I'm in NJ where we value public education, for the most part. According to National Center for Education Statistics our average teacher pay was $77,489 in 2022. This is excluding benefits/pension.
Title of that article: "NJ 4th Graders Score Low on Literacy, Still Ahead of Nation"
Throwing more money at the problem often makes some progress, but it's not always a definitive solution. Tough problems usually involve reorganizing processes, which tends to be harder than spending more money or recruiting more talented people.
It doesn't help that teaching programs in universities hold anti-science views about reading and reading comprehension and still cling to whole language nonsense. Furthermore they often reject broad cultural knowledge and vocabulary as key components of reading comprehension and insist that (despite evidence to the contrary) that it is a discrete skill that can be built in a vacuum.
Not being proficient does not mean they can't read, it's more that they're not "good" at reading. The same article says that the national numbers are even worse. The article only states that the gap between low income and wealthier students increased by 3% but it's not clear what the actual total difference is. If you look at the underlying data[1] you'll see that the national average is actually below proficient and that New Jersey is consistently above average, regardless of income. Certainly there is a difference in proficiency by income but there are far more factors at play there, most importantly the child's home life.
A hypothesis- their school reading lessons aren't being reinforced at home. Maybe their parents are too busy to do that reinforcement, working long hours, etc. Or there's a housing stability issue that lower income families often encounter.
How are the other 22% of low income fourth graders able to read?
I'm not going to defend New Jersey's teacher unions specifically.
However, pay based on outcome is really hard to get right, especially for something like teaching. What is the outcome? Well, what we really want is adults who can contribute to society. But that's too hard to measure and would take too long, so we need a proxy. Anything to do with tests is tough: not only do you have to (somehow -- this isn't a solved problem) calibrate for the students themselves to suss out what the teacher's contribution is, but there's immense pressure to teach to the test and prep for the test specifically, even at the expense of actual education. Not nothing, but imperfect. Other measures suffer from the same basic problem: any measure that becomes a goal ceases to be a useful measure because people optimize for that.
So what's an alternative? Maybe it's to make teaching a respected, well-paid profession where you have stability and advancement. One good way of doing that is by having clear seniority-based pay, not because it reflects how good at the job you are, but because that attracts teachers who are serious about making it a career and establishes it as a mainstream, lucrative profession.
But I don't know. This stuff is all extremely hard, and I don't think anywhere has figured it all out.
I don't like this argument at all. You are trying to enforce excess rules and micromanagements on teachers. I live in an area where teachers are paid well, and know a lot of educator who have been at it for 20+ years. Guess what, most them aren't trying to game the system. They care about their students and doing a good job. Sure some people might just try to coast, but it's not the majority. By trying to punish this minority, you end up hurting everyone.
Teaching jobs don't exist in a vacuum, and the reason to have pay based on seniority is simple. If you want competent people to go into the profession from the start, they need to know they have a steady and worthwhile career. If you can provide that, like NJ does, (and where I live in NY does) then you might actually get good teachers. If instead you make it unappealing and difficult because of uncertainty, you will only get people who are incompetent and have no other options.
The state doesn't have unions, the teachers do. The state negotiates with the union and then the teachers vote to approve the agreed on contract. If the teachers don't like the contract the union has negotiated, they can vote against it. If the union leadership continues to negotiate unacceptable contracts, the teachers can vote their union leadership out.
Well, if you get to teach a lot of well-off kids who have a lot of extra support at home and you can siphon off the undesirables onto others, you get good marks when most of them inevitably "succeed".
If you have to teach the kids who need help, you get poor marks when some of them inevitably fail.
School choice via vouchers, etc would allow parents to decide for themselves how outcome is measured
Edit: why the downvotes? If you are uncertain of or unamenable to the way outcomes are measured, vouchers are a reasonable solution that puts the power in your hands
2/3 of private schools are religious. And many private schools were literally founded as a response to brown vs board. Parents are not choosing schools based on academic success alone.
An extremely significant part of how parents choose schools is based on the social groups they want their kids associating with.
99% of the academic success of private schools is attributable to their ability to exclude poorly performing students, not some magical pedagogical secret.
It’s the same exact reason why homes of equivalent quality in two different districts of the same school system may have 2x or 3x price differentials. Because parents pay hundreds of thousands so their kid doesn’t sit next to a kid with parents who can’t afford the same.
No they pay hundreds of thousands of dollars so they don't have to deal with the school refusing to take action on bullying or disruptive behavior.
If schools are unwilling or unable to provide a stable learning environment then parents move on. There has been a lot of ink spilled on exactly why this is, including the racial and religious issues you allude to, but the brute fact is that in many communities families flee or switch to religious school because their children suffer violence at the hands of their fellow students.
It's the same thing, phrased two different ways. There's not some magical action any school administrator can take to make poorly raised kids behave. Especially in an understaffed school. You can make them leave the school, which removes the problem temporarily, but then what? Truancy is already a problem, expelling more kids is not going to fix the problem. The US already has one of the largest criminal underclasses on the planet. Fixing a classroom by ignoring tough situations just kicks the can down the road. Your kid will have a nice classroom experience, and when they graduate, they'll be robbed by the kid they didn't have to sit by.
IMO this entire problem was caused by segregating our schools to begin with. The problem of misbehaving kids isn't going to be fixed by giving them free vacation on the streets. They need to see with their own eyes that their behavior isn't acceptable, and that means putting them in environments where they are outsiders. Kids are a product of their social environment, full stop.
Measuring "outcome" in education is very hard, specially when deciding pay, as it creates perverse incentives. For example, teachers optimizing for test results instead of actual education, disadvantaged classes getting less attention (because results will be worse so it will affect teacher's evaluation)... Evaluating teachers based on outcome is something that sounds good at first but it's plagued with problems no matter how you try to do it.
Does NJ really value education? Or do you value education funding for other reasons?
I remember a while ago, googling around about the schools of Newark NJ, because of a rather complicated Mark Zuckerberg story. The school district's budget was around a billion a year, while a third of graduating students weren't proficient at reading.
And when public officials were trying to do something about this, their motives were rather ...peculiar. I think the words of governor Christie were something like "Nobody votes for me in Newark, so why not do the right thing?"
Think about that for a minute. The governor would have expected to to loose votes for trying to improve a city's public schools. Does that sound like a place that values the education of it's children?
I don't live in Essex County so Newark's schools don't effect me directly.
Newark's problems are at the family level, not at the school level. Parental involvement is a baseline requirement for a successful student. It's unfortunate but Newark is hurting in this regard.
Yeah but in NJ, that's 35k-45k in most other states. Not really worth bragging about. If it was over 100k for NJ, I'd say it was an leading. 75k there just barely pays rent on a small apartment.
60k is okay in some areas, personally I think the average salary should be 85-90k and over 100k where cost of living is much higher.
I lived in an area for a little bit Strongsville OH where the teachers went on strike because they wanted better benefits and they were making 90k. My mom with a master's and 7 years experience was only making around 40k as a school teacher where I grew up. It is interesting.
In another part of Ohio my SO was making 46k as a teacher. Keep in mind not every teacher is paid the same. To get higher salaries they often have to take on more preps or administrative duties, requiring even more hours.
it is 100% worth it but most states also don't have the property tax like NJ does. Imagine if California somehow voted to drastically up the property tax. The homes might become semi affordable.
Well worth it.