http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/07/nyregion/07charter.html is an interesting story on a new charter school in New York City. Using only the standard per-pupil budget from the city, the school is going to be able to pay its teachers $125,000 per year. How can they afford to pay more than the neighboring public schools? The article explains that they have no assistant principals, no “attendance coordinators”, and no “discipline deans”. The principal is paid $90,000 per year, less than the teachers, an idea that the head of the unionized public school principals said was “the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.”
These are similar ideas to ones presented in the 1970s in the book A Pattern Language. The architects and anthropologists behind the book said that the way to improve public education was to get rid of the physical school buildings. They claimed that large schools ended up requiring a lot of bureaucrats to administer and it was better to have the money available to spend on teachers.
Throwing money at a problem rarely solves it. If I were a teacher working at $50k per year, I would find the whole premise insulting. The premise being that at the current pay levels only undereducated, unsophisticated duds work as teachers and somehow, majically, doubling their salary will make them all intelligent. My experience with teachers is quite the opposite, with rare exception they are well educated and strive to do the best possible job they can.
You may be on to something with the large school/ bureaucracy linkage. Seems much of the business of a school district now is dedicated to increasing funding, unfortunately, when increases do come we end up with a new level of managers or teaching assistants rather than more teachers.
Maybe we should take the education dollars and use them to buy every parent a 35ft. sailboat.
This is great! There’s no teachers’ union to muddle the incentives and there are performances bonuses on top of the base pay. It’s exactly what the economist ordered.
Contrary to Paul S, my experience in college was that it was only the mediocre students who went into secondary education. The smart kids all went into fields where you are actually rewarded for being smart, not a field where your pay is determined entirely by how many years you’ve been able to put up with bullshit.
Paul: I don’t think the plan is to “throw money at” mediocre teachers and hope that their newfound wealth induces them to do a better job. I assume that the plan is to identify the best teachers in nearby school districts and hire them away. I think it should work quite well, though of course to the extent that this new charter school is enriched with great teachers it will be by impoverishing other schools who lose their best teachers.
It’s not a zero-sum game. There are plenty of smart people who could be drawn into a teaching career if it paid well and the unions and bureaucrats were barred from the premises. It should be very important to the teachers’ unions to oppose this charter school. Once you wedge open a sliver of competition, it infects everything – soon good people are getting paid what they’re worth, and the slackers are getting turfed. Not a happy outcome for a union. My prediction is that the school will succeed, but the union will find a way to co-opt the results and get ineffective teachers’ salaries in the rest of the region to rise along with the good ones (and retain the army of higher-paid bureaucrats).
Well, sure, but if this starts raising average salaries as a defensive move and to try and pull teachers to NY from the rest of the country, the impoverishment is temporary.
Taken to it’s logical extreme, this pulls people into teaching from the rest of the economy.
Which, I think, is sort of the idea.
Of course, there are ways this can go pathologically wrong. In Nursing, for example, job-hopping is inadvertently encouraged in many metro/regional economies by paying new hires more than existing employees, and the situation is then exacerbated by paying temps even higher rates just to keep the headcount down on paper. Temps also get their overtime pay, whereas employees get treated like captive peons who can’t leave at the end of their shift if their releif calls in sick (so they quit and start temping). And then, to control spiraling costs and personnel shortages, many organizations resort to bringing in nurses from overseas (which, due to their inexperience and lack of ESL skills, ends up putting an even higher workload on the locals).
I think one of the issues for this program becomes what is the best and brightest versus mediocre in teachers. I’m not convinced the smartest among us make the best teachers, especially in secondary and elementary shools. While demonstrated mastery of the subject matter taught is paramount, compassion, patience, empathy and especially common sense seem to be more important than finishing first or second or even in the top 10% of the teacher’s college class. I know many super intelligent people who I would not want near my kids because they lack the other traits that make up a great teacher.
The school highlighted in the article will probably be a success. I don’t think the high salary will be the reason though. I think the selective vetting of teachers, careful scrutiny of curriculum and the empowerment of the teachers hired to get the job done well without the meddling of administrators, unions and bureaucrats will make this an astounding success. My fear is that once it becomes “mainstream” and the novelty wears off, tenure, unions, political correctness and all the other impediments to a good education will firmly re-implant themselves. We will end up with a system that has the same result as now, except all the teachers will cost twice as much.
My stepmother is an associate provost at the college where Zeke’s mother teaches. So, for a lot of reasons I won’t comment up or down, but he will plug holes and he will do his best to solve the scalability problem.
More than half of the employees of the Cambridge school department are not classroom teachers. In a lot of ways, the public school system more nearly resembles a government run jobs program than an organization devoted to educating young people. Institutions tend to be run for the benefit of the people who run them rather the ostensible beneficiaries, in this case students and the society at large.