The problem is that most people don’t want to pay for a system that actually attempts to measure performance because it would cost a lot to administer. It’s not enough to just measure student progress as that’s akin to rating doctors based on the health of their patients, or soldiers based on the outcome of a war.
Sam, you know better than this. There is no point in arguing what wages someone “should” make, or what they “deserve”. The fact is that if the wages, benefits, and working environments were good enough, you would be able to attract and retain more than enough qualified people. Unfortunately, that is not the case given that nearly half of new teachers leave the profession within 5 years. Those numbers are even higher in urban areas most in need of good teachers. If unions were engaged in rent-seeking to the degree you speculate they are, then why do you see such high levels of voluntary turnover and burnout?
That said, they do make less than people in comparable professions:
I think most can agree that it’s in the public interest to monitor these things, but that doesn’t mean you need to vilify one side. More importantly, those in charge of the public coffers giveth and taketh away. There is no reason to assume the political contributions can overwhelm public opinion in the long run. Unions cannot force the public to pay them whatever wages they want anymore than any other person whose bread is buttered by government (eg. doctors, soldiers, firemen, etc.).
There are a number of false assumptions here. First, that the bottom 10% are the same year to year, that those people are not fired (or quit), and that the remaining teachers could absorb that many more students without any problems.
They education system does effectively filter out the least productive in a general sense. This is why districts and states without tenure, and with weak/no unions generally don’t fire more teachers.
Seniority is used generally because it’s much cheaper than doing rigorous evaluations, and training.
brickbacon did a good job with the rest of the post, but I thought I’d address this bit:
This is a laughable claim. Yes, there’s about that many instructional hours in a school year, but that’s not even close to the sum total of a teacher’s work. There’s about another dozen institutional days on top of instruction, and it’s a rare teacher that just punches out at 3:30 and heads home. Lesson plans don’t just fall out of the sky (even the laziest Read From the Textbook instructor has to prepare), then there’s marking assignments and writing tests, and extracurriculars. You don’t get paid to coach the basketball team, debate team, etc. - and while these aren’t requirements, teachers who don’t have some extra value don’t find themselves getting contracts.
Yes, you get summers “off”, but that’s time you get to catch up on your plans and research new pedagogy. That it’s flexible time is nice, but it’s not just 8 weeks of kick back and catch some rays. So there’s 1280 hours “on the clock”, but a teacher that only works that many hours would never survive.
I don’t disagree with your overall point, but that part must vary. The head boys’ basketball coach in the district I live in gets something like 17% of his teaching salary for coaching. (If the coach isn’t a teacher, then it’s negotiable, but teachers all get fixed percentages of their salaries for coaching/advising positions. Some of the positions don’t get a whole lot, but it’s not zero.)
Yeah, I live in the same province as Sam, so I’m just addressing things as they are here. As noted, teacher salaries are noticeably higher here than in the US, but it’s with an expectation that you put a little more than just the 8:00-3:30.
Sam Stone makes an excellent case about the bottom 10% of teachers and the kind of damage they inflict on students and parents. As a public high school counselor for 12 years I can say cases like this play themselves out at public schools across the country. A savvy principal will figure out a way to move the crappy teachers out of their schools, but the crappy teachers just go to another school and hinder student learning there.
The effort to connect student performance to teacher pay is complicated and scares many teachers, even the really good ones. A proper evaluation system, thouroughly enforced, should be good enough to weed out the bad teachers. It is a simple thing to identify a bad teacher. But the unions that impeded schools from properly using the old evaluation systems are still in place and they will work to protect the bad teachers from any new evaluation system.
While I like that I have a union…it is difficult to work with the bad teachers. Teacher unions must balance the need to protect and advocate for the majority of teachers along with the need to send the crappy teachers out of the classroom.
Having been married to a teacher for years, I can attest to the fact that she and every teacher I know through her works about 14 hours a day for five days a week. She and her colleagues had duties to perform on campus from seven until 3:30 (excluding a half hour “lunch” which is really a working lunch) then she came home and graded and planned and called/emailed parents from about 4 until 10 or 11, excluding a half hour “dinner” which was really a working dinner…
This is not to mention the fact that teaching is a job where, for the hours you’re on campus at least, you’re “on” literally the entire time. There is zero downtime. This has been shown to be highly unusual even in the most stressful professional workplaces. (This was in a previous thread on teaching but I can’t find the link unfortunately.) It’s like a high-paced high-impact day-trading job or something–but with a whole lot of BS and unclear performance standards added in.
