If the pay's too low I have a suggestion. Quit. Surely there's some other job available to the very bottom of the college educated crowd that has all the standard benes along with 8 weeks off in the summer.

I used to work in a school district. There are about 10-12 weeks dedicated to online testing now. It is absolutely ridiculous. NCLB is a joke and pretty much every teacher I talked to would agree. There are some really good teachers but there are also some really bad ones. Problem is you can't ever get rid of the bad ones.

I would laugh when I hear them complain about how much work they have to do and how underpaid they are. I would think good luck finding a job where you get paid 60K a year and you get a month of vacation from Sept - May and then the entire summer off. They get paid very well for being 8 month employees. Once you have a master's degree the payscale really goes high, really quickly.

All that being said basing pay rate on student test scores is a very bad idea.

Average teacher salary is 47k, and they get summers off. Give me a break with this hero business.


What do you think they deserve?

Okay to explain my position (sort of)

Here's what the NEA does- they create a payscale based solely on years of experience and not on quality in any way and they make it damn near impossible to fire crappy teachers unless they sleep with their students.

Good teachers are an incredibly important resource and can have an amazing impact on a child's lives. Often times they will arrive at the classroom an hour before school starts, stay 2-3 hours afterwards and then correct papers/make lesson plans, etc. for another couple hours when they get home (my GF is a teacher, my mom was a teacher, my dad was on the board of ed for a number of years, I have seen this). As such, they deserve to be rewarded for their dedication and ability. Yes they do get 3 months vacation, but they're working 10+ hours a day, sometimes 6 days a week during the school year.

Bad teachers teach from 9-3. Spend as little time as possible outside of school doing school work and generally see teaching as a means to make a modest living with a ton of vacation time. They often have negative impacts on the educational development of children and deserve to be fired for their inability and/or lack of work ethic.

Under the current system both teachers get paid equally. Obviously we want only good teachers teaching, but with overall crap wages for a college graduate and little advancement opportunities, the profession attracts those dedicated to saving the world and slackers. To attract the best, pay needs to be better. However, like any business, we need to be able to differentiate between the cream and the waste and pay them accordingly. One way to do this is through standardized test scores. Another way is through peer, principal and student evaluations (believe it or not these evaluations do help determine college professors pay, so it is a system that can be done). We award bonus' to those teachers who perform well in those areas and deny them to those who don't, vastly improving the quality of our educational system. This is already being experimented with in several school districts and the initial results are positive.

My g/f is a teacher as well, and with my work for the government, I can definitely agree with your thoughts on peer/principal and student evaluations. As a government employee myself, although in a different field, I definitely see the problems every day I go to work that this current system that makes dismissal, or nearly any type of disciplinary action at all, next to impossible.

The general problem is that those with the authority to take any action are generally so far removed from the day to day operations of the school that they don't have any clue what's really going on. Most of the time the process goes like this: the principal sees day to day problems with a particular teacher, gives her low marks on her performance evaluation, or receives complaint calls from parents and investigates and documents, sends it up the chain where it is thrown in the teachers personnel file, where it's never seen or discussed again.

The principals need more authority. That may not totally solve the problem, but it would certainly be a step in the right direction.

True. That's part of why a *public* education system will never get it right. Ever. Central planning just can't do it.

I pretty much agree. I think it's so stupid that pay is so largely determined by experience. A teacher's pay should be based on, ya know, how well they actually teach. This is difficult to discern, but I think that evaluations and such would be more useful than standardized test scores.

Here's my view of the problem. Many students get to college and decide that education is an easier major than something else they might have tried. They feel that a teacher has an easy job, and they try to get by doing as little work as possible. The teaching market is flooded by people like this, and this lowers the starting pay for teachers across the board. After getting hired, there is little incentive for poor teacher's to do better, and there are few consequences if they don't. Furthermore, those teachers who are doing well are not sufficiently rewarded, and many who would have been good teachers don't consider it enough because of the low pay relative to other things they could do. If society valued good teachers more and if they were rewarded for doing well, things might be better. I'm not sure to what extent standardized tests actually measure how well a teacher is teaching.

