Higher Pay for Math and Science Teachers

Coryoth writes "Following up a previous story, it seems that the Kentucky effort to provide increased pay to teachers with qualifications in mathematics, physics, and chemistry has been gutted. Teachers objected to differential pay, and that portion of the bill was removed. At the same time California has just put forward a similar measure, with differential pay for teachers qualified in mathematics and science. Shockingly 40% of mathematics teachers in California are not fully qualified in the subject — a higher percentage of unqualified teachers than any other subject. Is the Californian effort any more likely to succeed, or is it destined to be similarly gutted? Is there a solution to the woeful lack of qualified mathematics teachers that the Teachers' Union will find acceptable?"

Comments

paying based on seniority encourages laziness

[User 956]

Is there a solution to the woeful lack of qualified mathematics teachers that the Teachers' Union will find acceptable?

I don't see why paying people based on merit (versus seniority) is unacceptable. That's how most of the real world works.

Re:paying based on seniority encourages laziness

[porkThreeWays]

People ALWAYS say this and it's crap. That's not how the real world works. Maybe that's how it works at burger king, but in almost every industry I've dealt with there are people whom aren't in their current positions because of merit. I work in government now and people constantly complain that "X person should be fired, that's the way it works in the private sector". News flash, I've worked extensively in both private and public sectors, and the same crap goes on in each. There really isn't a whole lot of difference. People know people and get promoted unfairly. Unions exist and make it hard to fire people. People sleep with their boss. People obtain cushy jobs where there work isn't noticed and do nothing all day. It happens everywhere. I'm not saying it's right, but I am saying that's how the real world works. Not this fantasy land of moving people and salaries and resources like a commodity.

Re:paying based on seniority encourages laziness

[pogopogo]

How would you determine teacher merit?

Test scores? Student evaluations?

The problem with comparing education to the "real world" is that education is not a business. Teachers have to take every student that shows up in their class. Businesses get to define their own market.

Re:paying based on seniority encourages laziness

[jmorris42]

> I don't see why paying people based on merit (versus seniority) is unacceptable. That's how most of the real world works.

But you don't understand. The schools aren't about the students, they are all about the teachers unions. In exactly the same way the big three automakers slowly morphed from being about making cars into social programs for union autoworkers. It is what unions do, and when it is a union in control of a government monopoly like education it gets insane. The schools now exist for the benefit of the teachers, students are at best a useful prop for lobbying for more money. Reality has long been divorced from what goes on inside government schools. Untested fads by fashionable marxists intellectuals get rolled out into classrooms nationwide without any sort of testing, political correctness runs rampant, etc. Accountability is almost non existant. Unless a teacher gets caught in a politically incorrect belief or having sex with a student their odds of being fired for malpractice isn't measurable.

And yet the beauracy is so wretched that no sane person wants to teach even with the fairly good pay (and it IS fairly good pay in most states for the hours worked and the level of education required) in most states and the all but certain job security mentioned above, A doctorate in math or science is not good enough to qualify one to teach unless you can first endure a couple of semesters of mind numbing 'teaching' courses designed to both indoctrinate politically correct views and raise an artifical barrier to entry into the profession.

Re:paying based on seniority encourages laziness

[Copid]

Well, I wouldn't say that math and science teachers have more "merit" that warrants higher pay, but the price for a good generally correlates with its value at its next best use. Somebody who is good at math or science (hopefully a qualification for teaching math or science) usually has pretty solid pay options should they choose to go elsewhere. Not acknowledging that in your pay scale is just begging for a shortage of qualified people.

It's not a matter of "merit" or "fairness." It's a matter of acknowledging that most people who leave serious technical jobs to teach incur a serious opportunity cost. Limiting your candidate pool to people who would do the job at any price is not really a good idea.

Re:paying based on seniority encourages laziness

[larkost]

If you are going to do this rant, I think you have to include a bit more about how parent suing to get their children special treatment has warped how things get done. Lawsuits are a constant problem in public schools. My mother is a Special Ed teacher and has to deal with being on the periphery of 2-3 lawsuits every year. None of them ever go to court, but they all wind up very expensive for the school district in one way or another. The principals life is almost consumed with coordinating for all of them.

