Arne Duncan Wants to Throw More Public Funds at the Failing American Public School System by Starting Teachers at $60,000 Per Year; 18 States Have Changed Teacher Tenure Laws This Year
More than $500 billion is spent annually on public education in the United States (state and local spending for kindergarten through 12th grade education more than doubled since 1990). According to New America Foundation: "The federal government contributes about 8 percent of direct funding for elementary and secondary schools nationally (through the U.S. Department of Education, the federal government provides more than $40 billion a year on primary and secondary education programs). The two biggest federal programs are No Child Left Behind Title I Grants to local school districts ($14.5 billion in fiscal year 2009) and IDEA Special Education State Grants ($11.5 billion in fiscal year 2009). States rely primarily on income and sales taxes to fund elementary and secondary education. Property taxes support most of the funding that local government provides for education." The nation’s public schools employ more than 6 million workers, and instructional staff receive about $295 billion in salary and benefits, according to federal estimates ... All told, personnel costs—the salaries and benefits that sustain the K-12 workforce—consume about 80 percent of school districts' budgets, and many policymakers are determined to drive those expenses down. Yet reducing those costs is not as simple as chopping away at the state or local education budget, or eliminating programs or services. State pension systems, which typically cover teachers, generally are protected by state constitutions and other laws, and courts have made it difficult to reduce benefits for current enrollees. And teachers’ salary schedules and health-care costs are often protected by hard-fought collective bargaining agreements at the local level. There’s a lot of money at stake. [Sean Cavanagh, Personnel costs prove tough to contain, Education Week, January 12, 2011]
The collective bargaining laws have given enormous political power to the public sector unions. No matter what the real intent of these laws, by any objective standard they are not in the public interest. They represent an expression of the selfish self-interest of public sector union organizers and, indirectly, the interest of the politicians who enact them in order to curry favor with the union's political operatives. The existence of public sector collective bargaining makes public employees 'super citizens' and relegates the rest of the public to second class status. Rising public discontent has focused on the public employee, while public employees increasingly take a hostile attitude toward the public. Why is no one pointing out that unions are supposed to be for the people against the corporation, not for the people against the people? - Beyond Public Sector Unionism: A Better Way, Public Service Research Foundation
Roughly $1 out of every $8 Maryland pays in pension benefits will go to Montgomery County teachers in fiscal 2011, as promised increases in salary and benefits have almost tripled teacher pension costs in the past decade. Ballooning teacher pensions will cost Maryland roughly $924 million in fiscal 2011, up 165% from $348 million in 2002. Maryland's total pension contributions -- including state employees, police, judges, lawmakers and teachers -- will add up to $1.4 billion for fiscal 2011, with Montgomery teachers getting roughly $181 million of that. - Montgomery teacher pensions cost Md. $181 million, Examiner.com, November 23, 2010
In Frederick County Maryland, the starting salary for a teacher is $40,706 - $47,228 per year. The average salary for Frederick County public school teachers is $67,150 (note that teachers work 10-months vs. 12 months); the average salary for Frederick County public workers is $45,344; the median income for county employees in fiscal 2010 was $47,090, $6,500 more than the median pay for other county residents older than 16 (the average wage for private sector workers in Frederick County Maryland is $43,620). [Source]
What is the average teacher salary in each state?
Salaries for Faculty of State Universities
Should the Starting Salary for a Teacher be $60,000?
September 1, 2011The Lookout - How would the nation's school system be different if teachers were paid like engineers?
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan proposed last month that a significant boost in teacher salaries could transform public schools for the better by luring the country's brightest college graduates into the profession.
Teachers should be paid a starting salary of $60,000, Duncan said, with the opportunity to make up to $150,000 a year. That's higher than the salaries of most high school principals, who are generally paid much more than teachers.
The median salary among all middle school teachers, for example, not just those starting out in the profession, is around $52,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Would paying teachers 2 to 3 times more money mean that students would learn more? We don't know. But smaller raises of 20 percent or less have been ineffective, and one New York City school that embraced much higher pay has so far underperformed on state tests.
"It will cost money—and—given the current political climate with the nation wrestling with debt and deficits—I am sure some people will immediately say that we can't afford it without even looking at how to redirect the money we are already spending—and mis-spending," Duncan said at the at a conference sponsored by the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards.
Duncan's office would not offer further details to The Lookout about how a school district could redirect money to teachers' salaries or whether Duncan had any specific plans to encourage such sweeping salary changes.
But Duncan's idea has been tried on a smaller scale, which helps us to try to predict what changes a radical increase in teacher salaries nationwide might have on education.
