- 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.
How do you explain Finland and New Zealand, where they pay the teachers about the same as here but the test scores are off the charts?
While I think teachers are often unsung heroes and generally underpaid as well, it’s also worth noting that for a given purchasing-power-pay-range (mid-$30k’s), only one other country produces poorer performing students than the U.S., and Finland does better than anybody.
There’s lots more both to attack and praise in this line of reasoning, and I’m sure my fellow Sloggers will have at it.
@1: What the fuck don’t you get about statistics? (Oh. Perhaps you had particularly low-paid teachers.)
@ 1, I’d explain that with cultural differences which are not germane to this discussion.
Okay, so how much do we have to pay our teachers to guarantee that all students score perfectly on all tests?
Goldy, see what I did @ 4? That’s how you do it.
Apparently you brain trusts had such an awesome education that *correlation does not equal causation* just failed to make a fucking appearance.
How many of those higher countries have more than 199 different spoken or written languages, multiple large ethnic, religious, and cultural minorities, span multiple timezones, are split roughly 50/50 in urban/rural population… Come on, damn it. You can do better than this.
@3, what the fuck don’t YOU get about statistics? Or logic, or complexity, or basic human decency, for that matter?
That chart shows correlation but not an extraordinarily high one. And @1’s question is extremely pertinent: the success of the Finnish model is pretty damned interesting. There is a lot more involved here than teacher pay.
To quote this recent story in the Atlantic, “[t]he Scandinavian country is an education superpower because it values equality more than excellence.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/arch…
Might work long term but short term you’re just paying the same crummy teachers more. To make things better now you need a way to fire the current set of teachers and then buy better ones.
Matt @6: No, that’s how you do it. @3 is the way I do it.
@9, I submit that it has little to do with good teachers vs. crappy ones, and everything to do with what those teachers are told to do with their time.
@7, Goldy originally posted this at 10:05, then pulled it. I was sure he would change “direct correlation” (which is perilously close to cause-and-effect), but no. Not sure what changed, since I didn’t capture the original.
There’s so much involved. Not just pay, sure, but pay is part of it; Goldy has a point.
My kid’s teacher is TERRIBLE. She’s lousy at time management, she’s abysmal with classroom instruction…
I won’t make this a rant about her, but will point out that you could attract better teachers by paying them more and then expecting more. And no, that’s not going to fix our education system all on its own, but it’s part of a step towards a better system.
@1, more from the article I linked to:
Also, Finland has no standardized tests.
Abolish private schools and things will start to change in America. Not before.
@9 There currently are plenty of ways to fire the hoards of “crummy teachers” you think are plaguing the profession; however, most administrators don’t want to do the paperwork so they usually opt to make that particular teacher’s life miserable enough that they leave the school or the profession. This tactic is commonly used against teachers that the administration doesn’t like for any number of reasons, most of them due to differences in philosophies and education politics. So don’t worry Quinte, plenty of teachers are being driven from the profession all the time, many of whom would be classified as “crummy” using the simplistic and unreliable measure of student test scores.
Interesting that the US was (by appearances anyway) the second-largest negative deviation from an already weak trendline
Fnarf – Just so we’re clear, you would ban people from using their own money to educate their own kids? Lol get fucked
@ 10, what makes that preferable to engaging? To me, it looks defensive and a bit bullying, which I interpret as an outsized reaction to the fact that someone didn’t just agree with you.
Fnarf makes a good point about @ 1, something I overlooked myself when I read that comment, but as the guy who was just making fun of Rick Santorum’s children on the other thread, maybe he shouldn’t be lecturing others about “basic human decency.”
@19, absolutely. You shouldn’t be able to buy a better school than your neighbors. All schools should be public. Not just because of equality; because taking the kids of the wealthy, committed parents out of the public schools leaves those public schools bereft of the best. Private schools enrich the lives of wealthy but weaken America. They’re unpatriotic and indecent.
@11 & 15
1. You would be correct by stating that teachers are PAID for nine months. The rest of the time is essentially a furlough during which we are required to take professional development and further our degrees on our own dime, on top of the countless hours spent outside the paid 7.5 hours a day devoted to planning, assessing and developing curriculum. This directly connects to your question @13…
2. Teachers should be spending more time with things that directly connect to our classroom and our students. High-stakes testing means that now we are spending that time analyzing test scores and working on things that directly connect to raising those test scores. Contrary to what Arne Duncan might tell you, obsessing over standardized tests lowers the quality of our teaching because we have less time for the truly important stuff.
