Next Test - Value of $125,000-a-Year Teachers

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/05/education/05charter.html

by peter123 • 17 years ago

65 40 17 years ago

Empact• 17 years ago

Interestingly, it may be that one could pay twice as much per teacher and still end up with a lower cost per pupil overall, as administrator overhead plays a large part in the regular cost formulation. $125 / 30 students ~ $4k, a fraction of both the DC metro public and charter school cost per pupil (http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2009/04/03/dc-vouchers-better...).

smanek• 17 years ago

So, a base cost of $125K/30 kids. Add in benefits for the teacher and you're at $150K. Liability insurance is another $50K. Rent per year for 1500 sq ft to house the 30 kids (the classroom is smaller, but you also need to amortize the cost the space needed for admins, gyms, halls, locker rooms, cafeterias, etc) is at least $30K. Supplies (books, sports equipment, etc) conservatively cost about $10K for the 30 students. And, realistically, you'll always have some administrative overhead (tech guys, librarians, lawyers, principal, secretaries, etc) which I can't imagine being less than $50K (amortized over a sufficiently large school).

That brings our total cost to, at least, $290K - which is about 10K per student. Still not too bad (although I'm still probably missing/underestimating some expenses ...), but at least marginally more realistic than your made up $4K/student number.

I like the idea of school vouchers and private schools too. But you have to be realistic.

sethg• 17 years ago

IIRC the nationwide average for public schools is about $9K/student, and that includes areas where the cost of living is a lot lower than it is in NYC. So if they can actually get six-figure-salary teachers and still keep costs down to $10K/student, that would be fantastic for the profession.

granular3• 17 years ago

Yes, great teachers should be paid well. But there's another side to this coin.

Teaching is a brutal job.

Parents complaining about grades and/or teachers. Student behaviour worse than its ever been (with administrators that do very little about it -- partly because of outside pressures). Every bit of interaction with parents, and observed problem behaviours with students, must be documented. Dates, times, what was discussed, what actions are to be taken.

Far too regular class interruptions for all sorts of things (ex. sporting events, pep rallys, dances, early dismissals, awards ceremonies, field trips, plays). Teaching gets much more difficult when a non-trivial percentage of students are out every day, and/or class time is cut short (or gone) for other activities.

Rubrics required for everything (a teacher can't just say, "this is C work" -- everything must be documented, and this makes the amount of grading work go through the roof).

Unending meetings, data collection requirements (you'd be amazed at how badly administrators want to put a number on your kids). State curriculum requirements. Standardized testing. Paperwork up the wazoo.

And I don't even need to mention that you better not need to go to the bathroom during class, because you can't leave students unattended. And between classes, well, you've got 4 minutes between bells. Better make it quick. And hope another teacher's not using the same bathroom you're heading for.

Higher pay for teachers would be nice, but that ain't the problem.

nazgulnarsil• 17 years ago

state regulation of government funded day care is pretty brutal. public school.

meterplech• 17 years ago

well, if they are gonna get paid 125k some quantitative accountability seems in order.

krakensden• 17 years ago

Except the teachers the poster is describing aren't the ones from the article- they're the relatively poorly paid ones in the regular school system.

weaksauce• 17 years ago

I think they tried that in some districts by tying the amount of the bonus to the performance of the children in the class. The teachers were the one administering the tests so some of them gamed the system a bit and cheated on the grading of the test.

wallflower2• 17 years ago

> Parents complaining about grades and/or teachers.

Time magazine "Why Teachers Hate Parents" (2005)

"Ask teachers about the best part of their job, and most will say how much they love working with kids. Ask them about the most demanding part, and they will say dealing with parents. In fact, a new study finds that of all the challenges they face, new teachers rank handling parents at the top. According to preliminary results from the MetLife Survey of the American Teacher, made available exclusively to TIME, parent management was a bigger struggle than finding enough funding or maintaining discipline or enduring the toils of testing. It's one reason, say the Consortium for Policy Research in Education and the Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy, that 40% to 50% of new teachers leave the profession within five years. Even master teachers who love their work, says Harvard education professor Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, call this "the most treacherous part of their jobs."

