oppose it
Of course they will. Those unions are absolutely, irrevocably committed to the idea that teacher merit is totally determined by length of service and having a master's degree.
The moment you tie income to results, you incentivize teachers leaving behind students who won't perform.
An average sounds like a shitty, shitty system. Imagine finding out your kid is in a classroom with every low-performing and difficult kid in the grade just because it was random.
Could you pay more to attract better teachers in that situation and get better overall value for the kids being taught?
So how do you identify poor teachers? I would guess that if you let each member of the faculty vote for the 25 top teachers and then have parents do assessment of their children's teachers and then average the results over 3 years, you could come up with something that has virtual no false positives as to who the worst teachers were.
I agree with the ensemble of evaluations approach - student tests at the start and end of year show student attainment, student and parent feedback, peer feedback, and administrator feedback. Come up with a weighted average and experiment with it. Retain average and better teachers, reward rockstars, train underperformers, and let the bottom ranks and those who don't improve with training go.
Your best bet may be removing the obstacles that people who want to do a good job encounter (for example, the best teachers seem to often leave higher paid public teaching jobs to go to private schools that pay less - investigate why?).
BTW, MIT has gone back to SATs. The reason is simple - despite all the controversy about SAT validity, when the rubber meets the road the SAT does a better job than anything else at evaluating candidates.
Basing the bonus on the increment is probably a good improvement.
Agreed - to me it seems like paying teachers more is a tool. This enables you to offer incentives to improve student performance, but it also enables you to raise the bar (in some way) when hiring to get better teachers. If you just raise existing salaries across the board, you'll see no immediate change other than more people applying to be teachers. In theory if you have a good way of filtering for the "best", you might be able to then slowly overtime replace your existing teachers with (on average) better teachers.
We just tell the teacher that "hey you'll get a bonus if everyone in your class gets an A"!
Who's in charge of giving their students grades again?
Can you cite where you saw this data, what time period it refers to, what "substantially" actually means, and include a comparison against inflation, please?
> ... plus a substantial increment for every student in their class that meets grade level expectations at the end of the school year.
I think basing teacher pay on merit is a great idea in theory but I have some problems with it. Most of all, student performance is influenced to a greater degree by things outside the teacher's control like the student's socioeconomic status, their attendance (or lack thereof), their parent's education, and even the air quality in their school.
I also don't know how "teacher" raises based on "meeting grade level expectations" would work past elementary school when students are cycling through seven teachers a day? Just because one child excels at math do you give the math teacher a greater raise?
Finally, what if a student does NOT meet grade level expectations, but shows the greatest improvement year-over-year against any other student. Do you fail to recognize the achievement of the teacher who improved this student's outcome because the student does not meet grade-level expectations?
These are just some of the problems which make this a much thornier issue and worth greater consideration. It sounds good when you say teacher pay should be based on merit, but it oversimplifies things quite a bit.
Not offhand. It was the topic of the Seattle Times for months.
Let's take a look at the private sector. Pay is based on accomplishing goals. It works well. Sure it is imperfect.
> it oversimplifies things quite a bit.
It would be hard to be worse than the current system, which simplifies merit as "has a masters degree". I answered your other points in other replies in this thread.
Where does one start with such an egregiously wrong statement? Companies go out of business if they have employees that cost more than they produce. They can't just raise taxes like the schools do. They can't run deficits like the government can. What do you think regular performance evaluations of private sector employees are for? Why do you think a lot of employee compensation is commission based?
> those who live in Kansas City
Think about it. The only reason pay is higher in SF is because it is more productive to have people in SF, i.e. people accomplish more being in SF.
> as if accomplishing goals isn’t figured into teacher pay.
It isn't, other than getting a master's degree. Which teachers in the government sector are paid based on how well their students do?
No one gets fired for non-aggressive incompetence. Merit is below two or three other things when considering promotion and salary hikes. At least in the cases I'm familiar with, it's an incredibly frustrating experience. Increasing top-level salary would not fix this, but probably just increase the lack of fairness by over-paying to a greater extent the embedded poor performers.
You've gotta ask yourself: if private sector style pay would cost more, then wouldn't that imply the private sector is vastly more inefficient than the government? But that's clearly not the case, so we come to the conclusion that private sector pay and hiring standards must result in much greater output per dollar.
"Instead of hiring staff, the Authority relied heavily on outside consultants. These consultants were well paid, with the primary consultant compensation for HSR at $427,000 per engineer, compared with the Authority’s in-house cost of $131,000 per engineer. This structure creates a principal-agent problem where they are incentivized to maximize their billable hours."
(As an aside I’m willing to bet the #’s aren’t apples to apples with the consultant being a fully loaded coast, and the in-house not including pension benefits etc)