A reader pointed out an interesting confluence of stories in today’s New York Times.
Story 1 is “Teachers Wonder, Why the Scorn?”, about how it is an unsolvable mystery as to why taxpayers have a low opinion of teachers (a 2nd-year teacher earning $36,000 ($4,000 per month) is the salary poster child; the journalist apparently could not find any $10,000+/month senior teachers to quote.)
Story 2 is about how 75 percent of students delivered by those teachers to City University of New York require remedial instruction. It notes that only 23 percent of students who graduated from New York City public schools, some of the most lavishly funded in the world, were “prepared for college or careers” (just imagine how little the dropouts learned!).
[Speaking of New York City school funding… when Michael Bloomberg was running for elections and to hold onto the Mayoralty for a third term, he dished out future taxpayers’ money at a record pace to unionized city workers. Now that he is a lame duck and doesn’t need their electoral support, he is proposing to scale back pensions for workers yet to be hired (i.e., he will help get the city’s fiscal health in order starting in the year 2040 or 2050).]
[How do the $130,000/year (+ $75,000/year pension starting at age 53) schoolteachers in Rochester perform compared to NYC? Five percent of their students end up being prepared for college (source).]
Story 2: Given that the costs of a degree at many 4 year institutions is over $200K, perhaps the students are quitting in despair and becoming plumbers instead? 🙂
Interesting. The Canadian public education system appears to do significantly better than the US (PISA 2009 results), even though pay is based strictly on seniority. According to this page, teachers’ salaries max out at about C$60,000 for a teacher with a bachelor’s degree, and C$70,000 for a teacher with a master’s degree.
The idea of paying for performance rather than seniority, giving higher salaries to high performers (like Rochester’s paying $100,000 to “lead teachers”) and lower salaries to everyone else, has been raised by various educational reformers; but I’m dubious. It seems that teachers don’t have that much impact on educational outcomes: Diane Ravitch summarizes studies saying that teachers account for about 10-20 percent of educational outcomes, while non-school factors such as family income account for 60 percent.
Ravitch goes on to note that the child poverty rate in the US is about 20%, while in Finland (one of the top-scoring countries on the PISA 2009 tests), it’s 5%. In Canada, it’s about 9%.
Some ideas on education reform: Learning from Asian Schools.
Russil: The fact that teachers, who have the children in their possession 6 hours/day for 12 years, have only a minor effect on education would not seem to be an argument to support the idea that we have great teachers in the U.S. [Perhaps the structure of the school and curriculum is so broken that there isn’t much an individual teacher can do, but I don’t think that was Ravitch’s point.]
Rochester paying $100,000 to “lead teachers”? The whole point of that nytimes article was that Rochester paid $100,000/nine-months to all teachers who’d been there long enough ($130,000/year if they wanted to work summer school for their last couple of years and get a pension based on that higher “base” compensation).
Teaching is without a doubt just about the most important job we have in society. People pay lip service to that notion, but what they don’t do is put their money where their mouth is. First year teachers in Las Vegas have a room-mate matching service, because generally they can’t afford a place of their own. That’s idiotic. No one should expect to get stinking rich as a teacher, but we shouldn’t expect high-quality teacher candidates to take a vow of relative poverty either — you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.
I’d be willing to make the following trade — teachers get paid like the professionals they should be, so, roughly on par with, but probably a little bit less than, lawyers or doctors.
In return, they get treated like professionals — no unions. Bonuses for working in the toughest neighborhoods, bonuses for performance. Hire primarily based on demonstrated command of the subjects. Retain only if they demonstrate the ability to get this material across in classes.
Then you’d see a pretty good proportion of top university grads going into teaching. You’d see the schools get a lot better.
Why is the idea of paying for performance accepted everywhere except education? Are teachers some special breed of human which is unaffected by the incentives which affect the rest of us?
If you gave all U.S. citizens truth serum and asked them what they thought the public school should do, a high percentage would probably say that the public schools should provide babysitting… it should produce safe, happy children, and a time for parents to… ummm… not have to watch their kids… not scholars. The academic credentials demanded of teachers should be dropped; prospective teachers should just have to pass a basic literacy test and a background screening to make sure they’re not a convicted criminal. That would make the pool of teachers large enough to provide adequate babysitting, and it should help to lower the cost of schools. If parents want their children to be better educated, they should prepare to do it themselves, or to pay for someone not affiliated with the public schools to do it. The public schools are NOT set up to educate; they’re set up to provide babysitting and opportunities for transferring wealth. Can you learn in a public school? Yep! Are there some great, dedicated people working in public schools? Yep! But what most people demand out of public schools is… babysitting… and for the most part, that’s what they get. Are they paying too much for babysitting? Oh yeah! I think that’s safe to say.
Andy, I have 2 kids: 1st and 3rd grader. And, yes, yes and yes. I can subscribe to your every statement. Mind you, I live in Greenwich CT, with very decent public schools, and teachers making 80K+. Everything my kids learn they learn at home. Everything. Period. No exceptions.
