When I was a classroom teacher, I was a big proponent of compensating teachers based on performance. A bit later on, I remember having a subsequent conversation with a brilliant young software developer… While I was focused on raising the level of respect for teachers, he summed up the issue quite simply: Teachers need to get paid more. I thought about it…
Today, we’ve learned some lessons from the school reform movement. We see that accountability measures and tying educators’ pay to performance encouraged cheating by the very people who had previously acted as role models to our children.
This is a business lesson gone wrong. Salespeople get bonuses, but in many cases, they have a more controlled and linear relationship with their sales. However they get to selling you a widget, you can definitively count how many items they’ve sold. In education, you can’t count the same way—because the exchange is intangible. (There are some other things wrong with this approach – for another time.)
But if we were to raise the salary of teachers across the board, we might increase the chances that that really great leader/thinker/teacher/writer/counselor considers the classroom over the corporate office. More importantly, our teachers can live in comfort and have the mental, spiritual, and intellectual wealth to pour back into the classroom. This can be a first step to making education an attractive field for talented resources, so we can raise our nation’s educational consciousness.
Recognition is not the reason great teachers teach. I still want respect for teachers, but dangling data-driven prizes in front of educators is not the way to get priceless results. Great teachers are great because they invest their hearts, minds, talents and souls into their students. Attracting high-quality teachers and supporting them is probably the best step for education reform.
People talking about this:
www.labornet.org/viewpoints/meister/teacher.htm
www.businessweek.com/debateroom/archives/…/raise_teachers.html
