Good Idea - Bad Execution!

The Blue Ribbon Commission on Public Education recently came out with a non-controversial proposal: to raise teacher salaries across the board for Arkansas K-12 teachers by approximately $3,000. This echoes a previous proposal made by governor Mike Huckabee and is the type of idea that everyone supports, republicans and democrats alike.

Let me state my controversial thesis upfront: Across-the-board raises for teachers are a wrong-headed approach, and this strategy of teacher compensation actually harms kids.

Now you will ask: how in the world can providing more equitable salaries for some of our most deserving civil servants -- teachers -- harm children? Well, I’ll explain.

We live in a market based, capitalistic economy. This is not my preference. In fact, I am a political liberal who would prefer to live in a social democracy as compared to an unfettered, capitalistic democracy such as ours. I would prefer more government intervention and more pay equity for various occupations so that there are fewer rich and fewer poor.

My own preferences, however, are irrelevant; we don’t live in a social democracy (such as Sweden or Denmark). We live in the capitalistic USA where jobs and compensation are governed by the free market.

What does that mean for teachers?

It means that our teacher pay system, which currently is not governed by the free market, puts administrators, principals, and kids at risk of not having the most talented people in the profession. This is because teacher salaries are allocated under a more equal, but less market driven salary scheme. As a result, we pay roughly the same salaries to teachers regardless of their discipline, math, science, or English. Pay differences for teachers are based on seniority and education level.

So, in terms of teacher pay, the discipline does not matter-but it certainly matters in the outside market place. A talented young person with a degree in math or science has different choices in the free labor market than does the talented person with an English degree.

For whatever reason, the market place places a higher value on math or science degrees than it does on degrees in English or social studies. But when administrators attempt to hire talented individuals, they must offer the same salaries to talented aspiring math teachers than they do to talented aspiring social studies teachers. Consequently, schools can’t attract the best math teachers, because math majors have other choices that will pay them higher wages.

We know that most teachers don’t teach for the money, but they are not oblivious to money either. A young math major who may otherwise have pursued teaching might be steered away when she realizes the financial cost of entering the field.

It sounds simple right? We compensate teachers differentially based on their marketability just like folks in other fields are paid. Of course it is not that simple. The immediate reaction is: "so you’re saying that a math teacher is more valuable and better than an English teacher?"

The answer is yes and no. Yes, the marketplace values a math teacher over an English teacher. No, that does not make one teacher more inherently valuable, more valuable as a person, or even more valuable as a teacher.

Economically valuable and inherently valuable do not mean the same things. Take, for example, the contrast between a boxer and a nurse. The job of a boxer is to injure people while a nurse’s job is to mend injuries. Most people would agree that what the nurse does is more valuable than what the boxer does. But the market place does not agree with us. While a nurse might make $30,000 per year, a boxer might make $10 million per fight!

Thus, the human values we place on an occupation are not the same as the economic values attached by the marketplace. If we continue to mix these up in the field of teaching, we do so at our peril.

What do we need to do? We need a more flexible compensation structure that allows principals and administrators to hire teachers at marketplace rates. For example, if a school principal is considering a talented science graduate who wants to teach chemistry, she should be free to pay this person $45,000 as a starting salary regardless of the starting salaries paid to other teachers. Why? Because it will benefit the kids.

The goal of any teaching compensation scheme should be to attract and retain good teachers. There are many question marks about how kids learn, but we KNOW that good teachers have a major impact on student learning. We can’t necessarily identify good teachers based on education level or experience, but we know a good teacher when we see one in the classroom.

We need to find ways to attract and retain these teachers. That should be the goal of any teacher compensation scheme: not to pay all teachers the same amount. In an ideal world, equal pay would be great. But that’s not the world in which we live.