Teacher Pay: Are Education Degrees Surefire Path to Mediocrity?
Line up all the millionaires in South Dakota, and some poor soul (sob sob) will come in last. The same goes for teacher salaries from state to state. Being last, as South Dakota teachers are paywise, doesn’t mean that there’s a grave injustice. Why? There will logically always be a last place which can never be satisfied even with runaway inflation.
In his article “Why We Shouldn’t Raise Teacher Pay” DC public policy analyst Jason Richwine has found that “Even without the tenure obstacle, putting the best teachers in the classroom requires more than raising teacher pay. In fact, just that could drive down teacher quality”:
Even without the tenure obstacle, putting the best teachers in the classroom is a more challenging problem than many reformers will admit. One of the most common reformist prescriptions is raising teacher pay to attract stronger applicants. The logic seems simple, even obvious. But raising teacher pay will not work. In fact, it could be counter-productive. The reason lies not just with the well-known difficulty in predicting who will be a good teacher, but also with the entrenched hiring system of public schools.
Richwine suggests that university education schools have an indwelling expectation of mediocrity that promotes their own weak “education” degrees as the hiring benchmark. Even Albert Einstein wouldn’t be able to teach high school physics, because lacking education school credentials. As he says,
education—the degree held by around half of public school teachers—is among the least challenging fields of study. As measures of ability go, a degree in education cannot be equated with a degree in, say, computer science or engineering. That’s part of the reason why teachers typically receive a lower wage both before they enter teaching and after they leave for another field. Combine decent wages with a generous benefits package—guaranteed pensions, retiree health care, and job security—and teacher compensation is, on average, above market levels.
Richwine argues that the best teachers have already been screened out at hiring time, as “principals and superintendents who do the 
hiring are themselves the product of standard teacher training—attending a large, middling university and majoring in education.” He cites economist Dale Ballou in “Do Public Schools Hire the Best Applicants?” who argues that
Despite a surplus of candidates for most teaching jobs, a strong academic record does little for an applicants job prospects. This does not appear to result from lukewarm interest on the part of such applicants or choosiness about the positions they accept. Administrators’ lack of interest in these candidates may reflect the weakness of competitive pressures in public education. Policies intended to improve teacher quality need to consider incentives on both the demand and supply sides of the market.
It seems that simply tweaking public education with more money will make a bad system even worse. How can systemic change be brought about? Should we consider making the secretary of education at both the state and federal levels elected offices so that a firebrand might upset the heavily defended status quo? Should governors who really want to lead abolish education colleges and give more rewards to knowledge-based teachers rather that to pedagogy-oriented pleasers?
The debate needs to get out of the hands of unionists and Establishment Republicans and Democrats who think that promising more pay will result in more votes come election time. Richwine offers insights that even elected (“I’ll just show up at meetings”) school board members won’t take the time to consider:
Public school systems need fundamental changes in how they operate to improve teacher quality, and abolishing tenure just scratches the surface. The creeping emphasis on credentials must be reversed. School administrators must be willing to hire promising applicants who never received the standard education-school training. Objective evaluation systems must be adopted and refined. All parties must become comfortable with a process that will increase teacher turnover.
And, finally, the public must maintain sober expectations about the value of high-quality teachers, understanding that their effectiveness is naturally limited by the abilities and family situations of the students themselves. To effect all these changes, pundits and policymakers must move beyond their “pay teachers more” mantra. The idea is attractive for its simplicity, but in reality it is no solution at all.