Re:paying based on seniority encourages laziness

[NJVil]

You have little idea of what you're talking about, and your anti-school agenda is clearly showing. Sentence by sentence:

1) "But you don't understand." - Sophistry.
2) "The schools aren't about the students, they are all about the teachers unions." - Opinion.
3) "In exactly the same way the big three automakers slowly morphed from being about making cars into social programs for union autoworkers." - Exaggeration and opinion. The Big Three are having issues for many reasons, one of which happens to be the unions.
4) "It is what unions do, and when it is a union in control of a government monopoly like education it gets insane." - Opinion.
5) "The schools now exist for the benefit of the teachers, students are at best a useful prop for lobbying for more money." - Opinion. Sorry to hear you feel this way.
6) "Reality has long been divorced from what goes on inside government schools." - Opinion.
7) "Untested fads by fashionable marxists intellectuals get rolled out into classrooms nationwide without any sort of testing, political correctness runs rampant, etc." - Opinion. While you might have the basis for some sort of legitimate argument here, I'd argue you've got the same thing in most corporations. What's the latest management fad or catchphrase these days?
8) "Accountability is almost non existant." Groundless opinion. You have almost no idea what you're speaking of with this one. Read up on NCLB and learn some.
9) "Unless a teacher gets caught in a politically incorrect belief or having sex with a student their odds of being fired for malpractice isn't measurable." - Opinion, although close to reality. More of the problem with teaching comes from the fact that teaching and administrative jobs are often political in nature, which is the heart of the problem. Most good unions will work with administrators to get bad teachers out of the classroom, but they will insist that the administrators do it the right and legal way. More than a few administrators, though, because they're incompetent political hacks, don't know how to build a case to fire a teacher. Before a teacher receives tenure, he's got little protection, and administrators should do a better job of culling the bad ones sooner.
10) "And yet the beauracy is so wretched that no sane person wants to teach even with the fairly good pay (and it IS fairly good pay in most states for the hours worked and the level of education required) in most states and the all but certain job security mentioned above," - Opinion. I'm quite sane. I enjoy teaching. I love my job despite some of the stupidity that goes on. However, I hear similar complaints from friends and relatives in the corporate world, so it's a wash. I will not argue that the pay is bad because it's not. Still who wouldn't want to be paid more for what they do?
11) "A doctorate in math or science is not good enough to qualify one to teach unless you can first endure a couple of semesters of mind numbing 'teaching' courses designed to both indoctrinate politically correct views and raise an artifical barrier to entry into the profession." - Opinion. Terribly misguided opinion. Just because you know "math" doesn't mean you know how to teach it. Just because you've got a PhD in Molecular Biology doesn't mean you should be in a classroom with special education or ESL students. A few semesters of 'mind-numbing teaching courses' along with some child/adolescent psychology can do wonders for adults who have never worked with children before.

You've written nothing that petulant high school students haven't written before (all you needed to include was "boring teachers" and you'd have pegged yourself as a 17-year old whose Republican or Libertarian daddy filled his head with ideas about evil unions and abolishing government.

Solution

[timtwobuck]

Gutt the union? They're preventing progression and have become too in control. We're letting them run the show.

It's a question of priorities

[zCyl]

What's more important? A perception of equality between teachers of all subjects, or setting the salaries at the level required to attract teachers qualified to properly educate children in each subject?

Re:It's a question of priorities

[ranton]

Actually the true question is more direct:

Is the perception of equality more important? Or is the education of our children more important?

--

Awesome

[iridium_ionizer]

Wouldn't it be great to just read a bunch of novels for college and get paid the same ammount as the person that racked their brain while trying to solve differential equations?

Short answer

[lazlo]

"Is there a solution to the woeful lack of qualified mathematics teachers that the Teachers' Union will find acceptable?"

No. Because among the Teachers' Union's membership there are 40% of mathematics teachers who would become unemployed if a solution were found. A good solution would help two groups of people: Qualified people who are not currently teachers, and students. Neither of those groups is a part of any Teachers' Union.

Re:Short answer

[Chirs]

You missed the fact that it would also help the 60% of math teachers who *are* qualified, by giving them larger paychecks.

It might also provide incentives for the 40% that aren't qualified to take the courses necessary to become so.

Pay people more, they'll become qualified

[Colin Smith]

Human beings are simply not equal, no matter what you wish. Pay more for people who are willing to become qualified and more will become so. Insisting that everyone receive the same... Well it doesn't exactly encourage excellence, now, does it.

