A few weeks ago I got into a fiery exchange on twitter with my friend TeacHer about teacher pay. She thinks teachers should be paid more, while I think overall teacher pay should remain flat or even go down. You can read TeacHer’s opinion at her website if you’d like.
She’s a teacher and I’m not, so it may seem that she’s more qualified to speak to the topic. However, I’m an economics nerd and math/engineering major, so I’m going to approach this from a numbers perspective.
When you have an emotionally hyper-charged topic such as this one very few people look at numbers, data, and facts to explain their opinion. For example, my debate opponent today refers to teachers as “people who do society’s most important work”.
@kevin_is_money And if the options are accept a system where people who do society's most important work qualify for food stamps
— Lindsay Meredith (@TeacHerFinance) September 12, 2012
That’s certainly a debatable opinion. Are teachers more important than police officers who keep us safe, farmers who provide us with food, trash men who make sure we don’t wallow in our own filth, engineers who make sure buildings and bridges don’t collapse, truck drivers who make sure all the stuff we want and need can get from a factory to the shelves of a store, business owners who own the factories that make the goods or the stores where we buy all the things we want or need, or any other number of jobs?
The fact is these are all important jobs. If they weren’t important then they wouldn’t exist. Yes, teaching is an admirable and important profession, but to say it’s “society’s most important work” is not only a debatable opinion, but one that distracts from the financial reality of the situation.
First I want to mention that we both agree GOOD teachers need to be paid more. Where we disagree is the idea that teachers overall are currently underpaid (she agrees, I don’t), and that evaluating teachers to determine who deserves more and less compensation is too difficult (she agrees, I don’t).
More Education Spending Doesn’t Make Students Smarter
There’s a general feeling in America that “if you throw more money at it then it will get better”. It’s a very lazy idea and ignores the fact that spending the same amount of money more effectively can be better than spending a lot of money wastefully. Paying teachers more money has not resulted in higher achievement over the last few decades.
The following graph originally posted at Heritage.org consisting of data from the US Department of Education, the National Center for Education Statistics, and the National Assessment of Educational Progress, shows that per-pupil spending has risen from $4,060 in 1970 to $9,266 in 2005 while reading scores have remained essentially unchanged.
We more than doubled spending and saw very little benefit. Awesome.
Moving further along these lines, a study from George Mason University shows that US Education per-pupil K-12 spending is more than any country in the world except Switzerland.
Since we spend the second most in the world, we should have the second best performing children, right? Wrong. According to USA Today:
“We’re kind of in the middle of the pack [in educational achievement among countries],” Phillips says. “Being in the middle of the pack is really a mediocre place to be.”
Middle of the pack. Mediocre. That’s what all of our education spending is getting us.
Obviously more spending (higher teacher salaries, newer schools and equipment, the latest editions of textbooks, etc) isn’t getting better results. We won’t get smarter kids by spending more overall on education; we need to spend more on great teachers and less on crappy teachers.
Teachers Should Be Evaluated Like Employees in Any Other Industry
We don’t need to increase teacher pay overall. That’s just going to give the crappy teachers even more incentive to keep teaching. Instead we need to stop paying teachers based on years of experience and start paying them based on how well they actually teach.
“But Kevin, you can’t measure how good a teacher is. Every classroom is different and every student is different… blah blah blah whine whine whine.”
I agree that every classroom and student is different. That’s why test scores should have little or no impact on a teacher’s performance rating. You identify the good teachers just like you identify the top employees in any company; you watch them work and you talk to their clients (in this case, students and their parents).
I work in the corporate world. My old boss (thanks to my promotion!) lives 1,000 miles away and the last time I saw him in person was 2011. In addition managing me and 5 other people, he has about a million other things that he does on a daily basis. We have 1 on 1 discussions maybe 1-2 hours per week. And I have a really great, attentive boss; other I know have even less interaction with their manager.
If my boss can evaluate my performance based on that amount of interaction then surely a principal, who is in the same building as his teachers every day and has constant interaction with the teacher’s clients (the students and parents), can evaluate teachers.
Principals should observe teachers, and should do it frequently. And if they don’t have time to do it themselves then they should hire someone devoted to teacher evaluations (this person’s salary would pay for itself many times over if they successfully identified the best and worst teachers and compensated them accordingly). They should drop in on classes unannounced, observe teachers in the hallways, talk to students and parents, etc.
