

The Case for $320,000 Teachers - physcab
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/28/business/economy/28leonhardt.html?_r=1&hp

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pellicle
If you want better teachers, you don't necessarily need to pay much more. What
you need to do is make the job better, and you do _that_ by working to remove
the things that make teacher's lives miserable.

Teachers already love kids and teaching. What drives them away is a long list
of negatives: little support from administration (especially when parents are
involved), overbearing and/or micromanaging administration, way too much
paperwork, too many meetings, and too much weight put on standardized testing.
Large class sizes doesn't help either.

(And please don't tell me that teachers have summers off (technically,
contracts end at the end of the year and start up again when the school year
begins, so they are not employed during the summer). Teachers spend their
summers doing professional development, getting prepared for next year
(revising curriculum, tweaking tests/quizzes/homeworks), dealing with
paperwork, recovering from the school year, and often doing something
teaching-related for pay (running summer programs or summer school). )

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yummyfajitas
Are you seriously comparing an easy 6 week continuing education course to full
time employment?

I'm really not sure why you think the job needs to be made better. Teachers
already work less during the year than other professionals [1], get 2-3 months
in which they need to work only a few hours (if at all), get incredibly good
job security and defined benefit pensions. That's an incredible comp package
which most people in the private sector would love to have.

[1] <http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf>

~~~
pellicle
> Teachers already work less during the year than other professionals

Do you have any idea how much time teachers spend grading and preparing
lessons after the school day ends? If you teach 5 classes, with 20 kids per
class (that's being optimistic), then every time you collect an assignment,
that's 100 assignments to grade (same goes for homeworks, quizzes, tests, and
labs -- holy freaking cow it's a lot of grading). And not only that, but high-
schoolers will nickel-and-dime you for every point (and compare grades with
friends), so you have to be painstakingly consistent. This is excruciatingly
_boring_ work, and it sucks _hours_ of the teacher's time after the school day
has ended (and most evenings).

Not to mention contacting parents after school (who believe every word their
child says about how mean and awful you are (translation: you expect them to
actually do work in your class and behave)), after-school meetings, hunting
around for lab materials, and coordinating with the other teachers so you're
all on close to the same page.

> Are you seriously comparing an easy 6 week continuing education course to
> full time employment?

When the school year ends, besides all the wrap-up paperwork teachers have to
do, they have to deal with angry parents of kids who failed (and about whom
they've been sending letters home from day 1). Anyway, after all that's done,
teachers are standing in a large pile of material they've burned through
throughout the year. All this needs to be organized, revisited, and made ready
for next year. The school year is about Sept to June. That's, what, about 34
weeks net? Figure 2-3 homeworks per week, 1 quiz per week, 1 test every 3-4
weeks ... that's a boatload of material to edit/revise over the summer.

And don't discount recovery time. Teaching is mentally very difficult.
Students are constantly testing your limits all year. Parents are forever
questioning your teaching and complaining why their kid has to stay for
detention or whatever. Sometimes you even have to attend meetings and explain
in great detail to parents and administrators how you warned the student _n_
times, how they knew the consequences, and how they decided to behave badly
anyway. And this doesn't even account for the actual teaching -- which means
being _on_ performing in front of an audience every time (think how difficult
it is to write a program with collegues or your manager looking over your
shoulder). And they do it _every day_ \-- to the ring of a school bell even.
And when that bell rings, you'd better be at that door, taking attendance,
dealing with late passes and excuses, collecting homework, and getting the
group into learning mode because you've only got _N_ minutes until the bell
rings again, they shuffle out, and the next group comes in.

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yummyfajitas
_Do you have any idea how much time teachers spend grading and preparing
lessons after the school day ends?_

No, the data I gave only lists time spent working (at home and at school), and
does not break work down into specific tasks. So overall, I know teachers work
2.5 hours/week less than other professionals, but I don't know what they are
doing while working. Why does this matters?

 _...that's a boatload of material to edit/revise over the summer._

For new teachers, sure. For experienced teachers, not so much. My first time
teaching calculus was a lot of work, my second time it was pretty easy.

As for the customer-facing nature of teaching, I agree that it's not for
everyone. I certainly didn't like it, but some people love being the center of
attention. If you don't like customer facing work, find a different career.
Don't expect brownie points for sticking it out in a career you are poorly
suited for.

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jdminhbg
"Still, school administrators can do more than they’re doing.

They can pay their best teachers more, as Pittsburgh soon will, and give them
the support they deserve. Administrators can fire more of their worst
teachers, as Michelle Rhee, the Washington schools chancellor, did last week."

There is a gigantic elephant in that room with "NEA" painted on its hide.

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sprout
The problem with this debate is that if you speak to most teachers, they agree
wholeheartedly that procedures need to be in place to fire bad teachers.

The issue is that they are very hostile to the educational administration
establishment that has decided test scores are the ideal measure by which to
base this.

Test scores, while they are good at measuring some aspects of learning,
ultimately tie teachers' hands and force them to teach from only state-
approved curricula. Especially scary if you live in a state where Thomas
Jefferson has been struck from the books because the board of education has an
ideology to push, and is unconcerned with teaching truth.

So if you ask most teachers, they support this sort of thing totally, and
therefore the unions would too. But only if they receive assurances that
standardized testing - an enemy of free thought - is a minimally important
part of the evaluation system. Peer review is the ideal.

Now, this obviously still brings charges of cronyism, and it certainly will
create cliques of teachers, but only rarely cliques of bad teachers. And I
think it's worth knowing that we pass a widely varied bunch of knowledge onto
our children, instead of only those facts that are deemed convenient and
useful by powerful cliques in the state legislatures.