Re:Two types of teacher

[bendodge]

My father has been a teacher for almost 20 years, and describes the life cycle of a teacher like this:

1. Someone becomes a teacher, not for the pay, but in order to better the world.
2. They are very enthusiastic, and spin their wheels with enthusiasm.
3. About 5-10 years into it, they get cynical. But with that many years behind them, they are not going to switch careers. He also discussed the government programs issue:

1. A program is created and deployed with high hopes (except for the cynical teachers who have been through the last 3 programs.)
2. It generates a lot of (fake) steam, then is loopholed and "special-ed"ed out of commission, at which point everybody forgets the name.
3. The program is about to expire, and everything will go back to traditional mode. This creates a lawsuit hazard, as tens of thousands of students suddenly must pass a test or miss their diploma.
4. A new program is hastily implemented to keep the scores inflated and keep to the students rolling through (read: no lawsuits). Another problem is "special ed". Here is the story behind 85% of the students in special ed:

1. A student is ultra-lazy and isn't passing.
2. Parents roar at the teacher, and send their kid to the school shrink. At this point the student pays attention and dons his worst intellect, in order to pass the evaluation.
3. He is assigned a monitor who is specially responsible to keep an eye on his school (read: make sure he passes).
4. The student has a lot less work to do (the basic package is 1/2 the homework, and it gets worse as you go along), and the teacher is given a dossier (they have some politically correct name for it) on the kid's "condition", and he is required to tailor his lessons for that child's benefit. (There is naturally no way a teacher can tailor the class for a dozen individual kids.)
5. The student passes with good grades, and gets his diploma. He got by with minimal work, the parents are happy, and nobody got sued.
5. Since you can't discriminate against the handicapped or retarded, the diploma has no mention of the fact that the student didn't actually do the work, or that he has any condition. Now, the program does do much good for the truly handicapped people, but there are very few people who have anything wrong with them, except for their work ethic.

As for classroom discipline:

1. You cannot touch or search a kid without getting sued by the parents or the ACLU.
2. You cannot dock their grade without the parents getting zealous.
3. You may only send them to the office, where the overworked principle (who spends "half his time making sure we comply with regulations") tells the student to behave or face staying home from school (sounds silly, but it really irks the parents, who suddenly have a kid to babysit).
4. If the teacher saw the kid's drugs, the principle calls the students mom to come (no way will he tell the kid to drop his pants for a search without a parent present). The kid is then sent to the school police officer, and I don't know what he does with him.
5. There isn't much else to do. It is a general case of lazy kids, a lawyer-happy ACLU, terrible parenting, and staggering bureaucratic overhead.

Not a good idea

[Slashdot Parent]

I, for one, would definitely like to keep control of the schools away from the federal government.

Look at the No Child Left Behind debacle? Slowly, county by county, districts are telling the Department of Education to "shove it". My county is among those who have done so, and I'm proud of that.

For now, the federal government only funds like 2% of school budgets, so schools can defy the feds relatively painlessly. But what if the federal government provided 20% of the funding? 80%? You'd get the same mess we are in with the highway funds. As it stands right now, all congress has to do is tell a state, "Change XYZ state law for us, or you can build your own damn roads." I don't want to see that happen with education.

I almost became a high school science teacher

[Ogemaniac]

Instead, I went to grad school and am now a corporate staff scientist.

I really wanted to teach, but giving up nearly half my potential income was simply too much. The kids lost out. I met plenty of other students in grad school who felt the same way.

Re:Why math and science?

[Denial93]

In my country, parents do that. What do parents do in your country? Aren't your teachers most valuable when they teach things parents don't know?

The problem is not lack of money.

[MaWeiTao]

Education 8mar07

I think the reason American students are falling behind in subjects like math and science is not because teachers aren't getting paid enough, or is it because of a lack of funding. The problems students are facing are far more elemental. They're not being taught basic responsibilities. They're not being taught a work ethic. And they're not being taught to respect anyone or anything.

Instead educators are trying to turn education into entertainment. Lessons are reduced to wacky fun facts. Everything has to be packaged into bite-sized chunks. It isn't just the curriculum. Compare what schools do in the US compared to schools in Asia, for example.

