Last updated on 2011.03.28
Nicholas Kristof argued in Saturday's New York Times that we should pay teachers more. He cited a study by Stanford's Eric Hanushek (discussed last December on this blog) that found that the best teachers can raise a student's lifetime earnings by $20,000 to $32,000. Multiply that by 20 kids, and you've got pretty remarkable economic impact every year. Kristof thus argues that we can get those better teachers by offering better pay.
Kristof must have been reading ahead to this report from yesterday's Times:
Andreas Schleicher, who oversees the international achievement test known by its acronym Pisa, says in his report that top-scoring countries like Korea, Singapore and Finland recruit only high-performing college graduates for teaching positions, support them with mentoring and other help in the classroom, and take steps to raise respect for the profession.
"Teaching in the U.S. is unfortunately no longer a high-status occupation," Mr. Schleicher says in the report, prepared in advance of an educational conference that opens in New York on Wednesday. "Despite the characterization of some that teaching is an easy job, with short hours and summers off, the fact is that successful, dedicated teachers in the U.S. work long hours for little pay and, in many cases, insufficient support from their leadership" [Sam Dilllon, "U.S. Is Urged to Raise Teachers' Status," New York Times, 2011.03.16].
Schleicher's report notes that teachers make less than other college graduates in the U.S. and abroad, but the gap in the U.S. is larger: veteran elementary teachers earn 13% less than their fellow university graduates in Finland; the differential in the U.S. is 40%. Simple economics says that folks with valuable talent will gravitate toward professions that pay more for that talent, draining the talent pool for lower-paying professions.
Schleicher does not see money as the only solution to improving teacher status. Schleicher doesn't even think we necessarily need to raise taxes and spend more to attract top talent to teaching:
...Mr. Schleicher said the point was not that the United States spends too little on public education — only Luxembourg among the O.E.C.D. countries spends more per elementary student — but rather that American schools spend disproportionately on other areas, like bus transportation and sports facilities [emphasis mine; Dillon, 2011.03.16.
In other news, the Madison Central School Board has asked the Lake Area Improvement Corporation to study the economic impact of, among other things, building a new gym.
Update 2011.03.28: Mr. Dahle connects me with the report Mr. Schleicher wrote with Dr. Steven L. Paine. It's good, accessible reading (i.e., not egghead academic journal stuff)!
"... the best teachers can raise a student’s lifetime earnings by $20,000 to $32,000 ..."
In my opinion, no study can quantify something like this. My intuition would tell me that, all other things being equal (which they never are), a school career with good teachers could double, triple, or even increase by 100-fold the pay of a student over a lifetime.
But pay isn't all of it ... If one can find a "labor of love," where pay has less relevance than plain satisfaction in a day's work well done, where income matters less than the day-to-day enjoyment one derives from the work itself ... If one can find that sort of work, then no price can attach to the result.
I'd have to credit my dad, along with one of my ex-employers, as the "teachers of consequence" in my life. The former received no pay for his work, and the latter actually paid me.
I've got a study that says grasshoppers are 35.4% happier than crickets, if all other things are equal, which they never are.
But Stan, how many other professions count on "labor of love" to draw the best talent? I worry South Dakota has based too much policy on that expectation... and diverts too much of the resulting savings to really big gyms and other expenses that don't boost academic achievement.
Cory, I must have misled you. I didn't mean to imply that teachers shouldn't get better pay. I only meant to say that I have trouble with the study about lifetime earnings versus quality of teachers. (I suspect it's a gross underestimate, but I also suspect it's impossible to quantify anyway.)
No -- based on what I've heard about teacher pay in South Dakota, I think we'd do well do give them all a 50-percent raise on the spot. But where would we find the money? A tax increase? Try selling that idea to people who are buckling under the load of stagnant salaries, skyrocketing gas, heating, food, and medical costs.
My own income has dropped by more than 50 percent since 2006, while Black Hills power has raised their rates by about 20 percent, my medical insurance premiums have nearly doubled, and food prices are on the rise. Fortunately, because of my ultra-conservative financial planning and modest lifestyle demans, even when times were better than I'd hoped for, I've been able to "suck it up" during this recession -- so far.
I don't think it's unreasonable to ask teachers, along with everyone else, to "suck it up" for awhile so that we can all expect a brighter long-term future. It's about putting off the gratification.
One way or another, we gotta pay for the pickle we're in. We can do it now, or we can do it later. Governor Daugaard wants to do it now (believing that if we do it later it will hurt more), and he has the gall to stand behind his convictions. For that, I commend him. (He deserves at least one peach in the face along with all the rotten tomatoes and eggs.)
By the way, I just got a letter in the mail from Governor Daugaard. He responded to my idea concerning the payment of use tax. I think he'd like to make people aware that they're supposed to pay use tax on purchases made via the Internet from out-of-state retailers. He'd also like to make out-of-state retailers aware that they have to collect South Dakota sales tax when they sell their goods over the Internet to us.
I hope this post makes sense. I'm listening to the O'Reilly Factor as I write it, and you know how that can go.
I think it makes a lot of sense - provide good pay and you'll get high quality people to teach.
