The author then proposes an interesting idea, which is to increase teacher starting pay from an average of $65,000 to $150,000. I think the author believes that this will somehow change the relationship between teacher unions and the educational system. I don't know. Maybe it will, and maybe it won't.
Anyway, I thought it would be interesting to look at the evidence for increasing teacher wages on student achievement.
The basic argument for why increasing salaries will increase student achievement is that with higher salaries school districts will be able to attract (on average) higher quality people into the teaching profession. Better teachers will lead to better student outcomes.
This is an economics blog, so here is a diagram.
There are two papers that I jumped to when thinking about this question. The first is a 1995 JHR paper by Ballou & Podgursky. The other is a 2000 REStat paper by Loeb & Page. Both are a little old, so if someone has some good recent papers, let me know.
Ballou & Podgursky model three things: the decision to train for a teaching career in college, the decision to seek a teaching career after college, and the decision to continue teaching each year. Their insight is that increasing salaries for teachers keeps teachers already in the profession in for longer. This can actually crowd out new teachers from entering the profession. This is bad if you want to increase overall teacher quality in the profession, since the old (bad?) teachers stick around for longer. The other insight is that it can take a long time (decades?) for the old to be replaced by the new better teachers, and that the size of the change depends on how well school districts are able or want to pick the best talent.
Loeb & Page look empirically at what happens when salaries increase for teachers. They use state-level panel data and look at teacher wages relative to other professions teachers could enter. They find that increasing teacher salaries by 10% today reduces high school dropout rates somewhere between 3% and 6% (percent not percentage points) 10 years later.
This gets us closer to the original question. It's hard to say exactly what effect going from $65,000 to $150,000 (we are talking about a 131% increase not a 10% increase) will have on achievement. You can't take that 3-6% number too literally, since at some point the model would predict a negative dropout rate, which is impossible, but the point is that increasing teacher salaries to attract better talent does seem to have an effect.
To conclude, I am not exactly sure how big of an effect going from salaries of $65,000 to $150,000 would produce. It would probably be a pretty large effect, but it might take a long time to reap the fruits.
Thanks Brian, that certainly is an interesting article, and if nothing else, provides for an interesting and valuable thought exercise. After reading the article, I’m not sure I agree with the author that increasing teacher salaries by 131% (or any other very significant amount) would have the desired effect on teaching performance. This solution seems akin to the old saying of “putting lipstick on a pig.” The point being that even if it is a little prettier…it’s still a pig. Without a system in place that rewards exceptional teachers above and beyond their mediocre peers, we will never achieve a top notch education system. You can put lipstick on it by increasing starting salaries, but it does nothing to address the underlying issues. I’ll concede to the author that increasing starting salaries by such a large amount will draw better talent to the teaching profession, but unless the incentives are changed so that the most effective teachers are rewarded the most, even the most noble and altruistic among us would drift towards mediocrity (at any salary level). That’s just human nature. Our natural state is one of laziness and we only move beyond that state in response to incentives, both positive and negative. With all that being said, I feel that the solution to teacher salaries has more to do with doing a better job of splitting the pie, rather than trying to grow it. Until Teacher Union’s stop subsidizing mediocre and poor performing teachers with earning that (if operating in a completely free market for teaching services) belong to those exceptional teachers out there, no amount of lipstick will solve the education issues confronting our Nation. That’s just my two cents, though, with no data or research to back it up :)
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comment. I was actually thinking of writing my next post on the evidence for and against teacher merit pay, which is what you were describing with paying more to the more effective teachers. In short, the evidence is pretty weak for merit pay. There have been some nice experiments that suggest that the effect of setting up a merit pay system is pretty small for whatever reason. I will go back and read those papers to see why the authors thought merit pay wasn't very effective.
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