It just occurred to me that a ray of sunshine in the state’s share of education funding in Illinois being among the very lowest in the U. S. is that decreases in state funding for education won’t have quite as much effect here as they would somewhere that expected more from the state. I’ve been railing against the state’s low share here for decades as patently unfair to the poor (rich school districts spend a lot more than poor ones do) but it does have that advantage.
Unfortunately, I also think it will make the gap between rich and poor that much the greater and more permanent in Illinois.
BTW, here in Illinois we have more independently taxing entities than anywhere else in the country. Every school district, forest preserve district, sanitary district, and on and on has the power to raise taxes (mostly property taxes) on its own. Watch for big increases in property taxes from these entities here as the state tightens its belt.
As I said below, after reading a lot on teacher pay and benefits over the last week, it is unclear to me that they actually have outsized compensation. When you compare what teachers make in the US vs the rest of the OECD countries, US teachers make less as a percentage of per capita GDP (Korea pays best).
I have to wonder if that is due to teacher pay being mostly negotiated at the local level. There are 7 million teachers in the country IIRC. Most people know a teacher or two. It is pretty difficult for teachers to grossly misrepresent their lifestyles or needs. They are the neighbors of the people voting on their pay. I tend to think that it functions like a big market, with some local variations, but on the whole, local people manage to come up with pretty similar compensation for their teachers for their local economies.
( I wonder why we pay our teachers relatively less than other OECD countries? Does pay function as an incentive?)
Steve
Why is that the right measure?
IMO I think that just suggests that our GDP is higher and much of that is due to an out-sized financial sector.
“Why is that the right measure?”
If we want to provide the incentive for high quality people to go into teaching, should we pay them more than the average US salary? What signal is sent in Korea when they pay teachers over 200% of average per capita GDP? Also, this is a longstanding phenomenon.
http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind02/c1/c1s7.htm
I don’t really know what the right measure should be, so I think we should look at multiple measurements. Maybe we should also stop thinking about this so much as a federal issue as a local issue. What incentives do local governments have to overpay their teachers? Why arent they doing so?
Steve
steve, I think you need to look at salary comparisons based upon something other than GDP, because then you are essentially measuring a comparison within a nation’s economy. A country might spend half it’s GDP on education and that might not be a good thing, just like spending too much on health care.
This summary makes it appear that salaries are all over the chart:
http://www.worldsalaries.org/teacher.shtml
Steve, here in Chicago primary school teachers with bachelors only start at $45,000 per year plus insurance, pension, and benefits for a ten month job. Most of these teachers have education degrees from second or third rate schools, notoriously light weight.
The main effect of raising teacher salaries here wouldn’t be to attract better teachers. For that you need openings. The main effect would be to give a raise to the present teachers.
The median income for a household in Chicago is around $38,000. That’s for a twelve month month job and doesn’t include the healthcare or benefits available to teachers. Teachers make plenty here.
Just to expand a bit on my point. In Belgium a higher proportion of GDP is spent on coffee than here in the United States. I don’t think you can conclude from that the price of coffee is too low here.
“The main effect of raising teacher salaries here wouldn’t be to attract better teachers.”
Why is money an incentive for most people, but not teachers? What separates them from the rest of us? (You are correct in the short term, but I am thinking long term here.) As to Chicago, AFAICT, nearly all cities pay their teachers a higher salary. Is that a function of combat pay separate from actual teaching? I hate to draw upon anecdotal evidence, but a lot of friends have kids in college going into teaching. All of their parents are counseling them to stay out of city schools.
Steve
I’m talking about the immediate effects. If you were starting from scratch it would be different but you aren’t. Indeed, in the short term it disincentivize leaving so you’d keep the old, presumably worse teachers longer.
I give Chicago as an example because I’m most familiar with it and I prefer dealing with specific cases rather than national averages, theories, and questionable compositions. My key point in Chicago is how do you propose that we pay teachers more? The state won’t give us more money (they’re giving less). We already have the highest sales tax in the country. Property taxes are fairly high and sure to rise. The city doesn’t have the power to impose an income tax. And healthcare costs are eating up every additional tax dollar the city can come up with.
Illinois teachers are the best compensated in the country when compared using the cost of living.
http://teacherportal.com/salary-comfort-index
share of education funding in Illinois being among the very lowest in the U. S.
When you say this, are you referring to “as a share of the state’s overall budget”? If so, is that really the best measure? To me it’s like using GDP for teacher’s salaries. It could just mean that Illinois is choosing to spend a lot of stuff other than education, but still paying a lot for education. I come from one of those stingy states where a huge portion of the state’s budget goes towards education, but only because they’re tight-fisted just about everywhere else.
If that’s not what you are referring to, what am I missing?
@PD- Yup. I used that portal site for some post I wrote somewhere. I am just a bit leery of it since I could not find a clear description of their methods. It is interesting how high Texas was on the list.
Steve
Trumwill:
Total education dollars has essentially three components: federal, state, and local. Illinois has fourth or fifth lowest proportion of total dollars spent coming from the state of any state in the U. S.
Trumwill, Illinois is a high property tax state; the property taxes are collected at the local level and are the primary means of paying for education.
The Illinois state constitution requires that the state pay the majority of public education funding, something it has never been able to do. To do so, Illinois would have had to raise the income tax and distribute more money to the states. That would have distributed the money more equitably between rich and poor areas of the state.
I meant “distribute more money to the schools.”
Dave, okay, but why use that particular metric? Isn’t spending-per-pupil a better one? Or some SPP with an adjustment for regional costs?
If we want to provide the incentive for high quality people to go into teaching, should we pay them more than the average US salary?
