Teacher Compensation as a Carrot for Reviving the Profession
America's classroom teachers have earned the right to be compensated in ways that both acknowledge their contributions to the lives of our youth and reward them for their ability to nurture schoolchildren's gifts and abilities. Most of us underestimate the talents, skills, and formal training necessary to even begin to create learning formats that facilitate meaningful classroom instruction. Everyday people fail to realize how difficult it is to manage ten to thirty student personalities all at once - most of us have a hard time managing a hand full of people at the same time. The creativity, competence, commitment, flexibility, and leadership that are needed to be a successful teacher should give all of us a reason to pause and reflect on how simple our daily routines are in comparison to that of a teaching professional. The daily realities and challenges of teaching in our elementary and secondary schools underscore the urgency to correct how we compensate those who choose to nurture and train our next generation of citizens, leaders, managers, entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, and workers. While we as a nation have allowed ourselves to devalue and ignore the importance of teachers for a number of decades, my hope is that it doesn't take us as long to resurrect the profession back to its proper level of prominence and stature among career choices for our youth.
While we are grateful for the social and economic advancement that has been the experience of targeted groups and individuals across the country, one of the more striking consequences of removing longstanding employment and professional barriers has been the steep decline in the quality and quantity of people who actually apply for entry into the teaching profession. What we have witnessed for decades is a shift away from teaching jobs by graduates and a steadily increasing trend toward the higher paying and sometimes less rewarding careers and professions. As education leaders compete with other highly lucrative professions in order to attract the best and brightest teaching candidates, they must be willing to play by the rules of the marketplace, which means using competitive salaries and bonuses as carrots. Although not all college graduates choose careers based on how much money they can earn, a large percentage of them are often forced to make their decisions in ways that enable them to pay off student loans. It is a fact that many excellent teachers are drawn to the profession for nonquantifiable reasons - passion, commitment, service, and calling. It is also a fact that educators must step up to the plate and send a clarion message to prospective teachers that they are willing to pay the right price for those deemed worthy and qualified.
Rewarding and compensating teaching professionals cannot be accomplished in ways similar to other professions primarily because school age education is unique, it is a function of both teacher and student inputs and outputs, and education does not produce tangible goods and services. Although the success or failure of our public schools has traditionally been aligned with metrics related to the academic performance of students, e.g. test scores, graduation rates, and college entrance statistics, compensation systems need to be restructured so that they reflect not only how well students learn, but also how well teachers teach. Classroom teachers should be evaluated by their peers and group leaders, and subsequently rewarded based on these observations and assessments. Although we want classroom teachers to strive to maximize the usual metrics for every student and school, their rewards and merit cannot continue to be determined on the basis of how well their students perform. While teachers differ largely from private industry employees who routinely earn salaries and incentives based on quantifiable outcomes and benchmarks, they are more akin to nonprofit workers who often shun extra financial rewards because they've chosen their sphere of work for reasons that supercede money. Essentially, teaching is a hybrid vocation and should therefore be compensated in ways that reflect a dual focus on competitive pay and commitment to service.
While we are grateful for the social and economic advancement that has been the experience of targeted groups and individuals across the country, one of the more striking consequences of removing longstanding employment and professional barriers has been the steep decline in the quality and quantity of people who actually apply for entry into the teaching profession. What we have witnessed for decades is a shift away from teaching jobs by graduates and a steadily increasing trend toward the higher paying and sometimes less rewarding careers and professions. As education leaders compete with other highly lucrative professions in order to attract the best and brightest teaching candidates, they must be willing to play by the rules of the marketplace, which means using competitive salaries and bonuses as carrots. Although not all college graduates choose careers based on how much money they can earn, a large percentage of them are often forced to make their decisions in ways that enable them to pay off student loans. It is a fact that many excellent teachers are drawn to the profession for nonquantifiable reasons - passion, commitment, service, and calling. It is also a fact that educators must step up to the plate and send a clarion message to prospective teachers that they are willing to pay the right price for those deemed worthy and qualified.
Rewarding and compensating teaching professionals cannot be accomplished in ways similar to other professions primarily because school age education is unique, it is a function of both teacher and student inputs and outputs, and education does not produce tangible goods and services. Although the success or failure of our public schools has traditionally been aligned with metrics related to the academic performance of students, e.g. test scores, graduation rates, and college entrance statistics, compensation systems need to be restructured so that they reflect not only how well students learn, but also how well teachers teach. Classroom teachers should be evaluated by their peers and group leaders, and subsequently rewarded based on these observations and assessments. Although we want classroom teachers to strive to maximize the usual metrics for every student and school, their rewards and merit cannot continue to be determined on the basis of how well their students perform. While teachers differ largely from private industry employees who routinely earn salaries and incentives based on quantifiable outcomes and benchmarks, they are more akin to nonprofit workers who often shun extra financial rewards because they've chosen their sphere of work for reasons that supercede money. Essentially, teaching is a hybrid vocation and should therefore be compensated in ways that reflect a dual focus on competitive pay and commitment to service.
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