The World's Most Underpaid Profession (creating an economy for great teachers)

http://marcuswest.in/read/teacher-economy/

by marcuswestin • 16 years ago

15 16 16 years ago

bloomshed3• 16 years ago

HN Version of the comment I posted on your site:

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As a teacher in Milwaukee Public Schools, I tend to think that there is a direct correlation between socioeconomic status (SES) and student performance. Students who come from homes where their parents are educated and have jobs and take care of their kids likely are not in the lowest SES categories so they are expected to do well and work hard on school. Kids in this situation generally meet their learning goals.

Kids that have no parental support are common in the lowest SES situations. These kids basically have to raise themselves and their younger siblings because mom or dad aren't there. It takes a lot of training and an amazing school environment to lift kids out of these situations and keep them on pace with their learning.

The big reason why performance based pay for teachers is such a hot issue (besides the fact that teachers WILL cheat on their students tests to get their bonuses) is that every community has such a wide array of challenges to overcome. Kids from one area of Milwaukee have very different environments from the kids across town, for example. It's hard to determine benchmarks for performance when the kids are operating at such different stages of development.

marcuswestin3• 16 years ago

Thanks for your thoughts!

> It's hard to determine benchmarks for performance when the kids are operating at such different stages of development.

Agreed - the point I'm striving for is an incentive conceived from shared gains (you benefit directly from creating value) rather than evaluation by proxy (performance evaluation). It's possibly too theoretical a point to be of much value though, I see that :)

bloomshed3• 16 years ago

Part of me says, "Teacher evaluations come down to tests, and tests are b.s.", but another part of me thinks there has to be some way to evaluate whether students make progress. Our district tries to collect data on this but I'm not sure if it works all that great.

jamesteow• 16 years ago

"what if we gave teachers a fraction of a percentage of her pupils' future earnings?"

Interesting, but how would this work for students who had an awful teacher? I would feel angry knowing that substandard teachers were earning the same amount as one who were positively influential?

I suppose you could have a rating system whereby the student could rate the teacher and a higher rating would correspond to a fairer percentage.

But then this might backfire on good teachers who have to deal with problematic students. Maybe the teacher is doing a good job in this case but will get a bad rating for nothing of their doing.

rdl• 16 years ago

The economics solution would be to make teachers invest in students (paying cash to teach them!) in exchange for a percentage of future earnings. Taking a cheap student who everyone assumed would be a failure and inspiring and educating him into a successful entrepreneur might then be a better investment than finding a professor's son and providing an adequate education, due to a presumably kpmuch higher valuation of that child.

A problem is that a successful entrepreneur or hedgie is still more likely to come from a middle or upper class background and can easily make 1000x the return of other professions (which are more credential based, and hence a more level playing field for lower class students.). Hence, even at high valuations, investing in motivated, intelligent, well connected students may be the best investment.

Year on year changes would help ensure teachers were compensated fairly, as long as the market provided some kind of feedback to let parents and students evaluate teachers. I assume there is far greater variation among students and among teachers than between the teaching value offered by the same teacher to different students, but that may not be the case.

I don't really think this scheme is workable, but it provides the right economic incentives to everyone.

andrewce4• 16 years ago

>> I don't really think this scheme is workable, but it provides the right economic incentives to everyone.

You're right, from an economics standpoint. However, there's a pretty hefty body of research talking about the effects of intrinsic/extrinsic motivation.

We've already seen merit pay fall flat in at least one instance ( http://blogs.ajc.com/get-schooled-blog/2010/09/21/another-bl... ), which suggests that economic incentives don't translate to better instruction or learning.

Additionally, Alfie Kohn's research (see his book "Punished by Rewards") demonstrates fairly conclusively that the addition of extrinsic motivating factors (such as money) tends to decrease intrinsic motivation.

I'd much rather see all the time and money that administrating a system like this would take go to a comprehensive professional development system, reduction of class size, and/or providing more opportunities for genuine learning beyond rote memorization, but that's just me.

(Edit: added quotation at the beginning for clarity)

lukatmyshu• 16 years ago

Wouldn't that also lead to incentives for teachers to encourage students towards professions that would have greater future earnings? Thereby discouraging them from fields that may be useful to society but not that economically viable (I shudder at the thought of every teacher encouraging their students to work on wall street :) )

marcuswestin3• 16 years ago

Yup - that wouldn't be very nice :)

aphistic• 16 years ago

How would anyone know what percentage of my success went to each specific teacher of the 50 or more I had over my lifetime? Was it the teacher who taught me how to read and write, the one who taught me basic math or the one who taught me higher level skills that should earn the highest percentage? Maybe it was the one who showed the biggest interest in getting me on the right track when I deviated? There are so many arbitrary variables.

marcuswestin3• 16 years ago

Yup - no pragmatic advice offered really, just a theoretical idea. Perhaps the most interesting point is simply that it's hard to put a value to the work of a teacher.

jchonphoenix• 16 years ago

As a student in College that was recently in high school, my response is that being a teacher is not the world's most underpaid profession.

The vast majority of teachers were underachievers when they were in school. They care very little about the students future's and well being and also aren't teaching because they want to teach, but teach because its a job.

There are many wonderful caring teachers, but they certainly aren't the majority. If you were to pay teachers more, you must first completely abolish teacher unions so that a meritocracy could form and those that don't really want to teach would be weeded out. The issue with teaching isn't that the JOB DESCRIPTION isn't important. Its that the people doing the job aren't passionate.

andrewce4• 16 years ago

1) This would severely impair the earning potential of SpEd teachers; many SpEd students either don't work after high school, or get jobs doing dishes (or similar work). My high school (I went to a school for the Deaf) had 100% of its students on IEPs (Deaf persons are generally underemployed by a pretty decent margin), and about 1/5 of the students there had multiple disabilities.

2) This would encourage teachers to go after those students whose future earning potentials seem highest.

I'm a good teacher, but there's only so much I can do with 180 hours over the course of the year, particularly when that 180 hours is split up among 25 students. This isn't excuse making (there have been a few students for whom I've made a substantial difference), but rather an illustration of the pragmatic difficulty of providing 1-on-1 attention to every student, or even to most students.

3) We already do this, at least somewhat. Here in the US, most public schools are paid for by way of property taxes. In more affluent areas (read: where people earn more money, or at least are able to spend more money), the schools tend to be better, as they have nicer facilities, more resources, and better-paid teachers. More importantly, their students are accustomed to a higher SES, and so see that as the default position (not many people want to downgrade). The biggest predictor of a child's future earnings is how much his or her parents make.

gerwitz• 16 years ago

I see what you did there: you oriented toward an outcome of "value" and then substituted that with "earnings".

I take umbrage with your assumption that the goal of education is expressed in salary.

The World's Most Underpaid Profession (creating an economy for great teachers)

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