Invest In Your Child’s Future: Pay Teachers More
From the debates in Wisconsin and elsewhere about public sector unions, you might get the impression that we’re going bust because teachers are overpaid.
That’s a pernicious fallacy. A basic educational challenge is not that teachers are raking it in, but that they are underpaid. If we want to compete with other countries, and chip away at poverty across America, then we need to pay teachers more so as to attract better people into the profession.
Until a few decades ago, employment discrimination perversely strengthened our teaching force. Brilliant women became elementary school teachers, because better jobs weren’t open to them. It was profoundly unfair, but the discrimination did benefit America’s children.
These days, brilliant women become surgeons and investment bankers — and 47 percent of America’s kindergarten through 12th-grade teachers come from the bottom one-third of their college classes (as measured by SAT scores). The figure is from a study by McKinsey & Company, “Closing the Talent Gap.”
Changes in relative pay have reinforced the problem. In 1970, in New York City, a newly minted teacher at a public school earned about $2,000 less in salary than a starting lawyer at a prominent law firm. These days the lawyer takes home, including bonus, $115,000 more than the teacher, the McKinsey study found.
We all understand intuitively the difference a great teacher makes. I think of Juanita Trantina, who left my fifth-grade class intoxicated with excitement for learning and fascinated by the current events she spoke about. You probably have a Miss Trantina in your own past.
One Los Angeles study found that having a teacher from the 25 percent most effective group of teachers for four years in a row would be enough to eliminate the black-white achievement gap.
Recent scholarship suggests that good teachers, even kindergarten teachers, increase their students’ earnings many years later. Eric A. Hanushek of Stanford University found that an excellent teacher (one a standard deviation better than average, or better than 84 percent of teachers) raises each student’s lifetime earnings by $20,000. If there are 20 students in the class, that is an extra $400,000 generated, compared with a teacher who is merely average.
A teacher better than 93 percent of other teachers would add $640,000 to lifetime pay of a class of 20, the study found.
Look, I’m not a fan of teachers’ unions. They used their clout to gain job security more than pay, thus making the field safe for low achievers. Teaching work rules are often inflexible, benefits are generous relative to salaries, and it is difficult or impossible to dismiss teachers who are ineffective.
But none of this means that teachers are overpaid. And if governments nibble away at pensions and reduce job security, then they must pay more in wages to stay even.
Moreover, part of compensation is public esteem. When governors mock teachers as lazy, avaricious incompetents, they demean the profession and make it harder to attract the best and brightest. We should be elevating teachers, not throwing darts at them.
Consider three other countries renowned for their educational performance: Singapore, South Korea and Finland. In each country, teachers are drawn from the top third of their cohort, are hugely respected and are paid well (although that’s less true in Finland). In South Korea and Singapore, teachers on average earn more than lawyers and engineers, the McKinsey study found.
“We’re not going to get better teachers unless we pay them more,” notes Amy Wilkins of the Education Trust, an education reform organization. Likewise, Jeanne Allen of the Center for Education Reform says, “We’re the first people to say, throw them $100,000, throw them whatever it takes.”
Both Ms. Wilkins and Ms. Allen add in the next breath that pay should be for performance, with more rigorous evaluation. That makes sense to me.
Starting teacher pay, which now averages $39,000, would have to rise to $65,000 to fill most new teaching positions in high-needs schools with graduates from the top third of their classes, the McKinsey study found. That would be a bargain.
Indeed, it makes sense to cut corners elsewhere to boost teacher salaries. Research suggests that students would benefit from a tradeoff of better teachers but worse teacher-student ratios. Thus there are growing calls for a Japanese model of larger classes, but with outstanding, respected, well-paid teachers.
Teaching is unusual among the professions in that it pays poorly but has strong union protections and lockstep wage increases. It’s a factory model of compensation, and critics are right to fault it. But the bottom line is that we should pay teachers more, not less — and that politicians who falsely lambaste teachers as greedy are simply making it more difficult to attract the kind of above-average teachers our above-average children deserve.
By: Nicholas Kristof, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, March 12, 2011
The “Have-Nots” Sink While The “Haves” Smirk
The “race to the bottom” used to refer to the competition with low-cost foreign labor that threatened to undermine the wages of U.S. workers struggling in the same industries.
Now it refers to the competition between private- and public-sector workers to see who can become poorer faster.
In essence, that’s what the fight in Wisconsin is about. It’s also what last weekend’s Niagara Square rally with 250 union supporters was about.
But who’s going to foot the bill for the standard of living they want to protect? Middle-class taxpayers are tapped out. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker made that point, as did Gov. Andrew Cuomo when calling New York “functionally bankrupt.”
In other words, the money is gone.
But as private-sector workers turn on public employees, and non-union workers castigate their unionized brethren, the internecine warfare distracts from a more fundamental question: Where did the money go?
In a nutshell, it went up. Not in smoke, though it could have, as far as the middle class is concerned. Rather, it went to the top of the economic pyramid.
A Center on Budget and Policy Priorities review last year found that the gap between the top 1 percent and those in the middle and at the bottom “more than tripled between 1979 and 2007.” (If the wealthy lost any relative ground during the Great Recession, they’ve more than made up for it during the recovery.)
Similarly, the Economic Policy Institute — in its State of Working America report last month — found that average annual income growth from 2000 to 2007 went entirely to those in the top 10 percent, while “income for the bottom 90 percent actually declined.”
