Earlier this month, I noted a point made by columnist Robert J. Samuelson about teacher salaries. We all think they are lousy, but looked at in a certain way, that is not quite right. Their average pay is $53,230 a year, nothing to brag to your parents about. But if two teachers were married to each other and making that much, they “would belong to the richest 20 percent of households,” Samuelson said.
Now McKinsey and Co., the giant management consulting firm, has taken a deep, detailed look at teacher recruitment and retention and come up with a similar finding. Teachers are making significantly more than many of us, particularly our most academically successful college students, think they are.
The firm surveyed 900 college students who were in the top third of their cohort academically. These otherwise bright young people were way off when asked what they knew about what educators make.
“More than half of respondents believed that teachers’ starting salaries were under $30,000, when the national average is actually $39,000, comparable to what 25 percent of top-third students expect as starting salaries in their preferred profession. Similarly, fully three quarters of top-third students not planning to teach believe that teachers’ maximum salary is below the current national average maximum of $67,000 per year — and again a quarter of these students expect to earn less than what teachers will earn at the peak of their earning potential.”
The McKinsey report, “Closing the talent gap: Attracting and retaining top-third graduates to careers in teaching,” compares how we recruit, develop and retain teachers with how that is done in Singapore, Finland and South Korea. Those countries were selected as benchmarks because 100 percent of their teachers come from the top third of their academic cohorts, while only 23 percent of new teachers in the United States, and just 14 percent of those in high-poverty schools, are in that category.
The McKinsey researchers admit that research on whether a teacher’s high grades and test scores predict classroom effectiveness is “very mixed.” But school systems in the three comparison countries usually score far ahead of American students on international tests. The report provides a good starting point for seeing what else we can do to make better teachers.
The report looks not only at how the countries that hire only top-third people as teachers recruit them, but the way they train them and compensate them. It culminates with an series of scenarios — what the McKinsey computers predict would happen if we adopted several practices that seem to work in the three comparison countries.
They refer to this as a “top third +” strategy. My favorite scenario is this: “The U.S. could more than double the portion of top-third+ new hires in high-needs districts from 14 percent to 34 percent without raising salaries.”
How? “Non-salary changes are targeted at the neediest sixth of school districts: the government pays for teacher training rather than the trainee; schools offer excellent leadership and professional development; shabby and often unsafe working conditions are improved; high-performing teachers get performance bonuses of 20 percent; and an effective marketing campaign promoting teaching rolls out.”
Some of these measures had much more influence than others on top-third students entering teaching, according to what the McKinsey number crunchers lovingly call “choice-based conjoint analysis,” often used in consumer marketing. Improving the working environment, school leadership and professional development did not impress many potential recruits, although top-third people already in teaching valued those factors more highly as they decided whether to join or stay in high needs schools.
A marketing campaign to show students that teachers made more than they thought they made “would induce a 7 percent increase in the number of top-third students entering teaching each year (or an equivalent nationally of 4,000 additional top third students above an estimated baseline of roughly 55,000 who enter today,)” the report said.
Paid training increased the number going into teaching by 11 percent. A 20 percent performance bonus to the top-performing 10 percent of teachers would produce the same 11 percent gain in top-third students.
(Note my blog post just below this one: A Nashville study showed that such bonuses did not produce better results from the teachers who got them, but this study indicates that the chance to get such money, even if it does not affect learning, attracts more successful college students students.)
If you don’t want to pay teachers higher base salaries, you can still attract more high-level college students into the profession. But if you want to get a big jump in recruiting top-third students, higher salaries are the way, the report concluded:
“Offering starting compensation of $65,000 would induce a 15 percent increase in the number of top-third students entering teaching,” the report concluded. “Offering maximum compensation of $150,000 would attract a 39 percent increase in the number of top-third students becoming teachers.”
Singapore, Finland and South Korea do other things we don’t do. They make admissions to rigorous teacher-training programs very selective. They tie the number of teachers they train to the number of available teaching positions so jobs are guaranteed. They offer opportunities for advancement and growth. They offer great social prestige.
As many comments on the previous blog post note, teachers tend not to be motivated by money as strongly as many of the rest of us. So perhaps it would be worth trying some of these non-salary incentives. At the center of any new recruiting scheme would have to be better methods of teacher training. Anyone who has spent any time in an urban school knows that getting on the dean’s list at Enormous State University does not guarantee you know how to survive in a classroom.
2010 09 24 05 30
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Teacher Salaries 
Ah, the word that we all love to dread. What you’re going to find out is that if you’re in High School, College, or even Graduate School, you’re never ever going to be able to get away with it.