When I was living in Taiwan I observed that school and academics virtually encompassed a student's entire life. It's not like here when kids are looking to get out of school at a nice early hour to go play. First of all, students arrive at school at 8am, if not earlier. Again, unlike the US where some schools have delayed opening until 9am to let students sleep later.

More importantly were the responsibilities Taiwanese students are given. They spend the first half hour, maybe longer, cleaning the school. They actually have them sweeping the floors and cleaning bathrooms. They didn't necessarily do a good job but rest assured that they were much more reluctant to engage in vandalism knowing that they would be cleaning up the mess the following day.

Imagine the uproar if a school tried that sort of thing in the US. I'm sure lawyers would sweep in with their claims child labor laws were violated. But the fact is that this instilled a sense of responsibility in students.

And it's something that followed them through the school day. They often got out of school late in the day, 4pm or 5pm. And many, mainly those in high school would then go to cram schools in the evening to study for graduation exams.

The problem is, if the schools aren't reinforcing the value of education nobody else will. They sure aren't going to learn anything on the streets. Kids in the suburbs can be as bad as those in the cities. And I know people who've experienced these kinds of problems first hand. It's just that wealthy communities are better at sweeping problems under the rug. But there's a very big distinction. Regardles of what those kids in the suburbs do they're constantly exposed to people who are successful. Eventually it gets drilled into most of them that they need to take school more seriously. So it's the environment outside of school that is one of the biggest factors why many more kids in the suburbs go on to college and end up doing reasonably well.

The lack of interest in some subjects comes down to a lack of work ethic. No amount of money or salary increase is going to resolve these problems. The US already spends money on education than any other developed nation and students in those countries still outperform American students.

Re:Education

[Copid]

And this is exactly the solution. Instead of only paying certain teachers more, how about paying them all what they deserve and raising the standard of eduction in all subjects?

Because they don't all have the same earning power if they decide not to be teachers. The point of a salary is not to reward merit or make the world a better place. The point of a salary is to attract qualified people to do a job. Qualified technical people are more expensive than qualified history teachers. That doesn't mean they're better people or somehow more deserving on a moral scale. It simply means that they have other options and won't respond to the same salary that will attract a good history teacher. Not acknowledging basic economics is just about the worst thing you can do when trying to hire people or buy goods, and it looks like the school districts are doing just that at the behest of the unions.

Sure, teachers should probably make more money across the board, but the idea that you pay somebody with a highly marketable education the same as somebody who doesn't have nearly as many job prospects simply doesn't work in the real world. I'd be more than happy to consider teaching math or science as a career. I like teaching, I'm reasonably good at getting ideas across, and I have the technical background. As it stands, though, going into teaching could cost me tens of thousands of dollars per year in lost income. That's just too big of a jump to make, so I don't consider it a viable option.

Re:How Bout Higher Pay for Teacher's Not in Unions

[Surt]

The really sad part is, you know every step of that bureaucratic process was created to correct some egregious unfair teacher firing in the past. So weep for humanity, it's chock full of evil people.

Re:How Bout Higher Pay for Teacher's Not in Unions

[mctk]

Yeah, I don't make much money. I've got a math degree and a master's that I'll be paying off for quite a few years to come. And my math friends who decided not to become teachers make significantly more money than I do with significantly less schooling. Should math & science teachers make more money. Sure. A shortage in applicants means you need to increase the pay. That's pretty simple.

In spite of that, it's not the low pay that bothers me. It's the hours and the working conditions. I get to school at 7:15am. I leave at 5:15pm. If I've had 20 minutes to sit down and have lunch, I'm lucky. Most days I get absolutely no break. And I take homework home every weekend.

I just want fewer students and fewer preps. I want to get to know my students. I want to be able to talk with them. I want to know what they know and what they need to learn. I want to help them when they're struggling, and lift them up when they're having a bad day. I want to get in their face and challenge them. I want them to see that failing is not okay.

I want control over my curriculum. I want my students to decide what's important to them and study math through their ideas. Any curriculum abstracted away from the individual, any curriculum standardized to what some corporate suit things is important will fail to inspire the majority of students. Give me that job. I want to inspire my students. And I have an idea how to do it. But your all-important testing is holding me back.

That's what I want. I'm okay with the money. I'm not okay with the huge number of disengaged students and marginalized teachers.