Get Serious about Teacher Compensation

The Wall Street Journal published a cynical attack on teacher compensation this week: “Public School Teachers Aren't Underpaid” by Andrew G. Briggs and Jason Rich (November 8, 2011). The thrust of their argument is that teachers are underperformers who could not command higher compensation in other sectors of the workforce – and further, that in relation to any other job that they are qualified to hold, they are actually overcompensated. This is the latest version of the old saw: “Those who can, do - those who can't, teach.”  The irony is that Briggs and Rich recognize the importance of quality teaching and believe that the nation should draw its teachers from the top tier of college graduates. But, how is their argument that teachers are overpaid a formula for attracting top performers to the profession?

Briggs and Rich suggest that effective reform requires knowing the facts about teacher compensation. So, here are some facts. The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) reports that the nation hired 388,000 new teachers in 2008 (313,000 in public schools plus 76,000 in private schools).  NCES also reports that we had 2.2 million college graduates that year (1.6 million BA’s plus 650,000 MA’s).  To hire only top-tier candidates, we would have to hire well over half of the top twenty-five percent of the graduates from every college and university in the country – every year. Briggs and Rich seem to believe that we could somehow induce those top-tier candidates to pursue teaching in lieu of other careers, including medicine, law, finance, and technology - despite their conclusion that today’s teachers are overcompensated.

As a nation we say that we value teachers as the most important factor in the quality of a child’s education. But the way that we pay them says otherwise.  The fact is, we have some of the best teachers in the world, and they deserve a better compensation system.  If school reform is to succeed, we need to get serious about making that happen.