Comments on: Teacher Pay

By: Teacher Wanting More

Teacher Wanting More — Thu, 23 Dec 2004 01:53:53 +0000

I am currently a teacher. So, to all those who posted comments and have never taught…please just try it for one month and you’ll see and understand that teachers do not get paid enough for the job they do, and do well. All this conversation about merit pay is very interesting. Fine, policy makers come up with a way to pay “the good teachers” more than “the bad teachers”. Yet, at some point there needs to be some serious thought applied to the FACT that teachers, as a whole, are terribly underpaid. Our profession is one in which we have to wear many hats. Contrary to what some may perceive, teachers are probably some of the best managers/ administrators in a school setting. You really have to be a teacher to understand the complexity of this career. There are numerous roles and responsibilities under the umbrella of educator. Especially in elementary education some of those roles are planners, nurses, counselors, managers, peace makers, motivational speakers, expert implementors of curriculum, paper handling experts, and in some ways parental figures. Merit pay for some and not others? This whole debate is fine as long as you increase the overall pay for all first. Give teachers credit for the great jobs they are already doing; and most teachers really do a great job (no matter what the media tries to picture otherwise).

By: MW

MW — Sun, 19 Dec 2004 01:54:03 +0000

I’m suprprised that nobody’s compared college-level instruction with K-12. Instructors at colleges and universities are, for the most part, not unionized. They do not have standard pay rates—some disciplines pay more than others and the ‘stars’ may be paid considerably more. Colleges and universities also compete for students and are almost universally considered to be the best in the world. Our K-12 schools are merely average among industrialized countries even though our level of spending is very high. One obvious approach would be to try to make K-12 schools work more like our colleges and universities. How would instructors be evaluated? That would be up to the individual institution—no doubt different institutions would choose different methods and priorities. Completely apart from that, I am quite surprised that nobody seems to have mentioned evaluating teacher quality according to how well they served their customers—the students taking their classes and their parents. Universities use course-evaluations routinely, but K-12 schools seem to use them not at all.

By: JennyD

JennyD — Thu, 16 Dec 2004 21:57:54 +0000

Chris Correa http://www.chriscorrea.com linked to this post today, so you may be getting more comments. He’s an education academic, as am I. There are a few of us floating around, blogging on education topics of substance. Some of the blogs are quite good and thoughtful. Come check them out (and update your blogroll:-)). I must have misread your comment about the english teacher and counselor. No harm done. But this was an interesting conversation, one I would like to have on my own pages someday.

By: harry

harry — Thu, 16 Dec 2004 19:17:54 +0000

Jennyd, why do you think I am opposed to it. I am precisely trying to provoke thinking about how to do it. Getting rid of tenure is precisely the kind of thing that would raise costs. Government run organisations are able to pay people less than private companies because they can provide tenure, a non-pecuniary benefit which makes the job more attractive to some talented people. If you abolish tenure you’ll pay for it by having to raise the financial reards in orde rto attract the same people. I’m not opposed to doing that in pricniple, and agree that tenure is very problematic, but if you are going to propose it you are going to have to say how you’ll pay for it. The proposal has the added problem that you’d need administrators who would make better choices than the current tenure/attrition system does. I’m not convinced we have them, and getting them will take time. Thanks for the Florida article btw. Since no-one is probably reading any more I can safely say that Americans trying to get a grip on what is going on post-NCLB would do well to read some history of UK education; I think you’ll be able to predict the next ten years of debates here if you look at the last 20 years of debates there.

By: JennyD

JennyD — Thu, 16 Dec 2004 18:51:01 +0000

Harry: You don’t make sense. Why would pay a terrible English teacher more than a superb guidance counselor? Here’s a better idea: Why not get rid of tenure in K-12 education, and have teachers work under a five-year contract in their first job, and in seven year contracts after that? It would give school districts the opportunity to fire bad teachers without hassle at the end of contract. It gives good teachers the opportunity to bargain for a better contract if the district wants to keep them. And districts do want to keep good teachers. There’s a shortage of teachers, good or bad, and you need to keep your good teachers or you’re in trouble. I’m not worried too much about nepotism because the turnover among superintendents and school board members is pretty rapid, so it’s unlikely that someone would be held onto because they have a friend on the board. Likewise, because so many contracts come up regularly, the board is less likely to shove aside a good teacher to make room for a pal because there will be another job open at the same time. But Harry, teaching is not magic. It’s not like being a movie star, and some people are just born with it. In fact, some people are better skilled, better trained, and have spent more time improving their practice than others who are teachers. Let’s find a way reward them. FYI, see the series running in the Herald-Tribune in Florida. It’s about teachers who fail the basic skills test to be teachers, and notes that kids in poor schools are more likely to have teachers who failed the test, and are more likely to learn less in school. http://www.heraldtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20041212/NEWS/412120357/1060

By: Peter

Peter — Thu, 16 Dec 2004 16:59:43 +0000

Let’s add another variable to this list for incentive pay … teachers with very large classes should get extra money. First, it’s a lot more work for them and second, it’ll keep impoverished school districts from cutting teachers when they should be cutting things that have less impact on the student’s education. (They really shouldn’t have to cut anything in an ideal world, but …)

By: BigMacAttack

BigMacAttack — Thu, 16 Dec 2004 15:26:54 +0000

benton, Ok good point. But maybe if pay was increased and based on merit that wouldn’t be the case with the bottom 10%. Randy, We consistently rank in the middle or lower. We spend the second most even when adjusting for PPP http://www.unicef-icdc.org/publications/pdf/repcard4e.pdf

