- London School of Economics
You never would’ve guessed it from the education “reform” debate going on here in the US, but it turns out that the teaching profession doesn’t exist in some sort of bizarre alternate universe, operating under its own unique economic principles: According to a new study at the London School of Economics, if you pay teachers more, you’ll attract better teachers. In fact, as the chart above shows, there’s a direct correlation between teacher pay and student performance, with a 10 percent increase in teacher pay resulting in a 5 to 10 percent increase in test scores.
Who’d a thunk?
As usual, Atrios sums things up well:
Yes it seems rather obvious that if you pay teachers more you’ll probably get better ones. We seem to understand that in every other area of the economy. Perhaps if there was less of a constant drumbeat about how teachers were all history’s greatest monsters some better people might be attracted into the profession, also, too.
It’s interesting to note how advocates of charter schools, vouchers, merit pay, and other “market” based education reforms argue that competition is the magic panacea to all our K-12 ills, yet these same “reformers” seem to believe that the teaching profession is somehow immune to the economic forces and incentives that capitalist theory insists self-regulates all other labor markets. Huh.
The whole Pay-Performance thing is subverted by figures that show that suburban schools that have half the funding per pupil of urban schools often have stellar performance, while city schools have abysmal performance.
Some suburban districts can fund schools with as little as $6000 per pupil, and yet they matriculate at Ivy League colleges. Washington, DC, the most expensive in the nation at $11,000 is more of a jail system.
Even here, Seattle public schools are terrible, yet have some of the wealthiest families living here along with the very poor. Meanwhile, Bellevue, which is far more homogeneous and middle class spends much less on schools and government in general, yet has nice houses, with larger plots, and also better schools (last I read, something like 11 Bellevue high schools schools are in the nation’s top 1000).
Wow, what a lot of intelligent discussion. Can we start an alternate Slog, written by all of you commenters, including @1 Mr. Avacado, so we don’t have to put up with more of Goldy’s statistical wizdom?
@16, that’s an excellent point. Get rid of the private schools and you’re putting the kids of every greedy rich fucker in a public school. When their kids are in the public schools with the rest of us schleps they’ll be more willing to invest in public education.
@Goldy, By raising teacher pay you not only incentivise better teachers to enter the profession but you also give current teachers reason to be better at their job. When my company raised my pay I worked harder. If they paid me more I might not spend so much time on Slog. 😉
@28, thank you for that extremely comprehensive post. That was very helpful.
@55 it would be interesting to know how many of those “wealthiest families” send their kids to public schools rather than private.
Two things would help: front load the pay scale to give starting teachers more than 25K a year, and then defer and then forgive part/all of student loans after 5 or so years in the profession. They are so many great potential teachers out there but can’t afford to get into the profession.
There was a NYC charter school in the news a few years back that was going to try a new pay scheme – the teachers all got more than $100k, which was more than the principal earned (and the principal was the brain behind the plan). The goal, obviously, was to attract the best teachers and cut in other ways. Not sure what happened though…
Why is nobody considering the amount of instruction time students receive in different countries? Seems more important than how much their teacher gets paid (per hour).
Teachers should get paid more because they should work more. A teacher’s contract in Seattle is for 1,600 hours or so which is ridiculously less than the 2080 the rest of the full time workforce works. Add the 15% of additional time teachers put in and it still comes up way short.
Students learn more when they are taught more. Simple.
@60, simple. And stupid. You’re like one of those yahoos who complains because Bash McSlugger only plays baseball three hours a day for his pay, completely neglecting the thousands of hours of training he does. 15%? You don’t know any teachers. Even the bad ones put in more than that.
#59 – do you read Metafilter?
@62: No, should I? I actually have to cut down on my internet time, actually…
@60: Finland and a lot of other high scoring countries already do better with LESS instructional time:
“According to the OECD, the hours of compulsory instruction per year in these countries range from 608 hours in Finland (a top performer) to 926 hours in France (average) at the elementary level, compared to the over 900 hours required in California, New York, Texas, and Massachusetts. Of particular note, no state requires as few hours as Finland, even though Finland scores near the top of nearly every international assessment. As a matter of fact, Vermont – a high-performing state7 — requires the fewest number of hours (700 hours) for its elementary students (grades 1-2) than any other state, and it still requires more than Finland. Vermont’s requirement is also more than the 612 hours high-achieving Korea requires of its early elementary students. Moreover, all but 5 states require more hours of instruction at the early elementary school level than the OECD countries8 average of 759 hours.”
