Are Teachers Overpaid? What a Stupid Question!

In the February 2 issue of the Wall St. Journal, Jay Greene and Marcus Winters make the argument that teachers are not underpaid because they earn the equivalent of $34.06 per hour. It’s a preposterous argument, and it goes directly to the heart of our competitiveness as a nation over the next decade. I’m a professor at the University of San Francisco. Therefore that makes me—full disclosure—both a teacher and a member of a prominent national teachers union. I’ve occasionally attended faculty “union meetings”, and I receive the union magazine which describes labor and educational activities in schools from kindergarten through college. So I know something about the subject at hand, and you may be surprised at my conclusions: 1. First and foremost, the teachers union is primarily concerned with protecting the welfare of its members. Nothing wrong with that, but you can ignore the union's pap about the kids being the first priority. No, the first priority, by far, is wages and conditions of employment. 2. The union is politically and ideologically liberal-to-left, unabashedly advocating conventional policies and politicians. Seniority and tenure are openly worshipped, performance- and merit-based compensation are openly disdained. All problems will be solved with more taxpayer money poured into the status quo. Vouchers are anathema. 3. Moving away from the union to the teachers themselves, a different picture emerges. Anyone who doubts the sincerity and commitment of most individual teachers is, frankly, an idiot. Forget college professors--that’s a whole separate story about entitlement. In this blog, I’m talking about the majority of real life K-12 teachers who bust their butts trying to educate our kids under some of the most challenging conditions, including overcrowding, violence, multiple languages, and parents who aren’t around. God bless the teachers. 4. I consult with a lot of corporate executives. Almost universally, they agree that the most important competitive need for both their organizations and for this country is an expanding pool of highly talented employees. Without a great educational system, where, pray tell, will these talented people come from? Every successful leader I’ve worked with knows that if they want their own organization to succeed in a global knowledge economy, a failure to invest seriously and heavily in their people is a fool’s gambit. Why can’t we take that perspective with education? I’m not talking about pouring more money into rat holes of education bureaucracies; I’m talking about dramatically boosting teacher pay. If our kids’ minds are our number one resource, shouldn’t those who are entrusted to teach those minds be paid with high prestige dollars?5. Until we as a society are willing to elevate the financial status of good teachers to a high attractive level, we are not serious about innovatively preparing young human resources to compete in a knowledge economy. Let me be more specific: In this country, we assign a monetary value to jobs based on the skills needed to do them and on the value-add that those jobs provide. That’s presumably why doctors and investment bankers make more money than janitors and tow truck drivers. The way we can attract and retain the best and the brightest and most innovative people to the teaching profession is to offer them compensation for excellence that is in the six figure neighborhood. If I was king of the USA, I would begin the painful process of ridding the teacher ranks of that small, nagging pool of incompetents and deadwood (yes, I’d flight the tenure establishment and union protectionism), and then I’d raise base pay and tie mega-bonuses to performance metrics—test scores, for example, or other quantitative assessments of student accomplishment—so that excellent teachers could double their current pay, even to more than $100,000 a year. Boy, would you see some innovative upheaval in education if you did that. And yeah, if I knew that this super-compensation was based on documented super-results, I would gladly allocate more tax monies to education. 6. And that brings me to Greene and Winter’s absurd notion that teachers are now paid generously because they have lots of vacation time. Arguing that teachers work only the number of hours they are actually in the classroom teaching is like saying pro football players work only one hour a week on Sunday when they’re playing the game. Greene and Winter go further, in fact, and argue that the correlation between teacher pay and results is low. Sure, if you’re talking about the marginal difference between $45,000 a year and $48,000 a year, within an employment context based on tenure and seniority. But how about a difference between $45,000 and $85,000 within an employment context based on outcomes and merit? Finally, Greene and Winter insist on comparing teachers to other “workers.” I don’t want teachers considered as “workers”; the stakes are too darned high. I want teachers to be a hard-to-join elite group of high-skilled providers compared to doctors and bankers—and paid accordingly. My approach would vastly elevate the innovation within education by vastly elevating the job of “teacher”, which in turn would serve the needs of this country and its organizations by elevating the skills and competencies of students. Sadly, the loudest and most vehement opposition to this sort of plan would come from the teachers unions.