Still Doing the Math, But for 100K A Year

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/01/fashion/01generationb.html

by ojbyrne • 17 years ago

43 87 17 years ago

jacobscott• 17 years ago

FTA: you get $100k/yr as a teacher after working at the same job for ~30 years. A sweet pension is also possible -- although who knows whether this is still the case or will last.

patio11• 17 years ago

This isn't terribly uncommon, particularly for senior teachers in well-to-do suburban school districts. The "teachers are one step away from starvation" meme is, well, suffice it to say it was never universal and that we have excellent PR in a lot of ways.

As to whether this will last or not: well, that pension has been available for thirty of the last thirty years. One of the two political parties in the United States would rather scrape out its belly with a rusty fork before seriously taking a whack at teachers unions, and the other is the Democrats[1]. I'm not predicting rapid change with respect to the employment market for teachers in the US.

Do you want to be the political candidate cutting education funding and then facing, quite literally, a NEA warchest and a small army of very popular people in your district who you just made enemies of for life? Who will mention, in a totally non-partisan and objectively true manner, that you are cutting funding for the school Little Davey attends? To Little Davey's dotting parents?

[1]: Edited to add -- in deference to readers from outside the US, I should add the common knowledge that makes the joke work (at the expense of killing the funny): there are two major political parties in the United States, Republicans and Democrats. Organized labor and, in particular, the national teachers unions are inseparable from the Democratic Party.

larryfreeman• 17 years ago

In my view, a good teacher is still underpaid at 100K per year.

In the ideal world, the best teachers would be celebrities and their lectures/lessons would be high demand items.

Wait... Maybe it's coming... with YouTube, HubPages, and Google's 10^100 contest. Who knows.

dantheman2• 17 years ago

I completely disagree. The best teachers should be compensated, but there is no reason to spend 100k on high elementary school & high school teachers... Hell you could have a grad student teaching the course -- the material isn't hard. The trick is getting the kids to work and be motivated, and that's primarily caused by setting high standards and having parents emphasize the importance of education.

endtime3• 17 years ago

The trick is getting the kids to work and be motivated, and that's primarily caused by setting high standards and having parents emphasize the importance of education.

I think a good (grade school) teacher is not necessarily one who is an expert in the material (though, of course, base competence is necessary) but one who is an expert in motivating and engaging students.

pchristensen3• 17 years ago

Bill Gates disagrees.

"It is amazing how big a difference a great teacher makes versus an ineffective one. If you want your child to get the best education possible, it is actually more important to get him assigned to a great teacher than to a great school." Bill Gates

http://2mm.typepad.com/usa/2009/01/it-is-amazing-how-big-a-d...

ggruschow• 17 years ago

Paying as little as you can get away with isn't always the best policy.

gruseom• 17 years ago

but there is no reason to spend 100k on high elementary school & high school teachers... Hell you could have a grad student teaching the course -- the material isn't hard.

I would have thought it obvious that "hardness of the material" has little to do with what makes a great elementary school or even high school teacher.

pchristensen3• 17 years ago

Teachers are respected like that in Finland.

byrneseyeview7• 17 years ago

A system of seniority-based pay, negotiated between two monopolistic cartels, does not sound like the best way to ensure that someone is paid $100K for being a "good teacher".

albertsun• 17 years ago

The problem is, it's a heck of a hard task to determine who is a good teacher. How would you do it?

Give bonuses and raises to teachers who's students perform well on standardized tests? That just encourages teaching to the book.

Student evaluations? Then the teachers are obliged to suck up to the students for good ratings.

Leave it up to administrators? That creates huge potential for bias and currying for favor. At least when that happens in a for-profit company, the free market will shake out the worst cases eventually.

Seniority is not a great way to determine pay, but it's not an absolutely terrible way either, as generally, more experienced teachers ARE better teachers.

wallflower2• 17 years ago

> In the ideal world, the best teachers would be celebrities and their lectures/lessons would be high demand items.

On a boat ride in Brugges, I heard a boat operator/philosopher expound on why it was so that teachers were paid so little, rockstars like Ozzy Osbourne were rich, and famous composers like Mozart died broke.

He said it was a question of network effects and impact. Mozart died broke because of poor money management and the inability to reach a worldwide audience.

An elementary school teacher is only paid a small amount relative to most celebrities because their impact is small. They cannot reach more 10-30 students at a time.

