Defining The Real “Value” Of Our Teachers
In a recent publication by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, researchers were curious as to how nations with the highest performing students were able to achieve those admirable results. One variable analyzed across the board was how each country paid–and therefore incentivized a highly professional teaching force–their teachers with 15 or more years of experience. Of the 27 countries examined, the United States landed just in front of Slovenia and Hungary at the 22nd spot. In this analysis, researchers concluded that teachers in the United States earned less than 60% of the average pay for full-time, college educated workers. In most others, however, teachers on average received from 80 to 100% the average pay of an identically-educated and similarly-employed work force.
Expounding upon that, major market researching firm McKinsey & Co released a study last year that analyzed how top-performing countries went about cultivating their teaching workforce and found that, incredibly, all of the teachers in these countries (Finland, South Korea and Singapore) graduated in the top third of their class. In the United States, however, a little over 20% of new teachers come from the top third of their graduating class, and that number sinks to a mere 14% for poverty-stricken schools.
No, these countries don’t dole out exorbitant sums of money to teachers in hopes of luring in top-achieving graduates, as large salaries aren’t necessarily indicative of subsequent productivity (re: Wall Street CEOs). But what they do do is make an effective, professional and high-achieving teaching force a national priority. And how do they do that? Through competition. In these countries, the road to becoming a teacher is highly selective and rigorous (yet affordable) and thus the position is seen as quite esteemed. According to McKinsey researchers and US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, one way to stoke that same kind of competitive flood of high quality teaching forces in the United States–and hopefully achieve similar results in the caliber of students is to attach more competitive wages to teaching contracts. How much? To Duncan, starting teacher salaries should be around $60,000 with maximum earnings topping out at $150,000 a year (at present, the average teacher salary is around $40,000 a year with limited growth).
As the Oklahoma tornado and Sandy Hook massacre have demonstrated, when it comes to matters of life and death, we as a nation are unabashedly thankful for the heroic–or if you’re Suzanne Haley, average–acts of our teachers. It is how we treat them from day to day, though, that matters most. On a single day, they can save handfuls of lives. But if we truly value them and the minds that they produce, they can do so much more.