http://www.centerforpubliceducation.org/…
Well, in countries where education and knowledge are respected, so are teachers. As previously stated, the U.S. loves ignorance. Only country in the world where “intellectual elite” is considered an insult. All the people I graduated college with a degree in education have left the profession at this point and honestly it wasn’t just crap pay and having to pay for the course materials and supplies out of their own pocket that made them leave teaching. It was complete and total disrespect from parents, students, admin, the public, and politicians. The crap pay would have been bearable if they’d been shown any sort of respect, treated like they were a professional, and not demonized as burden’s on the taxpayer’s teat. I’m told that pay in Finland is low but teachers and education is held in high regard and their profession is considered as important and valuable as doctor. I know that if my friends had been held in that regard they would certainly still be teaching even if the actual pay was rather low. Ditto: my librarian friends.
@60- yes, when you factor in all the overtime and time off it comes out to something like 1800 hours. The only people who work less for full time pay are sheriffs’ deputies and the fire department.
Again- I used to do the job, and I can assure you, as nice as it would be to make a few more dollars, the money was actually pretty good, as were the benefits. During the summer I picked up a ton of extra $ working construction, did odd jobs on my many long breaks (2 full weeks off during xmas!).
There are a million things that need to be done to fix the system we have built. And if a few teachers or potential teachers would be motivated by a few extra bucks, that is money well spent. but it is far rom the first thing needed. There are qualified teachers lined up 5 deep for every potential job. If you want to get work immediately out of college you are advised to focus on ‘profound needs’ special ed. otherwise you’re likely going to spend 3-4 years working as a sub or temp or extremely prt time.
@55 Seattle has around 25% of it’s children in private schools, compared to a roughly 10% national average. PTAs cover a wide variety of things from their own funds, everything from arts & music instruction to classroom grants to scholarship funds for the children at their school who can’t afford extra curricular or field trip fees. Private schools also rely extensively on parent donations beyond plain tuition, so cost-per-child comparisons ignore a huge amount of actual cash that goes into the education of these suburban and upper income children. Furthermore, upper income parents often have flexible schedules that allow one or both parents time to volunteer at schools and invest themselves in school politics and improvements in a way that poor working families do not, and those highly skilled, unpaid hours contribute dramatically to education.
Fnarf is dead right about this.
So because teacher pay is low we don’t attract the best teachers? Therefore it’s the teacher’s fault?
Face it, some communities simply don’t give. As hit about education and ‘acting white’. You could
pay their teachers $250k a year and the results would be the same. How come north end Seattle schools do a great job educating kids, at a lower cost per student than southend schools?
Parents maybe?
@47 I agree, that for me, it’s more about time than money. Imagine giving a presentation for five hours of your work day, EVERY DAY. You have thirty minutes for lunch. You can’t leave the building. You can’t leave the room, even to pee. How long would you need to prepare? How much time would you need after to just decompress and think? Put aside that teachers present to children with all the myriad issues that others have mentioned. Most teachers have the best intentions, but with a work load like that I’m not surprised that many burn out.
Do not know about New Zealand.
Finland has an average class size of 15, plus a teacher aid in each room so the individual attention is high.
They have a large Swedish speaking minority, and they are taught in Swedish. There is also a smaller Lapp minority to the North of the country.
Higher pay, longer school year or school day would all help, as well as small class size.
I would like to see a graph with multi dimensions including pay, class size, and wether those on the trade track are included in the testing. Sure, in the lower grades before the kids are tracked, but what about the upper grades.
There is no doubt that higher pay would get a different teacher mix, perhaps better. I think we all understand this is a more complex issue that teacher pay. Again, class size and number of hours of instruction in a year would help.
I currently teach high school here in WA, but did my teacher training and first year of teaching in the UK. Teacher pay is definitely an issue that needs to be reformed in education, but it is so much more than just raising the base pay. And there are many more factors that make teaching in America less than ideal. The UK achieves quite a bit higher test results without paying much better, and there were a lot of things that I liked better about teaching there. (Although there were a lot of things that the UK needed to improve on, as well.)
UK teacher training involved two different schools and collaboration with more teachers than student teachers in America have. Training was also subsidized in subjects that struggle to attract teachers, such as math(s) and physics, and trainee teachers earned a $12,000 stipend. The first year of teaching is also designed to provide the newly qualified teacher more support and a reduced workload to aid in the learning curve and ease the transition. I also can’t verify this, not having done any teacher training in America, but I think the UK programs provide much more training in classroom management, which really helps.
