Raising Teacher Salaries Right
While checking out RVAblogs, I saw that there were a couple articles about teachers over at bacon’s rebellion. I am eating lunch at my desk because I was stood up by my lunch dates, so I figured I’d talk about something I’ve thought about before: teacher salaries.
While many people argue for raising them, I’d say it’s the way you raise them that is most important. You need to raise potential salaries the most for the highest performers, measure performance intelligently, and create promotional opportunities to really see benefits from pay raises.
Teachers don’t get paid much. Everyone knows that. But I’d argue that the biggest problem isn’t the salary, it’s the lack of advancement opportunity for good teachers. Few teachers are working towards a goal - most don’t want to be department chair, and most don’t want to be a principal. Most teachers I know just want to get better at teaching kids, either by improving their methods or improving their school.
What does high pay do? Several things. It keeps good people in their jobs by showing them that they are valued. It gives incentive for people who are coasting to work harder. And it attracts more and better people to a field. In short, if done right, it can be well worth the investment. It’s especially important to make sure a top performer stays in their job by giving them opportunities to move up without finding a new career. Top performing, experienced teachers are worth way more than ones that are new and high performing, or experienced and complacent. Look at the corporate world - how many companies pay by performance? How many go out of their way to make promotional opportunities clear? Lots. There’s a reason for that.
It’s not even very hard to evaluate this stuff, we just don’t do it. There’s test scores - does the person teach similar kids better? We do look at that, but it’s been argued on this website that it isn’t done right. You can look at competencies - can the teacher communicate well with parents and keep kids interest? There’s also contribution to the school - does the teacher make the school a better place by starting or sponsoring clubs, fixing problems, or helping their peers? Because administrators generally hate being in a classroom, and because it’s taboo to interfere or ask questions about a teacher’s methods, we really don’t evaluate how a teacher does their job. But were we to gather multiple points of data on all of these dimensions and normalize them correctly (get someone experienced in statistics involved, particularly with the test score piece, to make sure it isn’t stupidly skewed), we’d have a good all-around picture of a teacher’s performance.
The idea is to give the highest pay raises and most opportunity to those who are contributing the most to the school. You could do the same for administrators. If I run all the good teachers out of my school because I’m a bad principal, and the kids perform worse, I should be held accountable for that.
But what about the promotional opportunities? There are different ways to handle this, and I’d say it would depend on the school and the situation. The common thread should be that promotional opportunities should give a teacher the ability to have greater ownership of the school and responsibility of teaching kids, not of the administrative things they aren’t interested in. One idea would be to increase average class sizes for teachers who have shown themselves to be more efficient. Another would be to give the most charismatic and experienced teachers the ability to rotate around other classrooms occassionally, to provide a fresh perspective and to help improve newer teachers by demonstrating best practices. You could give an experienced teacher the ability to propose and teach their own elective class in a high school, or more freedom to vary the curriculum for their kids in a lower grade. There are plenty of possibilities, and probably the best ones would come from asking the brightest teachers what they would do if they had a bit more control or freedom.
Anyway, I’m not a teacher. Redesigning the job structure of educators would take way more input from actual teachers. But education ought to be one of the highest priorities for our state, and I know there are plenty of lessons we can learn. It isn’t even close to perfect yet, so I’d say there’s some work to do.
agreed dude.
i mean i have had soooooooo many bad teachers. like so many. and very few good teachers. and having a good teacher is amazing. like so amazing. and they should be paid millions!
— havoc | @
Dude this is pretty insightful and well thought out. This really hit home for me:
I will think some more before I comment.
— MaxPower | @
+1 RMS I especially agree with the part about how it’s taboo for principals to question teaching methods. We have so many teachers in my school who refuse to explore new ways of doing things and get very defensive when questioned. People don’t want to be told they’re doing less-than-good work, but I would rather eat some humble pie and learn something that would make me a better teacher. Fortunately, my administration has made a huge effort to spend real time in the classroom and has started checking lesson plans. A lot of teachers don’t like this, but it keeps us on our toes.
— Valeree Lynn | @
good ideas. some of the ideas below are better ideas than others. and i know very little about some aspects of teaching. that said, i offer for haduken scrutiny…
1. from what i understand the national certifying or licensing board is pretty weak/not widespread. there should be an effort to standardize the process for teaching and an effort to get as many states to adopt this as possible.
2. that process should be more difficult. difficulty decreases quantity, increases quality, increases average pay, right? when you have 400 teachers applying for 1 position, they can offer low pay and somebody will take the job.
3. that process could have an analysis similar to what rmszero is suggesting, then when you get done you say “i’m 98% good” and they pay you more. school systems will fight to say our starting teachers average 98% good and yours are only 80% good. but they’ll have to pay for that goodness.