@3 Wow, that’s a really hostile response to a legitimate question. Maybe explain to me what I don’t get about statistics instead of insulting me. To my eyes, that chart doesn’t show a tremendous amount of correlation. And when you have some outstandingly successful outliers like Finland and New Zealand, as well as Australia, Japan, and Korea, it seems completely obvious that you’d want to ask what’s going on there. Unless you’re just some asshole with an ax to grind, of course.
@8 My god, that’s a fascinating article. I want to read Sahlberg’s book now.
@21, why is this not a thing yet? Simply staggeringly good idea, as far as I can see.
Why on earth would the US government want to pay for better teachers? Schools are for producing obedient workers, and we have a surplus of those already. Their secondary purpose is to keep children busy and out of the work force, and they do that just fine with the teachers they have.
Finland has a lot of things going for it. It has the best schools in the world by almost all measures (e.g. PISA, etc.). Some surprising facts about Finnish education that we might be able to emulate in this country if more educators and parents got their heads out of the ground:
1. Kids don’t start regular school until age 6. Before that, (free universal) nursery schools and preschools focus on letting kids play, play, play, and play more. Play is learning, and the Finns see play-as-learning as the cornerstone of early chidhood education. Finnish kids don’t even start to learn to read until age 6-7.
2. Not only are there no private schools (or at least no schools that are not publicly funded), there are no “school districts” as we think of them. Every school is a fairly autonomous entity unto itself. Each school and each teacher gets to decide independently on how to structure the curriculum, what materials to use, what pace to go, etc. While there is a very loosely defined national curriculum, it makes almost no requirements of individual teachers.
3. Teachers stay with the same group of kids for multiple years, becoming an additional “parent” in many ways, and the small, cohesive classes learn to support and help each other.
4. There is essentially no standardized testing in Finland. The success of educational programs is observed indirectly in the employability, creativity, and innovation produced by the society in general.
5. Teachers teach in teams and come up with ideas together for dealing with the specific needs of specific classes and students.
Here are some things about Finnish education that the United States would have a harder time emulating:
1. Although teachers earn salaries comparable to their counterparts in the U.S., Finnish teachers all enjoy free universal health care and universal pension/retirement plans and ample paid vacation and sick days. If you factor these and other benefits in, Finnish teachers have a total compensation package nearly twice the value of what the average American teacher gets. (Note that Finnish teachers are unionized as well.)
2. Teachers incur no education debt because postsecondary education is free there. Teachers are required to have advanced degrees and undergo long-term apprenticeship teaching. American teachers typically graduate with debt and have spent less than a year student teaching, at most.
3. Teachers are treated as professionals and act like professionals. There is no micromanaging of their time and qualifications the way American teaching contracts do. Becoming a teacher is something many kids aspire to. In America, professionals from other fields cannot easily jump into teaching the way they can in Finland because of onerous qualification and labor union rules in the United States.
4. Because of universal health care and social benefits, Finnish children and their families do not have medical issues or nutrition issues the way a large percentage of American kids do. Thus, the schools are freer to focus on education and less on many social problems that plague American schools.
@19,21
The author of LeisureVille makes a similar point about retirement cities.
When elders pull out of communities, the schools have a smaller, more limited tax base. And these retirement cities do not, generally, support school funding levies for the children of people who work for the businesses these retirees frequent – so the new communities are just as screwed as the abandoned ones. I’m not saying (nor was Blechman) that there should be laws against moving to retirement communities, but people should be aware of the social contract and what their lifestyles are doing to schools.
Affluent parents decide that public schools are doing poorly, so they pull their kids (and support)(and volunteer hours) out, ensuring that those schools will continue to do poorly, and worsen.
@13: Nothing changed. I pulled it because there’s only a couple of us filling Slog today, and a cluster of posts all went up within minutes of each other, so I wanted to spread things out.
That said, I said “correlation,” not “causation,” so any attempt by folks here to discredit me with the latter is bullshit. The study showed a correlation.
Furthermore, as my post points out, this is a correlation that capitalist theory predicts we should see: higher pay should attract higher quality workers. That’s the way labor markets are supposed to work. And I find it absolutely baffling that the folks hawking market based education reforms should insist on dismissing this basic principle.
@29,
Or maybe schools shouldn’t be funded on the local level. Retirement communities or not, the fact remains that our current model of funding benefits rich districts at the expense of poor ones.
How are these two points not contradictory?
@3 What an asshole.
From your study of statistics you probably understand that @1’s question was perfectly legit when trying to understand this linear relationship?
Since you state “a direct correlation between teacher pay and student performance” by looking at that scatter plot, I too would like to hear your explanation of the New Zealand and Finland outliers. Else, cum hoc ergo propter hoc, vobis mentula.
@31, as I thought: you don’t know a fucking thing about statistics. Not one single, solitary fucking thing.
