Asymmetrical Information

Ah, but how do you measure results? That's the rub....

Megan,

While this sounds nice, I'm not sure it's the problem. After all, we have Ph.D.'s falling all over themselves to get $35,000 assistant professor jobs. Indeed, in many states, because teachers' unions are so politically powerful, schoolteacher salaries exceed professorial salaries. (I know this was the case in Alabama three or four years ago.)

I believe the real reason we attract low quality people to teaching at the primary and secondary level is precisely because they aren't viewed as professionals. It is widely known that the dumbest people (as measured by SAT scores and high school GPAs) on campus are in the College of Education and that the curricula for Education majors is laughably easy. In my Intro to American Government courses, the Education majors were almost universally the worst students, because they were conditioned to simply having to memorize lists and regurgitate them back to the profs. Even low-level analysis was beyond them.

Because of the power of teachers' unions, in most states competent people with subject-matter expertise literally can't get hired for teaching jobs. There are few states where someone with a subject matter Ph.D. are eligible for hire as schoolteachers: you HAVE to have the worthless "Education" degree, which emphasizes pedagogy rather than subject area competence.

Most companies are trying to do without any significant number of secretaries and admin assistants: this has stemmed largely from the wide deployment of the PC. As one industry watcher put it, "At great cost, we have converted high-paid executives into incompetent clerk-typists."

But what many companies don't understand is that a good secretary is far more than a clerk typist. She organizes the flow of information. The chaos and stress in so many organizations is in no small measure due to the virtual elimination of secretaries.

I expanded this discussion into a post at OTB and found a couple sources in so doing:

Walter Williams on teacher SATs

Dian Ravitch on teacher test scores

Poor quality teachers are a very old problem. Even when women propped up the system poor teacher quality was an issue. Beginning in the 1870s a wave of Normal schools came into existence to train teachers. Pedagogy is still a contentious subject and there are strong arguments that current general practice and the institutions which provide teacher training are of low quality.

It is not clear that professionalization of pedagogy and increasing pay would solve the problem. It makes sense that over time increased rewards would attract better staff both as teachers and trainers of teachers, but it seems it would take quite a long time to flush the system. It may also be that even better pay would not attract good teachers if they have alternatives. Teaching, and child rearing, are not as central a concern for people today. Even those brilliant women of the past might well have avoided teaching if they had had other options with equivalent pay. Pay is only part of the problem.

It's not like male teachers are any more blessed when it comes to the pay scale.

I think we should be raising teachers' salaries, and performance is a good benchmark for raises and such, it's not like we ignore whose kids are in which classes. But I think we need to focus on getting more teachers in the market in general, classes shouldn't be overfilled at 45, they should be capped at 25, with extra sections opened. I realize this may be difficult to pay for, but necessary.

The massive herding operations known as high school education right now aren't serving our kids well. We need a smaller teacher-to-student radio, teachers that are getting paid to care how their students do, and some diversity int the workplace. Teaching ain't just for women anymore.

My mother was a school teacher. At the time,it was the perfect position for her. She worked full time until she started having children. When her youngest child started going to school, she returned to teaching. It allowed her to be home when her children came home from school and to be with them when they were on vacation. There are still a lot of women and a growing number of men who are willing to take a cut in pay in order to have more time available to meet family obligations. For these people, teaching can be very good fit -- and the pay for teachers will continue to reflect this trade off.

Until other professions allow large numbers to achieve this same work/life balance, large numbers of people will find teaching a very attractive profession. (At our small CPA firm, we have 3 people who work a "reduced" work schedule. This is more than 10% of our total staff. I suspect all of these people would turn to teaching if we had not agreed to allow them more time to be home with their children.) At some point, I suspect a new equilibrium price will be reached and teachers will be paid more -- and part-time CPAs less -- than they are now. In the mean time, the teacher's union tries to artificially increase teacher pay by introducing more requirements to be "qualified" to teach. These requirements may not increase the quality of instruction, but they do reduce the pool of potential teachers and allow the union to bargain for higher pay.

