
How Much Is a Good Teacher Worth? (2011) - tokenadult
http://hanushek.stanford.edu/publications/valuing-teachers-how-much-good-teacher-worth
======
trowawee
The fundamental issue I see with the conclusions/recommendations is that the
primary blocker preventing raising teacher salaries isn't the union. From my
own time as a grade school teacher and the friends I still have in the
profession, I can comfortably say that there are very few teachers who
wouldn't cheerfully toss out the entire tenure and pension systems (and
honestly, probably the whole union) if they were offered a pay scale
comparable to that of coders in their area. The unions aren't powerful because
teachers are ideologically attached to unions, they're powerful because
teachers have been screwed over and over again and unions are literally the
only protection they have. The unions took lower and lower salaries over the
years in exchange for pensions and tenure; now everyone still wants to pay
poverty wages _and_ they want to strip away the other benefits.

Teachers know who's good and who sucks, and for the most part, they hate the
bad ones as much or more than anyone else. But the actual solution (a flat
trade of salary in exchange for giving up their protections) will never
happen, because too many people would rather nickel and dime the education
system and then whine about why the ranks of a job that requires a college
degree and pays below minimum wage aren't full of the best and brightest.

~~~
brightball
A true voucher type system that made schools competitive would help with that.
In the current system you either work for the district or you don't. A voucher
system would include many employment options and even a reason for them to
advertise and promote their teachers competitively.

~~~
jamesblonde
We have a voucher system in sweden and it sucks. It sucks bad. Schools compete
to offer better 'test scores', so the test scores go up, while the quality
goes down. Sweden has been on a downward trajectory in the Pisa rankings since
vouchers were introduced. Finland do it right. No vouchers, pay teachers well,
high status job. As it should be.

~~~
yummyfajitas
How do you know the quality goes down?

~~~
shanacarp
PISA scores

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_St...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_Student_Assessment)

Considering the cultural and ethnic similarity between Sweden and Finland as
Nordic countries, PISA score trajectory based on voucher vs highly paid public
professionals is really shocking.

------
mikekij
I was a physics teacher immediately after undergrad. I think I was a good
teacher,as my students seemed to enjoy class, and excelled in physics later,
in college.

When I left after year 3 I was making $42k a year. While that is a good
salary, I didn't see myself able to support a family on that salary. So I
left, went to grad school, and now work in industry.

It may sound vain or materialistic, but had I made $80k, I likely never would
have left teaching. I really enjoyed being in the classroom.

In order to get great teachers, you don't necessarily need to make teaching
lucrative, but you do need to be able to provide a salary that enables the
teacher to support a family.

~~~
dredmorbius
I strongly suggest reading Adam Smith on wages.

First: _all_ work must support raising a family.

Second: he enumerates a set of five factors, remarkably enduring, which should
account further for wages paid various sorts of work, based on the
pleasurability, training, regularity, risk, and trust required.

[https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_...](https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_I/Chapter_8)

[https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_...](https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_I/Chapter_10)

~~~
bumbledraven
> First: _all_ work must support raising a family.

Really?

What about the work of a Twitch streamer? Or a rock musician?

~~~
mordocai
Neither of those are standard work.

~~~
tnecniv
What work is standard?

~~~
monknomo
I don't know what Adam Smith meant by all work, other than the plain language,
but I think it's reasonable to say that all work for the government ought to
support a family.

The government shouldn't engage in work that isn't worth supporting the
employee's family.

------
randyrand
This article makes a fundamental error, and its sad they never even
acknowledge it.

You can't talk about the value of a good teacher without mentioning supply or
demand. Yes, I know, here we go again. But this is basic economics. If the
United States decided to train 100,000,000 good teachers, you can bet that the
100,000,000th teacher will not add the same value to the country as the first.
There likely won't even be anyone for the 100,000,000 teacher to teach! Yet
this is what the author here assumes. That the value add of a good teacher is
constant. No mention of supply or demand whatsoever.

Fortunately, there's a clever trick we use to incorporate supply and demand
into value-determination. It's called the market.

Unfortunately for students, teachers unions have done their best to destroy a
free market for teachers, school are usually not even _allowed_ to pay better
(in the schools eyes) teacher more as per union contracts. And this country
has no doubt suffered for it. All for a few extra thousand in the average
teacher's pockets, its sickening.

~~~
zevets
If this was the case, then why do private school teachers get paid less?
Private schools are the free-market and are ununionized.