Great teachers leave the profession because they aren’t compensated for their incredible work, and it’s just plain laziness to say “evaluating teachers is too hard” when employees are evaluated in basically every other line of work.
Don’t Forget Supply and Demand
The last reason teachers shouldn’t make more money is because the market doesn’t demand it. If I’m a principal, why would I pay someone $80,000 to teach if there is another highly qualified teacher who would do the same job for $50,000?
Nurse Anesthetists make between $78k and $185k a year. Why? Of course they do very important work, but the high pay is because when a hospital or doctor needs one, there are very few to choose from. Supply and demand economics have set both nurse anesthetists and teachers salaries where they should be. And if your response is, “Well that just means low teacher pay is going to result in bad teachers,” then I’ll refer you to where I suggest we pay great teachers what they are worth.
Our Only Hope is to Privatize Education
From a practical standpoint, I realize most schools are run by the government and the government never does anything efficiently. They don’t pay for performance in basically any profession, and they are more concerned about getting a bigger budget next year than they are concerned with actually doing their job. I don’t live in some fantasy world where I think the government could ever make public schools work like a free market educational system.
Privatizing K-12 education is the only way to get competition back into education and get schools and teachers competing to be the best. The first step is to eliminate the federal Department of Education and give education back to the states (which is where our founders intended it to be). Then you’d have states implement voucher systems and school choice becomes real.
However, the implementation of my theoretical system is beyond the scope of this already extremely long article, so with that being said I’ll summarize.
Money Doesn’t Fix a Problem
I’m sure TeacHer wants more money. So do I and so does everyone else in the world. But there are three problems:
- History has proven that more money spent on education hasn’t resulted in smarter kids
- The educational system encourages crappy teachers and discourages great, hard-working teachers with it’s reluctance to pay for performance
- The principle of supply and demand suggests there is no reason to pay teachers higher salaries
Paying teachers more money will solve one problem: putting more money in teacher’s bank accounts. Unfortunately it won’t make kids smarter and it will put even more pressure on overstretched local and federal budgets.
One more thing: don’t forget to read TeacHer’s side of the story!
Readers: Do you think paying teachers more money will make kids smarter?
Kevin, you raise some interesting points and I applaud you for taking this on from a data-driven perspective. However, as a fellow economics major, your spending/student performance graphs are really unconvincing. Have you seen this pair of graphs? http://www.seanbonner.com/blog/archives/001857.php
Correlation doesn’t equal causation, as you were likely taught in your econ and statistics classes. There are scores of studies out there that have much better methodology (randomized control trials where they test whether paying a teacher actually affects their performance), and the evidence from this body of literature on teacher pay and student performance is complicated.
Again, not saying I disagree in particular with your statements (some of them I do, but not all!), just arguing that the data you provide is not anymore convincing than the anecdata you are dismissing from TeacHer.
Thanks for taking the time and engaging in an important debate!
Correlation doesn’t necessarily equal causation, but to suggest educational spending and educational performance are as disconnected as global temperature and pirates is not something I can agree with.
We know that when more money is spent on education, some of that money goes to paying teachers. And we know that a teacher’s job is to help children learn and attain the knowledge and problem solving skills that would enable them to perform well on tests.
Unless you can give me some reason to believe that educational achievement in students would have declined (instead of stayed flat) over the last 30 years without the increase in educational spending, I stand by my data.
The pirate graph was obviously a joke, just like your stick figures.
The point stands that showing two graphs of two different things without attempt to relate them is an unconvincing use of data. The scientific method that we learned in fourth grade applies: start with a closed system, manipulate one variable holding everything else constant, and then see what outcome you get. In economics terms, at least show me a regression.
Things that could have changed to make student performance decline since the 1970s? Oh, let’s start with immigration and a changing student demographic, welfare reform, economic crisis — shall I go on? Additionally, most public school teachers are women, and the women’s labor market has changed drastically since the 1970s. You may have been able to pay teachers less back then because their outside options were fewer — paying them more now makes education spending go up, but it may still be pretty crappy salary compared to what they could make elsewhere. It’s possible that quality could decline as wages went up.
All that said, the evidence on teacher pay does sometimes come out your way, but it sometimes comes out the other way. We are still working to understand the nuances. Bottom line, there is no sexy line graph to show that makes the point you are trying to make, and that was my objection. I react strongly to the use of data in a dishonest way. We need to think and talk about this from a perspective that goes beyond Econ 101 — and beyond Heritage and USA Today.
