"The High Cost of Low Teacher Salaries"

About a week ago, The New York Times published an editorial that proposed some pretty radical and interesting solutions to our education crisis.

The editorial addresses several points, and is worth reading in its entirety, but I wanted to discuss some of its most interesting ideas.

The first is a question of properly using incentives to achieve a desired outcome. The federal government's No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) rewarded succeeding schools with additional funding and punished failing schools with less funding. So already-failing school were granted fewer resources, which ultimately punished students. In other words, the NCLB Act did not use incentives effectively.

The idea behind merit pay is to line up the incentives so that individual teachers work as hard and effectively as they can for their students. We believe that incentives should be based on individual performance so that they will incentivize individual teachers to do their jobs well. Most economists will tell you that incentives work best on the individual level. The failure of NCLB is a case in point. And as the editorial's analogy with the military goes, "when recruiting is down, we offer incentives."

The second interesting point is that with many teachers so near retirement, now is the time to rethink the way we treat the teaching profession in this country. The editorial discusses the percentage of teachers who leave before they have taught for five years (46) and the percentage of teachers who work second jobs to make ends meet (62). The editorial suggests recruiting elite college graduates to become teachers and treating the profession with more respect by increasing salaries.

While we agree that higher salaries would be a fantastic way to increase the prestige of the teaching profession, we also believe that even a ten percent bonuses for good teachers would do a lot to increase its appeal. Increasing the appeal of teaching by tying salaries to performance would make the applicant pool larger, and the more selective the teaching profession becomes, the easier it will be to hire the best teachers. The editorial provides examples of countries that have successful education systems because they have made teaching an important and respected career.