In case you're curious, the reason is that teaching at a private school is
easier, so people who love teaching are willing to take the pay cut.

~~~
randyrand
Your reasoning about why private teachers make less is completely wrong, im
afraid.

First, realize that if teachers were not unionized, their salaries would
without a doubt go down. Unions function very similar to monopolies in that
regard.

So just intuitively we would expect in a freeer market that teachers salaries
would go down. That said, even in the private sector teachers are still
unionized --its hardly a free market -- so why haven't private teachers been
able to negotiate as high of a pay as public sector teachers?

> why do private school teachers get paid less?

Because public sector unions have much more negotiating power. It's really
that simple.

Unions don't have infinite power, the can only negotiate as much as the 'pot'
allows. In the public sector, the pot size is all tax revenue. There are
almost no limits on how much public sector teachers can ask for.

This is exactly why FDR opposed public sector unions.

In the private sector, schools have to deal with remaining solvent. Teachers
can only ask for at most -- the whole pot of revenue. And that pot is smaller
in the private sector. The national average private school tuition is
approximately $9,518 in 2015. Way less than the public sector at $12,922 per
pupil in 2008.

As such, private sector teachers cannot demand as high wages as the public
sector teachers can.

~~~
mikekij
I agree with most of this. However, teachers' unions have done their best to
prevent schools from paying teachers with less common skill sets (like STEM)
more than teachers with more common skill sets (like PE). It's this aspect of
lack of free market and supply and demand dynamics that prevented me from
staying in the classroom.

------
zer00eyz
As the child of two teachers, my parents always told me "do whatever you want
in life, don't be a teacher".

Both of them got into the profession out of a desire to teach, both ended up
in administration roles out of a desire not to be poor.

The problem isn't just we "under pay" it is that we "over ask".

For those of you who haven't visited a school recently, getting into the
building is more of a hassle than getting on a plane. Want to volunteer at
your school, go get fingerprinted and give up your SSN to and underfunded and
over worked staff and hope they don't let that amount of personal information
out. Want to send your kid to school in CA, well you need to get them
vaccinated, and tracking that has fallen to schools (what ever your position
about this, shoving it into the department of education makes NO sense). Hell
the paperwork to just enroll your kids is monstrous, its easier to register to
vote, than it is to register your kids. I won't even cover sports > art(s)
when it comes to budget:
[http://thinkprogress.org/education/2013/08/05/2412381/public...](http://thinkprogress.org/education/2013/08/05/2412381/public-
schools-slash-arts-education-relying-more-on-private-arts-funding/) is a good
read if your interested.

Meanwhile, how much of a teachers job has become acting as an extension of an
overzealous CPS/child saver environment? Well the leadership at institutions
is doing stuff like this:
[http://www.fox26houston.com/news/117783912-story](http://www.fox26houston.com/news/117783912-story)
and if you think insanity at this level is isolated, you just haven't looked.
There are schools who have gone so far as to "ban peanut butter", for the
safety of other students: your more likely to get hit by lightning than die
from peanut butter.

You want to fix pay, and quality of education... give more money to hiring
teachers to do NOTHING BUT TEACH. Lets pass a law that says you have to spend
as much on students as you do on prisoners:
[http://money.cnn.com/infographic/economy/education-vs-
prison...](http://money.cnn.com/infographic/economy/education-vs-prison-
costs/)

Schools are now a direct path to jail: [https://www.aclu.org/fact-sheet/what-
school-prison-pipeline](https://www.aclu.org/fact-sheet/what-school-prison-
pipeline)

~~~
meric
>> your more likely to get hit by lightning than die from peanut butter.

In a school of 1000 students, there are students who could die by eating a
shared peanut butter sandwich[1]. It's not many, but more than would be killed
by lightning...I wouldn't say that warrants a ban, but I could see how some
would think that.

I'm glad I'm not going to be raising kids in the U.S.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peanut_allergy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peanut_allergy)

------
cassieramen
tl;dr The way to close the achievement gap between the US and stellar foreign
nations (here compared to Finland) is by increasing the number of average and
above teachers. Classroom size, homework, or any other measure is only weakly
related to performance. Nothing beats a stellar teacher.

Proposed fixes are a probationary period for new teachers and removing the
fixed pay scale that dominates the teaching profession.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> Classroom size, homework, or any other measure is only weakly related to
> performance. Nothing beats a stellar teacher.

I think you'll find that the impact of teacher quality on student achievement
is dwarfed by the impact of student quality.