4. that’s just starting pay. i’m down with some sort of analysis to rank existing teachers. i think pay decreases should be allowed to. if you try really hard for 5 years and make a lot of money, then stop trying and are crappy, buuwwwww (that’s the sound of your pay dropping).
5. promotions are difficult in teaching. i feel like the number of good promotions is not enough to cover the amount of good teachers, but maybe i’m wrong. i’m just saying maybe this area would require some creativity and thoughtfulness, which is always abound in the government, right???
6. other professions have required learning units. does teaching?? like, you have to go to a certain amount of seminars or whatever to learn new teaching techniques and whatnot.
7. this might be crazy, but i like the idea of classroom sizes in the hundreds for high school classes. for one it gets kids ready for college. for another, less teachers = more available funds per teacher in theory. i’m talking your general math/english type classes. maybe this is crazy.
— Wolf | @
Wolf - good ideas. A few things I would say:
1) Yep.
2) It should be difficult. But check this quote of a quote from one of my links: “Certification is tough–’Each year, less than 30 percent of the first-try teachers earn certification. Just 40 percent pass before the three-year mark.’” Maybe so, but then again, maybe lots of teachers aren’t very good. It’s hard to say. But it is kind of cool to have a thing like that so teachers can differentiate themselves.
3) Sure.
4) That’s why companies give bonuses. You can’t drop someone’s base pay, that’s just not cool. But if you give a yearly performance bonus, and performance dips, your bonus dips as well. What I’m saying is that I agree with you, but you’d have to do it a certain way like anything else.
5) Absolutely.
6) I’m pretty sure they have a thing like that. One of haduken’s teachers would know more.
7) Yeah thats a thing. I like the idea. i mean, the homework/exam grader -> TA -> recitation leader -> lecturer model of promotions would be a thing, particularly as you say for high schoolers. I actually think a senior teacher doing the lesson, with a junior teacher mostly enforcing discipline or grading or doing whatnot would be more efficient with 55 kids than the current 1 teacher, 28 kids model, especially when it comes to older, pre-college students. But I mean, I dunno. I feel like there ought to be research on this somewhere.
Seriously, good stuff all around. I guess the ideal way to make improvements would be for a state that takes education very seriously (like VA) to hire a superstar college administrator to lead the DOE who (a) had worked in business and (b) loves to teach. These kinds of ideas need to come from the top.
— RMSzero | @
Do they need to come from the top? I would like to see less federal and state restrictions to the curriculum (except spelling?) and more leeway given to local districts/schools. Kind of like the Baptist church. You aren’t going to get innovative ideas from administrators who’ve lived in the system and distanced themselves from the classrooms.
I feel like a district given autonomy and a healthy group of young teachers with a desire to see change could experiment a lot. They would probably fail alot, but if they weren’t stubborn about what the stuck with, it could be awesome.
Also, Val has to take classes towards “recertification.” So thats like #7. She would know more though…
— MaxPower | @
sure some small community could experiment and make some findings, but if you want widespread change (increase) in pay for teachers, it’s going to have to be from something more than a county. but sure, a state could look to locality for both bad and good models.
Max, i know you are absolutely obsessed with local power, but there are some things that the nation can be good for. for one thing, if you had a widely accepted national certification program, then you could easily switch between states with little-to-no hang-ups. i enjoy the idea of a base national curriculum that says every child will have at least “this” minimum education, and then maybe the rest can be left up to states/etc.
2.) still not difficult enough. there are too many college programs that are a cake-walk (while some may be difficult), then what?? student teach, be a good test-taker, you’re in?? am i missing something? i’m not saying becoming a teacher is easy, but it’s not becoming a doctor, lawyer, architect/engineer, cpa, etc. with the exception of cpa (if you get a cpa from some crappy place), all of those are much much more difficult to get thru. of course i may have some bias. maybe teaching doesn’t require that, but i find it easier to say i deserve better pay after going thru getting an architecture license (partly thru) rather than what i think teachers have to thru. keep in mind, i’m speaking nothing about the importance of the job at all. but also remember, janitors are important and everyone’s not jumpin up and down to give them raises. you’ve got to prove that just anybody can’t do this job. janitors fail comepletely at this (who can’t clean floors?), teachers obviously do better, but could stand to improve mucho. (don’t get all in a huff, i’m not saying teachers are like janitors, i’m merely using extremes to prove a point. chill)
— Wolf | @
All of these ideas seem like pretty good places to start. I think that teachers should be required to pass some sort of annual exam, or have a performance track, or something. We have to keep in mind though that certain schools will never perform as well as other schools just based on certain social structures. Also, many parents will probably be good with changing the way their kids are being taught, but not real okay with the idea that your eperiment may “fail”. Failing teaching experiments means failing kids. I know my mom woulda been real upset.
I think too, that a lot of schools are crying out for new teachers. I have this idea that there aren’t 400 teachers knocking down the doors to schools to teach. I think school systems pay what they can based on their budget, and teachers simply accept their pay rate because they know that comes with the territory. I may be way wrong though. I guess it depends on what grade level and subjects they’re teaching too.
