July 20, 2008
TECHNOS QUARTERLY Spring 2002 Vol. 11 No. 1
Commentary: A Modest Proposal for Greatly Increasing Teacher Compensation and Fixing Everything Else Wrong with Public Education
By J. Ogden Hamilton
Market forces are extremely powerful, and I think it's possible to use them to drive up teacher salaries. Like most issues revolving around teacher salaries, my idea won't be universally accepted — indeed, some in education will regard it with greater distaste than the topic of the original “A Modest Proposal,” which involved a recipe for cooking children (a topic that, now that I think about it, may not be completely irrelevant to this essay).
For years we've been wringing our hands about the failure of urban schools, and some educators have come to believe that the key to meeting this challenge may be to deploy our best teachers in our most challenging schools. Inner city schools would pay a significant salary premium - say, $10,000 to $20,000 per year - to induce the best teachers to abandon their jobs in suburbia for schools where children carry weapons and security forces escort faculty members to their cars.
I doubt that 10 or 20 thousand pre-tax dollars are enough to induce most teachers to risk that change on their own. However, if an entire school were re-staffed at one time as part of a high-profile, federally funded program to concentrate only the best teachers at the school, a $20,000 annual-compensation premium might do the trick.
Of
course, to borrow from the language of physics, for every action there is
an equal and opposite reaction. In this case, the only way the federal government
could persuade all the best teachers to move downtown is to raid the suburban
school faculties. Thus, suburban schools, not their urban counterparts, would
find themselves having to certify anyone with a warm body in order to staff
the classrooms.
To borrow more language from physics, that's not a stable state. Unlike our inner cities, our suburbs have the family income and property tax base to respond to the situation. First, of course, they'd raise hell about it. But if political efforts to return urban schools to their former disadvantaged state didn't succeed, taxes would be raised and teacher salaries would go up until the suburbanites felt assured that their schools were no longer operating at the same kind of deficit the urban schools once suffered.
If the suburban schools bid teacher salaries up to whatever it takes to attract today's very best teachers, I'd guess the average salary would rise substantially. If the popular thinking among educators about market forces is correct, we'd attract better qualified, more capable people into teaching, with the concomitant salutary effect on student learning.
If you think in terms of market forces, the idea amounts to using federal money to create a shortage of excellent teachers among those who can pay for what they need, at the same time alleviating the shortage among those who cannot pay for what they need.
In our scenario, Uncle Sam would be supporting the price of teachers instead of soybeans.
If you think in terms of government programs, the idea can be seen as a variant of the price-support program that has been a staple of U.S. agriculture policy. If the price of a crop falls too low for the nation's well-being, the federal government buys up enough of the crop to drive the price up to an acceptable level. (In a singularly appropriate twist, it then distributes the purchases to subsidize school lunches.) In our scenario, Uncle Sam would be supporting the price of teachers instead of soybeans.
A hard-nosed private-sector CEO would spot at least half a dozen places my plan could be expected to go off the tracks if it were ever to be implemented. Most of them would concern the absence of consensus about what our schools should accomplish and how we should measure student performance, and thereby figure out who the best teachers really are.
But as a dreamer whose knowledge of the U.S. education system is at least sophomoric, I can countenance the admittedly murky belief that although we may not be able to measure teacher excellence, we know it when we see it. I see a way to bypass the ambiguities surrounding objectives and performance measures and test the idea that a cadre of excellent teachers may be the key to breaking the cycle of ignorance and failure among our poorest citizens.
Today, thanks largely to more than a decade of patient work by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, there is a rapidly growing nucleus of more than 10,000 National Board-certified teachers. If you add to this nucleus the nation's teachers-of-the-year, Milken Award recipients, McAuliffe Fellows and the like, some localities may have enough consensus excellent teachers that we could reasonably aspire to staff one whole experimental urban school — or, to give the idea a real chance, one full K-12 sequence of schools that would serve the students who would be the subjects of the experiment.
Wouldn't you just love to see what would happen if we did that? For better or worse, the results would tell us a lot.
If the experiment did work — if, over time, there were a striking improvement in learning outcomes and a reduction in the concomitants of ignorance and poverty - the nation could move forward with confidence, knowing that the huge cost of scaling such a program up to the national level would be earned back many times over in the reduced cost of ignorance and poverty.
To be sure, there would be hot debate about which elements of the success were most important, exactly what the causal factors were, how and where to scale the program up, and how to pay for that. But the debate would be about success.
And if the experiment didn't work, the failure would at least tend to confirm the lurking suspicion that the public schools are not the appropriate institution for addressing all the ills of the most impoverished and least able people in our society. Then we could stop throwing the public schools into the breach and cursing them when they come away bruised, bloodied, and defeated.
Either way, I'd like to know. Wouldn't you?
Illustration by Gene Harrawood for TECHNOS.
J.
Ogden Hamilton is executive director of Pi Lambda Theta < www.pilambda.org
>, international honor society and professional association in education.
A graduate of the Johns Hopkins University and the Stanford Graduate School
of Business, he has owned and operated both service and manufacturing businesses.
Dr. Hamilton's TQ Commentary essay reflects his views and not those of PLT
or its members.