A NY Times Op-Ed by Nicholas Kristof advocates for increasing teacher compensation, in order to compete with other countries by attracting more talented people into the profession as other high performing countries such as Singapore do.
Kristoff Teacher Compensation Op-Ed
McKinsey Study on closing the talent gap for teachers
I’ve generally focused on equity issues in the Chapter 70 budget, and the problem of escalating health care costs consuming state and local budgets ( I think that localties must be allowed to contain their responsibilities for health care costs) .
But this Op-ed raises a very different approach to ed reform to consider, and one that is apropos when contemplating whether American teachers salaries are exorbitant because of teacher’s unions, with the prescription of stripping collective bargaining rights a good one for improving schools.
He knows which school systems? Probably New York Cities.
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p>Teaching work rules may be inflexible in NYC and other cities, but they are no worse than and probably necessary for protection from the bureaucratic and administrative abuses. It says something about our country that we can never imagine a problem with management, but we can always blame the workers.
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p>Money, though always welcome, is less of an issue than working conditions. If you know a teacher who teaches in a large, urban school system, ask them about the way things are run.
Really now, why so utterly dismissive? As it happens, I do know teachers who work in a large, urban school system and I have talked them about working conditions. None of it directly contradicts the points Kristof is making here, which is that we get what we pay for (though maybe we got more than we paid for back when capable women had fewer options in the job market), and that unions are not primarily driven by the incentive to improve quality.
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p>From what I’ve read, Kristof does not keep himself locked up in NYC. He travels and often comments on what he has directly observed. That sometimes leaves him vulnerable to a “forest for the trees” blindness, but I’ve never seen him writing about things where he has no credible experience.
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p>If you think the NYC school system cannot be compared to Boston, I’d like to know why. If you think teacher salaries are not a serious factor in the overall equation, please discuss. The knee-jerk “nitwit” response does not further the discussion one bit.
“and that unions are not primarily driven by the incentive to improve quality.”
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p>The misunderstanding of the role and position of unions is manifest here.
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p>Why do teachers have a trade union? Why is their role to ASSUME that quality is there, and therefore “represent” the teacher? Why would anyone assume, in the current configuration, we would represent the management?
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p>If people were serious about making teaching a profession in the true sense of the word, we’d be talking about licensure controlled to the majority extent by teachers. At that point, like lawyers and doctors, we would police our own membership. Until that moment, as a unionized teacher, I support the union and its role. Utterly.
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p>Tell us ONE time that our ideas about how to improve the profession have been adopted, or even considered? Just one. Ask the board that was asked to reconfigure the math curriculum for the Frameworks, only to have Sandra Stotsky dump their ideas and install her own?
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p>But people want teachers powerless like nonunionized workers, and are then surprised when they organize into unions.
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p>How dumb is that?
condescending, pal. The fall could kill you.
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p>Um, did you read what I wrote or just stop reading at “nitwit”?
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p>When I said “NYC and other cities” was I suggesting that “NYC and other cities” couldn’t be compared?
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p>Yeah, our big cities have a lot in common. Forty percent of my department has extensive experience in Springfield before coming to my suburban district. As difficult as the kids can be, the administration and the hoops the state makes urban schools jump through make it worse. That’s why we get up to 1/3 of teachers leaving “underperforming” schools in a year.
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p>I’m old-fashioned when it comes to salaries. They are set by the negotiations and the market. Raising teacher salaries might benefit me personally as a teacher, but it isn’t going to happen. I would support paying more to teachers who teach in difficult assignments. But that won’t solve the problem. Pay is not the only factor in working conditions, and it’s unlikely we can pay teachers enough to offset the working conditions.
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p>Kristof makes the mistake of seeing teacher unions as a monolith. They aren’t. Working pay and conditions are the primary responsibilities of unions, but on them, Kristof doesn’t know what he’s talking about. It’s a common error and my guess is that it’s based on his reading the newspaper and hearing about the NYC school system. I was just reading Education Week this morning. A school superintendent in Wisconsin was worrying about Walkerism destroying the mutually postive relationship he’s had with the union.
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p>And aside from defending Kristof, you’ve added what to the conversation so far?
Mark, let me start by saying that I respect what I know about you based on your well-thought commentary here. The reason I feel the need to say that is that I don’t want you to presume that I’m referring to you when I talk about teacher quality and salaries.
