Watching people argue about how much teachers make makes me think that we are asking the wrong questions, and getting garbage answers. Below the fold is a vid from reason.tv showing one of their journalists heckling attendees of the “Save our Schools” rally in DC. Some of their responses were hilariously inane, like the girl who suggested that there’s no amount that’s too high to spend on schools. However, most of the people they interviewed seemed pretty sharp, including Matt Damon, who had a rather eloquent reply. One of the words he used to describe the idea that we need to eliminate tenure to give teachers incentive to do a good job was paternalistic. Now, he of course is arguing with people who ostensibly despise paternalism.
Indeed, the main argument made by the reasonroids’ side of the debate isn’t that we need to set salaries or incentives for teachers differently. If we really are simply thinking in terms of incentive or the “MBA mentality,” we’d rightly conclude that Damon, however smart he is, is wrong to downplay the importance of salary and job security and raise salaries in order to attract more and better teachers. The argument is, or should be, that it is highly paternalistic to put teachers in a position that their job security, perks and even wages are at the mercy of taxpayers. The problem is taxpayers are stingy assholes.
People on reason.tv’s side of the debate trap themselves into a corner arguing for less cushy jobs for teachers when the free market very well could offer better working conditions for all we know. The fat seems not to be in teachers’ salaries and perks, but in supporting the various parasites that feed off the system*. If giving teachers rock star salaries brings more students to your school, then teachers will have rock star salaries. So let’s free teachers from the tyranny of the taxpayer**.
I’m suspicious of Milt Friedman’s idea of the school voucher. In many other 1st world welfare states, public schools are not free. If we do require people to pay what they can afford (with the rich paying the full costs), we can reduce the stress on the general fund and remove one subsidy for having kids. Welfare for the poor, not the absolutely rich. This will bring more money in so it is easier to pay teachers well and make it more worthwhile for private enterprise to enter the education (less crowd-out effect; hard to compete with free) without the free handouts vouchers would constitute. It would be important, though, to modernize accreditation requirements so as to allow actual competition between different approaches. That’s what education needs above all.
* Consultants and vendors gouging the district for their often worthless wares.. that’s what the artificial scarcity of the complex procurement process gets us
** Enter the tyranny of the customer. Still more tolerable since they have kids they care about. ‘Taxpayers’ includes these parents, plus everyone else
Huzzah for removing a subsidy on having kids! FSM knows there’s plenty of those.
I’m still unconvinced that competition is the way to save the schools, though. The level of educational competition we have right now seems to basically give parents the right to keep their kids selectively ignorant (by sending them to religious schools). I’m all for modernizing our approach to education, as the current one is a pretty terrible vestige of our early-industrial past, but I also want to be sure that the children of our society learn things.
Also, how do you deal with educational inequities if you have a fee-for-service model? School districts have huge enough disparities in quality without linking their revenues directly to the means of area parents.
I think religious schools prove my point. If you’re a for-profit company or non-profit without other sources of income than tuition itself, you can’t compete with free except on the high-end. So there are secular prep schools. Parochial schools are able to have better prices because they tend to be money-losing operations designed to evangelize. There’s little money currently in providing cheap, secular private education (other than online schools) but I believe with my idea there would be. There would even be space for teachers offering individual classes a la carte.
About inequalities brought on by fee for service, are you talking about for private or public schools? State funds would have to cover what parents aren’t able to. More competition may benefit the rich more than it would benefit the poor, but I contend it would benefit the poor and that that is all that matters. It shouldn’t take much money at all to provide quality education, so rich people are mostly going to pay extra so their kid can go to a school with a better gym, a better pool and tastier cafeteria food. They and poorer parents may even take their kids to the same private school, but with the former paying extra for some sort of a “premium” package that includes foreign field trips and tutors (first degree price discrimination)