My brother, and mother were teachers, my SO is a teacher, and I used to work in a school. I don’t think this is correct for the vast majority of teachers. The typical day for a middle school teacher is 7:45 to 4:30 with a half hour break for lunch. There are two periods of planning per day and at least one after school meeting each week. A week and a half off for Christmas and one week at Easter for Spring Break. The health benefits are very good and the retirement is generous. The pay is well above average.
The problem with teachers unions are that like all unions they are required to represent everyone who comes to them. Since the most of the good teachers do not need representation they end up representing the bad ones. Having bad teachers in a school creates a burden for the other teachers. At the school my brother taught at there was a teacher known for being the worst in the school. His students hated him and all the other teachers resented him. He was always trying to get other teachers to give him lessons plans and never did anymore work than required. He had been teaching over twenty years and had a masters degree. As a result he was the highest paid teacher in the school.
All the new teachers saw him and learned that once you had tenure, the process for getting rid of you was so onerous that it probably would never be attempted and if attempted was unlikely to be succesful. They learned there was no punishment for doing poorly and no reward for extra hard work. Absent the work rules the unions negotiated for, he could have been fired and his pay given to those who were better at teaching.
That’s an utterly disingenuous cite. The teachers in question were effectively suspended with pay while awaiting disciplinary hearings (just like every cop or firefighter who’s allegedly messed up on the job).
The amount paid out to them over the course of a year represents less than one thousandth of the NYC school’s operating budget.
What I described is the norm for teachers I have known. It could have something to do with demographics–the teachers I’ve know have all taught in very low socio-economic neighborhoods. Maybe it’s easier at other schools? Probably not as much calling of parents I guess.
It’s not important whether the pay is above average or below average or whatever. It’s important whether the pay is sufficient to recruit and keep good workers given the conditions of the job.
Perhaps the school made a mistake in not firing the guy before he got tenure.
Every job requires performance monitoring, and other industries have figured out how to do it. And many industries are much more opaque and difficult to measure than teaching, which has plenty of rating systems available. One mistake we’ve made in evaluating teachers is to attempt to do it with student test scores, but that’s fraught with all kinds of problems. The reason we keep going back to ‘objective’ measures like that, however, is because the unions generally won’t tolerate subjective analysis.
If I were doing this, I’d forget about figuring out exactly how to evaluate teachers - I’d figure out a way to evaluate schools, and I’d tie the principal’s pay to the performance of the school, then let he or she determine which teachers to retain and which ones to fire.
And before you say that this would just punish the schools in the worst areas, the evaluation could easily include year-over-year performance, or adjusted measures to group schools into similar socio-economic areas.
As an engineer, I get a performance evaluation every year. It doesn’t involve hard measures like test performances or error rates or lines of code written or anything like that. The evaluation is done by my immediate manager who simply makes a judgment call regarding what I’ve done compared to my peers, whether I’m easy to work with, if I’m a pain in the ass in meetings, whatever. Then he’ll meet with his managers and share his observations, and they’ll compare his to other members of his and other teams to come up with a final score for me. If my evaluation is good enough, I’ll get bonus pay. If it’s average, I’ll get merit pay. If it’s below average, I’ll be put on a performance management project to improve my skills/attitude, whatever. If it’s really bad, I’ll be terminated. This system works despite the fact that knowing how productive an engineer is can be a hell of a lot more difficult than determining who is or isn’t a good teacher.
Teachers act like knowing who the good and bad ones are is a big mystery that can’t be solved. In fact, I’ll bet you know who the good teachers in your school are, and who the bad ones are. And I’ll bet your administrators know even more about that than you do. They’re capable of figuring out that a teacher is performing well despite having low test scores because that teacher is taking on the most difficult students. They’re aware of the ones that are putting in extra time. They know which ones generate the most parent complaints and the most student complaints. And they’d know even more if they knew they had the power to get rid of the bad ones and reward the good ones, and that their own evaluations would be based in part on how good they are at figuring that out.
You might be able to attract them, but if they get into the system and realize that their lot in life is to be a substitute teacher or be given all the crap work for years and years because of the seniority system, you might not retain them.
In addition, the best people tend to seek out careers that reward merit. You see this in other white-color unionized professions as well, such as nursing. Nursing pays an extremely good salary around here - way higher than the average for that level of education. But it’s hard to retain good nurses because they chafe at a system that allows a slacker to sit and read a book for 8 hours without consequences while the conscientious ones pick up their workload - and are not rewarded for it. Eventually, the good nurses leave. Or, if there are cutbacks, the young, freshly educated, highly motivated nurses are fired regardless of how good they are, and the old slackers remain.