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p>When I was in high school, teaching was not a profession that the top honors kids were steered toward. It wasn’t what people aspired to be.
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p>I know that it takes a special person to be a teacher, and that money alone doesn’t guarantee better teachers. However, I think that if teaching paid as much as engineering, finance, law, consulting, accounting, or whatever professions are out there these days, I think that it would have been considered as an equal option by the top students. Compensation and prestige is one factor in how people decide to pick a career, or in this case, to rule one out.
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p>When I look back at the people I know from high school, the kids who wound up as teachers generally came from the non-honors groups. These were kids who weren’t taking the top-level math classes, they were the kids who were taking the easier science classes, the easier English classes, the easier language classes. They were middle-of-the-road students.
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p>Now that doesn’t necessarily speak to their competence and effectiveness as teachers, but I think it says something. I only think that, mind you — I’m not aware of any study that correlates high school performance with intelligence or job performance — I certainly know some people who were low performers in high school but who are now very successful, and I know others who were high performers in high school and are now not successful.
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p>I also have a friend (from another high school) who was #1 in his high school class, and he actually did go to school to become a teacher. He teaches at a private academy, not in the public schools. Again, just anecdotes — but a topic I’d like to see more information about.
about class rank is true. I was an Honors student in Granby–recognized as a smart kid and an indifferent student. Immature as well. I spent 2 years at HCC growing up and becoming a good student. Had I been more mature and a better student with a better idea of career possibilities, I might have ended up in a different field.
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p>I taught pre-service teachers for 5 years and recognized the most common pathway into teaching was indirect. People tried and failed or tried and didn’t like something else first.
You’re absolutely right. I’m working my way through Linda Darling-Hammond’s recent book and she talks about Finland purposely raising teacher salaries and recruiting from the top students. The country provided major incentives for people to become teachers.
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p>My basic point: money is good, but not enough if the job sucks. You might be able to keep a teacher in a crappy job if you paid them $120,000, but they wouldn’t be worth it. And I’m not sure it would be worth increasing salaries in East Longmeadow, Longmeadow, and Hampden-Wilbraham; our students are already performing well on a variety of measures, though our teachers likely come from the middle of the SAT pack.
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p>People that enter professional fields, in part, because they want and usually enjoy some independence and creativity in their work. A successful attorney, for example, would not start doing piece work because it pays more. We won’t be able build a consistently effective staff in Springfield (for example) until we can give them some creative control over their work and dole out less bureaucratic and administrative abuse at the district and state level. This is the other thing that Finland provides: creative control over teaching work.
The NYC education system sorely needed reform, and it took a lot of focus for the school board to do it. However, many of Kristof’s complaints (including these “rubber rooms” that are mainly a sign of an underfunded and mismanaged process) were taken out of existence through union-administration agreements over the past two years. He’s rather behind the times.
The public needs to be enlightened about those “rubber rooms”. They are a constant talking point from my conservative friends in union-bashing discussions. The point usually goes like this: “There are these rooms in NYC where teachers sit and get paid for years and years to do nothing because the union won’t allow the city to fire them. These teachers are there because they raped students, because they beat students, and they still can’t be fired”. That is what the conservatives believe about these rooms.
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p>I did a little checking, and the talking points are, of course, almost entirely false, fabricated from an ounce of truth into something that sounds just so much worse. These rooms, of course, are places where teachers are sent when they are under investigation or review, so they do not have to be in the classroom.
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p>Here’s one incident described:
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p>I don’t know the intimate details of this, but the way it is written, it sounds like this teacher was sent here because of a single student-initiated complaint — which sounds awfully like the Salem Witch trials. Can you imagine being called into your office and fired by your boss because a customer — maybe one that wasn’t happy that you wouldn’t give them a break — claimed you tried to sexually harass them? With no due process? And can you imagine if you then were removed from your profession, not your job? For an action that severe, I think that the process should be significant.
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p>I think what confuses the picture is that teaching is a profession that requires significant education and training, and one which there are few employers, particularly as one gets later in life (and can’t just move across the state or country to find another job). Especially in New York City — where a single principal can black-list a teacher for life in the city because there is only one employer in that profession.