~~~
lutorm
This is the real issue. I have absolutely no problem with rewarding good
teachers and sanctioning bad ones. The crucial question is how good and bad
will be defined. Standardized testing is absolutely _not_ the way to do it.

~~~
yummyfajitas
If you object to standardized tests, what do you propose we use? Non-standard
tests? The opinions of assorted cronies?

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jbooth
Well, that's sort of like saying we should use lines of code as a metric,
because what else to we have to go on. The opinions of assorted developers?

There needs to be some attempt at normalization between teachers and school
districts, of course. But there's room for qualitative measures instead of
quantitative ones. Especially when the tests seem (unintentionally) designed
to punish teachers for teaching poor/minority/ESL students.

~~~
yummyfajitas
We have much better metrics for developers than lines of code - bug
fixes/feature requests weighted by importance, P&L, etc. Do you have a better
metric for teachers than standardized tests?

 _Especially when the tests seem (unintentionally) designed to punish teachers
for teaching poor/minority/ESL students._

This is utterly false if we reward teachers based on deltas rather than
absolute values, that is we compare actual performance to statistically
predicted performance and reward/penalize teachers when actual performance
exceeds predicted performance.

~~~
kingkilr
> bug fixes/feature requests weighted by importance

Isn't there a DailyWTF about a company that did just that and found that the
testing people conspired with the developers to invent bugs, locate them, and
then collect bonuses for fixing them.

~~~
yummyfajitas
Preventing conspiracies like this is exactly why teachers should be evaluated
by standardized tests designed by an independent agency.

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jbooth
You already said you think teachers are overpaid and underworked and your goal
is to make things harder for them.

Why should they want to work under a system like that?

What independent agency would you want devising metrics to figure out how good
you are at your job while knowing nothing about the specific challenges you
deal with?

~~~
yummyfajitas
I believe teachers currently are comped at above-market rates. I would bring
them down to market rates. They would work under that system for the same
reason most other professionals work at market rates - it's the best they can
get.

The independent agency which currently devises metrics to figure out how good
I do my job is the stock market. My bonus = % of profits.

When I was a professor, I favored (and suggested to the department) that some
higher authority should devise midterm and final exams. It would a) allow us
to measure teacher performance, as opposed to student opinion [1] and b) allow
comparison of student performance across classes.

[1] To get good student evaluations, all you need is easy tests + jokes + good
looks.

~~~
jbooth
You've got market and non-market all mixed up.

Public education isn't a market good, it's a public good. Toilet paper and
oatmeal are market goods.

The labor market for teaching is in fact a free market. Any given municipality
can pay whatever they want to pay, and get the talent they're paying for
accordingly. The fact that teachers are getting laid off in something like 80%
of municipalities the last few years means you don't even have to scrape the
bottom of the barrel.

Agree on the statements about professors. All the same. If you were working on
something more qualitative as part of a team, and not a lone trader, we both
know there's no quantitative way to assess your work. Lines of code is a joke
and other metrics invariably bring in subjective measures.

EDIT to add: If you're pro-free market, shouldn't it be up to municipalities
to choose which teachers they want to keep or fire as they see fit, without
some bureaucrat telling them that according to some BS test scores they have
to do such and such?

~~~
yummyfajitas
Education is not a public good since it's both rivalrous and excludible. That
makes it a private good. The fact that a private good is provisioned by the
government does not make it a public good.

Also, the labor market for most govt employees is not remotely a free market.
Unions keep out the competition, essentially getting no-bid contracts to
supply labor. They play politics to elect politicians who will give them what
they want - in many cities the teachers unions essentially control the
political system. You might as well call Halliburton's no-bid contracts in
Iraq a "free market". It's a "free market", closed to new entrants, with no
negotiation between the buy and sell side, but with the buy and sell side
colluding to rip off the public.

In any case, just because it's tough to quantitatively measure some
development does not mean it's tough to measure teacher performance. Students
either know the material at the end of the term or they don't, simple as that.

All the whining about how it's impossible is really just an attempt by
teachers unions to avoid accountability. I'm sure Halliburton would love to
avoid accountability for their performance in Iraq and elsewhere too, doesn't
mean we should take them seriously.

