Teacher Pay

Hey you! Yeah you, the wonderful teacher.  I'm not trying to pick a fight with you, but I'm troubled.  Teacher pay in the U.S. makes no sense to me.

You are a great teacher, and I'm not criticizing you.  I completely accept the possibility that thousands of teachers provide excellent instruction every day.  The time you spend trying to effectively teach children is incredibly valuable to society.

I'm troubled because you work at a public school for the same amount of money as Mr. Crappy down the hall.  I'm troubled because you are a better teacher than Mr. Masters, but he gets paid more for getting a wasteful graduate degree in an unrelated field.  I'm troubled because someone as talented as you doesn't have the means, ability, or courage to go down a different road.  I think teacher pay oppresses you.

As I've said before, the market for teachers suggests there are more teachers available than there are teaching positions.  This is part of the reason why wages have stayed low.  This increased supply of teachers in relation to demand pulls wages down while the unions and social morals pull wages up.   The result, is juuuuust enough money to keep you there and keep your mouth shut.  Public schools are like a smoked beehive.  The bees are angry on the inside, but too paralyzed to really do anything about it.

As an illustration of my point, lets examine the extremes.

First, lets make our hypothetical world.  We announce new federal legislation that will go into effect in four years.  This legislation will mandate that all teachers be fired, that they be eligible for rehire, and that the minimum wage for public school teachers be raised to $120,000.


Maybe I'm wrong, but I think the demand for education-education would explode.  Professionals would go back to school for a career switch, students would choose teaching programs over law school, med school, and pharmacy school.  To counter the massive demand for education and the massive supply of new applicants, entrance exams would be created and schools would begin to require graduate degrees.  Suddenly you'd have to take the GRE or T-SAT to get an education degree.  Perhaps there would even be an educator's bar that would require a teacher bar exam of sorts.

Four years would pass and suddenly schools would have a huge variety of people to choose from.  Unfortunately, the methods used to evaluate teachers suck now, so they wouldn't properly value or measure your years of experience and dedication.  Most likely, they would choose the shiny ivy-league grads who tested in the top 10 percentile on the T-SAT.   Your school board and superintendent would want to rehire you, but he'd have to justify the decision to parents and the community.

Let's say you get rehired.  Phew!  The industry would be hyper-competitive.  Tenure would die because the public would be outraged if you couldn't be fired when you are making that type of money.   The teachers who could handle larger class sizes would get preferential treatment and teachers would put in more and more time to preserve their job.  The teacher evaluation techniques would still be ineffective, and you'd have to impress your managers in the same way everyone else in the world does.  Work more than everyone else and become invaluable.   Bring in private donations to your school, and keep the parents happy.   Publish articles and get famous.  All that jazz.

So, you tell me, would that make education better?  Would test scores go up?  Would "real" learning increase?  My guess is that currently under-achieving schools would benefit greatly from the program while those schools that currently perform well would see marginal gains.  Maybe I'm wrong and new teachers wouldn't fix the broken system.

Now for the opposite extreme.  Sorry folks, we are still going to require the same standards and pre-requisites, but we have to cut your pay.  You will make $18,000 per year plus $750 per year of experience.

I'm not totally convinced, but I can imagine demand for education-education would slow down substantially.  However, the current teachers would probably revolt.  Maybe the unions would do what they do and get the teachers to strike.  Everyone would chant and holler and stare at each other for a while.  Strikes make a difference, but I don't think it's that substantial.   OR Maybe, just maybe, some teachers would get motivated and set up a lobby for vouchers or start fund raising for scholarships.  A group of great teachers like you would break off and start competing with the public schools and you would own them.  Maybe parents would realize that your school performs better than the public school and they'd start to lobby for more schools like yours.  Maybe the wait list for your school would get so long that copy cats would pop up all over.

Maybe.  I don't know.  But you do, don't you?   You can beat them, can't you?

The median state in the union spends about $11,000 per pupil each year.  If you and four friends figure out how to educate 150 students, your school would have a gross revenue of $1.65 million dollars.   Pay some MBA you trust $150,000 to run the place, spend $950,000 a year on expenses and you'd still have over $100,000 each for your salary.

I know this is oversimplified.  But have you at least crunched the numbers?  Could you sell a school to parents without a football field or bus system?  Could you use a caterer for school lunches?   Or are you paralyzed by union and bureaucratic smoke?
With all of the complaining I hear about teacher wages and treatment, I can't believe there isn't one private school business plan for every two teachers out there.  Why don't you help get someone elected who can clear the way for private schools and vouchers?
Maybe it's because you are content with the wages you get.

How can I possibly draw any other conclusion?  You go to school knowing what you'll get paid when you graduate, you know that you won't get merit pay, and you know that it will be a largely thankless job, yet you do it anyway.  An on top of it, your lobby opposes private schools.  You pay dues to a union, and it strikes down any competition that could provide better employment.

I honestly think the education lobbies want your pay to stay low, but not that low.  If it gets too high, they know the pressure for merit pay and higher qualifications will be intense.  If it gets too low, both the quality and willingness to play the game will drop.

I'm troubled.  I don't get why so many people do what you with the wage ceiling where it is.  At least underpaid professionals in other industries can dream of making it big one day.  I'm troubled that you don't seem to be doing anything to change the system.  You are seriously leaving education reform to the lawyers... and that's suspect.