When Good Teaching = Higher Salaries
Of all the reforms that could be made within the government school system, changing the structure of teacher pay has the biggest potential to dramatically improve the system. (Vouchers have even more potential to improve government schools, as their track record consistently shows. But that’s reform from outside the system, not inside it.)
There’s a strong consensus in the empirical research that teacher quality makes a huge difference. And it’s pretty generally conceded — even among left-leaning education wonks, although not, obviously, by the teachers’ unions — that our current teacher workforce is pretty low in quality. Our society recruits teachers decidedly from the lower end of the academic spectrum (see here for the gory details, if you can stand them.)
Why does the system attract low-performing teachers and repel high-performing ones? It’s primarily because the teacher salary system is designed to ensure this result.
Teacher pay is based almost entirely on two factors: years of experience and the possession of teaching certificates and credentials. A large body of empirical evidence establishes that neither of these has much relationship to actual teacher quality.
Teacher pay bears no effective connection to teacher performance. Meanwhile, in all the other professions, high performers are paid better and low performers are paid worse.
Think about what that means for people who are deciding whether to become teachers. Those who would make great teachers will consistently be paid better in any other profession besides teaching, while those who would make bad teachers will consistently be paid better as teachers than in any other profession.
Obviously some high performers go into teaching anyway. But they’re small in terms of percentages. The financial incentive can’t help but reduce the quality of the labor pool.
Defenders of the status quo have tried to argue that it was the expansion of opportunities for women in other professions that drove down teacher quality. And that makes a plausible story. However, it doesn’t seem to square with the facts. A Harvard economist ran the numbers historically for the past half-century or so, and found that the decline in teacher quality didn’t track with the rise of opportunities for women in other professions. It did, however, track closely with the unionization of the teaching profession — which is another way of saying that it tracked with the imposition of the current pay system.
There are few issues more important than teacher quality, and there is no serious way of improving teacher quality very much until we deal with the pay system. It’s that simple.
Unfortunately, the unions have managed to block serious experiments with merit pay. In the few cases where something called “merit pay” gets through the political wringer, it’s loaded down with so many compromises that it doesn’t amount to real reform. That’s why we don’t have much empirical evidence on how merit pay affects teaching.
And I’m afraid Rhee’s proposal is falling afoul of the same problem. Most important, her proposed system would be voluntary — and of course the teachers who really need to be subject to it won’t sign up. The removal of tenure protections won’t make much difference in a voluntary program; the teachers who need to get fired aren’t going to volunteer. And the removal of the seniority-based pay system will have a limited effect if it’s only applied to teachers who choose it.
Nonetheless, the proposal is still a significant break from the status quo. For all its limitations, it wouldn’t be merely a “symbolic” program — if Rhee wins her struggle with the unions, D.C. will have one of the most serious experiments in merit pay ever attempted. Yet the symbolic power of showing that the unions can be beaten on this issue might well be the single most major impact the program would have.
Good teachers should get higher pay. that is inline with equal work = equal pay…the better they work, the higher the pay.
bad teachers however, shouldn’t be protected by their union. As McCain said “let’s find bad teachers a new line of work” and rightfully so.
I don’t buy it… explain to me how offering higher salaries to some of the teachers who volunteer for the new conditions, and allowing others to opt out, is going to make the schools more productive… I don’t see it. Frankly, it sounds more like a desparate move on her part to keep what good teachers she has to prevent all of the students from leaving… but it still doesn’t solve the underlying root problems of the failing public schools.
Rhee doesn’t understand how pay and unions relate. Simply doubling pay does nothing if the union or the system prevents taking action against those teachers whose productivity/value doesn’t increase significantly.
Bill,
You say that this is Rhee’s attmept “to keep what good teachers she has.” And that’s precisely why we can reasonably expect this policy to have a positive impact on teacher quality, although (as I said) a limited one. Bad teachers will not choose to participate in the new system, and that will limit its impact. However, good teachers do stand to make more money by signing up for the new system, so I think it’s reasonable to expect that they will in fact sign up. And if they do, and their higher salaries make them more likely to stay in the system than they otherwise would be, that means the policy will have a positive impact. Again, it’s not a revolutionary change. But it’s an important one.
