Will Higher Teacher Pay Lead to Success?
March 7, 2008
From the New York Times:“A New York City charter school set to open in 2009 in Washington Heights will test one of the most fundamental questions in education: Whether significantly higher pay for teachers is the key to improving schools.
The school, which will run from fifth to eighth grades, is promising to pay teachers $125,000, plus a potential bonus based on schoolwide performance. That is nearly twice as much as the average New York City public school teacher earns, roughly two and a half times the national average teacher salary and higher than the base salary of all but the most senior teachers in the most generous districts nationwide.
The school’s creator and first principal, Zeke M. Vanderhoek, contends that high salaries will lure the best teachers. He says he wants to put into practice the conclusion reached by a growing body of research: that teacher quality — not star principals, laptop computers or abundant electives — is the crucial ingredient for success.”
Kind of like Greene County, Georgia’s, single-gender schools, this will be an interesting experiment for everyone involved in education to keep tabs on in the coming years.
Entry Filed under: Education, Middle School, Public Schools, Reform, Students, Teaching, school. .
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1.
eyeingtenure | March 8, 2008 at 3:49 pm
Yes. It adds the air of respectability to the profession.
2.
Core | March 10, 2008 at 10:30 am
This will not be a good test, because the details make the school quite different than the average:
Demographics: 120 students, most of them from low-income Hispanic families.
Size: full capacity, it will have 28 teachers and 480 students…Its classes will have 30 students.
Curricula:In place of a menu of electives to round out the core curriculum, all students will take music and Latin. Period.
3.
mpullen | March 10, 2008 at 10:42 am
The curricula and large class sizes are that way BECAUSE of the increase in teacher pay, so it will be worth watching to see if those tradeoffs are worth the benefits of having better (?), more-motivated (?) teachers on staff there.
4.
Unionless $125,000 «&hellip | March 10, 2008 at 10:46 am
[...] in New York City whose teachers get paid $125,000. You might have read it at Dan’s blog or at Mr. Pullen’s, and I’ve yet to weigh in on [...]
5.
Kramerica | March 10, 2008 at 8:21 pm
I wonder if the answer to pay-related-to-job-performance is obvious and has always been obvious, regardless of the profession. If teachers were given more money would most of them work harder? Part of me wants to say, as respectful as possible: duh, of course. Would more money help motivate teachers more, overall, we know it would, the real question is how you are going to make that practical for your average public school or private school. It think my initial reaction to this article was awe and feeling like this is so cutting edge. In a way, it is, but not so much because it is going to find an outcome we don’t already know, but because it is so odd to think about teachers starting out with that kind of salary (even if they are doing other things besides just teaching like the article mentions.) I also disagree with the author of the article when he says it is just about teachers. I think it is a combination of factors, relating to teachers, parents, the system, culture, etc. You can’t just isolate one factor and say this is really what it is all about.
6.
mpullen | March 10, 2008 at 8:43 pm
I actually think the results will be disappointing. This school may inadvertently prove two things: (1) what a small role money plays in inspiring teachers, and (2) what a large role outside factors (parents/families, class sizes, etc.) play in the learning process. Other studies have shown that the #1 predictor of student success is family income… this school’s experiment is a great way for us to find out if that can be changed by simply paying teachers more. I doubt it.
7.
RJ | May 28, 2008 at 11:54 am
mpullen:
read my article about becoming a teacher.
Yes, pay will increase the performance of teachers, especially in the inner city. The problem will be that unless they can figure out a way to make it across the board, hoards of teachers will flock to those schools, leaving the rest destitute. It will be segregation all over again.
And family income as a predictor takes into account a number of different things ie, the things that parents with more money can do with their children, and free time. It is a poor indicator that is part of a large scale assessment.