Yes, great teachers should be paid well. But there's another side to this coin.
Teaching is a brutal job.
Parents complaining about grades and/or teachers. Student behaviour worse than its ever been (with administrators that do very little about it -- partly because of outside pressures). Every bit of interaction with parents, and observed problem behaviours with students, must be documented. Dates, times, what was discussed, what actions are to be taken.
Far too regular class interruptions for all sorts of things (ex. sporting events, pep rallys, dances, early dismissals, awards ceremonies, field trips, plays). Teaching gets much more difficult when a non-trivial percentage of students are out every day, and/or class time is cut short (or gone) for other activities.
Rubrics required for everything (a teacher can't just say, "this is C work" -- everything must be documented, and this makes the amount of grading work go through the roof).
Unending meetings, data collection requirements (you'd be amazed at how badly administrators want to put a number on your kids). State curriculum requirements. Standardized testing. Paperwork up the wazoo.
And I don't even need to mention that you better not need to go to the bathroom during class, because you can't leave students unattended. And between classes, well, you've got 4 minutes between bells. Better make it quick. And hope another teacher's not using the same bathroom you're heading for.
Higher pay for teachers would be nice, but that ain't the problem.
> Parents complaining about grades and/or teachers.
Time magazine "Why Teachers Hate Parents" (2005)
"Ask teachers about the best part of their job, and most will say how much they love working with kids. Ask them about the most demanding part, and they will say dealing with parents. In fact, a new study finds that of all the challenges they face, new teachers rank handling parents at the top. According to preliminary results from the MetLife Survey of the American Teacher, made available exclusively to TIME, parent management was a bigger struggle than finding enough funding or maintaining discipline or enduring the toils of testing. It's one reason, say the Consortium for Policy Research in Education and the Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy, that 40% to 50% of new teachers leave the profession within five years. Even master teachers who love their work, says Harvard education professor Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, call this "the most treacherous part of their jobs."
"At the most disturbing extreme are the parents who like to talk about values but routinely undermine them. "You get savvier children who know how to get out of things," says a second-grade teacher in Murfreesboro, Tenn. "Their parents actually teach them to lie to dodge their responsibilities." Didn't get your homework done? That's O.K. Mom will take the fall. Late for class? Blame it on Dad."
Just asked one of my friends whose wife has been teaching for a while:
"yep it's true. she always has parent stories. last week she had one on the phone complaining that their kid got a C, yet they had no idea about what the kid was doing in terms of curriculum, homework etc and the fact they always messed around in class. yet, the parent went off on her"
Not only that (parents complaining to teachers), it gets worse. Some problem parents actually go straight to the principal to complain about the teacher -- based only on what their child told them ("But mom, Mrs. So-and-so picks on me! She told us X wouldn't be on the test, but it was! And she's unfair!"). This is without ever even contacting the teacher (this tactic is often coupled with "but I tried to contact Mr. So-and-so but he never got back to me").
Other parents think they'll go "straight to the top" and complain directly to the superintendent of schools in their town. When time comes to renew jobs for non-tenured teachers, I've heard tales of non-renewal (for the next school year) just because of a couple noisy parents.
I think they tried that in some districts by tying the amount of the bonus to the performance of the children in the class. The teachers were the one administering the tests so some of them gamed the system a bit and cheated on the grading of the test.
It's not a matter of gaming the system. The teacher is the system. Just about anything the kids learn (except for honors classes, where the kids will sometimes learn some things on their own) is due to strenuous effort from the teacher.
All teachers "teach to the test" to some degree. The good ones try to get the kids to use higher-order thinking skills, and their quizzes and tests bear this out. If you want the kids to get better grades though, you could just heavily cover the material that's on the test, then make sure you use exactly the same wording on the test as was on the homeworks and quizzes (as opposed to mixing it up a bit to get the kids to think about things a little more).
gaius already made this point, but I wanted to make it again as a comment rather than a reply to head in a different direction: Unions are the problem. When crappy educators rise through the ranks to become department heads based on literally nothing more than seniority and a union contract, the education system has failed.
