Teachers Matter

At this point if you’ve been reading the blog, you know the daunting and unsettling statistics that rank American student test scores towards the bottom of the developed world. Our group has argued that among other reform measures, the United States has to end teacher tenure and increase teacher salaries in order to improve its education system. Higher teacher salaries would encourage higher achieving college students to enter the teaching profession, and it would reward quality teachers for stellar performance. The logic goes that if the monetary incentives are strong enough to both recruit (academically successful) teachers, and then retain only those who perform the best, teaching would become a prestigious and financially rewarding career, and, in turn, American students would be more successful. While it must be a part of a larger solution, we firmly believe that it is one of the most important factors in any large scale, education reform package. And a brand new paper written by education experts with McGraw-Hill agrees.

The paper, written by former West Virginia Superintendent of Schools, Dr. Steven L. Paine and the Director of the OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment, Andreas Schleicher reach two conclusions. First, teacher quality is more important than any other factor in predicting and increasing student performance. Second, the prestige of the teaching profession must be strengthened to recruit high quality teaching candidates. Their study, “What the U.S. Can Learn from the World’s Most Successful Education Reform Efforts,” examined education systems in Singapore, Canada, and Finland, and found opportunities for the United States to improve its own education practices, as well as surmount many of the possible barriers to those reforms.

To begin, the paper argues that America needs to increase the number and quality of the individuals applying to become teachers. Finland, for example, only accepts 10% of applicants for teaching positions. Some opponents may argue that upon further analysis of the study, Finish teachers make about the same amount as American teachers ($39,000), which is true. What they fail to note however are the distinct cultural and economic differences between the Scandinavian state and the US. In Finland the teaching profession is just as highly respected as medicine or law, but in the United States, about half of all teachers graduate in the bottom third of their college classes. In a country like the United States where both wealth and high levels of education usually garner significant respect, the low pay, and sometimes lower quality of the teaching pool leaves room for drastic improvement. It’s impossible to radically increase the prestige associated with teaching overnight, but what reformers in the United States can do rather quickly is increase teacher salaries in order to recruit high performing college students into the education field.

Educational success throughout the world also shows us how to overcome some of the problems that develop when trying to implement successful reforms. In particular, other reform movements prove that teachers’ unions and the government can work cooperatively and effectively to both improve student performance and ensure equitable and competitive working conditions and benefits for teachers themselves.

Teachers’ unions and the government must work closely to align each party’s incentives. The lawyer’s job is to defend his client or prosecute a criminal; a doctor’s job is to heal the sick; and a teacher’s job is to effectively educate children. The teachers’ union and government officials used this logic to improve student performance in Ontario, Canada. According to the report, “The educators, through their union, agreed to accept responsibility for their own learning and the learning of their students; the government agreed to supply all of the necessary support.” The Ontario example proves that high teacher benefits and compensation and a strong union are not principles that diametrically oppose student success or rewards for high quality teachers.

The McGraw-Hill report should give us all hope. Not only does it shed light on concrete practices that have proven effective in global education reform efforts, it demonstrates that changes to the educational system are indeed possible. A strong union of educational professionals does not preclude education reform initiatives from incorporating measurements of teacher quality. In fact, success for America’s students will be the most profound and dramatic when government initiatives are combined with a strong teachers’ union devoted to the academic success of this country’s youth.