There was a column in the Times today that touched on the topic of our previous discussion of unions and budget cutting. As you'll see, Nicholas Kristof is no fan of teachers unions, in fact he echoes a few of Lev's points, but his argument that we do a disservice to ourselves by treating teachers poorly is very well taken.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/opinion/13kristof.html?hp
Well, welcome to the government run enterprise! In the absence of real market forces any determination of teachers' salary is an arbitrary decision, and we can argue till the end of our days, but there is no way to justify one number over another. This is one of the reasons why I so much against government run enterprises.
ReplyDeleteStill, since in foreseeable future government will continue running most of the nation's schools, this question must be somehow decided.
I, personally, never said that teachers' salaries are too high or too low. The point that I always maintained was that their salary was not related to the quality of their work. I of course realize that it is not a trivial task to evaluate teachers' performance, and even though there has recently been some progress in this area, this issue will remain an area of controversy for some time to come.
In my humble opinion, though, the problem with teacher compensation should be discussed from a completely different point of view. It is not just the problem of setting the base salary, it is the problem that teachers' salaries are not structured well enough. One begins with some starting salary and it grows little by little every year. What we need is something similar to salary structure in colleges with different payscales for different levels of teaching positions. SOmething like Aprentice teacher, Teacher and Master Teacher. The whole teaching profession can be organized as a professional society similar to, for instance, Society of Actuaries, with compensations linked to the position within the Society and advanced based upon some tangible outcomes like passing special tests or something else. That's all I can say about teacher's salaries
Interesting idea about organizing teachers' salaries. But who is going to put it into effect? You would need some overall coordinating body to develop a rational structure and implement it--like the Society of Actuaries. What would be the equivalent in the teaching profession? Perhaps the teacher's union? But we don't want the teachers setting their own pay scale, so who else could handle this? Welcome to government run enterprise!
ReplyDeleteOn a more serious note, I'm not so sure that market forces are entirely absent in the determination of teacher's pay scales. It's very simple, well-educated and talented young people will not go into or stay in the teaching profession unless the pay is sufficient to support a relatively comfortable middle class lifestyle. If the pay is to low, no one will teach. If the pay is too high, cities and towns will go broke and taxpayers will get out the torches and pitchforks. So somewhere between those two imperatives of supply and demand the level of salary is determined. It sounds like the market to me.
I can agree that there is a market pressure on salaries from outside of the field. I meant, however, the lack of free market competition inside the field. The outside pressure is something, with which each corporate CEO has to deal with if he/she wants to attract people with talent commensurate with the need of his industry. However, private enterprises also have to consider internal competition, when competing firms develop renumeration ploicies directed toward attracting best talant, which is already in the field. And this very important market mechanism is not possible in government run schools.
ReplyDeleteHmm... I don't know...Certainly in New Jersey with 566 separate municipalities most with their own school systems, negotiating their own contracts with the teachers' union and conducting their own hiring, it seems like there would be a fair amount of competition for the best teachers. Or am I missing something?
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ReplyDeleteYes, you do. None of those bureaucrats negotiating salaries has a personal interest in the outcomes. They are not there to make profit neither they are to improve teaching. Their goal is self-preservation. And this is the main problem with all government run organizations. Left often like to cite the fact that government does not need to make a profit as a positive fact, but in reality, profit is the only objective measure of a successful (or failing) enterprise. Remove profit out of the picture and what is left as a measure of success? Only bureaucratically defined test scores and such which you despise so much. Also, competition between school districts for best teachers does not make sense unless they also compete for customers. But since customers are determined by the geographic location and no mobility is allowed, what's the point to compete? They will still get their money in the amount determined by geography, and not my performance.
ReplyDeleteI think we need to look a little more closely at how teachers' contracts are actually negotiated. My understanding is that these things are worked out by local school boards on an individual basis. This means that the people who are negotiating salaries are not some evil faceless bureaucrats, but rather school board members--ordinary people, elected by their fellow residents to handle the difficult task of administering schools. In most cases these aren't even professional politicians--they're usually people with other careers, often parents, who agree to take on this task for meager compensation if any because they care about children and schools. To be honest, I've even toyed (very briefly) with the idea of running for school board myself.
ReplyDeleteDo school board members have a personal stake in the outcome of negotiations? I would certainly think so. They are held responsible for the state of schools, and if things go badly, voters can and will turn them out of office. Moreover, school boards are held to stringent budgetary restrictions that limit their able to accommodate teachers. I've seen first hand just how difficult and bitter these negotiations can be.
Frankly, I'm baffled by the notion that the only way to determine whether a given endeavor is successful is to see whether it turns a profit. First of all, how do we define success? Profit is only a useful measure when the chief criterion of success is profit itself. If the criterion is quality education, then it seems to me the drive for profit is more or less a guarantee of, if not outright failure, then at least mediocrity. A for-profit enterprise has a built in incentive to minimize the amount spent on provision of services in order to extract a surplus which goes to enrich the entrepreneur rather than improve the actual outcomes. Quality is a value not as an end in itself only to the extent that it serves to insure a steady flow of income.
Aa far as education goes, there are plenty of ways to determine whether a school system is providing adequate services. For the record, I am skeptical of test results being used as the primary metric to evaluate the performance of individual teachers, but I wouldn't dispute that they have a place in evaluating school systems as a whole, particularly when they are evaluated as part of a broader array of metrics. Graduation rates, educational levels of teachers, school safety, arts, music, phys ed and foreign languages, teacher morale, parent involvement--all of these things and more, when viewed as a whole can give a pretty good sense of the overall health of a school and a district.
As for competition, I think you've got the equation rather jumbled. It's the school districts who are the customers competing to buy the services of the best teachers. If they can not offer competitive salaries and working conditions, teachers can and do move to other districts. The one thing that might impede this is teacher tenure, which in addition to defending teachers against arbitrary and unfair dismissal also can have the effect of locking them into a given system. On the other hand, there's a huge attrition rate of teachers in their first years of employment, and one can only conclude that a good portion of the teachers who leave their districts don't leave the profession entirely but seek out better opportunity in other districts.