So what kind of teachers could a school get if it paid them $125,000 a year?
An accomplished violist who infuses her music lessons with the neuroscience of why one needs to practice, and creatively worded instructions like, “Pass the melody gently, as if it were a bowl of Jell-O!”
A self-described “explorer” from Arizona who spent three decades honing her craft at public, private, urban and rural schools.
Two with Ivy League degrees. And Joe Carbone, a phys ed teacher, who has the most unusual résumé of the bunch, having worked as Kobe Bryant’s personal trainer.
The militant secularists mock us Christians for our devotion to an entity they say has no evidentiary basis for existing. Yet there is far more evidence for the existence of God (just look around) than the idea that throwing money at the government education bureaucracy will produce better-educated students. [url=http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-298.html]Just ask us Show-Me-Staters[/url]:
[blockquote]For decades critics of the public schools have been saying, “You can’t solve educational problems by throwing money at them.” The education establishment and its supporters have replied, “No one’s ever tried.” In Kansas City they did try. To improve the education of black students and encourage desegregation, a federal judge invited the Kansas City, Missouri, School District to come up with a cost-is-no-object educational plan and ordered local and state taxpayers to find the money to pay for it.
Kansas City spent as much as $11,700 per pupil–more money per pupil, on a cost of living adjusted basis, than any other of the 280 largest districts in the country. The money bought higher teachers’ salaries, 15 new schools, and such amenities as an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwater viewing room, television and animation studios, a robotics lab, a 25-acre wildlife sanctuary, a zoo, a model United Nations with simultaneous translation capability, and field trips to Mexico and Senegal. The student-teacher ratio was 12 or 13 to 1, the lowest of any major school district in the country.
The results were dismal. Test scores did not rise; the black-white gap did not diminish; and there was less, not greater, integration.[/blockquote]
When teachers are provided a higher salary the profession will attract people who want to make more money. Perhaps, if these high paid teachers are also excellent teachers, they may help some of the students. Some 50 years of teaching all age and grade levels (K – 16 plus illiterate teens and adults) and most subjects, I have learned that the child who learns to read well is the child whose adult family members read to him long before he started his formal education. Children generally do not rise much higher than the educational level or the parents (and not all education is received in school). When the educational level of the home is considerably higher than that of the teacher, the child is often discouraged or disgusted with school and likely to dropout, literally or figuratively, and acquire “education” elsewhere. That said, I would be interested in the criteria used for selecting 120 students from the 600 applicants. If the students selected are already well ahead of their peers, the school may succeed. Frances Scott
At last year’s Willow Creek leadership Summit, one of the featured speakers was the woman who founded Teach America. Her observation was that ANY child can learn and achieve high academic success but it depended almost totally on the quality of the teacher; not classroom size, school uniforms, equipment, etc. I’m pumped. Wouldn’t it be cool if the highest paid professionals in the nation were teachers? A high salary would attract the best and brightest to devote their lives to enriching others instead of driving them into the private sector simply so they could make enough to feed their families.
“Too many chiefs, not enough indians.” We need to put a restriction on the administrator to teacher ratio. What ratio? Perhaps 1 administror for every 10 teachers. Any more bureaucrats only increases paperwork for teachers.
[blockquote]Wouldn’t it be cool if the highest paid professionals in the nation were teachers? A high salary would attract the best and brightest to devote their lives to enriching others instead of driving them into the private sector simply so they could make enough to feed their families. [/blockquote]
Good heavens, no. This is not only unworkable from a public policy perspective (insofar as the taxation required to fund it would be kill the very economic activity needed to fund it), but would, if it were successful, create a positive feedback loop where the best and brightest graduates then turn into those who teach who then make more brilliant teachers. At no point does all that brilliance then make it into productive society.
Finland has one of the highest literacy rates in the world. Its teachers are not well paid, but they are highly respected in the community.
Hi –
Having been in education for oh, over 20 years or so now and teaching myself, I disagree that money makes a good teacher. Right now we have people in the field solely because they get summers off – I see a future of ‘well-paid’ teachers there solely for the money.
A good teacher has two primary qualities:
1. They love their students
2. They love what they teach
You get that combination and you will have a great teacher. The reason to teach anything Or anyone is solely because you care about them and want them to understand.