There's another part of that equation, though. We NEED to get rid of tenure. If teachers aren't achieving results, they shouldn't be teaching. We need to be able to - and willing to - terminate teacher employment if they're not doing a good job.
We also need to forget about teacher:student and administrator:teacher ratios. We're finding they don't make a big difference in classrooms. You could have a personal tutor, but if she stinks, your child is still not going to improve.
I'm intensely interested in The Equity Project (http://www.tepcharter.org/) in Manhattan, which uses only public funds - the same amount given to any other school - to pay teachers $125,000, removes tenure, and isn't afraid to fire teachers for not performing. Administration is a skeleton crew. They divert funding from all the special programs and fluffy staff positions to personnel pay for teachers (i.e. no need to raise taxes if Madison wanted to try it).
So far, they're not beating any other schools in test scores, but they're showing some real progress as far as moving reading levels and math skills. Within 4-5 years, we'll have a pretty good idea if treating teaching like a business works.
Sorry to have misread you, Stan! You make plenty of sense, even with your distractions in the background. I may just be flying through posts a bit too quickly between homework assignments myself!
I'm willing to take the $20K/student figure as a conservative estimate. Note on teacher-student ratios that Schleicher's work says getting top talent makes up for the one-on-one contact. Apparently a really good teacher doesn't need as much one-on-one time?
That point about ratios is one way Schleicher argues you don't have to spend more on education. If I understand the NYT summary correctly, Schleicher would argue that you can pay more to fewer teachers. That would tangle me up on my economic impact arguments about the governor's budget -- firing teachers means an immediate decline in local jobs -- but if the academic and long-term economic benefits for students outweigh... oof. Tough choice!
Schleicher also provides a revenue-neutral way to raise teacher pay by arguing that we need to reallocate from other expenses, like sports facilities, and dedicate that cash to the core mission of teaching.
Wayne, you're right: The Equity Project is one of the best laboratories we have for studying the effect of good pay and top talent. And yes, more rigorous evaluation of performance would come with higher pay. I'm still nervous about creating good objective metrics for performance... although I think every one of us could spend a week in a school, watch what's going on, and get a good sense of who's working hardest for the money.
I do think the tenure debate is overstated. Even under current "tenure" in SD, a school board can get rid of any teacher it wants... if it's willing to do the work and make the hard call.
The so-called "use tax" is a fraud. It is a sales tax on products in interstate commerce and nothing else; otherwise we would all be paying "use" taxes on every thing we use or food we store, etc. etc.
The only way to tax internet sales that won't be incredibly intrusive is with a federal distant transaction tax that applies to all such transactions not just internet sales and removes all legal fiction taxes like use taxes in all states. The feds should refund about 90% of the distant transaction taxes to the states based on their population. No need to actually keep track of what you or I buy or where we buy it or who sells it, etc. No huge databases of correct addresses for correct taxes, etc.
If you want a 30 state consortium of sales tax officials to know that say 30% of South Dakota males including you purchase viagra and California wine and you regularly buy your wife chastity belts, then you should just love the intrusive databases that another state sales tax would produce.
Doug, you're probably right. Most people won't pay taxes that they aren't forced to pay.
As a small business, I am required by South Dakota law to register for sales tax and have a sales-tax license. When I file the return, all of my income is exempt (out-of-state royalties, treated as sales-for-resale) but I must neverthless fill in data for use tax. If I were to enter goose eggs on that line, I'd surely get audited, and the Department of Revenue would be unhappy with me when they found out that I had dodged the use tax.
So I don't dodge it. I keep track of applicable purchases and I pay the appropriate amout every January (about a hundred dollars). The state doesn't know that I order a whole bunch of vitamins over the Internet, or that I buy books about Zen from Amazon dot com, or that I get my swim goggles from Speedo dot com, or whatever.
It's not quite fair to me, I suppose, but I'm willing to cough up that hundred dollars and fill out the little form every January, if it'll keep the income tax away.
If we do institute a personal income tax here in South Dakota, as some people have suggested as a means to boost revenue, you can bet your sweet bippie that there'll be a line on the return for use tax. One would enter donuts on that line at their own peril.
A cruel twist for this state: I wrote to the Wyoming Department of Revenue concerning my sales tax liability in the event I were to relocate there. They practically said, "Come on over!" No sales tax license needed. No sales tax liability. Property taxes are lower there. No income tax. That little two-acre parcel near Cody waits for me quietly, patiently, perhaps praying to the Dirt Goddess for an income tax in South Dakota so I'll ditch this state, come over there, and build a net-zero-carbon-footprint house ...
... I rant, again.
Back to the original topic of this thread, I wish we could find a way to improve teacher pay (and perhaps also link teacher pay to merit) without raising taxes. For the moment, I can't see how. South Dakota taxpayers are a leery lot. They (we) can smell a rat a mile upwind. Most of the people I talk to think that if we boost revenue, the state will boost spending in proportion (or maybe out of proportion) and we'll end up having dug ourselves out deeper than ever. I suspect that they're right.
Go, Dennis, go! (I mean stay, man; it's not break time yet.)