A baseball player is paid millions because he (through cable TV) can impact/entertain many more anonymous people indirectly.

This brings to mind the interesting question of micro-payments and distance learning - could an effective model for rock star professors be implemented, in an effective implementation of feedback-based distance learning?

anamax4• 17 years ago

> This brings to mind the interesting question of micro-payments and distance learning - could an effective model for rock star professors be implemented, in an effective implementation of feedback-based distance learning?

There's another interesting question - what happens to the "not quite rockstar" professors/teachers?

As Sousa pointed out, recorded music reduces the number of people who can make a living playing music. (It may increase the amount of money spent by listeners.)

Note that only some things scale through distribution. Lectures may. Office hours don't. Thesis advising doesn't.

potatolicious• 17 years ago

At universities and colleges it is like that. While bad professors struggle with pathetic attendance numbers, "celebrity" profs have to book rooms far larger than their enrollment numbers just to account for all the others who drop in and listen.

It's a little bit of a chicken and egg situation. At the college level students are willing to go out of the way to attend a lecture that they know will be good. How many high school students have the freedom and motivation to do the same?

kingkongrevenge• 17 years ago

> In my view, a good teacher is still underpaid at 100K per year.

Teach for America throws inexperienced recent liberal arts grads into teaching and pays them peanuts. They generally outperform experienced teachers.

Teachers are generally over-paid, I think. The problem is really that nobody with ability would choose to work in such a bureaucratic shit-show. It's not the money.

I bet lots of SUPER qualified people would go for a four year stint in teaching. Retired people, young mothers looking for reduced hours for a couple years, or recently cashed out entrepreneurs, or whatever. The bureaucracy currently precludes this.

Retric6• 17 years ago

How many of those inexperienced teachers stick with it? I know plenty of people who taught for a year or two and then left.

The system seems to punish new teachers and the job sucks even at 100k/year let alone what they start at. The types of skills that make a great teacher are in high demand. Many great teachers would also make a great consultants and where I work 200k/year is not that rare for senior people. Hell, at 28 I am 2 promotions from that pay grade.

PS: We need to compare teachers to other collage educated professions not just random call center / factory workers with lots of supervision.

jpcx01• 17 years ago

I wouldnt be surprised if there's a few kids at that very same school making 100k a year. I was hacking for 30/hr in my spare time in high school (10 years ago), and these days, all a kid needs is a bit of motivation to learn all the web development stack and start consulting.

cellis• 17 years ago

Downmodded because 100k is quite a stretch. 30$/hr in your spare time != 100k. And most college graduates aren't even making that much.

sak84• 17 years ago

100K for 30 years, is not as much as you would think. The problem with teaching right now, is that there is not a concrete way to have really great teachers shine.

In enterprise, employees that would perform really well would be accordingly compensated (theoretically) with a higher salary/bonus. This doesn't happen with teachers though. You could be a terrible teachers, with terrible results, but have tenure and still reach that 100,000k mark without a hitch.

I believe unions are important to ensure some job security and fair practice, but not at the expense of our children's education. There should be competitive practices in public education, that allow teachers to earn way more than 100,000k, but also does not guarantee that a teacher will rise on a pay scale when they just babysit in a classroom.

I speak from experience as I was formerly a teacher in NYC, where I encountered many teachers that were not competent to teach, but yet continued to exist in their role. There are schools that are trying experimental means to increase the quality of teaching - http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/07/nyregion/07charter.html?ex... - but ultimately we need to think of a new system of rewarding the best teachers and getting rid of the worst.

byrneseyeview7• 17 years ago

It would of course be protested as outrageous, and would also be hard to implement, but I bet if you allowed someone to pay for their education partly by selling a stake in their future income (capped at a certain point, or possibly with a buyback clause of some kind). This would actually lead great teachers to seek out great students, too -- instead of retiring on their teaching pension, they'd retire on .1% of the incomes of each of a few hundred students; if those students are making six figures...

Retric6• 17 years ago

Your education costs a lot more than you might think.

Lets say the average teacher has 30 students per year for 30 years, and the average student has 15 years of school. Your .1% would end up as ~6% of 100k/year. (In high school you have more teachers but they have more students, so the math still works out the same.)

ricree• 17 years ago

The bureaucracy needed to enforce it would be stifling. Think about the number of teachers one is going to have from elementary school to college graduation. Even if the portion was really small, you'd be talking about having well over a dozen people who are owed money for each person. Enforcing this, and tracking it (I'm sure the IRS will want their share, after all) will require a lot of government involvement. I do think the idea has some merit in principle, but I can't think of a way that it could be implemented without causing a ton more harm than good.

ibsulon3• 17 years ago

So, no great teacher would choose to work in poor school districts. We already have to give incentives to experienced teachers to work there.

