Reforming the Teaching Salary System

PJM: When Good Teaching = Higher Salaries A post about efforts to reform the District of Columbia school district by instituting merit pay. THE WHIG has previously posted on the subject of the need of differential pay to improve teacher quality.

Of all the reforms that could be made within the government school system, changing the structure of teacher pay has the biggest potential to dramatically improve the system.

Why does the system attract low-performing teachers and repel high-performing ones? It’s primarily because the teacher salary system is designed to ensure this result. Teacher pay is based almost entirely on two factors: years of experience and the possession of teaching certificates and credentials. A large body of empirical evidence establishes that neither of these has much relationship to actual teacher quality. Teacher pay bears no effective connection to teacher performance.

Meanwhile, in all the other professions, high performers are paid better and low performers are paid worse.Think about what that means for people who are deciding whether to become teachers. Those who would make great teachers will consistently be paid better in any other profession besides teaching, while those who would make bad teachers will consistently be paid better as teachers than in any other profession.

A Harvard economist ran the numbers historically for the past half-century or so, and found that the decline in teacher quality didn’t track with the rise of opportunities for women in other professions. It did, however, track closely with the unionization of the teaching profession — which is another way of saying that it tracked with the imposition of the current pay system.

There are few issues more important than teacher quality, and there is no serious way of improving teacher quality very much until we deal with the pay system. It’s that simple.