And what of those government workers lavishly compensated with our tax dollars?
A review by the center last week found that, when controlling for education, job tenure and other variables, “public workers are paid 4 to 11 percent less than private-sector workers.” A separate study by the institute found that state and local government workers make $2,001 less on average, even when benefits are included.
Yet the fight rages on among those in the middle of the pyramid.
Meanwhile, in its annual Executive Excess report, the Institute for Policy Studies calculated that CEOs of major firms made 263 times the average compensation of American workers in 2009.
SEIU Local 1199 Vice President Todd Hobler, who was at the Niagara Square rally, says such inequity gets accepted because the media suggest “that the goal of all people is to become rich, and that those who have fortunes deserve it and have earned it.”
But are corporate bosses 263 times smarter than you are? Do they work 263 times harder?
Yet despite the reams of data, the issue of inequity gets little traction in this country. Republicans philosophically don’t believe in greater income equality unless it occurs by accident, while Democrats have no beliefs at all that they’re willing to fight for.
The result is that anyone who mentions the income gap is accused of “class warfare,” which brings to mind a quote by billionaire Warren Buffett, whose Berkshire Hathaway owns The Buffalo News, that “my class is winning.”
But apparently working-class Americans are OK with that. We’ll dump teachers, close libraries and let parks go to seed because we can’t afford to pay more. Yet we’ll never ask, “Who can?” That’s not what we do.
Washington extended the Bush tax cuts for the top 2 percent; New York will let its surtax on millionaires expire. Both capitals are responding to working-class voters who apparently don’t want to “redistribute” wealth and are satisfied fighting one another for the scraps.
After all, we’re not Tunisians. We’re not Egyptians.
We’re Americans.
By: Rod Watson, News Columnist-BuffaloNews.com, March 3, 2011
No Glory For Governors Trying To Do The Right Fiscal Thing
If you want to get national attention as a governor these days, don’t try to be innovative about solving the problems you were elected to deal with – in education, transportation and health care. No, if you want ink and television time, just cut and cut and cut some more.
Almost no one in the national media is noticing governors who say the reasonable thing: that state budget deficits, caused largely by drops in revenue in the economic downturn, can’t be solved by cuts or tax increases alone.
There is nothing courageous about an ideological governor hacking away at programs that partisans of his philosophy, including campaign contributors, want eliminated. That’s staying in your comfort zone.
The brave ones are governors such as Jerry Brown in California, Dan Malloy in Connecticut, Pat Quinn in Illinois, Mark Dayton in Minnesota and Neil Abercrombie in Hawaii. They are declaring that you have to cut programs, even when your own side likes them, and raise taxes, which nobody likes much at all. Rhode Island’s Lincoln Chafee has warned of possible tax increases too.
Indeed, to the extent that Quinn received any national press coverage, he got pilloried in conservative outlets in January when he signed tax hikes that included a temporary increase in Illinois’ individual income tax rate from 3 percent to 5 percent.
Despite all the commotion around whether the federal government will shut down, the clamor in the states may be even more important than what’s happening in Washington, which is missing in action on the moment’s most vital fiscal question.
What states are doing to ease their fiscal agonies will only slow down our fragile economic recovery, and may stop it altogether. The last thing we need right now are state and local governments draining jobs and money from the economy, yet that is what they are being forced to do.
As the last three monthly reports from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed, an economy that created a net 317,000 private-sector jobs lost 70,000 state and local government jobs. Cutbacks are dead weight on the recovery.
In a more rational political climate, President Obama would have resurrected the lovely old Republican idea of federal revenue sharing. Washington should have continued replenishing state budgets for two more years, until we were certain the economic storms had passed. Instead, anything that might be called “stimulus” – “S” is now a scarlet letter in politics – was rejected out of hand.
The federal government could also help the states by picking up more of their Medicaid costs. In the long run, health-care spending should be a responsibility of the national government – as it is in almost every other wealthy democracy. A national commitment would end the specter of states forcing already financially beleaguered citizens off the health insurance rolls.
Such ideas are off the table because the current rage is not for figuring out how to make government work better – a cause that once united governors of both parties – but for cutting back even its most basic and popular functions.
Consider the new budget Gov. Scott Walker announced in Wisconsin on Tuesday. Among other things, he proposed cutting state aid to schools by $834 million over the next two years, a 7.9 percent reduction.
On top of that, Walker would make it harder for localities and school districts to make up for the shortfall by limiting their ability to raise property taxes. This isn’t about education reform. It’s about forcing larger class sizes, layoffs, reductions in extracurricular activities or cuts in teacher pay and benefits. But, hey, if it’s labeled “government,” let’s slash it.
What’s truly amazing, as Stateline.org reported recently, is the number of governors who are cutting taxes at the same time they are eviscerating programs. A particularly dramatic case is Florida’s Republican Gov. Rick Scott. He faces a $3.5 billion budget gap – and is pushing for $2 billion in corporate and property tax cuts.
Historically, times of fiscal stress forced states to make useful economies in programs that didn’t work or were not essential. But what’s happening in so many places now is a reckless rush to gut the parts of government that all but the most extreme libertarians support – and that truly deserve to be seen (one thinks of education and programs for poor children) as investments in the future.
And those governors doing the hard work trying to balance cutbacks and tax increases get ignored, because there’s nothing sexy about being responsible.
By: E. J Dionne, Op-Ed Columnist, The Washington Post, March 3, 2011
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