I like the idea of a bonus structure…but how do you measure the effect a teacher has on any one student, much less a group of them? This may be where the debate really comes in, you may just get a group of dumb (or unruly) kids one year. They’re not going to learn as well as others, then what? Do we punish teachers because they hit the crap class jackpot?
If we had a nationwide certification program, we’d probably end up with a nationwide curriculum. And you thought SOL’s were bad. I can only imagine what sort of abhorrent demands would be put on schools if that were to happen. And what would happen if the federal government got a hold of our education systems? Scary thought…
We all have to realize as well that the school systems are subject to the tax payers. The tax payers that make the most noise are white, middle class parents with school age children. Most of what I think doesn’t matter at all, because I’m in a voting block that doesn’t vote. So…whatever.
— RVAkid | @
the crazy thing to me about teaching is they have a speadsheet that says what your salary is depending on how many years you have worked and what your degree is. no mention of merit based anything. it kind of blows my mind.
apparently this is how gvmnt jobs work in my field as well. only instead of num years it’s how many people are ahead of you in years working. so you dont get a promotion until someone retires.
also i was under the impression that most teachers hated having large classes. so it would seem like punishment to give a teacher a larger class because they do well. also if you goto WM you dont need to get ready for large class sizes! goooooooooo tribe!
— midas | @
There is definitely a teacher shortage.
There are two ways to handle that. Make the job more attractive so more people apply, including better qualified people, or make it easier to become a teacher so more people are eligible to apply.
NCLB has put a few restrictions on who can be a teacher, but even so, we don’t want to drop the requirements for being a teacher any lower I’d say. If anything, we want it to be tougher to be a teacher.
The only way to do that, when there’s a shortage, is to make the job more attractive. I dealt with one aspect of this - job, promotional, and pay structure in this article. There are other things you could do, of course.
Midas: I hate having more work to do than I have now, but if you’ll give me a raise when you increase my responsibilities, I might be interested in that deal. If teachers got paid more for handling more kids, they might be interested. And I know at least a few teachers who would be able to handle a 35 or 40 person classroom with plenty of personal attention left over for individual kids. It just depends on your style, experience, skill level, and the sort of class you’re teaching. Just like in college - some professors could barely handle a class of 15, while others seemed to get to know everyone in a lecture hall of 50.
— RMSzero | @
sure maybe a good teacher can handle a bigger class size, but few i think would want to. maybe if you threw in the money i guess, but then let’s be clear that taking more students is a liability, not a reward for doing well. hopefully it would be optional.
you also have the added problem of trying to sell larger class sizes as a way to improve education. that is a difficult sell.
— midas | @
Midas - if you have a tremendous teacher who is not only efficient enough to handle more kids, but can make the subject come alive in a way that few others can, it makes sense to allow as many kids as possible to experience that teacher if the teacher wants it.
It also makes sense to allow the teacher to take any of the other options that I sketched out - flexibility, the ability to teach a cool elective, things like that. Like I already said, it would depend on the situation. It just doesn’t make sense to be so ridiculously rigid.
Obviously you wouldn’t do it if teachers and parents didn’t want it. I have spoken to teachers who have the desire and ability, both innate and because of what they teach, to handle many more kids. So it isn’t like I’m making this up.
— RMSzero | @
Yeah I agree RMS. I mean I had an excellent math teacher in college. Everyone of his classes I took (three or four maybe) was always packed. He taught a cryptography class that was close to 50 people. He is a tremendous teacher and could definitely handle the class size, and had a personal relationship with almost every single student.
I don’t think large class size is necessarily an indicator of either a bad teacher or a bad learning enviornment. Like RMS said, it would depend on the teacher.
— MaxPower | @
you listed giving teachers larger classes as a promotional opportunity. what i am saying is that most teachers regard being given a larger class size as a punishment or as an unfortunate effect of inadequate budgeting.
i’m sure that we can both bring up anecdotal evidence to support either side, but either way i would like to meet the superteacher who can provide the same amount of personal attention to each of 50 individuals as he can to each of 25, the total number of hours in a day remaining constant.
i’m not against options, give them whatever options they want, i just don’t think most people would pick that one, unless it’s as a financial decision.
— midas | @
also remember that college is an extremely different environment than grade school, for a variety of reasons, many of which i think would come into play here.
— midas | @
Isn’t grade school more like college in Europe? Or am I making that up?
Back to the topic, I think the most difficult thing for me to balance is the need for some minimum standard of education among students nationwide, and a need for teachers to have range to do what they want in the class room. I bet if we improved that tension/situation things would start to get better.
— MaxPower | @
accomplishing that says nothing about pay, though. but i agree, that’s difficult and important.
— Wolf | @
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