I’m with Bill in New York. Trying to blame the Teacher’s Union for the ills of the DC school system is bogus, and writing as if the political parties in the city are beyond reproach and are being blocked by the evil union is a crock.
“Teacher pay bears no effective connection to teacher performance. Meanwhile, in all the other professions, high performers are paid better and low performers are paid worse.”
The above statement just floored me expecially since we are being raised on the stories of Enron, and now Freddie Mack and Fannie Mae with all the other sandwiched in between such as all the bank failures etc. etc. High performers paid better? You must not be familiar with the old saying “F_ck up, move up”.
Unions came about because workers needed to join together and fight for better pay and better working conditions. Denying that is denying history. Fixing corrupt unions should be a high priorty, just as fixing corrupt politicians, but singling out the Union is business as usual for business. Try better.
I say let the Teachers Unions game the system all they can.
I think that tenure in a teaching position not in a college or university is just crackers. Go get a lot more of that. Continue to pack school boards with either retired teachers or their relations, so that you can simplify the path to my bank account to fund your ever growing salary needs. After all, it’s for the children.
Just not my children.
As I said, go ahead. Do it all. Just give me and mine the option of taking my tax dollars and putting them in an educational institution of my choice. Let’s see how well the teacher’s union fares when their supposed beneficiaries opt out to private education and the public funding dries up. If the marketplace was allowed to decide the issue, education would benefit and the union, which has its generous share of drones, hacks and outright frauds, would also join the marketplace or perish. Public education in the United States has become the madrassa of the left, where the only ideas allowed are indoctrinaire and completely un-American.
Many of us think the draft dodging, useful tools of the 60′s have so radicalized primary education that it is only with fefereal support that the public trough they feed from is kept full. Either let us opt out, or be prepared to see the rules change. The only way to keep the professional union teacher sinecure and give parents the right to quality education for their children is the “voucher”. If you won’t allow it, don’t be surprised when, in the end, the current structure and Kultur is thrown out, baby and bathwater, if only to de-contaminate the process of the self serving, union stiffs that game it now.
Lynn,
Several points: first, ‘the political parties in the city’ is a political non sequitur. There is effectively only one party in the city – Democrat. (The republicans sometimes get a council seat, but that has an impact on city policy that is between marginal and negligible).
Next, your cynical third paragraph, while citing a phenomenon that occasionally happens, cannot be the general case in competitive industries. In government, which is a monopoly and has no competition, the phenomenon can occur with great frequency since there are no organizational level consequences.
In your final paragraph you cite history from the ’30s which has no significant relevance to either the general business climate of today or specifically to union monopolies within government monopolies. To say that blaming unions is ‘usual for business’ ignores the fact that government is not a business – in fact, as discussed in the article, union rules are at the heart of the problem. There is no ‘business’ involved here, just Democrat politicians in a city that has been plagued by corrupt politics for decades.
The biggest problem you run into with “merit pay” is how to administer it. We all want good teaching but how do you measure it? Experienced teachers can tell you how much classroom ability can vary from year to year. In addition, there’s a big difference between Advanced Placement classes and fundamental courses. How is that worked into the mix? Add in the minefield of teaching the principal’s or superintendent’s child. I’ve seen good teachers get into trouble for giving too much homework, or too little, reading the wrong book, showing a controversial movie, or saying something politically incorrect. Without some sort of specific, measurable guideline, a teacher’s employment could rest on little more than the whim of the principal.
Any other industry which produced results as poor as public education would be seeing pay cuts and layoffs, even bankruptcy. We’ve poured billions down the education rat hole and like aid to Africa, nothing happens in return. It never will.
Why not privatize the public schools, dismantle the useless unions, voucher out the per student state allocation as a cash credit to the school of your choice, just start afresh?
We’ve done the merit pay dance before too. What good is that when the unions simultaneously protects their hacks? Salary isn’t the issue. Catholic schools in the inner city with a lot less teacher pay produce better results. With benefits for a nine month job teachers aren’t that underpaid in most places.
McCain hinted a accelerating vouchers. Breaking the grip of the useless unionized public schools with their fail outcomes is the only permanent sane path.