Good teachers would concentrate in wealthy districts, because the best teachers would have an amplification effect, and those kids are going to end up in college and most will end up in good jobs because of their family connections.

tokenadult4• 17 years ago

In a system in which learners could shop for the most suitable schools, the best teachers would make much more than $100K, while other current teachers would change careers, all to the good of learners.

http://learninfreedom.org/school_state.html

rcoder5• 17 years ago

As someone who spent most of my primary school years in "gifted student" magnet programs (like, I suspect, many other HN readers), this appeals to me personally. However, I have it on good authority from actual teachers that separating students according to interest and aptitude disadvantages the average and below-average students greatly, while providing only minimal benefit to the best students.

tokenadult4• 17 years ago

I have it on good authority from actual teachers that separating students according to interest and aptitude disadvantages the average and below-average students greatly

This is commonly said by teachers, but there is not a research base to back up this statement. There is a considerable research base (especially from cross-national comparisons) to suggest that grouping students by readiness at a given time benefits all learners.

http://www.accelerationinstitute.org/Research/Bibliography/

litewulf2• 17 years ago

I worry that the criteria for successful teachers will instead be teachers that are easy or social instead of effective teachers.

I have definitely taken languages classes where I hated the teachers (the class was hard!) but I learned a great deal and actually have pretty good recall years later. If I had been able to bail out and go join my friends in the class taught by the easy teacher I would have, but I certainly would not have learned anything.

In fact, now that I think about it, I think such a system would probably encourage a trend toward treating schooling as a sort of nationalized childcare program, as the money and rewards would go to teachers (and schools) where students are allowed to float through. You can argue all you want about how much you enjoy learning, but I imagine that the vast majority of the people in my high school could have cared less. (There are similar arguments for why private schools do better than public schools: private schools are primarily composed of the kids/families that actually care about what said student is learning.)

tokenadult4• 17 years ago

trend toward treating schooling as a sort of nationalized childcare program

You don't think that trend is already here? The parents I know who are shopping for more academics in their children's school programs have very limited scope of choice to look for something better, as something better has little incentive currently even to be offered.

dkarl6• 17 years ago

Public education often inadvertently acts as an amplifier for class differences, but your system seems designed to that end. What would be the upside of that? Upper-class and lower-class kids' paths would start to diverge at a very young age, and the kids couldn't very well be held responsible for the result. Anything that cements class differences like that would mean giving up the pretense of equal opportunity, which would create political pressure to officially recognize the existence of different classes with different obligations and different claims on the state. It sounds like a nightmare. Why not try to give a good education to kids even if their families didn't teach them the value of it?

tokenadult4• 17 years ago

Why not try to give a good education to kids even if their families didn't teach them the value of it?

Fully agreed with the goal. And in fact the newly industrialized countries of east Asia (where I lived for many years) are conspicuous in reaching this goal. But they are also conspicuous in ability grouping of a certain kind (although with higher expectations for the below-average students than the United States has for above-average students) and for a substantial degree of family-chosen, privately funded supplemental education after school hours. My claim is that the instrumentality I propose, letting state funding follow the learner and letting the learner choose the provider of schooling with the program best suited for the learner, actually better achieves your commendable goal of providing all learners with a better education.

gravitycop6• 17 years ago

In a system in which learners could shop for the most suitable schools

That's the way it would be if all schooling were on online. Naturally, there would be no physical schools, but children not logging-in from home might use local commercial generic offices for internet access, just as some telecommuters do. From the local generic office, children could still log-in to the school of their choice. Since the school choices could be worldwide, the number of schools available to choose from might number in the millions.

dkarl6• 17 years ago

What a farce. It's disgusting that they pay new teachers so little, and very few of the older teachers are worth $100k. This is nothing but two things.

First, senior teachers control the unions and take care of themselves at the expense of younger teachers -- it's disgusting. A salary spread of $50k to $100k is too much for the same job, and I never noticed older teachers being much more effective than teachers with five years of experience.