As a former classroom instructor I can assure you that there are not all that many ‘bad’ teachers. There are a few in every school, probably about the same number of folks who are bad at their jobs as anywhere else. What there is a lot of is bad administration and curriculum development.
Case in point- Block Scheduling and Integrated Math instruction. The theory behind integrated math is that each concept builds on the last, so young folks are learning basic skills, algebra, geometry etc all at the same time. Seems logical enough, but here is the problem: admins decided to reduce transition time by making classes longer and only meeting every other day- also seems logical. Now combine the 2. You have learning that is supposed to build on the previous lesson, but math class only meets twice a week (plus a short check-in w/ each class on fridays, with no instruction), and if you miss a day, or there is a holiday (of which there are many), you only have class once a week. The teachers know this won’t work. American education is a fad-driven field, always on the backs of teachers who over the course of a 30-40 year career will probably suffer through a dozen totally different modes of doing their job, most of which will make things worse, over which they have little input.
also- how many of these countries have mandatory education through the age of 18? are we comparing ourselves to countries that ‘turn loose’ the kids who do poorly after age 14 or 16?
@7: The US Census seems to think that there’s about four times more people living in urban areas than rural areas.
http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/GCT…
@32 But President Perry is going to close the Dept of Ed, so I doubt he’ll want to change the funding structure of local school districts. And I doubt that red-states will want us liberals force-feeding their kids all that new-fangled sciency-type-jargon-stuff.
Teachers are more sucessful at teaching in cultures that value learning. Here in the U.S.A. pupils and parents often look down on teachers. After all, how important can someone be if they can’t afford a cool car? Only here in the States do you hear; “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” Americans distrust education unless it related directly to making money.
@28, that’s a great point about benefits, particularly health care, bringing up the compensation package of Finnish teachers up far higher than what that chart says. America is such an outlier on health care now, as we continue to pretend that we’re not paying for it even as we continue to pay twice as much as anyone else for it, that all our statistics are skewed this way. It’s similar to the way health care costs are making economic recovery impossible, since health care is a hidden, massive tax on employment in this country that hirers in other countries don’t have to pay.
@21,
What’s your reasoning behind thinking that taking wealthy and a few lucky exceptional students out of public schools hurts the public schools? I’m not trying to be argumentative; I’m just curious because it flies in the face of what I’ve personally experienced.
Is the reasoning that exceptional students set a good example for everyone else? Or is just that they raise test scores for the school as a whole?
@30 Actually it’s quite the opposite. Private schools are self-segregated by race and class, creating a homogenous environment that creates a fear of the “other.” Culturally and economically diverse schools have a much easier time teaching compassion and inclusiveness. Not that they all do, but the opportunity is there. Most teachers see a heterogeneous classroom as the key to teaching for social justice and equality.
@40, it’s partly the example, but it’s also things like rich parents refusing to put up with inadequate libraries, inadequate teachers, inadequate educational programs like art and music, inadequate supplies, inadequate field trips, ad infinitum. Basically, rich parents demand more, and are better equipped to understand what “more” really means.
In addition, public schools bear almost the entire burden of the “difficult” children, such as the physically disabled, mentally disabled, mentally ill, emotionally troubled, and almost all the kids on the spectrum from “acting out” to “actively criminal”. These kids are incredibly expensive to educate.
I’m not that interested in test scores. At the end of schooling, sure, the SATs are one of a dozen useful indicators, and some testing along the way can point out incipient problems, but really, ugh. An interesting test from my perspective would be scoring kids on the answer to “what’s the last book you read?”
Obligatory:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation…
We’re pretty confident that hiring better teachers improves educational outcomes. Pay can help, but generally teachers in America are in low-status jobs in comparison to the amount of education they have to pay for to get their jobs in the first place. Other countries can attract better teachers for less money than we can for a number of reasons, including the fact that they are working relatively high status jobs.
A great comparison would be the military. Being an enlisted soldier in the US is a much higher status job than what it’s pay would indicate. This is cultural and it took a long time to develop. Suddenly increasing existing teacher’s pay won’t change the culture we live in immediately.
Interesting stuff about the Finnish system. The ban on private schools makes a lot of sense. But what about New Zealand -anyone know much about their system? I believe they do have private schools there, unlike Finland, and they seem to be extremely successful by the measure of this chart, despite paying their teachers pretty badly. What’s the deal there, anyone know?
Also, even though I realize the benefits are way better in other countries, I am still really surprised at how low actual wages are for teachers are in some very rich countries! I mean, Norway? Less than 30K? wtf!
Simac@28 puts forth most of the reasoning for why Finland does better.
Here are a couple more.