"At the most disturbing extreme are the parents who like to talk about values but routinely undermine them. "You get savvier children who know how to get out of things," says a second-grade teacher in Murfreesboro, Tenn. "Their parents actually teach them to lie to dodge their responsibilities." Didn't get your homework done? That's O.K. Mom will take the fall. Late for class? Blame it on Dad."

http://forums.atozteacherstuff.com/showthread.php?t=8834&...

wallflower2• 17 years ago

Just asked one of my friends whose wife has been teaching for a while:

"yep it's true. she always has parent stories. last week she had one on the phone complaining that their kid got a C, yet they had no idea about what the kid was doing in terms of curriculum, homework etc and the fact they always messed around in class. yet, the parent went off on her"

lyime• 17 years ago

I was rather surprised when a family friend of mine told me that she takes in around a a $100k yearly. She is a middle school teacher(~10 years in the bay area). So teachers in many places actually get paid a good salary.

gaius• 17 years ago

Teaching has very strong unions. Actually that's the main problem. Teachers here in the UK are effectively unsackable, yet at the same time their jobs are hell because the unions insisted on all sorts of trendy Marxist nonsense being taught at teacher training colleges.

gjm11• 17 years ago

You got some evidence for your claim that "the unions insisted on all sorts of trendy Marxist nonsense being taught at teacher training colleges"?

yardie• 17 years ago

Teachers in many areas do not get paid well. What is good for NYC/SF/DC does not represent the rest of the country. I believe teachers make 35k on average. I had a friend teach a high school in the Appalachians and they started him at 24k. And they really had to scrimp, save, and beg the feds to pay him considering the avg income for his area was less than half of that.

If you are a teacher with degrees and certificates, then 100k in a major metro, plus 10 years would be about correct.

Additionally you didn't specify what she teaches. Science and math teachers are harder to come by and their salary reflects that. My middle school science teacher was plucked from a high school, which had plucked her from a local college. She was one of the highest paid teachers in the school because she had experience and a load of degrees. She was working towards her doctorate when I left. She didn't come right at and tell me what she made, but the Benz in parking lot and the neighborhood she lived in gave me a clue.

Also, this was a magnet school so the teachers tend to be of higher qualifications than a typical high school.

Plus people seem to confuse the union with government a lot. In government you get paid in bands. Bands are based on the type of job, your accreditation, and your seniority. You can do the bare minimum and stay at the bottom of your band, until you are pushed up to the next band based on some formula, or you can do more and constantly stay in the top of your band and get pushed through quickly. The union probably doesn't have a lot of say in how much teachers get paid. They do have a big influence on how the workplace is run (ie. how late they must stay, when breaks can be done, etc).

mrdodge• 17 years ago

The average salary for public school teachers nationwide is $51009.

This is higher than most occupations.

jim-greer• 17 years ago

Your friend may be a good teacher, but I bet the reason she's getting $100k is because she's been there 10 years - and possibly because she has a masters in education (which has been shown to have little or no correlation to being an effective teacher).

The quote from the article that struck me was this one:

“This is the first time in 30 years of teaching that anybody has been really interested in what I do.”

That's the really terrible combination of teacher's unions and the public school bureaucracy. Bad teachers can't be fired, good teachers aren't paid more, and the way you get ahead is by sticking around for your automatic raises and early retirement.

koepked4• 17 years ago

gaius already made this point, but I wanted to make it again as a comment rather than a reply to head in a different direction: Unions are the problem. When crappy educators rise through the ranks to become department heads based on literally nothing more than seniority and a union contract, the education system has failed.

As far as salary increases, what good would that do? Because of the unions, crappy teachers would recieve the same increase. Not only that, there would me MORE crappy teachers; $125k is definitely enough to attract people who don't want really want to teach. Good teachers teach for the same reason good programers program: it's what they love to do, it's what they were made to do, there is no other life. Money isn't everything. I'm not saying the rewards shouldn't match the benefit given by a good teacher, but again, the union prevents this.

koepked4• 17 years ago

In my opinion, the solution to all this is free school choice through a voucher program: http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Stossel/story?id=1500338

Also, for anyone who's really interested, I believe you can watch this report if you search 'Stupid in America' on youtube.

Dilpil• 17 years ago

Indeed: if this is repeatable, it is repeatable in private and charter schools.

crux_3• 17 years ago

The problem?

A little less ideology and a little more clear thinking, please. You could certainly convince me that unions are a problem, but setting them up as the source of all badness is just your way of scoring points for your political/ideological team, rather than doing anything to contribute to the discussion.

So, onto your 2nd paragraph. How many "good" programmers are there, out of all programmers? One out of ten? (And that's being incredibly generous from my experience.) How well would these superstar volunteer for-the-love-of-it teachers do with 10x increased class sizes?

