It’s just good economics to think that raising the pay of teachers will improve the overall ability of the teaching corps, knowing that higher pay attracts higher-qualified workers in other situations.
Now comes a study from Australia making the same point. Two researchers at the Australian National University’s Center for Economic Policy Research looked at changes in the quality of education over time, and concluded one change for the worse was pay for teachers and a resulting decline in quality of teachers. Andrew Leigh and Chris Ryan write:
For an individual with the potential to earn a wage at the 90th percentile of the distribution, a non-teaching occupation looked much more attractive in the 2000s than it did in the 1980s. We believe that both the fall in average teacher pay, and the rise in pay differentials in non-teaching occupations are responsible for the decline in the academic aptitude of new teachers over the past two decades.
Is that a surprise? U.S. Education Sec. Bill Bennett used to tout his “$50,000 solution” to improve schools — get a good principal. That action generally would improve the support for teachers and improve things across the school. Today, the amounts are higher, and the need is greater after more than three decades of economic starvation of public schools.
Raising teacher pay is a good market solution to improve the achievement of students.
Tip of the old scrub brush to Andrew Leigh’s blog.
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 
I’ve seen those claimed literacy rates from the mid 1800s before, and I don’t give them much credence. It doesn’t match with the fact that so few got beyond basic elementary school — I don’t think it’s a valid comparison to look at literacy for the wealthy and educated in the North (did those figures include the poor? really?) 150 years ago, and compare it to Level 3 criteria today. It also runs counter to our experience with SAT scores, which declined a lot between 1940 and 2000 chiefly because we tested such a large part of our population. Expanding education opportunities has exposed the need for the education, too. Public education got us through two world wars in the 20th century before we could say it even hit 60% of the population. I don’t hear anyone in the education establishment making excuses, by the way — those are the same people who note these problems and ask for more resources to fix the problems.
I don’t know anywhere that poor teachers stay because they can’t be fired. As I noted, in Texas there simply is not such protection. Texas is the second largest public education state. I don’t think anyone argues that the ability to fire teachers in Texas has made it competitive with New York, or with California, even, while California’s schools continue to free fall due to budget cuts. Those states with the toughest protections for teachers have also been, over the last half century, those states with the highest educational attainment in students: California, New York, Indiana, Utah, Hawaii, etc. Where is it difficult to get rid of bad teachers? I keep hearing the stories, but I don’t see any correlation between the claims and evidence that it can’t be done.
Making schools compete economically, by the way, is not a good way to empower teachers to change things. So far our experiments in trying such competitive systems, in San Francisco, Dallas, Philadelphia and Baltimore, to name a few of the more famous examples, have demonstrated that non-government run schools are no better than government schools, and often are worse. As I noted earlier, there is no place on Earth where school competition has been tried and been found successful. In fact, if we look at the industrialized nations of the world who score better than U.S. students in attainment, each and every one of them uses government-run schools with a national curriculum. If one were to look for models of success, one would not be urging competition for dwindling dollars; one would be urging tough, national curricula with dollars dedicated to getting the teachers in place to deliver the goods.
Everybody wants the $2,000 Savile Row suit, but in a knock-off version that is just as sharp looking at 10% of the price. Education is a market in a sense. Generally, we get what we pay for. It’s time to pony up for good teachers.
Remember what the Car Guys say: The cheapskate always pays more. We shouldn’t be cheapskates about education.
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I meant to say “I’m not saying that its the fault of the teachers.”
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Free market education worked just fine before public schools became common in the United States (in the mid 1800s). Literacy rates in 1840 were 91-97% in the north and 81% in the south. According to the U.S. Department of Education National Adult Literacy Survey in the early 1990s, about one half of our adult population was unable to function at Level 3 literacy (which would include such things as being able to write a brief letter explaining an error made on a credit card bill). About 25% of the adult population was unable to function at Level 2 literacy (which would include such things as locating an intersection on a street map). This was after 150 years of government run education. Not a very good record for public schools. And all the education establishment does is make excuses.
Poor teachers stay because it is almost impossible to fire a teacher unless they commit a crime while on the job. Our government run education system doesn’t reward excellent teachers, but it does protect incompetent ones. If the system protects incompetent teachers, then it will never be able to get rid of them, and some good teachers will become bad teachers. That’s exactly what we have now.
I’m not saying that its the fault of the teachers. Its the fault of the system itself. The teachers are trapped in a system that they have very little power to change. Things won’t change until education reverts back to a free market system.
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Steven, if you are committed to market solutions, then you should acknowledge that raising teacher pay will indeed improve the teacher corps. Take a look at the Australian study I cite. In no other job do we say ‘we’re gonna keep the pay low until the quality improves.’ [That reminds me of the old sign, “Daily beatings of staff will continue until morale improves!”] We don’t do it anywhere else because it’s a foolish idea. If you slash the pay of the brain surgeons at your local hospital, the good ones will move on to something else. When you need brain surgery, where will you go?
Getting an education for a kid is not something that is amenable to market competition whose main feature is parental choice. The consumers of education are high-tech companies, and they are making their purchases today in India and China, increasingly. Market solutions particularly don’t work well where we misdefine what the market is and who is the customer. Parents are not consumers of education, and models that put parents in the drivers’ seats strike me as silly.
Poor teachers and poor administrators stay because there is no one to replace them. Raise the pay, there will be someone there to replace them. Here in Texas, for example, teachers have almost no protection from employment at will. We have the same problems all other states have. Poor schools need to be improved, not hounded out of business. Education is one of those things, like defense, foreign policy, and Congress, that we should not contract out to the lowest bidder. Free market education has never been shown to work well, anywhere, at any time. That’s why we have public education in America now — the private competitive system couldn’t do the job.
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You can’t improve education by just raising teacher pay. To improve education you must subject it to market forces, including parental choice, the probabliliy of poor teachers and administrators being removed, and poor schools going out of business. Those things are highly unlikely so long as education remains in the public sector.
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Holding down the pay of teachers economically encourages poor teachers. It discourages highly-qualified people from even joining the profession.
In Duncanville, Texas, the district set as a goal being the highest-paying district in the metro Dallas area. Recruiting of good teachers suddenly got easier . . .
Smart people move where the money is. Raising teacher pay is one of the quickest and surest ways to improve education.
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If you were talking about raising the pay of individual teachers whose performance merited the raise, you might have something here. But public education does not operate that way. The bad teachers are paid the same as the good ones. In that situation, a market solution generally doesn’t work. It rewards bad teachers at the expense of good teachers.
Usagi, in your example, the owner of the casual dining restaurant was spending his own money and making his own decisions. He could have immediately changed his mind if things were not working out. That is usually not possible in the public sector. So I don’t think your example applies to public education.
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It ain’t rocket science. There was an article years ago (it may have been an in flight magazine actually) about a highly successful casual dinning restaurant with a staff turnover of damn near zero. The shortest term employee had been there for close to four years. The customers were as intensly loyal as the staff. When the owner was asked how he did it (that kind of consistancy is hard in the food business), he replied (paraphrased), “I hire good people and pay them 15-20% above the industry standard. The additional overhead is more than made up for in the profit.” He willingly sacrificed a percentage of his bottom line to insure the long-term health of his business.
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