1) the teachers spend nearly as much time with other teachers at their school as they do with students. They talk about each student and ask for strategies to help the student. They talk about coordinated lessons. In short, they build a teaching corps in each building so that each teacher isn’t in his/her own vacuum. It builds teamwork and pride in the profession.
2) Years back, if Oprah mentioned public school teachers, loud cheers. Today, not so much. There has been a systematic demonizing of teachers and I can’t say why precisely except some are anti-union (and want to break the teachers’ unions) and they need someone to blame. Do you hear any of that ire directed at superintendents and principals? No.
3) The public support and belief in public education is stronger in many countries. Teachers in Finland are as educated as doctors and lawyers. In Singapore, it is consider a huge job because of the teacher’s influence on the child. We do not have that respect for education or teaching in our country. We have idiot presidents who say “hey I got Cs and I’m President.” We have stupid tv shows like Jackass that celebrate being dumb. As the Dean said in Animal House, “Dumb and fat is not the way to go through life, son.”
4) Lastly, the third rail of public education that no one talks about. Parents. Kids spend more time out of school than in school. They are in a country where being stupid is celebrated more than being smart. We are in a country where many people make the choice to be a single parent even though they have no real way to support/guide their child.
It can’t all fall on teachers.
It’s interesting because Teach for America basically bribes Ivy Leaguers to deign to teach inner-city kids for two years. The majority leave after two-years but some stay on and the cry is always “if they just paid more.”
Teachers should get paid more (and not stupid bonuses but within their salaries).
Finland has a more homogeneous population but as immigration is changing their demographics, schools are having more problems (particularly in the greater Helsinki
area where immigrants prefer to move).
Note it can take just a few weeks to learn to read and write Finnish – each letter makes
one sound, almost every word is spoken like it is spelled (tuli, tuuli, tulli, etc are all
different words which their ears differentiate easily – not so easy for many Americans
and just don’t get started on the fact the nouns decline into ~17 cases and there are
enclitics and postpositions (vs prepositions)).
I’d be interested to see a chart like this that measures test scores against how much time teachers have to focus solely on planning, prepping, assessing, and modifying instruction for their classes.
Personally, I’d rather have more time than more money. It’s impossible to be the best teacher one can be with the 115 minutes of the contract day I have to do the above (along with various other duties like parent communication, IEP meetings, ordering supplies, etc.) for 5 classes/150 students a day.
Obviously I and every other teacher I know works long past contract hours just to keep our heads above water.
I’m a little puzzled by the vitriol against the “reform” movement — are “reformers” really against paying teachers more? I know plenty of “reformers” (myself included) who think that paying teachers more (and generally improving the stature of the teaching profession) is critically important. I happen to think that the way we pay teachers doesn’t make much sense (experience and degree-based schedules ), but the amount clearly should be higher on average. Anyways, there are lots of thoughtful “reformers” out there, it’s not only people who worship at the alter of competition…
@45, the ecstatic celebration of stupidity, and the concomitant conviction that you don’t need no durn-fool book-larnin’ to know wut’s wut, is indeed astonishing in this country — and unlike any other; even places that have a little of it (Australia, Italy, the UK, plenty of others) don’t have it in the overwhelming totality that we do, and they generally don’t have it in their top offices. In no other nation would an entire lineup of presidential candidates express not just the lack of knowledge and awareness but the exuberant pride in that lack that the Republicans have been offering us.
Which is awful, because Americans used to stand for knowing how to get things done. Now our heroes are Kardashians.
Case in point: Steve Jobs is a hero, and was lionized when he died. But his products were all wholly dependent on dramatic improvements in battery engineering; those brick-like cell phones of 20 years ago were all battery. Name one battery engineer.
That’s right folks, hire nothing but Ivy leaguers @ $100k each to teach at Rainier Beach high school and it’ll be cranking out future Rhodes Scholars by the pound.
So you say it would be easier to give everyone a 15% raise than to implement a bunch of crazy liberal do gooder scheme (like charter schools).
Yep.
@42,
I definitely agree with your second and third paragraphs, but I’m skeptical about schools improving because rich parents won’t put up with inadequate facilities. I grew up in a rich school district, and our schools weren’t inadequate, not so much because parents in that town wouldn’t put up with it but because those schools were drowning in property tax income.
Our country is greatly segregated by income and race, and I don’t see getting rid of private schools as a solution unless we also completely change the way schools are funded.
@52, I absolutely agree.
I’m a part-time teacher. The expectations are ridiculous, the support is nominal and the pay is abysmal. I do it because it is the most rewarding and fun job I’ve ever had, and I’m pretty good at it, to boot. I wish I could do it full time (the college has asked me to), but I can’t afford it. It’s unfortunate but true: With few exceptions, the most meaningful and rewarding jobs pay terribly.