J.Long you’re on to one of the problems. The principal needs to have a lot more power and leverage. I’ve been in way too many meetings where the teacher essentially thumbs their nose at the principal. Right now if a teacher has too many problems with too many parents/students the school board just moves the teacher to a different school the next semester. Your kid moves on to different grades and different teachers and it all gets shoved under the rug.
One other problem holding down quality is demand. That is, there’s few people wanting to teach. Why should they? Low respect from parents, students, and public. Then there’s the administration always introducing some “new” teaching technique or program that’s supposed to raise test scores so the public will stay off its back. If you want to improve education, get those dollars into the classroom and to the teacher! Higher pay will create more demand which will drive competition. Many schools are saddled with poor teachers because no one else wants to do it. Schools here in NC have 3 years to decide if they want to keep a teacher or let him go before giving him “continuing status”. I’ve seen very poor teachers kept around because there’s no others waiting for that job.
Not to change the subject, but here’s a piece of worthwhile reading:
(Note: This is an interview given prior to Sarah Palin coming onto the scene and within 7 days garnering more positive support and approval than Obama did in 18 months!)
Nancy Pelosi talks about the importance to have young women in politics…
http://feathersblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/nancy-pelosi-talks-about-importance-to.html
I heard about it on the Roger Hedgecock show (San Diego, KOGO Radio).
Like GE under Jack Welch, the schools should dump the bottom 10% of teachers in each school annually. Poof – gone – get them a job doing something they are better suited for. Teaching under the NEA is lowering the standards to the worst performers which is wrong in schools, business and government.
Now, the uniona won’t like this but they are non taxable entities and should not be able to fund politicians and campaigns. Unions are probably the worst thing that could bappen to schools or government.
Sorry, J.Long, I think you are incorrect that few people want to teach. There are many bright people with core degrees outside of education that would do it at junctures, like motherhood, in their lives if the most of the teacher “training” wasn’t an so inane and deliberately an obstacle. It’s not bad work with benefits for 9 months a year. You can be on a schedule with your own kids with lots of holidays off.
Like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic more money down this unionized rat hole isn’t the answer. The public has bought into the teacher’s union no can do excuses. Why does a first grade teacher get tenure? It’s ridiculous.
It’s a failed public taxpayer funded industry that needs privatized. It couldn’t be any worse.
This comparison would work if private corporations were funded by taxes. The bailouts are a separate issue, but the fact of the matter is, if a private company f_cks up, it will typically go out of business with no real impact on the tax payers. When public schools f_ck up, they have the power to hold students in them until their parents can afford to send them elsewhere. When you factor in property taxes AND private tuition, most parents can’t afford it, which makes all of the difference in the world.
And that has nothing to do with public sector unions. Teachers are already given plush jobs. They don’t have to work a full year to make their salary. I had a teacher in high school who exploited that fact by doing all of her grading during her classes. She then had enough time to work a second job, and as a result, had quite a lot of disposable income to enjoy since she was single.
What you have here is a union that has monopolized the school system, in a system where most students have no choice but to go to that union-monopolized school system. You’re guilty of denying reality here because you are being an ideologue. People who work for government entities should not be able to unionize because their pay comes from tax revenue, not corporate revenue.
The obstacle to improvement in public education, and the reason teachers’ unions will not be reformed, is the Democratic Party. It benefits enormously from union contributions and directed votes, and it has no desire to see any change in the status quo.
Look at Obama’s list of “changes”. None will impact the Dem voting base except to give them more money. McCain singled out education as an issue. There is a clear *political* basis for the sorry state of “education”, and the problem lives on the left.
Cool,
She has a sure fire scheme to select the real teachers and screen the worthless ones. She can then put the real teachers in real schools and the worthless ones in the school’s emptied by the flight of pupils seeking a real education at the voucher schools and then she can close those schools and toss the worthless teachers out. Subtle. I like it.
Still haven’t read a rebuttal that refutes what I have said. The only change that I might make is instead of F_ck up move up, is to refer to the Peter Principle. Everyone is promoted to their level of incompetence to describe what we are seeing today in the business sector and more than likely the DC school system. It has nothing to do with unions. Sorry your pointing your fingers at the wrong people. Administration is a responsible for results, the buck stops there. They’re just diverting everyone’s attention away from themselves to an easy target, the teacher’s union.