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p>I know that people in the business world have this idea that “less than average” employees should be shown the door — but 50% of the workforce will always be less than average at their job. We can’t get hung up on that vision. We need to focus on having standards, making those standards clear, and holding people to them — with the goal that no one be sub-standard. Those standards should be input-based rather than output based, because especially in teaching, the outputs are directly related to the quality of the inputs. You can’t make gold from straw.
The rubber room meme assumes management has correctly identifed a problem and would deal with it properly were the union not a problem. Even Law & Order got that one right.
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p>There are plenty of good managers out there, but the number of bad ones out there is big and the bureaucracy is even worse.
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p>Here’s one example: did you hear about the bomb that was set of in the cafeteria of one of the Springfield high school a few years ago? (I think it was Sci-Tech). It never made the papers.
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p>The principal, who was a higher-up acting as principal, hushed it up and kept it out of the papers. I heard the story from a retired Springfield teacher and confirmed it with others I know.
Can’t you just put someone on administrative leave or suspend with or without pay as appropriate? Also, am I getting the correct sense that innocent until proven guilty doesn’t apply here?
And I think this is now approaching ancient history
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p>My understanding was that the then extant contract did not allow for suspension, and so these people had to report to work every day, even though they weren’t assigned anywhere.
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p>I do believe that the particular problem has been resolved.
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p>However, it strikes me that its existence was another of those “isolated incidents” that have nothing to do with anything that seem to pile up over time, and, at the very least, cause severely bad optics for the teachers’ unions.
This article is from December 2010
of due process in NYC that causes rubber rooms.
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p>”The evidence of Mohammed’s incompetence-found in more than five thousand pages of transcripts from her hearing-seems as unambiguous as the city’s lawyer promised in his opening statement: “These children were abused in stealth. . . . It was chronic . . . a failure to complete report cards. . . . Respondent failed to correct student work, failed to follow the mandated curriculum . . . failed to manage her class.” The independent observer’s final report supported this assessment, ticking off ten bullet points describing Mohammed’s unsatisfactory performance. (Mohammed’s lawyer argues that she began to be rated unsatisfactory only after she became active with the union.)
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p>When the bill for the arbitrator is added to the cost of the city’s lawyers and court reporters and the time spent in court by the principal and the assistant principal, Mohammed’s case will probably have cost the city and the state (which pays the arbitrator) about four hundred thousand dollars.
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p>Read more http://www.newyorker.com/repor…
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p>So it cost $400,000 to try and get rid of an incompetent teacher. And BTW, they certainly aren’t underfunding NY schools. New York state spent $17,173 per student and that’s just the state I bet the city is much higher.
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p>Megan McArdle has a great article on Why Fire Teachers ?
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p>”Let me start by saying that I think there are some jobs that are too important to let any consideration intrude other than the best way to get the job done. Nuclear power plants, firefighters, poison control–I don’t want to let other social goals, no matter how laudable, hamper their mission.
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p>Teaching is one of those jobs.”
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p>and lets not forgot the story of 13 years in a rubber room ?
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was misleading crap when I read it.
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p>Part of the problem with journalism (as opposed to research) is that in telling a story, it stops short of providing a realistic context. It’s not empirical; it’s not research. What Brill gives us is a bunch of quotes and an anecdote. He neglects the context.
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p>The New Yorker’s correction, December 1, 2009, however does provide some context: “A twentieth of one per cent of all New York City teachers are Rubber Roomers, not half of one per cent, as originally stated.” Brill overstated by four-foled the number of teachers in the Rubber Rooms!
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p>.0005% of NYC teachers are in the Rubber Room?! (Please check my math, I teach English).
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p>I can’t find the total number of teachers in NYC, and theoretically the number of teachers could be significant, but something other than a hit piece might have tried to provide some context.
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p>I have to go to a meeting so I can’t respond to the other citations, but that’s a start.
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There are some telltale signs that the article was written with a slant. Here’s an example:
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p>I’m not sure how this writer feels qualified to describe the thoughts of union officials…
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p>I’m not going to deny that the process can be drawn out. However, I will reiterate the point that firing a teacher is much more significant than firing a cashier, especially in a city like New York, where the city is the only employer. I’d be willing to hear suggestions as to how to prevent the situation that is described as long as those suggestions don’t start out with “eliminate the process”.
