Teacher Pay, Incentives, Teacher-Led Instructional Improvement

A Google-alert and a marketing e-mail led me to these two stories on teacher pay, performance incentives, and teacher-led instructional improvement:

Program That Expands Teachers’ Roles Linked to Higher Student ...
Education Week News - Bethesda,MD,USA
The program uses the value-added information to dole out salary awards to teachers and schools that have performed better than the state average over three ...

When you go behind the story, you find that the TAP program it discusses includes a strong teacher-led instructional improvement component:

Ongoing Applied Professional Growth

TAP restructures the school schedule to provide time during the regular school day for teachers to meet, learn, plan, mentor and share with other teachers, so they can constantly improve the quality of their instruction and hence, increase their students' academic achievement. This allows teachers to learn new instructional strategies and have greater opportunity to collaborate, both of which will lead them to become more effective teachers.

And here's the story on teacher pay.  Basically, it is hard to argue that teachers are grossly underpaid compared to similar professionals, but, as evidenced by the rarity of the teacher-led instructional improvement models, it is very easy to see that they do not receive the respect they deserve in the form of encouragement to engage their professional judgment and commitment. 

How Much Are Public School Teachers Paid?

Today, Manhattan Institute scholars Jay P. Greene and Marcus Winters released a new report entitled "How Much Are Teachers Paid?". Greene and Winters use data collected by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) to compile information on the hourly pay of public school teachers nationally and in 66 metropolitan areas. The authors compare the reported hourly income of the public school teachers to those of workers in similar professions; and analyze whether there is a relationship between higher relative pay for public school teachers and higher student achievement as measured by high school graduation rates.

KEY FINDINGS:
* The average public school teacher in the U.S. earned $34.06 per hour in 2005
* The average public school teacher was paid 36% more per hour than the average non-sales white-collar worker and 11% more than the average professional specialty and technical worker
* Public school teachers are paid 61% more per hour than private school teachers, on average nationwide
* Increasing public school teacher pay is not related to higher graduation rates

Comments

[Alvaro]

Dave, great analysis.

Many teachers deserve way more; some don't deserve to be teachers. If we don't acknowledge differences, and allow for a more transparent meritocracy, higher pay won't happen.

[Brett Hodus]

I am not a teacher, but I have worked alongside teachers in the classroom. This is a very hard job when it is done well. Managing 30 students who are largely disinterested in attending school in the first place is an uphill struggle. In other parts of the workforce, a person managing and training 30 people below him/her is almost ALWAYS making 6 figures. The fact that teachers manage children should qualify them to earn more, not less...as the job of training young people is much more difficult than training willing adults.

Bottom line: the less teachers are paid, the less high quality people with exceptional brainpower will be drawn to the field of education. The fact that teachers are paid less than those in the field of business, for example, is not justice, but a tragedy. Until we pay teachers the way we pay others in the workforce, we will not get the best and brightest to teach. The people training the next generation of computer analysts, professors, laywers, doctors, accountants, etc... SHOULD BE THE SMARTEST, BEST QUALIFIED PEOPLE ON THE PLANET, as they are the ones producing the next generation of success stories. If we pay them appropriately for this very challenging job, the end result will be a generation of smarter, more prepared adults.