~~~
tokenadult
Do you have evidence for this statement? The author of the article submitted
here is certainly aware of that claim (he has been researching education
reform for many years), but his claim, with evidence shown, is that teacher
quality matters more. I think so too, partly because good teaching can change
student behaviors toward learning.

~~~
yummyfajitas
The chetty paper is a classic. They claim that raising a teacher from -2sigma
to 0 adds 1% to a student's earnings.

[http://www.rajchetty.com/chettyfiles/value_added.pdf](http://www.rajchetty.com/chettyfiles/value_added.pdf)

If you scroll to table 3, you'll see how huge an effect non-teacher quality
factors have. Table 5 shows huge specific roles for parent income and minority
vs non-minority status.

Perhaps a simpler way to think of it: if teacher quality dominated everything
else, then a teacher getting poor scores out of a class of poor black kids,
relative to another teacher getting great scores out of a class of rich asian
kids, would be entirely to blame. Do you really believe this?

~~~
thaumasiotes
> if teacher quality dominated everything else, then a teacher getting poor
> scores out of a class of poor black kids, relative to another teacher
> getting great scores out of a class of rich asian kids, would be entirely to
> blame.

Well, using the weaker-but-still-absurd claim that teacher quality matters
more than student quality (but isn't necessarily the only thing that matters
at all), that teacher would only be almost entirely to blame.

However, switching the teachers around should cause the poor black kids to
start outscoring the rich asian kids.

------
maus42
Note: Interestingly enough, teachers in Finland (the country US is being
compared against in the article) are fully unionised: 95 % of teacher
workforce are members in the main union, OAJ.

source:
[http://www.oaj.fi/cs/oaj/Tietoja%20OAJsta](http://www.oaj.fi/cs/oaj/Tietoja%20OAJsta)
(in Finnish)

------
randyrand
As others have said, the problem is union contracts.

Unions, have negotiated to _not_ pay teachers based on performance. And unless
we reduce union rights, I'm not sure that's ever going to change....

------
grownseed
The advice in the article talks specifically about the US, but I've seen the
exact same issues come up in a lot of other countries (and to an extent other
jobs too).

Good teachers need to be paid more, and for that to happen, normalized
salaries should simply disappear. They look nice on the surface because you
can pretend everybody is getting equal treatment, but the harsh reality is
that people don't perform equally. I see the same issue first-hand in public
healthcare: no matter how well (or poorly) you perform, you get compensated
the same, which can considerably reduce incentives. Since this is generally
organized through unions and collective agreements, there's also quite often
considerable overheads associated with managing all of this. I think there
should be base salaries that can then be re-evaluated based on performance, as
a lot of other professions have done for a long time. (not saying unions
themselves should go away, but I believe they should definitely rethink the
approach)

At least in public settings, a lot of parents need to stop acting like they're
customers ("always right"). It always baffles me to see parents offload
absolutely everything on teachers, including responsibilities that should at
least be shared (e.g. sex education) or downright theirs (e.g. manners). I've
seen parents blame teachers for their kid having a foul mouth or for beating
up other kids and whatnot, if we expect teachers to do actual education, we
can't have them also play cops, it's your responsibility as a parent. Parents
who fail at this should also be educated, as part of the overall education
program (I'll admit that identifying failure can be a hard one, though a lot
of social programs do similar things).

Not everybody needs to go to school until 18+, seriously. It doesn't help
anybody, it spreads resources thin and it perpetuates the same stupid
incentives (e.g. by extension, not everybody needs a college degree to end up
being a manager at Starbucks...).

Stop trying to push normalized education, it's a complete disaster. Not all
teachers teach the same way, not all students learn the same way (and
combinations thereof), not all regions have the same culture or the same
needs, etc. and it's fine, let each class adapt as it needs to, just make sure
you provide equal opportunities. I get the point of systematization for
assessing grades on country-wide and international levels and such, but when
we get to the point that tests have become the end-goal rather simply a
control, we've messed up, badly.

And I could go on... The state of Education as it is saddens me: the general
population seems to assume schools will just take care of everything, teachers
either end up simply not caring, burnt out or depressed (not necessarily
exclusively) and many politicians have forgotten that there are actual people
behind the numbers they've worked so hard to game.

I firmly believe Education, once essential needs are met[0], is the biggest
factor in a successful and caring society. If we spent a fraction of the money
currently spent on fixing the after-effects of bad education (e.g. policing),
we'd all be better off for it, on all fronts.

[0] One could argue that basic education is essential to covering basic needs
in the first place.

~~~
tropo
Pay solution:

Since teaching quality increases when classes are small and decreases when
classes are large, we can adjust class sizes to equalize the quality delivered
by each teacher.

Having equalized the quality, we now simply pay teachers for the number of
students they teach. A good teacher might deliver standardized quality to 90
students, while a bad teacher might deliver standardized quality to 5
students. The good teacher gets paid 18x as much as the bad teacher and the
students all get standardized quality.

The main difficulty here is physical classroom dimensions.

~~~
kybernetikos
My understanding is that research does not in fact show a strong correlation
between outcomes and class sizes, so I doubt that this would work.