No. This isn't fair, because different teachers get different students.

Consider this example: Teacher A has a relatively bright class, whereas teacher B has a class full of kids with learning disabilities. If teacher B's students score only 5% lower on the test than teacher A's, which teacher did the better job?

In my opinion teacher B did the better job even though his students averaged a lower score.

true, however

pay would be based on IMPROVEMENTS in standardized test score, not just score alone.


Also, as poker players, you should know that in the long run the distribution of intelligent and below average kids will even out among classes.


I'm not saying standardized test scores are perfect, I am saying there are one method, among many, of measuring teacher performance and thus should be used to help determine teacher pay.

ohh, and the teacher with the class full of kids with learning disabilities is likely a special ed teacher and getting paid more already

A child with a learning disability likely has a lesser ability to improve his score than a normal, studious child.


In poker you play many hands an hour. A teacher only gets his yearly compensation once a year. The "long run" can't apply. A teacher can't get unfairly compensated for 2-3 years in a row and expect to take comfort in the laws of large numbers. That doesn't help out the fact that he can't afford to live decently in the short term even though he deserved to be paid well for busting his ass and being a great teacher.

Don't get me wrong- I think teaching should be a more competitive profession. I think good teachers should be compensated more than they are right now, and great teachers should be compensated much more. On the other hand, weak teachers who are lazy and can't reach kids should be weeded out.

I just don't think the formula on how to accomplish this can be as simple as only using test scores. There should be many other factors considered.

Evaluations by principals and other officals, perhaps? Principals are the ones who know which teachers are good and which ones are great.

I think you're emphasizing fairness too much. In fact, I can't think of any reason, as a taxpayer, that I should want teacher pay to be fair. What's important is that teachers have strong incentives to teach better. So what if a few teachers get a windfall and a few teachers get screwed? What's important is that all teachers have the incentive to do the best they can with what they have. Now, I think testing is not a great metric because it's too gameable. But the principle is good.

I would take a different track. I think you (not bobman, the person he was replying to) have an improper conception of fairness. The status quo of paying crappy teachers and good teachers the same is far less fair than paying good teachers more and crappy teachers less. The good teachers lose out on more money and the students lose out on increased teacher quality.

And lets be clear here, I don't think teacher pay should be solely based on test scores, I just think they should be part of the equation (one while has many variables, some of which have already been suggested) when determining teacher bonus.

How is it ridiculous? Their work day isn't much longer than any other normal job, but they get over 4 months off in vacation. Most people get 2 or 3 weeks vacation. how is that not working as hard as everyone else? Do you know of any other full time job that offers over 4 months in vacation time?

I'm all for teachers being paid more because they make a major contribution to society, but don't tell me that they work just as hard as everyone else. I work on a trading desk, where i have to be in my seat by 6:30am everyday, and I generally don't leave until 5:30pm. And I take about 3 weeks off per year. I have a good friend who is a teacher. He makes a lot less than I do obviously, but he's currently in Europe on vacation and will be there through July. In August he will spend most of his time golfing and going to the beach. Fortunately for him he has family money. And he's a GREAT teacher. But there's no way he works as hard as the average professional in just about any other field.

No.

Or you could just make up better standardized tests? Or maybe the current ones are already good enough. The way I studied for my tests was to spend a ton of time cramming in all of the information needed to pass the test...and thats because that was the information I needed in the future. As long as your tests arent arbitrary (which no matter how poor you think they are you have to admit they arent arbitrary) then what is wrong with "teaching to the test" as a general rule? Good tests + teaching to the test = good results. Poor tests + anything = bad results. Having no way of incentivising teachers to get results = bad results.

All of my anecdotal experience points to the conclusion that teachers just dont work as hard as everyone else, or at the very least, certainly not HARDER than everyone else. LOL at heroes.

Teachers should be paid at a rate mutually agreed to by an individual teacher and his employer, just like everyone else.

Isaac, teachers already do that via collective barganing.


Also, being infront of 25-30 children and trying to teach them is very hard work. I bet it is more taxing than staring at a computer screen all day. Only people who have jobs where they have to be 'on' the whole time can understand this.

You slimy radical.