Ehhhhh, I wouldn’t if I were you. I included data in my post, too, but studying educational outcomes is very, very difficult and it is also notoriously unreliable. The reason for this is lack of ability to control variables. As many of your other commenters have pointed out, there are so many factors that impact student achievement that it gets very tricky trying to isolate the variable of interest in educational studies to see if it’s REALLY affecting student outcomes or if some other factor is.
Don’t get too wedded to the data or you’re likely to be misled.
Also, the NAEP exam is a very, very poor test to use when trying to prove a point about student achievement, which is what many news outlets try to use it for. It’s totally voluntary (meaning, the students can choose to participate in taking it or not) and most students just go take it so that they can get out of class for a couple of hours. They sleep, goof off, skip questions, etc. It’s not even close to an authentic assessment.
Want to see an eyeopener concerning education in America, watch the John Stossel special report, Stupid in America.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bx4pN-aiofw
BTW, I taught high school for three years and I agree with you.
I definitely think we need to pay teachers more given the importance of their job and our future.
Pay more, increase the range of compensation, and be more flexible with turnover.
Let’s say the starting salary began at $100,000 instead of $30,000. Teaching will attract even better candidates at the margin. Then it’s up to the administrators to choose and to continuously improve.
Sam
Bingo! Turnover is the variable. Higher salaries won’t do anything if we just pay the same people more.
This is an interesting point:
“History has proven that more money spent on education hasn’t resulted in smarter kids”
Do you think that maybe the money isn’t being spent right or that there’s no correlation at all?
This is the point I wanted to make: Increased spending slopegraph is not the same as “increased teacher wages”. i.e. how much of this money is draining away in Teachers Unions and non-education related slush. Let’s face it, standardized testing didn’t really work out the way we planned either.
I heartily agree with abolishing tenure, at least without 20 years of experience and a proven teaching record. Performance should matter. (Watch he great documentary “Waiting for Superman”, and see how depressed that makes you feel for the future).
I disagree with privatization being the be all and end all solution. Privatizing has rarely solved the issue, and we are talking purely about public schools here, an area where the underprivileged are already being disadvantaged (the wealthier kids are already going to private school). Making it a pay-for-use system that requires the generation of profits will not help improve education. Just like privatizing electricity has not lowered prices, privatizing water treatment has not increased water quality, and how America’s health care system stacks up to the rest of the world v dollars spent.
I feel uniquely qualified to comment on this post because I was a full-time college teacher and I currently teach part-time evening courses. During my full-time years I was also involved in the management and hiring of new teachers. To top it off, I also have two close relatives who are full-time teachers in public education.
Teacher compensation in our country is screwed up, but the problem is very complicated and both sides usually over-simplify it.
I was appalled to learn that the Chicago teachers’s union strike wanted a raise that would effectively make the average teacher’s salary 200% of the average income of their students’ households.
However in my home state, the average teacher’s salary is only 75% of the median household income.
Why is there such a disparity?
Yes, as you point out, supply and demand play a major role in teacher salaries. But, that means that there is less incentive for good teachers to stay teaching when they can get a better paying job outside of teaching. It also means that there is less incentive for administration to pay more to keep good teachers when there is always another teacher waiting for a job.
Many are suggesting quality-based compensation. However, it is also very hard to measure the quality of teaching because quality output is a dynamic made up of many variables including the teacher, the students, and the environment. One teacher with one group of students in a particular setting may be excellent, but the same teacher with a new group of students may not work out as well. Also, you can take the same teacher and the same students and put them in a different classroom and the quality may go way down. So one bad year doesn’t make someone a bad teacher. You have to follow the trend over several years.
Because of the dynamics stated above, student choice is extremely important. Parents and students need to be able to choose the education that is best for them, which may not be the education that is best for another student or even the majority of students. Vouchers provide a way to enable student choice between schools. But students also need more choice over who is their teacher. Not everyone would choose the same piano teacher so why should they be force to choose the same math teacher?
However, it would also be wrong to make teaching at the elementary education level a truly free market system because the minute I can “buy” a better education because I have more money than you is the same minute that the American Dream dies and we introduce an aristocracy perpetuated by wealth. Quality elementary education needs to be a system that is accessible to all regardless of wealth or status.