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p>I would also like to reiterate the point — made in the New Yorker article by Joel Klein, the NYC school chancellor — that the “lowest quartile” should be routinely fired is just plain silly, particularly when people spend significant time and money to become teachers. If that’s such a great method, then why don’t we apply it to other professions — let’s fire the bottom 25% of doctors whose patients die. Let’s fire the bottom 25% of lawyers who lose cases. Let’s fire the bottom 25% of fitness trainers whose clients lose the least weight. Let’s fire the bottom 25% of financial advisers who have the lowest rates of return (even if they’re making money). Let’s fire the players on the bottom 25% of baseball teams. Right?
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p>Wrong. That approach may be business-savvy, and may allow businesses to wring more profits out of their workforce, but it completely ignores the concept that you cannot have an all-above-average workforce, that different people bring different things to the table, and that no ratings mechanism is that accurate.
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p>Genuinely unqualified teachers should be given a chance to improve, and should then be dismissed — but the process to judge them needs to be accurate at the expense of ease.
I had a job dealing with labor issues involving the NYC Dept of Ed. The NYC DOE has an unwritten policy of removing, immediately, any employee who is the subject of an accusation of this sort, or is arrested for anything, from the school building.
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p>In certain cases, after a court or an arbitrator determines either that (1) the charges are unsubstantiated; or (2) that the arrest (e.g. an arrest at a protest rally) is entirely unrelated to the employee’s job, the DOE still does not reinstate that employee. Instead, the DOE chooses to keep the worker in the “rubber room.” That’s the DOE’s decision AFTER the due process and I believe the CBA contains nothing specifically forcing the DOE to return someone to the classroom, though they must be paid full salary.
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p>It’s true that, were all of these employees at-will, the DOE could fire them based on innuendo and allegation. So in that sense it’s the union that keeps them “on the payroll.” But it’s the DOE that doesn’t let them do their jobs. So to use that as an argument against the unions is throwing the baby out with the bath water. Which, I suspect, is exactly what the anti-union folks want anyway.
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as if most teachers are bad, and in need of firing, but that contracts and unions won’t allow this. People don’t tend to adopt this attitude toward firefighters and police, even though there are always examples of individuals in those other departments who act up, sometimes egregiously, yet are still on the job. Teachers unions are a great scapegoat for kids who watch too much t.v. and eat Twinkies for breakfast. I have to admire the effectiveness of divide-and-conquer for public employee unions- Walker’s exemption of police and fire, always two of the most expensive departments, was as brilliant as it was outrageous and unfair.
I teach at a community college, so I’m not exactly the target audience for the op-ed. But I’d like to respond to a few points from Mr. Kristof’s piece.
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I thought this was going to lead to a discussion of how the tax base is there to be taxed, we just lack the will to do so. The fact is that federal income taxes are at their low point for my lifetime. Refusing to tax those at the top tier means that we are constrained in our federal aid to local schools. That means the local schools are largely constrained by property taxes. And that, in turn, means there simply isn’t money for teachers’ salaries. This is an important point, to which I will return.
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That is a meaningless metric. SAT scores measure knowledge content coming into college. But one does not become a teacher until they have completed their bachelor’s degree. By this measure, we would condemn all blacks and Hispanics because they are over-represented at the lower third of SAT scores. But by the end of a four-year program, most of the factual knowledge gap has leveled off – which indicates that many blacks and Hispanics are coming from schools that do not adequately prepare them. There is nothing scandalous about that statement. It’s been true for decades.
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Yes…and the lawyer is not drawing his/her pay from a pool of tax dollars. The lawyer’s pay is often based on “billable hours” and they are expected to bring in a certain amount of income for that salary. Teachers, on the other hand, do not bring in new customers or bill by the hour. Usually.
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It sounds good. I’m skeptical. Unfortunately, we are left to take Mr. Kristof’s word for it because he didn’t link to anything.
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Okay – here’s a study begging for expert quantitative analysis criticism. I’m not going to do it here. But once again, I’m skeptical.
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Here is a major problem. How are we to grade teachers? What objective measure exists to rank them with any validity, much less subject them to statistical analysis? And while we’re at it – $20K over a lifetime? If a person works fifty years, that averages out to $7.69 per hour. Yes, I’m dubious.