In China and Taiwan, grade school through high school teachers traditionally command a tremendous amount of social respect, though I have no idea how much they are paid. When I was a kid growing up in New Jersey, I often saw Chinese family patriarchs and matriarchs publicly defer even to young elementary school teachers. I certainly never heard anyone in my Chinese expat community ever openly criticize a teacher. If there was a problem with student performance, the family regarded that as a failing on the part of the student or the family, not the teacher. The solution was always the same: work harder and don’t blame others.
I am thinking that a large part of the education problem in the US is rooted in the social disrespect of grade school teaching. My son is in public school now, after years in an expensive private school, in what is supposed to be one of the nation’s best public school systems. Yet it is very clear to me that the vast majority of families in my son’s school do not care all that much about elementary education. My son tells me that many kids in his classes routinely show up unprepared for school — homework not done, reading not done, no studying for a test — and that the kid’s parents don’t care. Even a great teacher cannot overcome a lack of familial support.
Phil — by the time a child gets to middle school in most medium and large school systems, any one teacher has any given child in class for about 1 hour per day, 180 days per year. During that time the teacher is charged with teaching a specific subject, say math, NOT with trying to instill a “love of learning” into the child. That is the parents’ job. Typical class size is maybe 25 students, so on average a student gets 1/25 of the teacher’s attention for that hour, or roughly 2 minutes a day. So typically one teacher has about 6 hours PER YEAR to influence a student’s education. The effect is going to be minor unless the student’s family provides adequate support on the home front.
Stephen — who says pay for performance is accepted everywhere? In my experience, pay for performance is largely the exception, not the rule. When I worked at a telecomm equipment company, the corporate officers were awarded tens of millions in “retention bonuses” while the company was quickly and visibly sinking. The chairman even admitted that these bonuses were to make up for the fact that, due to the dismal performance of the company, the officers were not going to make their incentive bonuses. Do I even need to mention Franklin Raines’ compensation for destroying Fannie Mae (bailed out at the cost of over $100 billion to taxpayers, and we are STILL paying millions for this guy’s legal fees), or Robert Nardelli’s lavish pay and severance packages at Home Depot and Chrysler? Or the hundreds of millions (maybe billions) in bonuses paid out directly by taxpayers to Merrill Lynch and AIG executives for blowing up those companies and dragging down the entire US economy? Why is there so much antipathy towards teachers when there are far bigger fish leeching off the taxpayers?
Andy, but wasn’t Thomas Mann’s original objective for Public Education – to serve political, anti-intellectual purposes? So we got what both parents and politicians want.
“Rochester paying $100,000 to “lead teachers”?”
Did I misunderstand the article?
Based on this, I thought that the top salaries only went to the lead teachers, that it wasn’t based on seniority. But perhaps I misunderstood.
enplaned, Stephen, I’d suggest taking a look at the article about Rochester:
And the article suggests that by paying high salaries, they’ve been successful at attracting and retaining top people (one of the interviewees has a doctorate, for example). But as Diane Ravitch points out, teacher quality only accounts for 10-20% of the variation in test results. Non-school factors like family income account for 60%. Teachers may have kids for six hours a day, but in a class of 20 students, they can’t give them the individual attention that parents can. And they can’t control their activities outside school; they can’t make them sit down and do their homework instead of watching television (according to the OECD, US households watch television for 8 hours/day; in Canada, it’s 3 hours/day). The Stevenson article notes that Chinese and Japanese parents put much more emphasis on school, homework, and effort (as opposed to innate ability) than American parents do. Amy Chua’s recent Tiger Mom book provides an extreme example.
Philip noted elsewhere that 18% of Harvard grads already apply to Teach for America. I don’t think there’s a shortage of highly motivated, well-educated young people who already want to become teachers.
My own feeling is that teaching would have been much easier before the introduction of television and video games. There’s a lot of highly entertaining distractions competing for children’s attention these days. The Economist:
Russil: I think that you did misunderstand the article. $70,000 was the top salary in 1986. It is presumably quite a bit higher now. Also, you probably imagine that becoming a “lead” teacher is harder than it is. Most people would not expect a 24-year-old to be given “tenure” after working a couple of years in a California school, but that’s how it was (and is?) set up.
Bloomberg’s proposed reform is called “Tier V”. This is because Tiers II through IV had been taking on previous prension reforms which had been weakened over time in givebacks.
McKinsey has done some good research on school systems.
http://www.mckinsey.com/clientservice/Social_Sector/our_practices/Education/Knowledge_Highlights/Best_performing_school.aspx
Their 3-key points are obvious, but seem to be missing from most conversations on education:
* Getting the right people to become teachers;
* Developing them into effective instructors; and
* Ensuring the system is available to deliver the best possible instruction for every child.
Page 13 of the report points out the complete lack of correlation between education spending and student literacy. Clearly, simply throwing money at the problem and blindly increasing teacher’s salaries has had no effect on educational quality.
This type intelligent, honest research and thought is critical to creating worthwhile schools.