“Are teachers more important than police officers who keep us safe, farmers who provide us with food, trash men who make sure we don’t wallow in our own filth, engineers who make sure buildings and bridges don’t collapse, truck drivers who make sure all the stuff we want and need can get from a factory to the shelves of a store, business owners who own the factories that make the goods or the stores where we buy all the things we want or need, or any other number of jobs?”
Two thoughts:
First: Are the people whose job is is to help ensure we are not surrounded by the ignorant, the unskilled and the unemployable less important than any of those, especially in the long run when those teacher’s students will be running the country? ‘Idiotocracy’ was a fun movie, but I don’t want to be living in one when I’m old.
Second: pay peanuts; get monkeys.
Teachers are just one aspect of a bigger equation that makes sure we aren’t all surrounded by ignorant, unskilled people. There are also parents and mentors. Kids could learn a lot from an apprenticeship if any kids were actually willing to work at a young age. There are ways to self teach on computers and the internet.
Are teachers important? Absolutely. But teachers aren’t the only way kids learn things. Again, you can say that teaching is the most important job in the whole wide world; I’m just going to disagree with you.
“Teachers are just one aspect of a bigger equation that makes sure we aren’t all surrounded by ignorant, unskilled people. ” <—- I don't know why I'm still astounded that this concept seems to be constantly ignored. Thanks for bringing it up, Mr. McKee.
As far as the money per student state is that assuming the same base year dollars or just totals dollars in each year. If the latter I bet inflation has a lot to do with that.
I see.both sides of the argument but totally agree tthat teacher pay shouldn’t be based on years of service. There should be a way to evaluate teachers based on how they teach. I am sure they all get a bad class of students once in a while.
I completely agree with you Kevin.
I only hope that I will be in the position to offer home school or private school to my children when that day comes.
Which makes me wonder how the average private school teacher makes $10k-$15k less than their public counterparts and yet private schools still have higher test scores? I guess I’m flirting with the proverbial pandora’s box.
You throw out there that private school scores are higher, yet you don’t put it into context.
Since you are keeping the data close to the chest, let me ask a few questions:
1. What is the average income for the private schools in the study and what is the average income for the public schools in the study?
2. What is the spending per student?
3. Where are these schools located?
4. What were the demographics for each school in your study? How many special education, special needs, etc?
5. Where do the students come from? What type of background?
Since you generally state that private schools have better test scores, I assume you can answer the questions above.
http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/naepdata/
I just had a post on the teacher’s strike myself; although my perspective is exatly the oppostie of yours! Haha, but I respect your opinion. One thing I think is that none of us would be able to read or write posts, no one would have big corporate bazillion dollar jobs, or anything else without teachers. We should pay them as such. HOwever, I will agree with you that good teachers and crappy teachers shoudl not get paid the same. There should be an evaluative system in place for that, like at any other job, that I’ll agree with.
I personally think that what Michelle Rhee was trying to accomplish in the Washington DC school district was phenomenal. She instituted large bonuses for teachers – but in order to get them, they had to forgo their “tenure”. The reason that teachers are paid so little *today* is because they tend to have much higher levels of job security as compared with the average private sector worker. In a sense, much of their pay is wrapped up in this security. Increase their pay, sure, but let them accept a good bit of risk with that as well.
I agree. I firmly believe in performance-based incentives to increase productivity. It’s always worked for me! If I do well, I get a bonus. If I do poorly, I get fired.
I too believe in performance-based incentives…well…I used to…until I became a teacher!
When I worked in corporate America, I loved my performanced-based incentives because I had control over most of the variables I needed to manipulate to do an awesome job. Unfortunately, in teaching that is not the case most of the time.
For instance, I started my teaching career in an upper middle class area where I ROCKED as a teacher or so I thought, then I moved to an urban school district (with very high poverty) and all of a sudden I SUCKED as a teacher. Well, last I checked I’m still the same person so what’s the difference? The difference is in my previous setting, the students were motivated to learn and actually attended school everyday, completed homework assignments and classword…TRIED. Now, I feel like I go to war every single day. I have to fight the kids to listen just so I can teach. Not to mention the learning defiencies they show up with and other factors that make them harder to teacher than my previous students who came from a good area and supportive home.
Anyway, all you people who like to judge without walking a day in a teacher’s loafers don’t know the full story. And I will add, the day that my pay depends on my students’ assessment outcomes as many reformers are now proposing is the day that I will go back to corporate America because there I know if I do my part I will be successful whereas with teaching I am killing myself doing my part while the students and parents can skate but society deems me the “problem”.