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Yes…back to the earlier point. Teacher’s salaries are tied directly to property tax rates. And historically, management has said that they can’t give raises because they are constrained. Thus – benefits. And benefits were, historically, cheaper to give than raises. It cannot now be lain at the feet of teachers that health benefits prices have risen to astronomical levels.
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p>I’m not sure which “work rules” Mr. Kristof is talking about. Most professions have fairly inflexible “work rules.”
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p>As far as it being difficult to dismiss teachers – that is true…once they are given tenure. But the point of giving tenure is that it allows a teacher to speak up publicly about mis-administration in their schools. Every complaint, fair or unfair, about a school starts either with a student or a teacher. I’ll given anyone even odds on picking which of the two generally are more effective at getting problems addressed. When one of my students has a problem with the school, they come to me. When I have a problem with my kids’ school, I go to their teacher. Take away tenure and suddenly there is an incentive for teachers not to try and improve their work conditions, or to advocate for students and the community.
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p>Yes, it also protects bad teachers. Everyone has a horror story about having a bad teacher. But regardless of how we cull the herd, the bottom ten percent will always be occupied by the bottom ten percent. In other words, there is no way to get away from having some bad teachers. Just like there is no way to get away from having some bad lawyers (who don’t usually lose their license), bad doctors (who don’t usually lose their jobs), bad mechanics (who seem to do as well as their better comrades), and whatnot.
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p>And I’ll clue you in on something, corporate America isn’t so quick to get rid of bad workers. I’ve seen my share of idiots, flops, lazy-bones, and malcontents who never seem to find the boot out the door. Teaching isn’t an anomaly in this regards. It’s simply the norm.
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Hey, I’d love to actually get paid a living wage for teaching. But Kristof doesn’t say anything about how those countries manage to entice top notch students into teaching – like limiting who can enter teacher training, paying a living stipend for teaching students, paying the education for teaching students, and the like. Note that none of that – none – is on the board for discussion in this country.
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p>And Kristof never gets to what the study he cites suggests we need to do to get better teachers: better principles (no suggestion of what that even means), improve “shabby and sometimes unsafe working conditions” (without any budgeting help?), and “the state or district would benefit from a marketing campaign promoting teaching as a profession.”
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p>Now, let me give my first-hand opinion on something that cuts to the core of Mr. Kristof’s argument. I am a professional educator. I was not only in the top third of my SAT cohort, but in the top ten percent. I graduated from Navy Nuclear Power School, and have the graduate credits in physics, chemistry, and math to prove it. I have a MA in my field, and I’ve authored several research papers and scholarly articles. Without bragging, I can say that I’m probably the kind of person Mr. Kristof would want to recruit into teaching secondary school.
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p>It ain’t gonna happen.
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p>Why? Because I worked for a very short time as a substitute teacher in a high school in New Jersey. I have nothing but respect for my teaching colleagues who earn their living at that academic level, but even if I were offered $250,000 a year, I’d not take the job. And I didn’t even have to worry about irate parents or the administration where I worked.
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p>Some people are cut out for teaching. Some aren’t. Some are made to teach kindergarten, some high school, and some college. Some aren’t. Money isn’t going to get effective teachers. It will get people interested in making more money.
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p>Teachers deserve more money because it’s a tough damn job and a damn important job. The problem isn’t that teachers get paid too much, it’s that most workers don’t get paid enough – and those that do have too much of their income set aside from adequate taxation to supply the services that our communities need.
“Yes, it also protects bad teachers. Everyone has a horror story about having a bad teacher. But regardless of how we cull the herd, the bottom ten percent will always be occupied by the bottom ten percent. In other words, there is no way to get away from having some bad teachers. Just like there is no way to get away from having some bad lawyers (who don’t usually lose their license), bad doctors (who don’t usually lose their jobs), bad mechanics (who seem to do as well as their better comrades), and whatnot.”
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p>Mr. Hart, if by “protecting” bad teachers you mean, “requires administration to do their job of supervision”, you’ll get no argument from me. That job is hideously underperformed by management, and undervalued. Principals complain that they have no time to supervise, to actually see education happening in their buildings. And it’s true they’re likely to have been called to another mind-numbing central office meeting more often than not. But there is no more important function for a principal. Not one. No paperwork is more important. No attendance at some blowhard meeting is more important.