As far as salary increases, what good would that do? Because of the unions, crappy teachers would recieve the same increase. Not only that, there would me MORE crappy teachers; $125k is definitely enough to attract people who don't want really want to teach. Good teachers teach for the same reason good programers program: it's what they love to do, it's what they were made to do, there is no other life. Money isn't everything. I'm not saying the rewards shouldn't match the benefit given by a good teacher, but again, the union prevents this.
A little less ideology and a little more clear thinking, please. You could certainly convince me that unions are a problem, but setting them up as the source of all badness is just your way of scoring points for your political/ideological team, rather than doing anything to contribute to the discussion.
So, onto your 2nd paragraph. How many "good" programmers are there, out of all programmers? One out of ten? (And that's being incredibly generous from my experience.) How well would these superstar volunteer for-the-love-of-it teachers do with 10x increased class sizes?
(And let's not forget all those who are thoroughly passionate about programming (/teaching) yet suck at it.)
I'd say that the largest concrete problem to me is our thoroughly anti-education culture.
And the largest meta-problem is that we have yet to discover a good way to measure the success of various approaches (and no shared philosophy, however small its kernel, as to what would even constitute success).
Otherwise, a laundry list:
- A problem: Inflexible bureaucratic structure/procedure permeating everything.
- A meta-problem: Debates about education always become proxies for ideological warfare. (C.f. your original reply, or the creationism push, or the "Culture Wars".)
- A problem: Parental non-involvement.
- A problem: Pushy, over-involved parents.
And on and on it would go, if I weren't supposed to be working right now. No wonder education here mostly sucks.
I think you're right about the fact that they're not the problem; I should have chosen my words more carefully. I also admit that I am by no means an expert on these issues. I do believe, however, that they are a problem, and in some places, a big problem. I believe that almost any organization that does not promote or reward based mostly on merit is flawed. I'll allow for character assessment in place of some merit, but not much else. I agree with you that this is ideology, but that doesn't mean it's wrong.
Also, of all the problems you listed, and the one I listed, I think if unions were found to be part of the problem, it would be one of the easier parts to fix.
I hope I'm not coming across hard-headed on this issue. This is something I deeply care about, and I am definitely open to other perspectives.
The problem with ideology is that it generates beliefs, convictions, and orthodoxies -- not hypotheses.
As an anecdote (and counter-example), I grew up in Wyoming, where there are no laws requiring union recognition, in a school district with no union or association at all, and my primary education was not exactly great. Downright poor, actually, especially when it specifically came to teacher quality.
Further, your alternative "promote or reward based mostly on merit" sounds nice, but unless we can define merit in a measurable way, and gain consensus on that definition, isn't it also mostly empty words?
And, even if we could clearly agree on a way of measuring merit, how well would that survive the morass of local politics that education operates within?
All of this isn't to disagree completely with you.
Rather, it is to say that things are rather messier than 'unions are bad'; education issues (in particular) aren't really amenable to bumper-sticker solutions.
I agree with you 100%. Correlation is not causation, I know, but look at every major organization that has unions: GM, The Ontario Government, The Toronto Transit Commission, our hospitals. The service is terrible, the quality average at best, and the money never ceases to drain from the public purse.
Why would we expect anything else from our unionized public schools? Why does it cost more than $10k per kid for a 10 month period just to educate them? For $1k per kid per month I could give 15 kids a way better education than they could get from a public system.
The reason I can't get a voucher for $10k is that the system is about social engineering, not education. If India can get their students doing calculus at grade 9 then we can too, our politicians just don't want us to. They would rather have conformist idiots than questioning geniuses.
Not all teachers' unions are created equal. Nor do they evolve equally. Your claims reminded me of Wikipedia's fantastic list of logical fallacies. Please refer to:
Interestingly, it may be that one could pay twice as much per teacher and still end up with a lower cost per pupil overall, as administrator overhead plays a large part in the regular cost formulation. $125 / 30 students ~ $4k, a fraction of both the DC metro public and charter school cost per pupil (http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2009/04/03/dc-vouchers-better...).