In any effective HR system, cutbacks in the economy or the business will result in a filtering process that removes the weakest employees. Then when the business or economy comes back, new workers are hired. This process of constantly filtering out the worst and retaining the best leads to high-performance work forces. If instead you always fire based on seniority, that doesn’t happen. And this is critical, because the top 20% of employees generate 80% of the value, and the bottom 20% create 80% of the problems. Any system that doesn’t seek to find employees that fit in the top 20% and remove the employees at the bottom will never create a high-performing work force.
Unfortunately, a seniority-based system does exactly the opposite. It discourages high performance and rewards mediocrity. The good teachers wind up doing the work of the bad ones along with their own. Receiving a class full of poorly-prepared students because the last teacher didn’t do his job just puts more burden on the teachers who actually care. They eventually burn out and join the slackers, or they leave for a job that actually rewards them. But the lazy ones? They’ve found nirvana. You can’t get them out of the system with a crowbar once they have tenure.
How many teachers with 10 years of experience leave? How many leave once they have tenure? You’re making my point for me - being a new teacher sucks when you’re hired into a seniority-based system.
I posted the actual stats from the Bureau of Labor Statistics last time we had this debate, and it quite clearly shows that teachers do just as well or better than any other white color professional jobs with similar education levels. Search for it if you’d like.
Unfortunately, this is what happens when you politicize an occupation by making it public. The teachers unions feel free to vilify anyone who doesn’t agree that teachers are the most hard-working, underpaid, critical people in the economy who deserve much more than they’re getting. Since it’s a public debate, it’s only fair for the other side to point out the untruths of that, and the inefficiencies in the public education system. That’s not ‘vilifying’ anyone - that’s simply engaging in the debate.
No, but they can certainly influence politicians and sway the balance. For example, charter schools are supported by close to 70% of the population, and that percentage is even higher in poor inner-city areas. And yet, even politicians who have spoken in favor of them in the past have caved and removed their support after being pressured by the teacher’s unions.
And something tells me that if I said you shouldn’t worry about big money from corporations influencing politics because ultimately the people can’t be fooled, you’d call me silly.
No, the unions can’t force the people to pay them ‘whatever they want’. They can, however, force them to pay a lot more than they otherwise would in a free market. Look at what the public sector unions have done to California, and what the big, politically connected unions have done to Detroit. In fact, I thought the argument for unions was that they DO get better pay and working conditions for the workers. Are you saying now that this isn’t the case?
I said what I did because there have been studies showing exactly that.
I originally read about this in a paper by Eric Hanushek from Stanford, who is the author of the piece above. Here’s another cite from the UK which finds the same thing.
Here’s a brief from the World Bank which also comes to a similar conclusion.
What they’ve all found is that the teacher’s unions are peddling nonsense. Specifically, there is little correlation between spending and performance. There’s very little correlation between class sizes and performance. The one area where teachers can receive extra pay is by having a master’s degree, but there’s little evidence that that improves performance either.
What DOES improve performance is putting together a system that rewards good teachers and gets rid of the bad ones. And that’s the one thing the unions won’t tolerate. But hey, lowering class sizes lowers teacher workload, and increasing funding raises teacher pay. So that’s what they claim helps education, but there’s no real evidence for it.
Cite?
Well, it’s certainly true that not trying to improve your workforce is easier than actually improving your workforce. That’s hardly an argument for doing so. If simply setting up seniority rules was the most cost-effective way to operate, you’d see that as the norm in private white-color occupations. In fact, you never see that unless a union is involved. The reason is because the bottom 10% of employees cost a company a fortune, and the top 10% provide most of the productivity. So companies are constantly trying to weed out the bottom and seed the top. Not doing so is far more expensive that just saying “the hell with it.”
I’m actually for this, believe it or not, though of course the concept of “school performance” is just as easily politicized as the concept of “teacher performance.”
Teachers keep making the claim that they work SO many unpaid hours that looking at hours worked isn’t fair. This of course ignores the fact that ALL salaried professionals are expected to do as much work as the job takes, and that they do, even if it cuts into their ‘off hours’.
Fortunately, the Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks this stuff, and they clearly show that the claim that teachers work more unpaid hours than other professionals is complete BS. In particular, it found that teachers worked fewer hours on the weekends and evenings than did other white-color professionals. My wife is a health-care manager, and she works at least two to four hours every night to keep caught up, and is generally in the office about an hour before her ‘workday’ starts, and usually doesn’t leave for at least an hour afterwards. I often have to work late hours when on a deadline, and my job often involves travel on short notice when I’m basically giving up ALL my free time for days or weeks on end, with no additional pay.