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p>The only union function when management goes after an allegedly poor teacher is to say “Show us the evidence.” The number of times they have none, or screwed the pooch on the evidence is amazing.
I wasn’t actually looking at the mechanics of things. I was simply pointing out that the typical right-wing talking point is trying to single out the teaching profession for a level of excellence that cannot be achieved and is not even attempted elsewhere.
It is wrong to equate the “bottom ten percent” with “bad teachers”:
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p>Are the bottom 10% of students at Harvard “bad students”? They would likely blow the socks off most people at a local community college. Likewise, the bottom 10% of teachers can still all be both qualified and effective. This is the danger of the “Jack Welch” corporate mentality of “fire the bottom X% every year”. It is a fallacy that the bottom 10% are bad. And if you think they really are, then why stop at 10%? Why not fire the bottom 75% — surely that would result in even better employees, right?
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p>We should get rid of “bad” teachers — like those described in the New Yorker article — the teachers who aren’t actually teaching. But the minute we claim that the bottom 10% are bad teachers, that just means that the war on public school teachers will continue to be waged through this group.
and get rid of the .01% or whatever small percentage it is, of the really bad ones.
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p>No private company, be it union or non-union would put up with this person. Rubber room’s ‘dirty’ old man
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p>Would you honestly let this person be in a room alone with your children?
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p>I think this is a very important issue. One of the complaints that I hear in Springfield is that “teachers are paid 3x the salary of the average Springfield resident”. As if the poverty in Springfield is justification for lowering teacher salaries into the $20k range. But it is a valid concern that salaries of teachers can’t be supported by the taxpayers in the community.
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p>I think this is also related to another phenomenon I have been seeing lately — houses that are relatively sound in structure, but cannot be rehabilitated because the cost is not worth it. In other words, a house needs $100k in rehab costs but the value of the house will be maybe $90k when it is completed.
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p>Another related phenomenon is the fact that in Springfield, the cost of the education budget alone, which is $300 million, would translate to a mil rate of about $44/1000 (adding in the rest of government comes to a rate of $70/1000). The balance is made up from state aid.
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p>Now right-wing cynics would point to those things as a sign that “government costs too much”, but given a mil rate of $20/1000 as a benchmark, it is laughable to believe that the city budget is 71% waste.
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p>Instead the problem is that we have sorted our population into communities of “haves” and “have nots”, and we have done the same thing with our jobs — offshoring the jobs that used to allow the “have nots” to earn a respectable living (Springfield used to be a major manufacturing center, making things from radios to tools to even trains and automobiles). The result of this is an economy that can’t possibly work, because we have open borders between communities (which are like mini-countries with mini-economies) — so if Springfield reduced all its salaries by 70% so that they line up against a common tax rate, all the employees would find work elsewhere.
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p>This is a major issue facing our country. It manifests itself in the Springfield schools because Springfield is paying one of the lower teacher salaries in the area, and because of the difficulty of the job, is not attracting the top talent — we have more uncertified teachers than any community in the area, perhaps in the state, because even the teachers we have wind up leaving to go to other communities who pay more for less work.
Aren’t we all (biased, that is)? This is the kind of context and thoughtful analysis that you can’t get by reading the paper/s these days. Thanks for sharing your perspective and experience, Thurman.
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p>It seems absurd to think that money alone will attract “better” teachers into a profession that is being assaulted from all angles (with a handful of high-profile champions, like John Stewart, Diane Ravitch and Matt Damon, coming to the rescue).
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p>The other absurdity is that paying good teachers more will spur them to miraculous feats of teaching magic that will mitigate the effects of poverty and social trauma and close gaps in achievement.
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p>I didn’t see it, but 60 Minutes apparently did a piece on a school in Manhattan that tried paying teacher $125,000 a year on the theory that super teachers can overcome all obstacles and raise achievement in a hurry. Anthony Cody has blogged about the program, pointing out that, while the staff is doing some great stuff, the school is still being outscored by others in the district. Cody writes:
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p>It’s worth reading Cody’s whole piece and pondering the points he makes about the need for unions, tenure and better teacher evaluation systems.