Teacher Training

Very interesting article on the teaching of teachers and the need to raise the standards for those charged with educating the yutes of America in today's Wall Street Journal. The article, Teacher Training Is Panned, looks at the patchwork system for training teachers for America's schools and the efforts in a number of corners to improve that system to hopefully turnout higher quality teachers. Sounds nice but I think the article misses the mark.

There are two fundamental issues here. One, teachers are perceived to not be paid very well. I say “perceived” quite intentionally and I will address that in a moment.

Secondly, as the report implies, the perception that teaching is a lower paying professional position tends to discourage the “best and brightest” from pursuing teaching as a career.

Studies have shown that, historically, students who enter teacher-education programs generally have lower grade-point averages or lower scores on college-entrance examinations than students who enter other professions.

I would concur with this anecdotally from my own time in college. The only way to consistently encourage the very best students to choose teaching as a career is to change the pay perception and that takes money. Unfortunately money is in short supply these days for most school districts. Between lower property values and the explosion of extra staff that are not traditional classroom teachers, the odds of getting large pay increases for teachers are pretty poor and frankly not needed.

Compounding the problem is that the public is in no mood to keep giving more and more money to public schools. As more data comes to light and is more readily accessible, it is also apparent that teachers are not nearly as “underpaid” as folklore would claim. According to a report published by the Manhattan Institute in 2007, statistics show that the average public school teacher made $34.06/hour in 2005. If you were to annualize that hourly rate to 40 hours per week times 52 weeks per year that would be the equivalent of just shy of $71,000. That doesn’t mean that the average teacher makes $71,000 per year but then again they aren’t working 52 weeks per year either. There are 260 weekdays in a non-leap year. The average school year is 180 days or 36 weeks. Compared to a private sector employee with three paid weeks of vacation, public school teachers get the equivalent of 16 weeks of vacation. So they are really only “on the job” around 70% of the year. During the time that they are on the job they are paid an hourly rate that is much higher than most private sector workers who have full-time employment and a college degree. Because teachers only work a partial year, their annual income is perhaps low but frankly the per hour pay for actual work is much higher than most . Granted, many teachers spend a lot of time outside of school grading papers and other school related activities but those same teachers still have an enormous amount of time off compared to private sector workers. Perhaps for those reasons (lower pay that is offset by having 16 weeks off per year and a work schedule that corresponds to the school schedule of teachers children), it seems that teaching is more and more a female dominated profession that attracts women who expect to have a spouse who works to help offset the lower annual pay. The entire conversation about teachers being underpaid is framed by the talking points of teachers unions in a guilt trip scheme to continually add to the pay of teachers (and the coffers of teachers unions) but when you look at the facts as opposed to relying on folklore and emotional appeals, it is apparent that public school teachers are paid on an hourly basis far better than their higher achieving peers from college.

The other factor is that there is no real correspondence between pay and performance of students. If it were a simple mathematical formula, where X amount of additional money yields Y percent improvement in student performance, it would be far easier to make the case for paying teachers more. Unfortunately that is not the situation. Case in point from the same Manhattan Institute report, Detroit public school teachers have the highest average hourly pay at a whopping $47.28 per hour. That is an annualized rate of nearly $100,000 per year so if teacher pay was tied to educational quality, Detroit public schools should be leading the way in academic excellence. Alas that is not the case.

The education system is antiquated and it is broken. Merely throwing more money at it is not going to fix the problem and the public seems to be increasingly hesitant to rubber stamp millage increases on an annual basis for government services including public schools.

Maybe what is needed is a radical rethinking of the entire system. I am not suggesting that all parents should homeschool their kids but I do think that we have a system in place for educating children that has been virtually unchanged since I was a child and long before that. The four walls of a school building and the anachronistic schedule actually confine and restrict education instead of supporting it.

I am not sure what this radical rethinking looks like. Perhaps we see more out of classroom work, more online or interactive studies. What about asking someone who is a business person to come in once a month and teach economics or instruction from other subject matter experts from the “real world”? Why not pool resources in a given school district, instead of having a history teacher in each school have one history teacher who covers classes in multiple locations either in person or by video conferencing. I think the artificial, age based system of K-12 grades absolutely should go. Students should be grouped by ability and background, not age. Kids with an aptitude for math shouldn’t be restricted because a certain class is not offered at their “grade level”. I obviously don’t have all the answers or perhaps any of them. I do know that stubbornly trying to use 19th century methods and structures to teach children in the 21st century is foolish and self-defeating. We are no longer a primarily agrarian society so why do we still have academic years that are built around farming?

What are some ways to radically change the educational system in this country without increasing the costs?