I work way harder as a teacher than I ever have in my life. I’m physically and mentally drained at the end of everyday all because I had a desire to help poor children. I’m not complaining about it because that’s what I choose to do but it is hurtful when I work hard and then on top of it have to endure insults from most of society who know absolutely nothing about what it’s like to be a teacher (especially in poor neighborhoods).
Just my two cents.
I was ready to rant one way, but then I read your article and realized you did not make the blatantly false points that most people use when they claim teachers are over paid, and not being judged accordingly. I currently am In education so to speak, as a Graduate student in Mathematics Teaching college students math. As I teach the nearly remedial level courses at a State School, I have realized that there are a lot of bad teachers out there, but even worse is there are a lot of parents out there that don’t feel education is important. I get students in my classes that think math is pushing things around till you get an answer, and fail to realize that there is an actual logical process to what is going on when you work out a problem.
While yes k-12 likely needs to be privatized, and yes we need to find a way to separate good teachers from bad and either retrain or fire the bad ones. I remembered a post going around a few years ago that takes an interesting point on how many people think k-12 teachers are basically baby sitters that need to do a little extra. So what if we actually paid them like babysitters?
http://jaxkidsmatter.blogspot.com/2011/02/if-teachers-were-paid-like-babysitters.html
I am not saying we should pay teachers like babysitters, but if we did there would be a lot more talented people willing to take the job, making it easy to fire with clear conscious those that are quite bad.
I have a lot of points to make, so here’s my best attempt to keep them organized:
1. You cannot compare the spending per student to any type of standardized test. Period. You cannot do it, the data does not correlate. It will never correlate. Here’s why:
A) Standardized tests change almost every year. How can you assess someone on a dynamic scale? Standardized tests are a false metric, everyone knows it, but there have been no better options. You, yourself, said that standardized test scores shouldn’t be used in teacher evaluations, why should they be used in student evaluations at a specific age?
B) They test everyone at the same age, yet they don’t follow their improvements (or declines) through their entire school career. Every single class of students is completely different than the previous.
C) There are more outside influences than I could possibly list. None of these are factored in.
D) During that time frame, special education spending has grown astronomically. In Michigan, for example, just from 1999 to 2010 it’s grown 17%. Almost 15% of students are receiving special education services. Often, special education spending just keeps students at the status quo – trying to keep them from falling short. Were special education students included in scores previously? I don’t know, but now everyone is.
E) How do these number correlate to income levels? It’s no secret that low incomes translate into lower test scores. It’s also no secret that incomes have not been rising.
F) These are Heritage foundation charts… I can guarantee that a liberal think tank will have exactly the opposite statistics.
2. There is a shortage of teachers. Don’t believe me? Google it. There is a shortage list, by subject, for every single state. Major shortages looming in places like California. In a shortage, where pay is crap, hours are long and benefits are being cut, do you think you’ll attract top notch teachers, let alone retain them? How will competition help with this?
3. Sorry, Kevin, privatizing schools is a terrible idea. Have you seen the metrics on charter schools? They are plain bad. Most charter schools fail. Waiting for Superman is not reality. It highlights the best charter schools in the country, yet ignores all of the failures. I bet I could find public schools that beat those charter schools on every metric. Also, how do you grade these schools and how do they compete with one another? How do you compare one set of students vs. another? “They are more concerned about getting a bigger budget next year than they are concerned with actually doing their job” – That’s a pretty bold statement with no basis, and you don’t think privatized schools will do exactly the same thing in order to appear competitive?. Who is going to pay for privatized schools? How will they get their funding? How will they determine who goes to what school? Which school will take the special education students? Which school will take the “resource” kids who need aids?
4. Being a teacher in most places requires you to have a Masters degree and be on a continuous learning track. What other profession requires a Masters and pays crap? You talk about police officers, farmers, etc. They often don’t have degrees. The ones that do advance and get paid accordingly. You talk about engineers, but they get paid, you know that. Chicago teachers want to be paid 200% of their student’s median income… you can’t compare that to your low cost of living state’s average median to that of an expensive metro area! Chicago teachers deserve to get paid 200%, they have to deal with some of the most difficult circumstances in teaching. You also cannot begrudge inner school teachers their high pay, how else will you attract and retain those teachers? Have you ever been to an inner city school for more than a day?
5. Completely agree on evaluations. Too few people actually understand that administrators are a vital part of this. Too few people understand that tenure is not job protection for bad teachers… tenure actually provides a very simple process to fire a bad teacher, but few administrators do the evaluations necessary to start the process.