Should we increase teacher pay? Not if sufficient numbers of quality people are willing to teach at the lower pay. Would higher pay attract new applicants? Of course. Some of these would be better than the average person now in the profession. For example, my brother, a double major in math and computer science, would make a great high school teacher. He'd love to teach, but he cannot support his family of seven on what a teacher makes. On the other hand, if the salary paid teachers does not take into account the value many potential teachers place on the work hours, raising teacher pay would lead to a surplus of teachers. Not a good situation if you are a tax payer.

In the long run, allowing more kids to go to the school of their choice using vouchers should quickly align teacher salaries with the market. The schools will need to compete to attract the best teachers. To do that, the schools will need to offer the most attractive combination of work environment, hours, and pay. This will lead to a number of different pay/schedule combinations that will better meet the needs of the individual teacher.

Part of the problem facing our schools (having little to do with teacher pay) is a change our society made over the last couple of generations. When I was a kid, the average class size was LARGER than today. (I remember my elementary school classes having between 30 and 35 students.) Most of those kids had intact families with stay-at-home moms. If a kid got out of line, it was a simple matter to send him or her home -- there was someone there to address the situation.

This is no longer the rule but the exception. When my children were in elementary school, most of the classes had between 25 and 30 students AND the teacher had a part-time teacher's aide to help. Most of the children came from what we used to call broken homes and in most circumstances, if a child's parent needed to be called you needed to know the work number. For several years my wife served as the room mother for all three of our children's elementary school classes -- because she was the only parent who could be relied upon to go on field trips and to make the all-important birthday and holiday treats.

The point is NOT that moms should stay home with their kids. The point is that working outside the home imposes additional burdens on the school system -- burdens we have not fully figured out how to bear. We are asking our schools to do more (in some cases, we are asking schools to go longer to reduce day care costs for parents) and this makes teaching more difficult. It also makes teaching less satisfying as a profession.

Very interesting comments about the teaching profession, however, it is apparent that none of you are teachers.

My wife is teacher and she teaches 3rd grade in a Title 1 school. My wife's classroom is her stage, where she is the producer, director and writer of a drama, tragedy and comedy that plays daily for a minimum ten hours a day (standing for seven of those hours and writing the script on the 6th day). Her current audience is comprised of students from Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas (both North and South), four major religions, hearing and learning impaired children with over 33% of the class ESL (english as a second language).

She is a teacher because she loves to teach. Teaching, like the practice of medicine, is an art. And I would suggest, that these artists are first underappreciated. My wife throughly enjoys teaching children from Ecuador. It isn't that these children are brighter or even more solicitous, rather, their families respect the profession.

Kevin,

Until one retired last year, our local high school had two very different chemistry teachers. One was boring and openly dismissive of many students, and one was interesting and responsive. One day when I was talking to the head of the social studies department, I said that it would be fascinating to take the results that the two groups of students had gotten on the departmental final exam in chemistry, and compare it with their results in the previous years science, their grades in other courses, etc. to see if having one or the other teacher made a difference in how well they did on the final. I suggested that since all grades were computerized, you should be able to do this sort of thing with all teachers.

He agreed that the results might be interesting but said that it was probably a violation of the master contract.

Two things are mentioned here: class sizes and teacher salaries.
1. Class Size: there is no evidence that this matters. Class size makes a difference if you segregate trouble-making students and put them into small classes of fellow trouble-makers, but average and above average students learn in large classes as well as in small classes. Note that class sizes of 400 or more are not uncommon at Ivy League universities.

2. Salaries: US teachers are the highest paid in the world, and the lowest qualified. The real problem is that they are not allowed to exercise any significant judgement in the classroom and are often forced to teach in ways they know are doomed to fail because the administration doesn't trust them enough to let them do their jobs. The poorly paid private school teachers who outperform the public school teachers are allowed to practice their craft without a bureacracy getting in the way and parents suing them every time they lift a finger. And their job satisfaction is higher as a result.

I'm a former teacher. I would like to get back into it after I retire. Salary is secondary to being allowed to teach without being harassed by bureaucrats, and preferably without having to go through some half-assed certification process. Under current laws, I'd be allowed to teach physics (my original major), which I haven't thought about for 20 years, but would not be allowed to teach anything related to what I've done for the last 20 years. That is sad.