So, a base cost of $125K/30 kids. Add in benefits for the teacher and you're at $150K. Liability insurance is another $50K. Rent per year for 1500 sq ft to house the 30 kids (the classroom is smaller, but you also need to amortize the cost the space needed for admins, gyms, halls, locker rooms, cafeterias, etc) is at least $30K. Supplies (books, sports equipment, etc) conservatively cost about $10K for the 30 students. And, realistically, you'll always have some administrative overhead (tech guys, librarians, lawyers, principal, secretaries, etc) which I can't imagine being less than $50K (amortized over a sufficiently large school).
That brings our total cost to, at least, $290K - which is about 10K per student. Still not too bad (although I'm still probably missing/underestimating some expenses ...), but at least marginally more realistic than your made up $4K/student number.
I like the idea of school vouchers and private schools too. But you have to be realistic.
IIRC the nationwide average for public schools is about $9K/student, and that includes areas where the cost of living is a lot lower than it is in NYC. So if they can actually get six-figure-salary teachers and still keep costs down to $10K/student, that would be fantastic for the profession.
One of the problems with public education is that it has to serve everyone.
Many private schools succeed because the don't have to deal with the same types of children as do public schools.
I'm sure this school will have good results, but I think the most important question is whether or not the results can be repeated.
Are there enough good teachers to serve all of the children in the U.S.? Are they just not teaching right now because of teacher pay?
The majority of these teachers were already in the educational system. This expeirimental school simply pooled the best of the best together.
I hope this model is successful, and I hope even more that they are able to figure out how to increase the quality of education when dealing with a much larger scale.
"Many private schools succeed because the don't have to deal with the same types of children as do public schools."
Or with the same types of parents. A private school can always tell parents to take their tuition dollars and go somewhere else, if the trouble they are causing exceeds the value of the tuition they are paying.
Agreed with the question of scaling. It is easy to poach all of the best teachers and put them into one school, and you should get good results. But is this a solution to raising the level of education nation wide, or even in one city?
> It is easy to poach all of the best teachers and put them into one school, and you should get good results. But is this a solution to raising the level of education nation wide, or even in one city?
It's so much better to let the trouble-kids make sure that no one gets an education....
We can't save them all. However, we can lose them all, and that's what we're doing by keeping good kids in bad situations.
If you really think that the presence of good kids helps the bad ones, shouldn't you be paying the good ones for that help? After all, being with the bad kids costs the good kids.
I don't think that these special schools are sorting.
However, their opponents do. They argue that letting kids out of crappy schools makes things worse for the kids who are left by denying them role models or somesuch. This is a curious argument because the kids left behind don't do worse when left behind.
I think that the opponents are wrong. (I'll even go so far as to say that almost all of the kids in the crappy schools would do better in these special schools but when you say that, the opponents figure out that you're accusing them of defending crappy schools.) However, my point is that if they're correct, they owe the "good kids" something for the sacrifice that they're asking them to make.
The article focuses on the hiring process they went through to find great teachers who were already teaching. The real challenge, though, is to find the best teachers who would be teaching if it weren't for the absurdly low compensation for such taxing work. How would you do that?
Well, ideally the timeline goes something like this:
2008: announce the project; get the attention of a few of those who would be teaching
2009: launch, get a press hit in the NY Times; get the attention of hundreds of thousands more
2010: report good results and plans for expansion
2011: report good results and plans for expansion. At this point some of those who would be teaching who were entering university in 2008 are almost ready to graduate, and others are ready for a career change.
2012: report good results and start hiring a bunch of the fabulous scientists, engineers, etc., whose attention you've been attracting over the past four years.
I was rather surprised when a family friend of mine told me that she takes in around a a $100k yearly. She is a middle school teacher(~10 years in the bay area). So teachers in many places actually get paid a good salary.
Teachers in many areas do not get paid well. What is good for NYC/SF/DC does not represent the rest of the country. I believe teachers make 35k on average. I had a friend teach a high school in the Appalachians and they started him at 24k. And they really had to scrimp, save, and beg the feds to pay him considering the avg income for his area was less than half of that.