Second, the unions have convinced teachers that any measurement of quality will be inaccurate, arbitrary, and a front for administrators' political and personal animosity. Hey, welcome to the real world! Most professionals work in jobs where performance is subjective and difficult to measure. It isn't as bad as you imagine, except when it is, and then you get a different job. It wouldn't ruin education any more than it has ruined law, medicine, engineering, or any other profession where objective measurements of performance are problematic.

rcoder5• 17 years ago

There's one critical area where assessment of teachers varies from those in medicine, law, etc.: many states require consistent salary and retention policies across all their schools. Given the limited resources available to do any sort of meaningful performance measurement, that pretty much means that any "pay for performance" model will necessarily require a single set of standardized tests that can be delivered to every student in the state.

...and we all know how well those sorts of tests measure real learning and intelligence, right?

dkarl6• 17 years ago

How consistent do they have to be? Law abounds in absolute-sounding formulations that are never interpreted absolutely in practice. By policy (though probably not by law) my company has a consistent salary scale across the company. There are hundreds of people of my position and rank, managed by dozens of managers, many of whom have never met each other. (Yes, my company is really that epically huge.)

Is a Software Engineer B in my group exactly the same as a Software Engineer B in every other group in the company? Of course not; a pay grade is just a vague description interpreted by many different managers from diverse backgrounds. Yet people are content to say that we have a consistent pay scale.

The union would fight against it because they oppose giving any discretion to management, but teachers might defect from the union if it meant a chance at making teaching a rewarding and respected profession.

Radix• 17 years ago

I must be naive, why is $50k a poor starting salary when there are families who get by on $50k-$55k?

lacker• 17 years ago

It's a shame that the best teacher still starts at $50k, especially when the worst teacher at the same school will make $100k at some point. If a star teacher could make $100k from the start, it would be a lot easier to attract them.

brent• 17 years ago

"A salary spread of $50k to $100k is too much for the same job, and I never noticed older teachers being much more effective than teachers with five years of experience."

First, there are similar margins in engineering as well. It is not unique to teaching.

Second, as to your effectiveness claim, anecdotes != data. I would have a tendency to believe the contrary and would need to see evidence otherwise to be convinced.

Third, part of the pay differential is probably due to the turnover rate in teaching. Why pay someone top dollar when something like 1/2 teachers leave before their fifth year (in the US)?

dkarl6• 17 years ago

To the best of my knowledge, such a salary spread in engineering would span different jobs with different job titles. Inside software engineering, you don't get promoted from Junior Software Developer to Architect by seniority. Heck, being a senior citizen doesn't even guarantee you a promotion to Senior Software Engineer. Outside of software engineering, only about 5% of people earning engineering degrees end up doing design work at all, so the work roles of different engineers can be very different.

You have a good point about retention in the early years, which is why I mentioned five years of experience. I also believe that the best teachers just keep getting better. However, among average teachers I couldn't tell much difference between the thirty-year-olds and the sixty-year-olds, except that the thirty-year-olds were better-looking and told better jokes. I had dozens of teachers and cared deeply about the performance of each one (me: valedictorian, mathlete, AP whore) so I expect I would have noticed the pattern if older teachers tended to be significantly better than younger ones.

rms• 17 years ago

>Second, the unions have convinced teachers that any measurement of quality will be inaccurate, arbitrary, and a front for administrators' political and personal animosity.

But this is true. How do you suggest measuring performance? Standardized testing is not an acceptable answer.

dkarl6• 17 years ago

The same as in any other job: we rely on the honesty, skill, and self-interest of their bosses and peers. Honest and accurate evalution of performance is the signal, stupidity and bias is the noise. Somehow, though it's pretty frickin' amazing when you think about it, people who are chosen, guided, and evaluated by biased, flawed, mostly stupid human beings manage to treat disease, build bridges, publish newspapers, maintain sewage systems, and do everything else required to keep society going.

I mean, I work in a vast and faceless corporate bureaucracy driven by the most idiotic politics imaginable, but when I think back to my favorite teachers from high school, they got a raw deal compared to me. Even though I got laid off my first job because of the dot-com bust. Even though I left my last job because of an abusive boss. Even though my review process is cookie-cutter and somewhat divorced from reality. It would have been better than having no opportunity to differentiate themselves from the stupid, lazy, coasting teachers who climbed right up the pay scale with them. Heroic, good, average, bad, and sleepwalking, they all have the same job title and same pay all the way to retirement -- it's no wonder teaching isn't respected as a profession.

Still Doing the Math, But for 100K A Year

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