I wonder if part of the reason why public school teachers are paid better than private school teachers is because of redundancy. All of us pay for public school teachers in the form of property tax, sales tax, state income tax (if applicable) and, to a lesser degree, federal income tax. For those parents who want to send their child to private school, they have to ALSO pay for those teachers' and administrators' salaries.

Perhaps in the case where the amount of total tax allocated to schools was paid directly to a private educational system rather than paid to a public system via the respective governments, teachers could actually make more money without parents spending more.

Perhaps I'm full of it, though.

I've been thinking the same thing for years.

It's also possible that the dire nursing shortage comes from the same situation. And, trust me, we're about to walk into an enormous shitstorm, nursing-wise.

It used to be that women could be moms, nurses, or teachers, so nursing and teaching tended to get tons of dedicated, intelligent, driven women who put up with the (relatively) low pay and low acclaim because there wasn't anything else to do. These days, those women can do just about anything they want to, so why put up with it?

I've worked with nurses, and I've worked with teachers, and these people (mostly women, still), are *angry*. They're tired of being taken advantage of, and they're getting out. Young people aren't even bothering to start.

The teaching and nursing professions no longer exist in that world, whether we like it or not, so something is going to have to change.

Not to be over dramatic, but we're going to need to give nurses the pay and (way more importantly) respect they deserve, or we'll die in pain and alone.

James Joyner wrote:

“It is widely known that the dumbest people (as measured by SAT scores and high school GPAs) on campus are in the College of Education and that the curricula for Education majors is laughably easy.”

My girlfriend in college was taking courses through the College of Education and she told me about an assignment she had. For one of her practicum courses she was required to teach a group of kindergartners about diversity by having them color pictures of children holding hands in a circle. Each child was allowed to pick as many crayons as they wanted to color the picture with the goal being to get the children to use many different colors.

One little boy however stubbornly only used one color for all of the children – green. When she asked him why he colored all of the children green he said “ because they got sick from the germies from holding hands with each other.”

;)

The main problem in education is the same problem that exists in the field of health care: too many people involved in the process. The worth of human labor has risen with respect to other productive assets so much over the last half-century that labor-intensive fields (like education and health care) are being placed under immense pressure relative to areas such as manufacturing and transportation. We can't afford all of what we would like to have, so something has to give. In health care, we aren't willing to compromise on quality, so the price is going through the roof. In education, we aren't willing to pay what it would take, so the quality is in the basement. As long as we adhere to the Thomas Chippendale/Paul Revere methodology in these two fields, that situation is only going to get worse. Until we achieve the "industrialization" of these fields, it *can't* get any better.

Public money drives out private money.

The pay of private school teachers today has nothing to do with their potential salaries under a privatized system because they are two completely different markets. The mass market - presumably where the money is, or would be - is currently monopolized by the government system. The private schools just niche market their way around the edges.

Education under a free market would be just like anything else in the price system: too few teachers and their salary goes up, then either cost of education goes up and the amount demanded goes down, or more teachers flood the system and salaries go return to normal.

The massive free (at point-of-sale) school system throws everything out of whack efficiency-wise. We can't look for accurate prices in the current system, because it doesn't reflect supply and demand.

A good book on the economic disaster of govt. schooling is Education and the State by E. G. West.

When I got to college, I was full of aspirations that as a high school teacher, I could single-handedly work miracles in our education system. My students would be the brightest, most enlightened kids on the planet. So I tacked onto my studies the extra classwork required to get a teaching certificate. This meant that in some of my classes I would be interacting with other students were also interested in teaching.

What I found was so discouraging that I quit the program after three semesters (I have a high tolerence for pain). Basically the majority of students in the teaching program were women and they were the type of women for whom college wasn't about learning but finding a husband and teaching wasn't about teaching but a lifestyle that would permit long summer vacations with the kids (Breakfast Club anyone?).

These were not people with whom you could strike up a conversation regarding Stalin's criminalisation of the peasantry. Heck if you weren't constantly inserting "cute and fluffy" into your conversation you might as well have come from the moon.

