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Increase Pay to Increase Results
A couple of number crunchers at the London School of Economics recently published an interesting conclusion. On the one hand, their finding is no big surprise. On the other hand, we can expect conservatives to push back hard against it. What is this piece of news? Paying teachers more increases student performance.
The researchers looked at academic performance from several countries in the OECD, and then charted those performance scores against teacher pay. They found that, on average, a 10 percent increase in teacher pay could be expected to correlate with a 5-10 percent increase in student performance.
This is not to say that increasing teacher pay in the U.S. will immediately cause student scores to rise. Rather, higher pay elevates teaching in the eyes of future job seekers. This makes teaching more competitive and leads to higher overall quality among incoming teachers; high-performing college students who don't consider teaching when it ranks in the 49th percentile of incomes for the country tend to re-evaluate when it's in the 60th percentile or higher. Not only that, but all prospective teachers will fight harder to distinguish themselves in a more competitive labor pool, leading to an increase in preparedness for those who make the cut.
Over time, these higher performing, better prepared teachers will make up a larger and larger percentage of the teaching force. This will increase student performance, as teacher quality is generally identified as the most important in-school factor for student success.
Now, a much larger amount of student success is determined by socioeconomic status—it dwarfs any given in-school factor as a predictor of outcomes—so it isn't enough simply to pay teachers more. We need to do a better job of identifying how family income affects students (including during the years before kindergarten) and targeting public policy to redress those impacts.
Conservatives will likely wail and moan about these kinds of recommendations. Nevertheless, we must be relentless in advocating for stronger public investment in our education system.
Posted in Education | Related Topics: K-12 education Education Funding Teachers Teacher Assessment
5 Comments
January 8, 2012 at 6:39 pm
I believe teachers do deserve a pay increase, and I think it should be linked to performance. This means administrators will need to start doing their jobs and evaluating teachers and mentoring them on a path to continuous improvement.
It is disappointing to see that school systems spend additional money to a principal, who seems to preoccupied with student discipline. The principal is a supervisor who needs to start to supervise.
January 6, 2012 at 11:31 pm
I feel all workers need to be paid more. However, do it on a performance measures. Fine. However, employees need to have input on the measures used. Then, those measures needs to apply to all equally.
Then, while we’re at it, measurements need to be instituted for princpals and superintendents, CEO’s, executives, and so on. The “good ‘ol boys” network needs to come to a close. People at the top need to actually earn what they get for a change. Then, watch the attitude change about what is fair compensation for workers.
January 4, 2012 at 2:31 pm
Craig,
Regarding performance pay, I think you may be reading something into my post that isn’t actually there. The data we have available on performance pays suggests that it doesn’t actually work (hence NYC canceling their program after the RAND Corporation looked at its 3-year results and found no impact).
The study that I’m citing here is not about performance pay, but instead about simple salary. Basically, a raw increase in the amount that teachers get paid (with no performance strings attached) increases the competitiveness of the profession with a corresponding increase in new recruit quality.
As for our current teachers being “inadequate,” that’s definitely not the implication I’m trying to make. Rather, I’d point out that teaching in the US these days is seen as a decidedly second-tier profession and not in the same league as say, engineering, medicine, or the law. This is not to say that the teachers we have are bad or inadequate; rather, there is still room for growth and increasing the prestige of the profession (which includes increasing pay) would aid in that growth.
Thank you for your respectful tone, and I hope this has cleared up some of the confusion.
- Michael
January 4, 2012 at 12:33 pm
Growth & Justice reported a similar study. In that study, in order to get the student performance increase, the authors noted that increased teacher pay must be based on merit and purging inadequate teachers from the system. It would, the authors estimated, take about a decade to reach the predicted levels of student achievement.
As a conservative, I would support teachers being paid a market wage in an school choice environment where schools, to attract students (and revenue) competed for the best teachers by paying them more and providing better working conditions. A market-based education system would achieve the objectives of paying good teachers more and purging the system of inadequate teachers.
I also find it interesting the MN2020 would promote this study. Unionization of teachers, which MN2020 tends to support, is the greatest negative factor that stands in the way of implementing increased teacher pay in an effective way. Also, do you really mean to imply that today’s teaching pool is inadequate?
KJC says:
January 12, 2012 at 6:16 am
Now there’s a landmark study on teachers and what it’s worth to the students…in dollars and cents…to have a good one.
I think many would be surprised to find that a great 4th Grade teacher might be worth a $100K in income to one whole class of students?!
They even admit that the better test scores that teacher seems to get out of the students might fade over time… but that the income improvement doesn’t.
So? Next time somebody suggests that public service workers, like teachers, should be subjected to something like “feel the pain,” consider that stingy view might cost your family significant income over the long run.
Here’s the link:
<http://obs.rc.fas.harvard.edu/chetty/value_added.html>