First off, I like the concept of you taking one side of an argument and TeacHer taking the other side. I may just have to steal that. I apologize in advance.
Here’s why teachers will never be paid a whole lot: because teaching meshes really well with having a family, which makes it a terrific career choice for (mostly) women who plan to have kids. Demand will outpace supply because of this.
In Canada (where teachers get paid 20-40% more than in the U.S.) there’s too many teachers. All sorts of them can’t find a job. Just a little food for thought.
Kevin, your point about more spending on education not making students smaller goes off on two different topics!
You state that you’re talking about paying teachers more but the DATA you post is about per student expenditure – NOT about the link between student growth/teacher pay.
Of course student growth may not happen simply based on how much we’re spending per student! As a teacher and having watched the careers of others who have been in the profession longer (and those who have been in it fewer years than I) it is clear that it is the TEACHER who aids the growth. If the teacher knows how to use the tools, tech, resources, etc. that are available BECAUSE OF the per pupil spending, that is what can make the difference. How does a teacher know how to use those things to foster student growth? High quality education and the motivation to continue learning through various avenues of professional development. Teachers spend their time learning and growing for the sake of student growth to use that expenditure per student to it’s greatest potential. You’ve got the teacher who DOES know how to use those resources bought based on per student spending and how to use it to foster and show growth. That doesn’t qualify for more pay?
It’s an entirely separate issue from the per student spending. Just saying per student spending hasn’t brought growth is obvious even to teachers… Just having “things” for students doesn’t do anything. It is us who use that spending (ie the resources that $$ is used for) to create ways for students to grow.
As a teacher, I recognize It is very difficult to evaluate teachers. You should be able to use benchmark tests of students and measure if the students do better later in the year. The problem with that is I cannot control a student’s learning nor testing.
I am in my 12th year of teaching and have only received one raise. My salary increased by steps based on time and classes I accumulated over my career. That stopped at 10 years. Every 5 years, I receive a token few hundred dollars a year. Not even 1%. Should I get more pay? You betcha! I am not complaining because I knew what I was getting into when I started.
Education is messed up! Thanks to budget cuts, my pay was cut by 5% using furlough days. People are complaining about my pension or benefits. I pay for my pension (similar to Social Security) and see it as a form of compensation replacement for the pay.
You are braver than me. I agree with everything (except the privatizing education bit—just not sure yet). Checked out TeacHer’s post too. I have a number of friends that are teachers, and a couple of them are amazing. They should be paid more. But to say all teachers should be paid more is ridiculous. And the argument about being paid less than other people with masters degrees—oh please. Having an advanced degree does not mean you’re a good teacher, engineer, executive, etc. It’s all about performance.
It’s so typical to throw money at a problem. It’s the easiest thing to do. But that’s not the real problem. It may be some of the problem, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. New teachers don’t all leave the profession because they’re underpaid (they know what they’re getting going in). There’s more at play than teacher pay.
We should stop focusing on that one issue and talk about the hard stuff.
It would have been ridiculous to not bring the level of education of the worker into the equation when comparing pay levels across different professions. It’s not an apples to apples comparison if you don’t. My point wasn’t that people with master’s degrees make better teachers (although, both studies and my personal observations suggest that a master’s DOES matter) my point was that if you’re looking at careers that require comparable levels of education, teachers lose out.
My other question for you is, what IS the “hard stuff” that you would prefer to see people discussing? You referenced it more than once, but don’t make specific recommendations.
I taught college English for 12 years ending in the mid 80s, first as an adjunct instructor at the school where I earned my Ph.D., and later as an assistant professor where I eventually lost a close tenure decision. Our pay and raises were unionized, and they were hardly munificent compared to what I now earn in the business world. As for evaluations, they are notoriously tricky. When I was up for tenure, I got an equal proportion of good and bad reviews, sometimes getting both a favorable and an unfavorable evaluation from two colleagues obserivng the same class! Eventually my department advocate went through all the reviews in chronological sequence and made the case that my students were actually learning a great deal as the semester progressed. But that analysis was too clever for TPTB, and I was finally let go. I started a month later as a tech writer for an accounting software firm and haven’t looked back since.
