A recent New York Times op-ed on teacher salaries has been making the rounds:

WHEN we don’t get the results we want in our military endeavors, we don’t blame the soldiers. We don’t say, “It’s these lazy soldiers and their bloated benefits plans! That’s why we haven’t done better in Afghanistan!” No, if the results aren’t there, we blame the planners. We blame the generals, the secretary of defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff. No one contemplates blaming the men and women fighting every day in the trenches for little pay and scant recognition.

And yet in education we do just that. When we don’t like the way our students score on international standardized tests, we blame the teachers. When we don’t like the way particular schools perform, we blame the teachers and restrict their resources.

Let’s think through this for a moment. When we don’t get the results we want in our military endeavors, we might very well blame the generals, the secretary of defense, etc. But part of the blame will presumably go to how we are deploying personnel, and how we are deploying our resources. Do certain military assets contribute more to our war-fighting capacity than others? Military endeavors are successful when there are clear objectives, and when fighting units are structured to achieve those objectives. 

This is one reason why pay varies dramatically across military personnel. Some specialists receive large reenlistment bonuses in recognition of the fact that the military needs to retain their skills. Other do not receive large reenlistment bonuses. Imagine if military personnel were compensated the way that we compensate public school teachers. 

The rest of the piece is impressively selective in how it deploys evidence, e.g., citing high-performers on standardized tests that pay teaches relatively high salaries while ignoring countries and cities that perform well while offering somewhat lower salaries. 

The consulting firm McKinsey recently examined how we might attract and retain a talented teaching force. The study compared the treatment of teachers here and in the three countries that perform best on standardized tests: Finland, Singapore and South Korea.

Turns out these countries have an entirely different approach to the profession. First, the governments in these countries recruit top graduates to the profession. (We don’t.) In Finland and Singapore they pay for training. (We don’t.) In terms of purchasing power, South Korea pays teachers on average 250 percent of what we do.

Here is another factoid from a paper on “Class-Size Effects in School Systems Around the World: Evidence from Between-Grade Variation in TIMSS”:

In Singapore, we have 268 classes in our sample – 134 schools with one seventh-grade class and one eighth-grade class each. With an average mathematics test score of 623, students in Singapore are the best performers of all countries participating in TIMSS. The average class size in Singapore is 33.2. Figure 1 plots the average test-score performance of students in class-size blocks of five students. Each block with five students more on average has a higher average level of performance than the previous block, indicating that students in larger classes perform better than students in smaller classes.

So does this mean that we should raise class sizes, fire large numbers of teachers deemed to be weak performers, and raise salaries for those that remain? Sounds like a splendid idea.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution. Some teachers should be paid more. Others should be paid less. Many should be fired. Those decisions should be made by school leaders who are held accountable to parents, and not just elected officials.