Any parent who tells you that they have no power to change a poor performing school is not trying hard enough. They ARE afraid of the parents especially when they group together as in the PTA or PTO. Their power is tremendous and I have seen it up close and personal. You are taking the easy way out and looking to one cause for the problems. Your still not trying hard enough.
What if homeschoolers, who are as organized as the teachers’ unions started an online petition for a voucher system? I’d sign. So would millions of other Americans.
This has to be a battle between parents and good teachers on one side and bad teachers and the Democrats on the other.
I don’t think the Democrats are going to be winning many intellectual battles any time soon. Their opposition is way too intelligent and persuasive. With Sarah Palin and John McCain leading the battle, there are lots of talk radio and TV commentators on our side who will bring the issue before the American people.
I wasn’t so hopeful before Sarah but now I think people are energized and once we win our first great battle (on energy) victory will give us momentum which will carry us forward on other issues from vouchers to the flat tax. I see such a pent-up desire for reform on the part of the American people that politicians will become afraid, very afraid.
thought you would find this of interest
interesting
Placing almost exclusive emphasis upon test-score improvement as a basis for rewarding teachers is patently unfair and, when coupled with inadequate performance-appraisal systems, drives teachers toward unethical behavior or departure to other pursuits.
A primary reason the public has not been more supportive of higher funding for education has been the poor relationship between better funding and higher educational quality as revealed by a number of studies.
Use of an appraisal system based upon the following guidelines should go a long way toward turning things around.
Those associated with schools, need to fairly identify true “stars” and “inadequate performers” as one of the bases for:
justifying good pay for outstanding teachers,
providing for self-guidance on the part of newcomers and present staff,
and providing an important basis for terminating those who cannot, or will not, measure up.
Research findings show that evaluators achieve much better agreement about who are Stars and Inadequate Performers than they do about who are Average, Above-Average, and Below-Average performers. Yet, placing individuals in the middle-three categories is a time-consuming, often arbitrary, and resentment-causing activity that most evaluators dislike having to do. Also, clearly, an average performer in a superior organization deserves much more recognition than an average performer in an inferior one. No wonder that many teachers and their unions oppose conventional merit-rating systems!
To avoid a popularity contest, assure greater fairness, and provide for constructive self-guidance, there should be behavioral documentation for both Star and Inadequate Performer nominations via the Critical Incident Technique.
To lay the groundwork for this, students, parents, veteran administrators, and experienced teachers should be polled at to what specific, observable behaviors they associate with outstanding and inadequate performance for each important aspect of a teacher’s job.
Then, required behavioral documentation for Star and Inadequate-Performer nominations from fellow teachers, adminstrators, students, and parents should be based upon the most agreed-upon behaviors, and the agreed-to relative weights that should be assigned to these.
The results of this analysis can also constructively guide the initial training and subsequent selection of teachers, as well as, provide a much-needed, qualifying context for the currently over-stressed evaluation factor of test-score-improvement.
This approach also sets the stage for more productive review sessions between the rater and ratee. Since the ratee has a sound basis for self-rating, the session should start with the rater asking “How do you rate yourself for this past period through the presentation of relevant, supporting behaviors?” No rater can be all-knowing, so if behaviors are mentioned that she or he is not aware of, the rater can postpone giving his or her evaluation to provide time to check out the validity of the assertions, if this seems necessary.
A sound behavioral basis for rating also facilitates the use of motivational goal setting during the review session. For example, if the ratee wants to be a Star, what specific behavioral goals does she or he plan to adopt by such and such a time? If stardom is not the goal, which specific, Inadequate Performer behaviors will he or she need to avoid?
This approach permits a rater to be more of a counselor and coach, than one who appears to sit in arbitrary judgment.
For discussion of relevant research and related citations, see: “Improving Performance Appraisal Systems” by William M. Fox, NATIONAL PRODUCTIVITY REVIEW, Winter 1987-88, pages 20-27.
William Fox
gryfox@bellsouth.net
Professor Emeritus
Department of Management
University of Florida
(352) 376-9786