I know for sure however that the level of ability my entering students displayed was far below what I was expected on graduating high school in the mid 1960s. Where I was expected to read 15 books and write on each for my 11th grade honors English, and had read almost all of Shakespeare by the age of 18, I had students in my freshman classes who had never read a book in their lives and could hardly write a sentence. Yet every year my town puts out a school budget asking for nice raises for the teachers.
I can’t imagine what goes on the high schools these days. A few weeks ago I was on line at the grocery store and asked for $50 cash over my purchase. The kid behind the counter pulled out a pocket calculator. Grade inflation is rampant at all levels, and making the kids “feel good about themselves” seems more important than challenging them to do better.
Sometimes when I am being dunned for contributions from one of the three universities I have attended, I remind the dunner that in ancient Greece, Socrates taught the youth of Athens to think and reason while having no more resources than a grassy knoll overlooking the Acropolis. Money isn’t the answer. Unless more is demanded of young students nowadays, we can hardly complain about our lessened competitive position among the educated nations of the world.
I read both posts and I have to agree with you, Kevin. Great teachers should be paid more. The only way to distinguish between the good teachers and the “low performing” teachers is evaluations. I believe that a third party should evaluate the teachers throughout the year while taking into consideration the principals’ evaluations, parental and student evaluations. Remarkably improved grades and test scores over the year should be rewarded. “Low performing” teachers should be cited and coached to improve their teaching methods. If changes aren’t made then they should be fired. TeacHer had a point about teachers being paid less than other professionals. However, considering that teachers can get great tax cuts after getting their degrees because “they are paying a service to their communities” they are also entering the workforce with less debt then a doctor, lawyer or even an accountant. Are they really making less? Though, a steady increase in pay over time is not bad either. But let’s not forget one major fact here… Students have to be willing to learn and accept what a teacher is trying to.. Teach. Our society as a whole should put more emphasis on education. Only then will we “find” the money in the budget to fund educational programs.
As a follow-up, I disagree completely with this (certainly debatable) opinion from our host:
“That’s certainly a debatable opinion. Are teachers more important than police officers who keep us safe, farmers who provide us with food, trash men who make sure we don’t wallow in our own filth, engineers who make sure buildings and bridges don’t collapse, truck drivers who make sure all the stuff we want and need can get from a factory to the shelves of a store, business owners who own the factories that make the goods or the stores where we buy all the things we want or need, or any other number of jobs?”
Yes, absolutely. Any one of us may need police and fire services on occasion, as well as any of the other estimable services Kevin enumerates, but the quality of teaching one receives especially at a young age informs one’s entire intellectual personality through life – that is, whether one can read, write, and compute; whether one can analyze an argument insightfully or is swayed by the blowheads (left and right) on talk radio and cable TV; whether one is familiar with the history, science, philosophy, and arts of human culture; whether one can speak another language; and more. Of course other sources beyond the classroom teacher can contribute to the development of the young person’s mind; I will always be grateful that my father read good children’s books to me continually at a young age, as that experience certainly helped mold my understanding of and ability to use the English language. But nothing is more crucial and pervasive than teaching, no matter what the source. I would be all in favor of higher pay for teachers if my experiences hadn’t led me to believe that the quality of teaching in this country is seriously short-changing young students.
I would have to firmly agree here. Teaching is not just another “profession” among the sea of “jobs” in this world.
Education is the CORE and FOUNDATION of civilized meaningful life in a society that expects the EDUCATION SYSTEM RAISE THEIR CHILDREN. We have slowly lost our HOME BASED VALUES that should be teaching our children which is instead replaced with MASS MEDIA, CELEBRITY STATUS and the overpaid ORGANIZED SPORTS CONGLOMERATE.
Academic education seems to be only half of school these days. You have missed the other half of what the school system now is; PARENTING.
The title immediately made me think, “Them are fightin’ words!” However, there are some points I agree with such as there should be a better way to evaluate teachers and tenure shouldn’t be the be-all-end-all that allows lazy teachers to stick it out until retirement.However, Tom, a commenter, made terrific points that I agree with completely. I’m going to ditto his comment. He must be a teacher. 😉
“Teachers are just one aspect of a bigger equation that makes sure we aren’t all surrounded by ignorant, unskilled people. ” <—- I don't know why I'm still astounded that this concept seems to be constantly ignored. Thanks for bringing it up, Mr. McKee.
I absolutely agree with you that more education spending won’t make students smarter. A teacher’s salary should be performance-based, and the government should regularly evaluate the teachers and pay them based on their skill level & knowledge.