If you are a teacher with degrees and certificates, then 100k in a major metro, plus 10 years would be about correct.
Additionally you didn't specify what she teaches. Science and math teachers are harder to come by and their salary reflects that. My middle school science teacher was plucked from a high school, which had plucked her from a local college. She was one of the highest paid teachers in the school because she had experience and a load of degrees. She was working towards her doctorate when I left. She didn't come right at and tell me what she made, but the Benz in parking lot and the neighborhood she lived in gave me a clue.
Also, this was a magnet school so the teachers tend to be of higher qualifications than a typical high school.
Plus people seem to confuse the union with government a lot. In government you get paid in bands. Bands are based on the type of job, your accreditation, and your seniority. You can do the bare minimum and stay at the bottom of your band, until you are pushed up to the next band based on some formula, or you can do more and constantly stay in the top of your band and get pushed through quickly. The union probably doesn't have a lot of say in how much teachers get paid. They do have a big influence on how the workplace is run (ie. how late they must stay, when breaks can be done, etc).
Your friend may be a good teacher, but I bet the reason she's getting $100k is because she's been there 10 years - and possibly because she has a masters in education (which has been shown to have little or no correlation to being an effective teacher).
The quote from the article that struck me was this one:
“This is the first time in 30 years of teaching that anybody has been really interested in what I do.”
That's the really terrible combination of teacher's unions and the public school bureaucracy. Bad teachers can't be fired, good teachers aren't paid more, and the way you get ahead is by sticking around for your automatic raises and early retirement.
Teaching has very strong unions. Actually that's the main problem. Teachers here in the UK are effectively unsackable, yet at the same time their jobs are hell because the unions insisted on all sorts of trendy Marxist nonsense being taught at teacher training colleges.
I fully expect this to work. The kids will love school in a way that no one thought possible. They'll learn more in a year than most pick up in 4. What then?
Why do I suddenly picture Don Quixote raising his lance, or Wile E. strapping on rocket skates?
I agree. Some people argue that if we raise teacher salaries, we'll have people become teachers for the money instead of for the love of teaching. However, many teachers that teach solely for the love of teaching just suck at it. I know because I have had many of these teachers. I would much rather have a teacher who is good at teaching, whether they love it or just like it, than a teacher who loves teaching but is bad at it.
There are x number of brilliant and dynamic students that graduate from universities across the US every year. Before the bust, did > 50% of these students want to become investment bankers because of their love for working in Excel all day? No, they wanted to do investment banking because of the high salaries and solid career footing it provided. It's basic economics; the higher the salary and job prestige, the more qualified the applicants will be due to increased competition for the job.
The main problems that cause education to under-perform in the US (I think) are bad parenting, a non-education oriented culture, and poor teacher quality. Of these three, poor teacher quality is the only one that is most easily affected. So how can one say that it's not logical that increasing teacher salaries can be a solution to helping improve education in the US?
Teaching is a brutal job.
Parents complaining about grades and/or teachers. Student behaviour worse than its ever been (with administrators that do very little about it -- partly because of outside pressures). Every bit of interaction with parents, and observed problem behaviours with students, must be documented. Dates, times, what was discussed, what actions are to be taken.
Far too regular class interruptions for all sorts of things (ex. sporting events, pep rallys, dances, early dismissals, awards ceremonies, field trips, plays). Teaching gets much more difficult when a non-trivial percentage of students are out every day, and/or class time is cut short (or gone) for other activities.
Rubrics required for everything (a teacher can't just say, "this is C work" -- everything must be documented, and this makes the amount of grading work go through the roof).
Unending meetings, data collection requirements (you'd be amazed at how badly administrators want to put a number on your kids). State curriculum requirements. Standardized testing. Paperwork up the wazoo.
And I don't even need to mention that you better not need to go to the bathroom during class, because you can't leave students unattended. And between classes, well, you've got 4 minutes between bells. Better make it quick. And hope another teacher's not using the same bathroom you're heading for.
Higher pay for teachers would be nice, but that ain't the problem.