I quite the teaching program because I was horrified at the thought that these would be my peers throughout my career. I also realized that the sad state of affairs in school management (the board, principal, etc) would never allow me to go outside the box to teach kids beyond the piss-poor watered down education that I received in public school.

All that being said, I totally agree with Kling -- the quality of teachers sucks. I do have a thought on how to fix it though: What if states outsourced teaching to private companies while still maintaining control of the school facilities and standardized curriculum requirements?

Teaching could be just like the accounting, IT and legal consulting businesses where private partnerships are formed to manage human capital. In fact, I don't see why McKinsey or Anderson wouldn't want to run a teaching practice. They could offer the positions on a rotating basis to those early in their careers (as a proving ground) or to mid-level professionals who are looking to take a few years to either give back or slow down.

Just as law firms today have pro-bono practices, I don't see why professional teaching firms couldn't exist to provide educators a career track with many options.

Anyway, I blogged on this back in December...didn't anyone read it? :)

Timmy,

One of the things I've often noted is that there are still a surprisingly high number of really good teachers out there--I'd guess maybe 20-25% of the total number of teachers. They somehow manage to exist despite a system that seems almost intended to drive out bright, creative, enthusiastic people.

I would also make a distinction between elementary or special ed teachers on the one hand and junior high and high school teachers on the other. Clearly, in the first case, there is a need for pedagogical expertise. Even the dumbest college graduate knows how to read at a 6th grade level, count to 100, and say his ABC's; the challenge is to impart those skills. Once the coursework turns to more sophisticated math, science, history, and social science sujects, I'd contend that the emphasis needs to be placed on subject matter expertise.

I think raising teacher salaries would decrease educational quality. IMO, the problems in the educational system stem not from teacher salary or class size, but that we as a society seem to expect so much more from the school system that just teaching our kids the basics. In many cases, the school is providing the only two balenced meals the kid will get, the school is trying to shape behavior and social norms, the school is primary babysitter, etc. In a sense, many parents have outsourced raising their kids to the government. An across the board pay raise would only lead those parents to expect more from the system.

Not to be contrary, but despite all the rhetoric I think we basically have the educational system that we want and deserve. My experience as an immigrant is that Americans are far more confused and divided about what they want from schools than other people. Many other nations focus much more single-mindedly on measurable progress in areas like mathematics and languages -- and I think when highly-educated and politically active elites talk about failing schools, they'd like to see more progress made in these areas. But when you talk to ordinary parents, they are horrified at the idea that their middle-schoolers should learn calculus. They have squishy goals like "teachers that really love my child" and "encouraging my child's creativity" and "giving my child the opportunity to play on a winning football team" (all quotes from friends). In an abstract way they support "high standards", but not if those standards would result in negative consequences for their child -- and they're highly willing to sue to make sure this doesn't happen. Given that parents totally can't agree on what they want, how are teachers supposed to make it happen? So the way we handle the issue is that rich neighborhoods self-select for people who want good math education, middle neighborhoods self-select for people who want good local football teams, and poor neighborhoods self-select for people who want their kids to be able to stay home from school a lot to babysit their younger siblings. That's not a teacher problem, it's arguably not a problem at all, so paying teachers better will have no effect.

Not to pile on to the teachers, but no one here is arguing that becoming a teacher is hard. Perhaps if teachers were required to master certain technical skills (I use this loosely to distinguish it from pedagogical skills), it would raise the bar and thereby raise both the respect level and the impetus to increase teacher salaries. It's unfortunate, but true -- it seems that one always knows a college peer who was not so bright, but heading into teaching of some sort.

When a doctor walks in the room, you think "That person went to a lot of school and took a lot of tests to know and do everything he does." and in your mind, his pay is justified. When a teacher walks in the room, you think "There's the guy that slacked off in college and got an education degree. Now he gets paid peanuts to put up with the crap that other people's kids throw at him. Better you than me, pal! Hey, at least you get three months off."