Zeke Vanderhoek, the founder and principal of the Equity Project, a charter school in New York City, decided to pay all of his middle school teachers $125,000 salaries because of research that shows a very good teacher can lift kids' test scores and close achievement gaps. Teachers at the school can earn up to $25,000 more in bonuses, depending on how well their students do.
The Equity Project had to make sacrifices in order to devote more resources to teacher salaries. Its average class is larger than at other city public schools, at about 30 students, and teachers are required to serve in administrative roles so that Vanderhoek doesn't have to hire assistant principals. He also doesn't have to hire any substitute teachers: full-time teachers cover for each other's absences. The teachers work longer days and have only three weeks off during the summer, in contrast to the months-long break many teachers receive.
Nor are the teachers in a union, because Vanderhoek says he must be able to fire teachers who aren't lifting kids' test scores.
Duncan hinted at the same tradeoff in his speech.
"If teachers are to be treated and compensated as the true professionals they are, the profession will need to shift away from an industrial-era blue-collar model of compensation to rewarding effectiveness and performance," he said. (Most public school teachers are in a union.)
It is too early to judge the Equity Project, but it has not yet worked any miracles on its high-need student population. Gotham Schools reported that for the second year in a row, the school's students did not outperform kids in regular schools in the district on state tests.
There is not a lot of research that shows the effect of higher pay on teacher performance, retention and satisfaction. This is in part because public school teachers are compensated fairly uniformly around the country.
"It's very hard to find a lot of variety in order to do research on the effect of different ways of paying teachers," said Neal McCluskey, the associate director of the Center for Educational Freedom at the libertarian Cato Institute, in an interview with The Lookout.
A few studies of programs that give teachers cash bonuses for lifting their students' test scores showed that those programs didn't work. Offering up to $15,000 to Nashville teachers did not lift students' performance, and a similar program in New York City was also shown to be a bust.
But looking at bonuses and other forms of merit pay isn't a good way to gauge the success of an across-the-board teacher salary hike, said Brian Lewis, the interim chief executive of the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards. Teachers are paid so little in base salary that many high-achieving college graduates are not drawn to the field in the first place, Lewis told The Lookout. These students know they would be giving up significant lifetime earnings by becoming a teacher rather than entering a more lucrative profession.
In Norway and other countries where students do significantly better than Americans on math tests, teachers are recruited from the top third of college graduates. In the United States, only 23 percent of teachers come from the top third of their class, according to a McKinsey study. (Critics of teacher-focused reforms point out that there is significantly more child poverty in the United States than in most of the countries that perform better on standardized math tests.)
"We have a fundamental misalignment from what we're expecting of people who go into this career and the baseline salaries that we are willing to provide them," Lewis said.
But it's possible that teachers would rather have more job security than a higher salary. When Michelle Rhee controlled Washington D.C.'s schools, she offered up to $130,000 salaries to teachers if they would give up their union's tenure and seniority rules and agree to be paid based on their students' test scores. She could not get the teachers union to accept her offer.
Rhee eventually negotiated a slightly watered-down version of her plan, but she resigned only a few months later when the ouster of Mayor Adrian Fenty was widely seen as a rejection of her education policies.
See: The Truth About Public Education in the U.S.: Public School Systems Are Overfunded and Public School Employees Are Overcompensated18 States Have Changed Their Teacher Tenure Laws This Year
At the Save our Schools rally, actor Matt Damon slammed standardized testing and what he described as the influence of "corporate reformers" on the education system. His speech brought a lot of media attention to a relatively small rally attended by a few thousand people. After he spoke, Damon defended teacher tenure in a testy exchange with a reporter from Reason TV, who asked Damon if he thought tenure made people less likely to work hard. - Duncan tried to stop Matt Damon teacher speech, The Lookout, August 24, 2011
There is ample evidence that the growth of teacher unions was a factor in the decline of the quality of public education. The dramatic rise in teacher union membership and collective bargaining in public education began in 1962. By 1976 teacher union membership had more than doubled. The decline in SAT scores began in 1963 and continued throughout this period. Yet all of the studies on the state of public education in America and the challenges it faces in the future completely ignore the question of the union role in the decline of quality. - Beyond Public Sector Unionism: A Better Way, Public Service Research Foundation
The Lookout - Lawmakers in 18 states have passed bills changing the tenure laws for teachers in public schools this year, according to a new report from the Education Commission of the States.
Idaho politicians eliminated tenure for the state's teachers altogether this year, arguing that it makes it too difficult to fire ineffective teachers. (Education Week points out that Idaho voters will have the chance to repeal that law in 2012.)
In most states, tenure is usually granted after three years, and it means administrators must point to specific reasons for dismissal at a hearing if they want to fire a tenured teacher.
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