It’s the same premise on which our Faith is built.
As most business people will note, you get what you pay for. The corporate world has been declaring that if we don’t offer a million dollars a year, we won’t get qualified candidates.
There is no magic bullet to changing the education system, but there are a few interesting ideas that are out there. One is that just a few bad teachers really harms the system. Finding a way to identify the bottom ten percent and fire them would increase a school’s productivity by much more. Not every teacher will be brilliant, but when they have freedom and accountability, classrooms can thrive.
Malcom Gladwell suggests that it is through apprenticeship that we identify and mold effective teachers, not through education programs. However, apprenticeship is expensive.
It is true that just spending money wildly won’t change a culture. Spending money wisely, however – to ensure high standards of teaching and to reward effectiveness – is quite justified. The Harlem Children’s Zone is a good example.
Personally, I think a culture of teachers would produce, also, a culture of learners, because one cannot have one without the other. Further, the skill of teaching is applicable in all sorts of different careers.
And that would surely increase “productivity.” The “feedback loop” would not be such a horrible thing.
#7 – unfortunately, money is often a way of conveying respect. We implicitly say teachers aren’t worth very much, and we exploit good intentions. Teachers with high integrity will have a sense of what they are worth.
Teachers have every right to expect that they can live within a 20 minute drive to where they work and can have enough of a salary to support a spouse and two children. I’m always perplexed by the attitude that teachers should teach for nothing. If its worth it, its also worth paying for.
Conversations about compensation are always complicated. A big problem with teacher salaries is that they tend to be set by schedule and across the board, based on paper credentials and years of service rather than by the market. What if you made the Administrator/Principal’s salary and job absolutely dependent on 3-year performance improvement benchmarks, but then gave that Principal the flexibility to go out and recruit teachers based on competitive forces. If there’s a fabulous math teacher at the local community college, maybe the Principal of the high school could “go after her” by offering financial incentives. This kind of thing happens at the university level all the time: Berkeley goes after a young Harvard hot-shot, etc. It creates a race to the top rather than a traffic jam in the lower-middle rung of the ladder . . . .
Bruce Robison
There is certainly an optimal salary that will enable those who want to do the job. Less and they can’t raise a family; more and (as noted) you get those interested in the money, not in the kids.
A few common sense actions would help: first, we need to quit investing the schools with salvific purpose (an overstatement, not a mis-statement). Schools won’t make kids good, healthy, wise, rich, and happy because the family is the critical determinant in a child’s life. I was fortunately to grow up in a family where reading was important, my parent’s required we behave in school and respect our teachers (even the jerks), and so on. Except for my brother with mental retardation, we all have master’s degrees (as do the spouses) and earn a living. Those kids not so fortunate may, or may not, do as well (let’s face it, there are complexities here). Perhaps if we focus on the family, we will get better results from the kids.
Consider the matter of sex education: a generation (plus) of school based sex education hasn’t solved the teen pregnancy. The problem is, in fact, worse (I don’t blame sex ed, only note that it’s not a solution). What if efforts had been made to educate parents and encourage them to raise sexually responsible kids?
Schools should do what schools can do and not what they can’t do? Is that complicated? Not really, unless you believe that school is the primary agent for rearing the child, in which case, it must do everything.
Oh, yes, did I mention the “culture wars” aspects of all this? Think: social control. But let’s not go, ok? Let’s just stick to intellectual matters.
I have to chime in with agreement with #11. My experience in public schools is that occasionally someone from a less than stellar home finds a good role model or is able to somehow pull themself up by the bootstraps, but if the concern with academics and civics isn’t found in the household then you probably aren’t going to get far with the child. Schools are a reflection of society, and while most educators try to show the “straight and narrow” is is usually usurped by the crooked path that is more often than not promoted by peer pressure.
These pilot projects are always suspicious since they have tightly controlled variables that cannot possibly be duplicated nationwide. Hand-picked students? Heh. Celebrity teachers? Get real.
And I’m sure the facilities and supplies will be of the Cadillac variety, not the broken-down Gremlin that a high percentage of the nation’s students and teachers are forced to utilize. A decade ago, I taught at a school that had encyclopaedia sets from the 1950s in the school library and rats the size of house cats in our classrooms. It was shameful!