1.) We can test your hypothesis. Private school teachers tend to be paid less than public school teachers. Are higher quality people drawn to public school teaching or private school teaching.
2.) If you offer higher salaries to attract higher quality people TO THE PROFESSION, then what should be done about the army of low quality people who currently staff the profession?
3.) The market signals clearly show that there is a surplus of supply for the limited number of teaching jobs. Does that look to you like there are not enough people who want to be teachers?
4.) The fact that other nations pay higher salaries to teachers is, not itself, noteworthy. If they are distorting their market by paying above market clearing price that doesn’t mean that we should emulate them.
5.) It is student quality, rather than teacher quality, that has the largest impact on student outcomes. When Korean school systems have to contend with a half of their students being black and Hispanic then we’ll have a more controlled basis upon which to make a cross national comparison. Alternatively we could take one of those higher earning teachers, so long as they speak English fluently, and give them carte blanche in a US classroom, and measure how effective they are in bringing poor performing American students up to Korean standards. We don’t even have to go the route of this outlandish experiment for we’ve seen it done countless times in the US – a successful US teacher or principal, drawn from a high income suburb where the students perform admirably, is hired to achieve the same outcome in a troubled school. The outcome is never achieved despite these stellar teachers being brought in.
You’re missing my point. In Illinois state funding for education is declining, not increasing. To increase funding for education that means it must come from local funding.
In Illinois the only alternatives for raising revenues at the local level are property taxes, sales taxes, and fees. In Chicago sales taxes are already the highest in the nation—we now know with an understanding based on experience that increasing the sales tax doesn’t raise more revenue, it just drives local retailers out of business.
We already have high property taxes and raising them will only drive people on fixed incomes out of their homes and create blight. You can’t raise enough revenue through fees to make up the difference.
Dave, got it! Sorry, I was completely misunderstanding (obviously). Thanks for helping me clear it up.
” Private school teachers tend to be paid less than public school teachers. Are higher quality people drawn to public school teaching or private school teaching.”
Apples to oranges. How much of a premium would you want as a teacher if you had to work with disruptive, even hostile, students?
” If you offer higher salaries to attract higher quality people TO THE PROFESSION, then what should be done about the army of low quality people who currently staff the profession?”
They would gradually be replaced by the better teachers.
“The market signals clearly show that there is a surplus of supply for the limited number of teaching jobs. Does that look to you like there are not enough people who want to be teachers?”
There are four people available for every job opening right now. In a capitalist economy it is not unusual to have mismatching for a while.
“) The fact that other nations pay higher salaries to teachers is, not itself, noteworthy. If they are distorting their market by paying above market clearing price that doesn’t mean that we should emulate them.”
Maybe we are distorting ours. Maybe unions dont really accomplish much for teachers. Maybe we undervalue teachers.
“It is student quality, rather than teacher quality, that has the largest impact on student outcomes. ”
I agree with a lot in that paragraph. I think it is actualy more the parents than the kids, but that is just taking it back one more step. I think really good teachers are probably most important in developing our exceptional students, but this is just belief w/o data.
Still, if incentives matter to people, why wouldn’t they matter to teachers?
Steve
Apples to oranges. How much of a premium would you want as a teacher if you had to work with disruptive, even hostile, students?
It’s only apples to oranges if you restrict the comparison to the extremes. There are plenty of public schools which are comprised of students who could be transferred, en masse, to a private school and fit right in.
Secondly, you’re assuming that the public school salary incorporates that premium. I actually haven’t seen a union negotiating demand to increase the wage premium because public school teachers have to address difficult students that their private school counterparts don’t. I’d be interested in any references you have to this being a negotiating demand.
Thirdly, there is a wealth of literature which demonstrates that there is a wage differential between union and non-union employees. That would be my primary assumption to explain what’s going on here rather than invoking the bad student wage premium factor.
They would gradually be replaced by the better teachers.
Sorry, but I don’t buy that for a second. You mean to tell me that unionized public school teachers are going to sit still and allow new hires to come into their school and be paid higher salaries and that this dual wage system will exist until all of the existing teachers are retired? Moreover when it is likely discovered that these more intelligent teachers are not able to generate improved student achievement the existing low quality teachers are still going to allow this dual system to continue.
If you want to try this experiment the only way I see it happening is to have a Reagan Air Traffic Controllers situation where all of the teachers in a district are fired and a whole new crop of intelligent people are hired as teachers.
There are four people available for every job opening right now. In a capitalist economy it is not unusual to have mismatching for a while.
I never wrote anything about “right now.” If teachers were underpaid in all districts then there would be, and would have been, systemic shortages. There weren’t, there were only isolated shortages in districts which had notoriously low pay or notoriously poor working conditions. In most other districts there are hundreds of people patiently putting their time in as substitute teachers waiting for an opening to develop. Simply, there are far more people who want to be teachers than there are positions available. This dynamic has nothing to do with the current employment situation.
What does that tell you? When there is more labor supply than there is labor demand and wages are are not responsive to market signals?
Maybe we are distorting ours. Maybe unions dont really accomplish much for teachers. Maybe we undervalue teachers.
Again, for the last number of decades there have been more people applying and waiting for teaching positions, knowing all that these jobs entail, such as working conditions and pay, than there are positions available. I’d venture the guess that the same situation applies in other countries where teacher wages are even higher than the US, in fact, the higher the wages the greater the proportion of people who desire a job as a teacher in relation to the number of jobs available.
If you have evidence of a non-unionized employment situation in these other countries where teacher salaries are set at market clearing levels and this results in wages being higher than those seen in the US, then I’d be very interested in looking at that data.