-- the job seems to require incredible amounts of patience and th

hi all,
i am a teacher, in a private school and i have listened with interest to what you have said. i just want to make five points and then a radical claim:

first, though i agree with reasons given for why teachers are willing to take lower pay in a private sector job, i would add: in a private school, one is allowed to teach the way one wants to, WITHOUT teaching to a standardized test witha standardized curriculum. check out temin's paper on that issue--he gets the ambiance right i think. for those of you who feel that standardized testing is a panacea for working out who is a good teacher or not--"horsefeathers."

second, that one needs a phd to teach well in a high school. i am sorry to tell you this, but: i have met teachers in high school who have phd's and they teach very well. than again, i have met just as many with phd's who bored their students senseless, because all they could do was a lecture/question format or a limited socratic method (i use it, as one amongst a number of methods of instruction). a phd is no guarantee of being able to teach well. having gone through a university system, many of them are ill-prepared to actually teach teenagers or any one else for that matter. haven't you noticed how poor pedagogy is at many institutions of higher learning. there is a reason for that!

third, i attended those ed courses, and i have to agree, in many ways they are a total waste of time and space. however, there is a lot of valuable information in those courses, especially in the hands on, application type courses. whether you get it or not, i found, depends on two things: whether you are willing to do your own research/work and whether the teacher you have is interested, caring, knowledgeable, and passionate about what they are doing (hey, those are the qualities we want in our high school teachers!).

fourth, the lower you go down the age line towards kindergarten, the more you really need to know pedagogy--as in knowing modes of instruction presented by mentors and/or ed courses. you do not need a phd to be able to write or spell effectively, but you really need pedagogy to get those skills over to a 6 year old in an affirming way (so specific ed classes can be very helpful here).

finally, as for the low wages, i think that will take care of itself--we are seeing large numbers of retirements, and an increase in demand due to the baby boomlet. the public sector is already attempting to adjust: not so much with large % pay increases but with signing bonuses. this is a first step. as the gap between demand and supply increases, wages will rise. evidence of this can be seen in the doomed attempts to raise the credentials of teachers who want to teach in the public sector (new york basically ignores the mandates). the private sector already is adjusting--not just with appreciation nights and bagels, but with higher wages and benefits. catholic schools appear to be an exception. (fly in the ointment: classes getting bigger: i am sorry i respectfully disagree with the claim that size doesn't matter. it does. my experience --and that of other teachers i talk to--suggests that larger classes hurt learning--crowd control issues and time per student issues).

having said this, i am cognizant of Temin's paper, where he argues that wages are likely to be stagnant or fall because he thinks demand for teachers will fall (due to lack of funds due to effects of bush tax cuts and future constraints on spending--hence the larger class sizes). i think this claim is a bit sweeping, and if folks are interested i think i can put together a post on that issue.

so, radical claim:
stop thinking of teachers as professionals per se. think of them as being craftsfolk. teaching is a craft. and the way to do teaching is to teach. get people out there teaching for a year or two with a mentor. after that, send them to ed classes to get the meta-instruction and exposure to the latest research in their area of pedagogy (employers paying for it will increase the attractiveness of teaching). that is what new york has stumbled onto.

With all you Americans complaining about your public schools, I, as an Australian, cannot understand why they are so popular.

Australians complain far less about our public schools, whether this is an indication of fewer problems or just less concern I don't know. And yet we have up to 50% of students attending private or catholic schools.

Although I don't know any figures from the USA, all the impressions I get is that only a small minority of Americans attend private schools.

If you guys don't like your government schools, why don't you leave?

Patrick --

Some do. I'm generalizing to an incredible extent, but people in the US tend to see public schools as the one place where national values are inculcated into children (be they diversity, patriotism, whatever).

Patrick, there are two problems with sending your kids to a private school in the USA. One is that you have to pay double - you pay taxes to send other people's kids to the public school and you also pay the full cost of the private school. Do those catholic and private schools in Oz get some sort of subsidy??? Or maybe Aussie teachers work for less pay, maybe you don't have so many bogus regulations raising the cost of running the schools, maybe Aussie parents are more willing to sacrifice for their kids. Maybe Aussie public schools are even worse than American, so obviously lousy that no one who can afford an alternative at all will send their kids their. OTOH, maybe you are mistaken and it's just 50% of your rich neighbors that are sending their kids to private school.

