Teacher Salaries Revisited.

We do not have enough good teachers and their salaries are too low. You have heard it before, it is almost ubiquitous. Get a group of people together at a party and say, “Not enough teachers and not enough pay.” You will quickly have everyone in your group nodding their head in agreement. This situation has been going on for so long that there is no public outrage anymore. Indignation has been replaced by apathy. But who is to blame? And what can we really do? I have been researching these issues for several years and here is what I have discovered.

On the teacher shortage, blame the licensing requirement. Take me for example. I have taught graduate school at the University of Kansas and the University of Missouri at Kansas City. However, I can not teach K-12 without jumping through a licensing hoop and surviving a gauntlet lined with a plethora of pointless teachers union requirements. There are many qualified college graduates, some retired these days, who would make great teachers except for capricious licensing requirements, which arbitrarily shrink the prospective teacher pool. Solution? The teachers union should be abolished for failing to recognize that its actions have contributed to the systematic reduction of the prospective teacher pool. And through these actions, the union has single-handedly denied our children access to our most experienced people.

Also, the teacher union executives are squeezing the breath out of the educational system’s lungs by operating the teacher’s union like a 12th century brick-layers gild. Principals should be authorized to hire teachers who are subject-matter competent rather than only teachers who are licensed union members. Let’s put the most competent subject-matter knowledgeable people teaching our children rather than a person who survived the school of education and student teaching. Kill the licensing requirement in favor of college graduates who are subject-matter competent.

Recently, I proposed this solution to one of my teacher friends who responded, “Sure they are subject-matter competent, but they can not teach. “ On the contrary, surely if you are qualified to teach college math, you are competent to teach K-12 math. Subject-matter knowledge should always trump a union restriction that is designed for providing virtual tenure for a few teachers rather than designed for providing access to the best knowledge for our children.

And frankly if I had a preference, I could live with a teacher who had the best knowledge, but not the best teaching skills; rather than a teacher who had great teaching skills, but didn’t know the subject matter. The teachers, that most of us remember the most and we learned the most from, were usually the teachers who knew the subject the best. It’s hard to fake knowledge.

On the subject of the low salaries, blame a system which pays ineffective teachers the same as effective teachers. Teacher pay, despite education’s rhetoric to the contrary, is based on time of service rather than performance. A business would fail if it paid its unproductive employees the same as it paid its productive employees. The educational system defends its specious compensation method behind a facade of an inability to distinguish between effective and ineffective teachers. But don’t believe it. We all know our good teachers from the ones who taught us nothing.

If we can send a rocket to the moon, surely, we can devise a measurement of a teacher’s performance. Solution? Scrap the teacher’s union. Delegate the power to allocate “significant” adjustments in teacher salaries on an annual basis to the school principal. With this system, some teachers would receive no increase in salary. They might just quit and do something else. So be it. A natural filtering of teachers based on performance. Just like the real world! This approach frees-up funds for the principal to reward the best teachers. Some effective teachers, the superior teachers, would receive significant increases in compensation. They would remain teachers and produce superior students. Is that not the goal?

As a side thought, educational organizations claim they have made great advances in education. Yet, it still takes 8 years for grade school and 4 years for high school. And still we graduate students who know less than their counterparts in other countries. If we made this kind of progress in other institutions, we would still be using typewriters, telex machines and riding in horse drawn carriages. Someone needs to grab the educational system by the neck and drag it into the 21st century.