Funny, but I don’t get summers ‘off’, and yet I also have to catch up on new methodologies. In the computer field, change happens a lot faster than in teaching. I’m constantly hitting the books to learn what’s new. And so do other professionals. Many of them have to recertify and write exams every few years, and they have to keep up with their field, and they don’t get summers off to do it.
The other funny thing is that I know a few teachers, and I don’t see a lot of them ‘hitting the books’ in the summer. I do, however, see them out at the lake. So I question just how much of those summers teachers spend dutifully reading the literature and preparing lesson plans. I’m sure the best ones do - but the bottom 10%? That’s who we’re talking about here. Just how much diligence do you think they’re doing in the summer?
Also, teachers get a number of ‘professional development days’ that are specifically for that purpose. AND they get seven ‘personal leave’ days to do whatever they want. AND they get two weeks off at Christmas and a week at Easter. No one in my field gets anything like that. Engineers with less than 10 years of experience get 3 weeks of vacation time per year. Junior people get 2 weeks. If you’ve got more than 10 years, you get 4 weeks, and that’s where it’s capped. Junior people like technicians cap out at 3 weeks. And yet, I daresay that engineers have to do more ‘keeping up with the literature’ and learning new skills than teachers do.
By the way, don’t teachers get a lot of non-class time during their workday to work on lesson plans and mark tests and such? How many hours a week do teachers actually spend in the classroom? I believe the average is around 20-25 hours. That leaves a significant amount of time for grading and lesson planning.
There are teacher’s unions because nobody gave a crap about teachers. Individual teachers care plenty about the students. Parents, tax payers, and school boards don’t care as much as they should about students so if teachers want proper pay, working conditions, and job security they have no choice but to unionize. It wouldn’t hurt for the unions to demonstrate concern for students, but that isn’t their function.
Anything in the public sphere will be politicized. However, there are some pretty hard metrics available for evaluating schools. Graduation rates, college acceptance, percentage of students who graduate on time, SAT scores of graduates, you name it. In Canada, the Fraser Institute puts out a national ‘school report card’ that tracks a number of measures of the schools, including year-over-year performance. You can read about it here and see the report cards of the various schools in Canada.
Of course, the best way to evaluate them would be to allow the market to do it. That’s the point with charter schools - let the money follow the students, then let the schools compete for the money. Then let them choose their own HR practices and teaching methods, and let the market decide.
But failing that, you can still measure schools, and there are other ways to allow for school choice. Here in Canada, parents are free to send their kids to any public school - it doesn’t have to be in their own district. We chose to send our kid to a school that’s halfway across the city rather than to our ‘designated’ neighborhood school, because the neighborhood school sucks. It does cost us more because we don’t get the subsidized transportation we’d have if our kid went to the local school, but we pay the extra for the better school. If schools lose enough students, they shut down. Our ‘inner city’ schools are mostly gone now because the parents and students fled them, choosing instead to bus their kids to better schools.
Unfortunately, we still have the public unions and their unwillingness to allow merit pay or the firing of poor teachers. But at least parents have more flexibility in avoiding them.
I call BS on this too. If parents don’t care about their kids education now, it’s because they’ve been sold a bill of goods that the government will make sure their kids are properly educated, so they defer to the school. Back in the day when education was the parent’s responsibility or the local community’s responsibility, teachers were lauded and the parents far more involved.
I’ve seen how unions agitate the work force and constantly propagandize to keep the workers radicalized. They need to do that to maintain their support and the justification for their dues. When my wife was a nurse, we got special ‘bulletins’ from the union on a regular basis. Said bulletins were nothing but horror stories of management malfeasance and claims of how badly the nurses were being treated.
I’m sure teachers get the same thing. And of course, when your pay and benefits are tied to the outcome of elections, it politicizes the whole field, and teachers are encouraged to complain constantly about their poor pay and benefits, and to make claims that the only way to improve the education of children is to give teachers more money and lower their workload. And I don’t really blame them - they’re just responding to the incentives baked into the education system. Everyone wants to improve their lot, and if the only way to do that is to complain and picket and organize and rally and support certain politicians, then that’s what they’re going to do. It’s the system that’s broken, not the teachers.
Teachers may have been lauded on occasion, but they weren’t paid enough to live. They also lived in constant fear of losing their jobs for offending the child of an influential parent, or teaching science insted of religion.
I suppose I would say that you and I have very different definitions of surviving as a teacher if yours includes people who do not, in fact, teach students.