The other thing is that, because the market for private education is rather small in the USA, the choices are limited. There are a few schools for the super-rich. There are the catholic schools, which give a pretty good education, but along with it there's a frequently successful attempt at indoctrination - not in the religion itself, but in attitudes which are often too conformist and too trusting of authority. There are various fundamentalist protestant schools, all dirt poor and hardly the place to learn anything outside of the the King James Bible. In the smaller communities, that's it... In the big cities, you'll have a few other choices (Montessori, for instance), but there's not a whole lot for the parents that simply want a good, conventional, non-sectarian education and aren't millionaires.

As a site with (I think) a free-market readership, I'm surprised that this discussion has gone the way it has.

First, I think the notion that property taxes should be levied to fund the education of others' children is preposterous on its face. It's the worst kind of collectivism.

Second, shouldn't it bother more people that the government, through the public schools, essentially tells children what to think?

Kevin Drum wrote:

> Ah, but how do you measure results? That's the rub....

Plus, as Megan will know from the Org. Behaviour classes in her MBA, when you set up a assessment system based on quantitative measurement, activities that aren't measured in the assessment system get neglected in favor of those that are measured.

So, in some cases, best to go with a qualitative assessment system instead, so those hard-to-quantify-intangibles don't get left out.

You can't control what you don't measure, and you can't reward for what you don't measure either.

But how are you going to do your qualitative measurement? The only people who observe the teacher day to day aren't qualified to judge. Parents may be more worrie about whether little Brittany got a good grade than whether little Brittany learned what she is supposed to.

There are basic things that we really care about, like reading and math, that aren't hard to test. Others are harder, but not that hard. If you tested students at the beginning and end of the year, and paid teachers based on a weighted average of the improvement in their classes, you could mitigate some of the problems. I think qualitative measures would just lead to the teachers abandonning teaching in favor of sucking up to whoever writes their evaluation.

By the same token, Jane, teachers (in Florida, at least) are abandoning normal classroom operations (for the most part) in favor of training students to pass the quantitative evaluations.

This argues favorably for testing the teachers rather than their output. Competency testing should come first. The trouble with testing how good a teacher one is (conditional on that one is in fact competent to teach in the first place) how to go about testing that, without testing who is being taught? Like it or not, one's effectiveness as a teacher is constrained by how well-prepared the incoming class is.

The above was rambling and incoherent due to caffeine deficiency syndrome. Deal with it.

Troutgirl, have you worked in education? That sounds an awful lot like the sort of thing that my wife concluded while working in administration in the public school system (although she was actually a grant manager, she was nominally in the curriculum department). The stories of teachers being harassed, sued, or even assaulted for giving children poor grades were frankly astounding.

I can assure you that no child of mine - should I have any - will ever darken the door of any public school as long as I'm breathing. If I eat Alpo and live in a van down by the river, so be it.

(An aside: Becky, you are exactly right. My wife and I are both medical students, and you can't imagine how many girls we've heard discuss possibly going into nursing that we've warned off. I've seen what life in a private hospital is like for an RN, and it's pure hell. It's bad enough in this teaching hospital, with armies of LPN's and nurse's aides underneath them.)

Bob: "First, I think the notion that property taxes should be levied to fund the education of others' children is preposterous on its face. It's the worst kind of collectivism."

Bob, I agree. However, when I rant about this, my wife kindly reminds me of one major problem with complete privatization of education. Some people are ignorant and irresponsible.

When people pay property tax, they pay it as a part of their house payment, and it gets escrowed and paid to the local government on their behalf. When people pay sales tax, they pay it as a part of the purchase price of the good/service and the reseller/provider pays it to the government on their behalf. That money ends up in the schools because the individuals have no choice but to pay it.

If you permitted people to stop paying those taxes and instead pay for their child's education directly to a private school system, most would. Some wouldn't. Instead, they would spend said money $5 at a time on smokes and groceries and when the school bill came, it wouldn't get paid.

I personally have a problem denying a child an education as a result of the parent's ignorance or indigence. After all, a more educated society tends to be more civilized. However, I also have a problem paying for a lesser quality education of another person's child. I struggle with a solution. Any thoughts?