~~~
jbooth
So, by your logic, roads and sewage are private goods? Basically everything
except the military? Consistent with a libertarian.

In almost no city does the teacher's union essentially control the political
system. The police union is always, always more powerful, for one. They're
just more politically engaged, people who are driven by power. Several private
unions will be more powerful. And that's leaving out every power broker that
isn't a union (representing most of the power).

"All that whining about how impossible it is to measure programmer
productivity is just an attempt by developers to avoid accountability." You
might consider that you don't know a single thing about teaching in a non-
college or lower-class environment. No offense. I don't claim to, either. But
I'll at least listen to what every teacher I've ever met says about the
matter.

~~~
shasta
Programmers may routinely be judged by peers, but the entire team is then
judged by results. A team that can't ship gets the axe or goes under. The
closest counter-examples to this I can think of, doing government contracts,
have also been some of the worst software shops that I've encountered.

So what's the analogous mechanism going to be? Are you ok closing entire
schools if they have lower than average test scores in their class (whatever
this means)? Otherwise, how do prevent the whole system from devolving into
politics and cronyism?

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adolph
Summary:

A new study finds that "[s]tudents who had learned much more in kindergarten"
did better in later life.

"The economists don’t pretend to know the exact causes. But it’s not hard to
come up with plausible guesses."

"Mr. Chetty and his colleagues ... estimate that a standout kindergarten
teacher is worth about $320,000 a year."

Voila, "The Case for $320,000 Kindergarten Teachers!"

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shizcakes
A small thing, but kudos for the NYT for mentioning that the research was not
yet peer reviewed. Too much 'science reporting' lately presents papers and
other publications as sworn fact, often skewed in whatever direction the
reporting body wants.

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jim_h
Good teachers are undervalued. Education is valued, but they sure don't give
the enough compensation to the teachers. Teachers need more recognition. It's
not the institution that makes a school great, it's the teachers.

Thank you to the teachers out there.

~~~
dhimes
I've long felt that the best ways for teachers to get what they deserve is for
them to open themselves up to real evaluation. Pre-test/post-test. Once this
happens, the true stars will be able to command quite a premium. Although the
teachers fear such a day, I believe the perceptive administrators fear it more
because they will enter into bidding wars for the top teachers, and lose their
jobs if they don't get and keep them.

Perhaps the answer will lie in something like _The Teaching Company_
attracting the best and brightest teachers and selling their lectures for the
expository parts of instruction, and your average teacher will be reduced to a
glorfied Teaching Assistant (TA).

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bryanlarsen
The fact that a teacher is "worth" $320,000 does not mean that the teacher
should be paid $320K. If they were, then the teacher is capturing the entire
$320K, and society as a whole is not better off at all. Instead this number
provides an "upper bound" for the proper salary. A more reasonable figure
would be 1/3 to 1/2 of the value they're adding. IMO, society should receive
"most" of the value of a teacher. That still leaves lots of room to increase
the salary of a teacher.

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jteo
People are rarely compensated fairly for their contributions to society.

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chaostheory
_On Tuesday, Mr. Chetty presented the findings — not yet peer-reviewed_

I'd like to see the details of the study before jumping to conclusions. There
are just way too many variables.

------
korch
_A thousand things advance, nine hundred and ninety nine retreat: that is
progress._

    
    
        --Henri Frederic Amiel
    

It's sad to think academics and education policy wonks are still struggling
with the question of what is the fair market value of teachers in 2010? I'd
bet two generations from now it's going to be common sense to say "great
teachers are 10x more productive than average teachers, so let's incentive
that behavior." (Hmm, doesn't that sound just like the conventional wisdom
about another certain profession we all know about here?). Why is it such a
struggle to realize that now?

What absolutely kills me is that we have all of these super smart people
dedicating their careers to this, and billions of tax payer dollars spent, and
the education system that will eventually become the consensus is going to
resemble the earliest modern education system in 19th century Germany/Prussia.
(It's a fascinating history itself—the US public school system was originally
designed as clone of the German system.)

Oh and after incentiving and selecting teachers for teaching talent based on
performance becomes the norm, here is the next question that the education
system will confront:

Are great teachers who get to spend one academic year with their students much
less effective than even greater teachers who instead stick with the same
group of students, and teach the kids for several years of k-12?

After a million studies, experimental schools, and policy debates by people
who don't even know what they're talking about, the new consensus will be yes,
the greatest teachers are the most effective when they can become semi-
permanent tutors for kids over longer periods of time. And then we will have
arrived back at the original German system of grad-level teachers who are
state-funded, private full-time tutors for small groups of kids.

