Teachers & Money

There’s a lot of talk out there to link individual teacher pay to test scores.  While I’d be thrilled to get a pay raise (and in an earlier post, I shouted, ‘Bring it on!’), here’s why I don’t think this is a good idea.

First all the usual reasons: teachers will teach to the test and do drill and kill, principals can create classes to reward & punish, it’ll kill collaboration, what about special ed classes & English learner classes, schools filled with poor kids will lose out to wealthier schools, yadda, yadda, yadda…

We know all that.  We’re heard it a hundred times before.

But here’s the real reason.  Have you looked at Wall Street lately?  What happens when monetary incentives are the most important values?  MELTDOWN! May 18th’s New Yorker has a fantastically insightful piece on how our present economic crisis came into being though misapplied incentives and a culture of doing the wrong thing for money and feeling it was okay because everyone else was doing it too.

I believe human nature under pressure reveals itself to be pretty ugly more often than not.  The veneer of civilization is just that, a veneer, especially when everyone around you is doing the same thing.  That’s why I like to work with kids.  They’re by no means innocent, but they’re a whole lot more innocent that most adults.  They’re full of love and caring, even the ones who’ve been hurt.

Explicitly linking money to teaching will bring out the ugly in adults: pettiness, jealousy, anger, backstabbing, and above all greed.

Is that what we want our kids to be around?

Do we really want to import Wall Street into a world where caring should be first and foremost? (just like in medicine–see last week’s post and the one to come…)

Which is not to say that teachers shouldn’t be paid.  We’re not nuns.  We’ve got lives, school loans, kids, mortgages, looming college tuition just like the next human being.  We aren’t immune to the desire to have more money for whatever reason or end.

So what do teachers do right now to make more money?

1.  Become administrators.  The main way to make more money in education is the leave the classroom.  Does this incentive system make any sense?  Why not restructure salary scales such that teachers are paid more than administrators?  Wouldn’t that reduce the incentive to generate more and more bureaucrats?

2. Start tutoring.  I recently spoke with a mom whose child is on my child’s soccer team.  Her child attends the best elementary school in one of the best school districts around Los Angeles.  People pay an extra 50 to 100K to live within that school’s boundaries.  So I was floored to hear that her son was being tutored after school by his own teacher.  For $50/hour.  And not just her child.  She said the majority of kids in that school were tutored by their own teachers after school.  And her child’s teacher was one of the cheaper ones: the others charged up to $75/hour.  Isn’t this a conflict of interest?  No wonder the school’s test scores are that high.  But this is where the culture of greed begins…

So what do we do?  Wait for the next post…

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