I think Troutgirl and Klug have come closest to identifying the true problems.
If you think about it, I think it is clear that nearly every salary is determined by the intersection of four factors: amount of education required to get the job (why doctors get paid more than janitors), the natural talent required to do the job (why actors/athletes get paid more than autoworkers), the danger or disgust factor in the job (why fireman and garbagemen get paid more than bus drivers), and the scope of effect of the position (why a CEO gets paid more than a staffer).
The only other factor is the union influence, in which people who unite can create an artificial monopoly of their services to increase demand (why mill workers get paid more than salesclerks).
I didn't include the union influence in the first four factors because it is unpredictable and inconsistent.
So raising the salary by itself won't do much. Particularly, as Jane said, if it is only by seniority rather than merit.
Judging merit is problematic, yes. But the exact same problem is true in most professions. Who is the best cake decorator or flower arranger? In peacetime, how do you judge the best soldier? Yet somehow, these (and many, many other) fields manage to have merit promotions...
The most effective way to improve our education system would be to eliminate Teacher's Unions and let the market work on the situation. Then Supply/Demand would bring about a better situation for teachers, which would result in better situations for students.
Hey, what if we made being a teacher like joining the military? You have basic teaching skills taught in the same manner as basic combat skills...you sign up for a number of years for a set salary...the best teachers (the ones with a passion for teaching) are groomed to become careerists, with a generous retirement coming at 30 years (a nice less-tangible benefit to staying in for the long haul, rather than just choosing to be a teacher cuz you can get paid more than working at McDs for about the same committment), which would allow good teachers to then draw retirement pay while going to teach at schools that can't pay as much....
You'd be surprised how many retired military choose to go into teaching because their retirement pay allows them to choose locations and situations in which pay is too low to attract quality teaching talent.
And I'm now officially rambling. I'll stop here.

I think the problem is not that teachers as a whole are underpaid, it is that bad teachers are overpaid and that good teachers are underpaid. My SO works at a school where one of the worst teachers is the highest paid. He antagonizes the students, the other teachers don't want to work with him, and the guidance counselors are always having to transfer kids out of his classes. However, because he has an advanced degree and 20+ years of experience he makes tens of thousands more than most of the rest of the teachers. The principal seems to busy with paperwork to notice.
I think the solution is to give more power to the principals. Let them have more say in the hiring and firing of teachers and how much different teachers get paid. Then hold the principals accountable so that they get out of their offices and into the classrooms where they can monitor what is going on.

I don't know what teachers' salaries are like in the US, but at least in Canada I have trouble buying the argument that they are greatly underpaid, particularly given the low barriers to entry, the vacation time and the traditionally generous retirement and other benefits. Saskatchewan teachers with a basic four year degree would top out in the neighbourhood of $60k/year, which may not be huge bucks but isn't bad, especially considering the cost of living in Sask. is pretty low. Maybe our teachers are better paid than yours?

Regarding property taxes and education:
If you accept, as I do, that educating our children to a certain level benefits society as a whole, then it shouldn't be a big stretch to accepting that it be funded by society as a whole through taxes. It doesn't have to be property taxes necessarily but, as Jeff Utech notes, leaving it up to individual parents to pay has problems of its own. This isn't intended as a defence of the current public school system, just of the premise that public money of some sort has a role.

"I personally have a problem denying a child an education as a result of the parent's ignorance or indigence."

Problem is, the existing schools are notoriously bad at teaching the children of neglectful and inattentive parents. Administrators and teachers admit this; they tend to blame their failures on such parents. Since those are exactly the ones that would fail to send their children to school if it were not free and mandatory, the downside to completely privatizing education probably won't be nearly as large as one might think.

"After all, a more educated society tends to be more civilized."

Correlation does not imply causation. In a more civilized society, the return on one's education investment increases, increasing the incentive to education oneself and one's kids, leading to a positive correlation between degree of technological advancement and average educational level.