By: harry

harry — Thu, 16 Dec 2004 14:34:46 +0000

Russell, no I haven’t, but now I will—you’ve piqued my interest. Thanks. Don’t worry about mistaking me for henry—everyone else does. bigmacattack—I didn’t understand a word of your response. Sorry. I must be dull at the moment. Still, I shall talk to some experts about this and figure out what the problems actually are (as opposed to what they seem to me, a non-expert, to be). If the variance in salaries predicted is 1-2% then it is almost certainly not worth bothering with merit pay. Remember there are going to be new administrative costs, and the whole point is to make teaching more attractive to talented people so they are more likely to enter and less likely to leave the profession. And I’m very surprised by the comments people make about the reward structures in the private sector. Even in the non-unionised private sector seniority is a major predictor of wage rates, and not of productivity. Also, as several people have said, it would be bad economics to erode the sense of public service that leads soem people into teaching at a lower wage rate than they could command in other jobs. Excactly what measures erode and what measures support that sense of public service is soemthing we might want to talk about

By: Harald Korneliussen

Harald Korneliussen — Thu, 16 Dec 2004 07:46:28 +0000

It’s conventional business wisdom that not all sorts of jobs profit from reward schemes, especially in creative fields like computer science. Why should teaching be any different? People take those jobs mainly for idealistical reasons, it’s a well known fact, and it’s good, because a certain fervour about your field is essential in passing it on to future generations. Being a good teacher is really hard, it’s not a given that you get better results if you throw more time into preparation etc. So even if economic incentives really did inspire teachers to try harder, a teacher would probably improve a lot less from it than your average professional. On the other hand, economic rewards should probably be used to encourage teachers to apply for inner-city jobs, and also in competing for high-demand knowledge (science, mathemathics).

By: Randy

Randy — Thu, 16 Dec 2004 07:07:31 +0000

In the interest of accuracy—SAT scores are not down, and many, many, many more students are taking the SAT test. That’s not a failure. International comparison rankings are not down. There haven’t been many, and the US has never been especially high. Given what we spend per pupil on education, we’re above where we should be. Check out The Manufactured Crisis by Berliner and Biddle.

By: Russell L. Carter

Russell L. Carter — Thu, 16 Dec 2004 04:22:56 +0000

I see google is not forthcoming. Here’s a start: http://rodcorp.typepad.com/rodcorp/2004/12/how_we_work_ric.html Only part there important to the present discussion is the centrality of peer review: teachers should review each other.

By: benton

benton — Thu, 16 Dec 2004 04:01:21 +0000

Jared – Peer review for purposes of determining tenured status is something that is being done. Its done well in Toledo and COlumbus Ohio. Not necessarily done so well in California, but its there too. The stats from Toledo imply that teachers are much harder on eachother than administrators were. Glenn/Bigmac I’m with you at least in theory on the 10/80/10 but I don’t know how you get the bottom ten up to the middle so easily. That’s like saying that the Mets could improve if they could just get their worst 3 hitters to hit as well as their best three. I think they are trying to accomplish this by getting Manny Ramirez. When I was teaching in NYC we pretty much has ten percent of the slots always open and were always rotating in people who were not destined to be successful teachers and trying to rotate them out when that became apparent. Not enough Manny Ramirezes. Not enough positive karma/good working conditions/money to convince people to try to become Manny Ramirezes. There are people who blame this on the certification rules and talk about how Bill Gates couldn’t get certified in NYC etc. Actually that may be true now under the NCLBA. But when I was there, I routinely was in a staffroom filled with uncertified teachers. In fact I was one of them. Bill Gates would have fit right in if he’d felt like it. Somehow he thought being a philanthropist was a better move than coming to Hollis everyday.

By: Russell L. Carter

Russell L. Carter — Thu, 16 Dec 2004 03:45:42 +0000

Oh geez, end of a long hard happy day. Henry->Harry

By: Russell L. Carter

Russell L. Carter — Thu, 16 Dec 2004 03:37:09 +0000

Jared, Teachers at least from middle school on in my experience get to deal with kids on an in/formal basis from the set of all the teachers the kids have in their schedule. The kids provide a big part of the diffusion of knowledge of competency; the watercooler does the rest. This is arguably better than in commercial ventures. You have the benefit of adult vs. child viewpoints. Henry, have you spent any time at all looking at Semco?

By: BigMacAttack

BigMacAttack — Thu, 16 Dec 2004 02:28:00 +0000

‘100 students is a paltry size, given the pretty small variation in improvement that we can expect to see. Studies of school effectiveness in the UK, using much more sophisticated techniques than have been developed for the US, and much richer data (and much bigger samples — we’re talking 800 or so kids a year) cannot distinguish within the middle 80% of schools — the top 10% and bottom 10% perform differently than the others, but within the vast majority we can’t get good comparisons.’ What makes you sure there is a difference? No significant differences between 80% of sample sizes of a 100 or 800 doesn’t mean that 100 or 800 are paltry sample sizes. Unless we assume differences exist. It does not mean that ‘On top of that, teachers typically do not have enough students over the course of the year to get statistically significant results: and nor should they.’, unless we assume that there should have been statistically significant differences. (Dear heaven semantics.) I say statistical insignificance can be significant. Reflexively 10/80/10 seems about right. And could be quite helpful. Eliminating the bottom 10%. A conservative estimate would be that the top and bottom 15 – 20% would be encouraged to perform better by 10/80/10 results. A substantial improvement.