I really don’t like to comment any more, because people use this anonymous formum to attack one another for the most inane reasons. That said, when I was in ciminal process/constitutional law class in law school, my professor used to ask us to ponder how different the world would be if policemen made $250,000 and lawyers made $25,000.
[blockquote]Finding a way to identify the bottom ten percent and fire them would increase a school’s productivity by much more. Not every teacher will be brilliant, but when they have freedom and accountability, classrooms can thrive. [/blockquote]
You’ve proffered this ten percent datum before, but I have yet to see anything that supports the idea that the incompetent contingent is that size. How do we know it’s not 30% or 50%? Given the lousy test scores and tides of ignorant graduates we have, it’s hard to believe that a mere 10% is creating the problem. It would seem that a succession of sub-standard teachers is required to crank out such a poor product.
Further, doesn’t accountability require the end of tenure? Do you really think you’re going to get that past the NEA and AFT?
[blockquote]And that would surely increase “productivity.†The “feedback loop†would not be such a horrible thing.[/blockquote]
Not if the education bureaucracy absorbed the best that it created. That’s the very definition of a positive feedback loop and, as you may or may not know, positive feedback loops tend to destroy the systems they control.
Common sense and experience show that student success can’t be assigned purely to the quality of teaching – or why do ten students in the same class, with the same teacher and identical teaching, achieve grades ranging (in English terms) from A to U? It’s certainly true that, all other variables being equal, a good teacher will obtain better results than a poor one – but then in many subjects (my own, English, being one of them) a bright student with a poor teacher will still get better results than a dim student with a good teacher.
Last year, my class of 9 A-level English Language students (18-year-olds) obtained 6 As and 3 Bs, with one girl receiving the Exam Board’s award for top student in the Humanities (which put her at the head of roughly 120,000 candidates). This year, though the results won’t be through till August, I’ll be lucky to see 3 As out of 15 students. I’m the same teacher and the syllabus is identical – but the students are very different.
The argument is not how many bad teachers there are. It is that the worst ten percent do the most damage. They suppress an entire system.
It’s not easy to get rid of 33% of an entire teaching staff. A few have done it (say Anthony Lombardi).
It’s Jack Welch and Joel Klein style of management, and it’s a basic, round number.
As an aside, if good teachers didn’t become bureaucrats, but taught, and were paid higher than bureaucrats, it might be a bit different.
But I don’t see anything wrong with excellent teachers going into the profession for a healthy paycheck. Teaching – and learning – are productive enterprises.
Rather well paid teachers than lawyers.
“There is no magic bullet to changing the education system, but there are a few interesting ideas that are out there. One is that just a few bad teachers really harms the system. Finding a way to identify the bottom ten percent and fire them would increase a school’s productivity by much more. ”
I am astonished to find myself, for once, in total agreement with John Wilkins. Perhaps there is hope at last for us all! He is, however, of a more merciful bent than I, I am ashamed to admit. I have stated every year, when the media cover the Teacher of the Year, that more good would be done by finding the Worst Teacher, adding tar and feathers, and riding them out of town on a rail. I have said this because I am convinced that truly bad teaching is no accident, and involves, at its heart, an actual active hatred of the students coupled with institutionally permitted deliberate acts of psychological sadism.(In part, this is because of certain school memories of my own.)
But again, this instance of agreement is way cool!
Well, no one’s going to argue that it’s a nice, round number. Arbitrary, but round. Jack Welch never had to deal with tenured engineers, accountants and managers.
If we’ve been scraping the bottom of the barrel with low teacher pay for so many years, as you posit, wouldn’t you think the percentage of incompetent teachers would be higher?
Why should teaching be any different than business? The tenure system should be done away with and teachers paid according to how their students do. I know of a high school teacher who drinks on the job, misses two days of school per week but has tenure and a lawyer and the principle is afraid of her. Her students will probably not graduate. (She is a teacher of the blind so her students will stay with her forever.) This is just criminal and would not be tolerated in business.
I heard the other day that the schools are schooling the students but not educating them.
The problem with paying teachers based on how their students do is that first, not all students are equal. The poor sod of a teacher who gets assigned the remedial class is going to be penalized, while the lucky one who gets to teach the honor students will be showered with money. And second, it would be yet more encouragement to “teach to the test,” and we already have far too much of that going on.