Some people claim that universal education is needed to generate good citizens and ensure the survival of democracy. This of course assumes that the public education system can be trusted to properly define what is meant by a good citizen. We must remember that good citizens will (a) all agree with each other on very few issues, (b) share very few behavioral traits, (c) sometimes vehemently disagree with the people that tend to run public school systems and/or write the curricula.

When evaluating the desirability of keeping public schools, there is one relevant point that I rarely hear mentioned. As students found themselves needing a more extensive education over time, the school system could have responded one of two ways:

1. Shorten breaks, speed up the curriculum, and generally impart a more extensive education in the same amount of time

2. Keep the pace of education the same and keep the massively long breaks, forcing their students to spend proportionately longer amounts of time in school and ultimately condemning them to ever-lengthening periods of childhood.

The public school system went with option 2. A completely private, competitive educational market seems more likely to go with option 1. That factor alone makes me conclude that getting rid of public schools is a good idea.

As for class size, arbitrarily shrinking them is not necessarily the way to go. Reduced class sizes mean more teachers. Given 100 kids, three good teachers will teach them better than four mediocre ones; assuming that teachers are properly priced, you might come out ahead going with the three good teachers.

James,

When you say:

> you HAVE to have the worthless "Education" degree, which
> emphasizes pedagogy rather than subject area competence

you are mis-stating the problem. The problem isn't that prospective teachers have to study pedagogy (where does the idea that subject area competence automatically implies the ability to convey that information in a useful manner for beginners come from, anyway?) Rather, it's that so much of pedagogy is taken over by crap fads, socialist idealogues, etc. My wife's experience in her ed classes was all too typical. Basically, from many of the profs the real take-away message was, "Your experience will conform to my theory--if you want to pass, that is!"

"2. Salaries: US teachers are the highest paid in the world, and the lowest qualified."

Well, since teaching is pretty hard to trade internationally, I'd imagine cross-country salary comparisions miss the point. One possibility, which I can't find a thing about on google, is looking at the relative location of teacher salaries in the income distribution of countries.....

Jane wrote:

"But how are you going to do your qualitative measurement? The only people who observe the teacher day to day aren't qualified to judge. Parents may be more worried about whether little Brittany got a good grade than whether little Brittany learned what she is supposed to."

"There are basic things that we really care about, like reading and math, that aren't hard to test. Others are harder, but not that hard. If you tested students at the beginning and end of the year, and paid teachers based on a weighted average of the improvement in their classes, you could mitigate some of the problems."

Some, but you'd still run the risk of drill-and-kill and teaching to the tests. The more tests, the more who fail the tests, and you have the problem that some bright kids aren't good at taking tests. That's the unintended consequence of the more quantitative assessment scheme you advocate.

We've all been educated, and so bring our own prejudices. Personally, I was taught via drill-and-kill in a system with national testing at 11, 16 and 18. Good for transferring content, but not good for building confidence across the population (e.g. we had a test at 11 where 70% - yep, 70% - of the testtakers "failed").

Wheras I see in Americans, who don't have a mandatory national or even statewide standardized tests, more confidence in their abilities. That confidence may sometimes be misplaced, but it is endearing and admirable. And I think part of that confidence is the legacy of Dewey's liberal, student-centered educational philosophy, rather than the sort-the-sheep-from-the-goats philosophy that is more the case in Europe & Asia.

So, if you think you can find a quantitative measure of "this teacher has nurtured their students rather than wrecking their confidence by trying to hammer the facts they'll be testing on thru their skulls" I'd be all in favour, but I'm not sure you can.

I think like healthcare, there will always be dissatisfaction with education provision. Elite universities are the gatekeepers to getting into the economic/cultural elite, and everyone wants their kid to get into an elite university; but not everyone can. So there will be dissatisfaction 'cos not everyone can get out of education what they want.

I did calculus at age 14, and did second-order differential equations and group theory before leaving high school. Was being able to differentiate equations 5 years before your average US student worth the Fear Of God placed into me by the priests and corporal punishment? Nah. God knows what it did to the egos of my less able classmates.

> I think qualitative measures would just lead to the teachers abandonning teaching in favor of sucking up to whoever writes their evaluation.

And that doesn't happen in the private sector, of course. No sirree.

Tom

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