(And let's not forget all those who are thoroughly passionate about programming (/teaching) yet suck at it.)

koepked4• 17 years ago

What do you think the problem(s) is/are?

rw• 17 years ago

Not all teachers' unions are created equal. Nor do they evolve equally. Your claims reminded me of Wikipedia's fantastic list of logical fallacies. Please refer to:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judgmental_language

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_the_single_cause

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasty_generalization

3pt14159• 17 years ago

(Toronto, ON biased response)

I agree with you 100%. Correlation is not causation, I know, but look at every major organization that has unions: GM, The Ontario Government, The Toronto Transit Commission, our hospitals. The service is terrible, the quality average at best, and the money never ceases to drain from the public purse.

Why would we expect anything else from our unionized public schools? Why does it cost more than $10k per kid for a 10 month period just to educate them? For $1k per kid per month I could give 15 kids a way better education than they could get from a public system.

The reason I can't get a voucher for $10k is that the system is about social engineering, not education. If India can get their students doing calculus at grade 9 then we can too, our politicians just don't want us to. They would rather have conformist idiots than questioning geniuses.

noonespecial• 17 years ago

I fully expect this to work. The kids will love school in a way that no one thought possible. They'll learn more in a year than most pick up in 4. What then?

Why do I suddenly picture Don Quixote raising his lance, or Wile E. strapping on rocket skates?

hpvic03• 17 years ago

I agree. Some people argue that if we raise teacher salaries, we'll have people become teachers for the money instead of for the love of teaching. However, many teachers that teach solely for the love of teaching just suck at it. I know because I have had many of these teachers. I would much rather have a teacher who is good at teaching, whether they love it or just like it, than a teacher who loves teaching but is bad at it.

There are x number of brilliant and dynamic students that graduate from universities across the US every year. Before the bust, did > 50% of these students want to become investment bankers because of their love for working in Excel all day? No, they wanted to do investment banking because of the high salaries and solid career footing it provided. It's basic economics; the higher the salary and job prestige, the more qualified the applicants will be due to increased competition for the job.

The main problems that cause education to under-perform in the US (I think) are bad parenting, a non-education oriented culture, and poor teacher quality. Of these three, poor teacher quality is the only one that is most easily affected. So how can one say that it's not logical that increasing teacher salaries can be a solution to helping improve education in the US?

misuba3• 17 years ago

"Some people argue that if we raise teacher salaries, we'll have people become teachers for the money instead of for the love of teaching."

There are way easier ways to make $125K if that's all you want.

nopal• 17 years ago

One of the problems with public education is that it has to serve everyone.

Many private schools succeed because the don't have to deal with the same types of children as do public schools.

I'm sure this school will have good results, but I think the most important question is whether or not the results can be repeated.

Are there enough good teachers to serve all of the children in the U.S.? Are they just not teaching right now because of teacher pay?

The majority of these teachers were already in the educational system. This expeirimental school simply pooled the best of the best together.

I hope this model is successful, and I hope even more that they are able to figure out how to increase the quality of education when dealing with a much larger scale.

jimbokun2• 17 years ago

"Many private schools succeed because the don't have to deal with the same types of children as do public schools."

Or with the same types of parents. A private school can always tell parents to take their tuition dollars and go somewhere else, if the trouble they are causing exceeds the value of the tuition they are paying.

Agreed with the question of scaling. It is easy to poach all of the best teachers and put them into one school, and you should get good results. But is this a solution to raising the level of education nation wide, or even in one city?

anamax2• 17 years ago

> It is easy to poach all of the best teachers and put them into one school, and you should get good results. But is this a solution to raising the level of education nation wide, or even in one city?

It's so much better to let the trouble-kids make sure that no one gets an education....

We can't save them all. However, we can lose them all, and that's what we're doing by keeping good kids in bad situations.

If you really think that the presence of good kids helps the bad ones, shouldn't you be paying the good ones for that help? After all, being with the bad kids costs the good kids.

misuba3• 17 years ago

The article focuses on the hiring process they went through to find great teachers who were already teaching. The real challenge, though, is to find the best teachers who would be teaching if it weren't for the absurdly low compensation for such taxing work. How would you do that?

kragen2• 17 years ago

Well, you could start by founding a school that pays teachers $125 000 a year and then getting a press hit in the New York Times.

misuba3• 17 years ago

And then you go see these new teachers in their classrooms... which they don't have yet.

What then?

Next Test - Value of $125,000-a-Year Teachers

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