I was also observed much more frequently in the UK than here in America, mostly informally, and graded on a four-level scale of outstanding, good, satisfactory, or poor for the 2 formal observations, with a lot of constructive feedback about what I was doing well and needed to improve on. Also, I was observed by people who knew about the teaching specific to my field (German). Here in America, I am only observed twice a year, by someone who doesn’t know German or how to teach a foreign language. There are also county-wide education authorities and a national office for standards which come in and observe teachers in every subject across the school every few years in the UK.
My experiences so far in America (I am in my third year of teaching, but my first year full-time) are that the pay isn’t what bothers me. (But I’m not choosing between a career of teaching or as an engineer in a private firm…) It’s that, once I’m a certified teacher, there isn’t really anywhere for my career to go – to earn more money, I can become head of the department, which doesn’t bring enough of a raise with it to make the time spent worth it to me, I can earn more credits, and I can build years of experience. If I’m an excellent teacher, there’s not many ways for that to be recognized or any advancement to be made within the hierarchy of the school. Contrast that to England, where there are many different levels within a school – it’s too complicated to explain succinctly, but excellence in classroom teaching is more easily recognized and rewarded with positions that have higher pay. These positions also result in a lightened teaching load to accommodate the extra demands. There also seemed to be more money available for me to use in my professional development. There was never a question of having my school pay for a conference or class; I just had to submit the right paperwork.
Overall, I felt way more supported in my quest to become a better teacher and that there was more of a need to, with all of the different levels of observations and the frequency of them. Here, I could easily coast along for the rest of my career taking bs credits to fulfill requirements and never strive to improve, and because I am a good teacher, no one would care.
The only things that I think can really be taken from this data is that paying teachers really low is a surefire way to screw your education system and that paying teachers a ton insures that you will do better than average. the mid to high ranges are a total grab bag, leading me to believe that in the mid pay ranges culture and the way systems are structured are way more influential on education quality then they are at either extreme.
@64: Ah, but in private schools, the teachers ARE treated like this. Rare are the public schools where this is the case, but there’s an occasional similarity…
So what’s the deciding difference in contrast to public schools? The pay? The hours? Class size? I think these are factors that weave together, but I think above all: “Parental/family/community respect for education”. No one in a private school spends their energy on a bitch&moan blog or writing eloquent protests to stupid decisions at board meetings; no one expects the school to feed 2 square meals to their special little snowflake for free; no one treats the institution as their rightful free daycare.
They are there to learn (even if their kids aren’t always).
The Rev’s easybake new school reform recipe/brainstorm:
LOWER CLASS SIZE (to ~ 1:15 ratio);
GIVE INSTRUCTOR RAISES TO PUT SALARIES IN COMPETITION WITH PRIVATE SCHOOLS (and actually build schools that COMPETE with private schools and use economics of supply/demand to put them out of business);
GIVE TEACHERS FREEDOM to RUN EDUCATION… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFj… ;
DROP STUDENT TESTING DOWN TO 3 PER SCHOOL CAREER (grade, middle and high)…(but institute principal and administrator testing for job evals);
TEACH ‘LEARNING’ + ‘INQUIRY SKILLS’ ( rather than just ANSWERS + SUBJECTS);
oh, and LOWER CLASS SIZE
@31: yes, pay can attract better workers. but workers do better and increase innovation when they are given total freedom to create + LESS ‘managing’. BETTER, EVEN, THAN GIVING THEM outrageous RAISES. see also Dan Pink’s RSA talk on “What Motivates” and the MIT study here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFj…
aside: slog is something which must be filled daily? Oy.
@12: add also; Year after year, teacher unions ask for ONE THING: smaller class size. Listen to the teachers!**
@32: If fairness/financial equity is paramount, redraw the districts then, like congress.
@35: word. Bad and good WORKERS exist in any organization, regardles of industry (Gov however seems especially good at gathering in their top ranks more of the latter).
@thatsnotright: isn’t that quote a question posed to Batman from the Riddler?
@Fnarf: Name one american cell phone battery FACTORY and I’ll name a battery engineer. =)
@5 get rid of the tests – problem solved.
@60/65: you seriously think a teacher’s duties are limited to 7.5 – 10 hrs /day for only the mandated 180 school days? I don’t know these teachers. in SPS, ISD, LWSD, etc 40% additional time is typical (12+ hrs/day for 180days or 6 day workweek), and CE eats up an average of 3 to 5 weeks of the ‘summer break’. The “summers off” lazy teacher is as rare and inaccurate as the ‘100% Bootstraps Student’ meme.
**
…Doubling the number of teachers in the union scares somebody, I guess.