The U.S. keeps hiring scads more teachers. Their ranks have swollen markedly faster than school enrollments. As the Education Intelligence Agency interprets data recently compiled by the NEA, "for every 20 additional students enrolled in America's K-8 schools in the last 10 years, we hired three additional elementary school classroom teachers."
Are more teachers compatible with better teachers? I doubt it. In most of life, we make such trade-offs all the time. Think of buying clothes or cars or pastry - and deciding whether to shop for something at Target or Saks. Think of hiring staff. You may go for better quality, which usually means you have fewer options and the unit cost is greater; or you go for greater quantity, which generally translates to cheaper (per item) and lower quality. Econ 101, right?
Isn't this also true of school teachers? See below. First, though, a bit of stage-setting.
Not long ago, I took part in a small conference hosted by Michigan State University's Education Policy Center. My panel centered on a fine new report called Public Policy and Teacher Labor Markets: What We Know and Why It Matters, by Stanford education economist Susanna Loeb. In 60 pages, Loeb objectively reviews much of what's known about this important subject - and is candid about how much more ought to be known but isn't. She offers useful reminders, such as the interplay of salary and non-salary factors in determining teachers' school preferences and the important fact - especially for cosmopolitan policy types who spend their lives trotting around to conferences like this one - that most teachers opt to work near where they grew up.
Loeb's paper is also informative about salary comparisons, noting, for example, that average teacher pay resembles that of social workers and clergymen, not engineers and attorneys. And it provides welcome perspective on some issues, such as pointing out that today's young college graduates are inveterate job- and career-switchers. In other words, teaching isn't the only occupation that has trouble retaining new recruits. Nobody who knows twenty-somethings will find this point startling, yet it seldom enters into discussions of the teacher workforce.
As for Loeb's policy recommendations, three are noteworthy. First, the importance of targeting reforms at hard-to-staff schools and hard-to-fill teaching posts rather than laboring to make across-the-board changes in this immense enterprise. Second, differentiating among teachers on criteria that matter in the labor market (e.g. subject specialty) rather than treating everyone alike. Third (and perhaps most controversial), lowering entry barriers to teaching rather than raising them.
But one huge point shines through Loeb's data, though she does not dwell on it: for at least half a century, America has invested in more rather than better teachers. Between 1955 and 2000, the number of K-12 teachers in the U.S. almost tripled while school enrollments rose by about fifty percent. Instead of paying more money to a relatively smaller number of people, we chose to pay lots more people a more-or-less constant wage. Surely America would have found it easier to recruit, hire, and place better educated and more generously compensated instructors in its public-school classrooms if we hadn't set out to hire so many millions of them. Budgets (and labor pools) are finite. Choose guns or butter.
This trade-off has been noted by just a few analysts, such as Darius Lakdawalla in Education Next. Yet it's central to future teaching policy deliberations.
The unions don't want to hear about tradeoffs, however. Also present on my panel at the MSU conference was a senior staffer from the American Federation of Teachers who made clear that she and her organization demand cake AND ice cream AND fudge sauce AND a cherry on top. She said that America ought to (a) hire still more teachers (to reduce class size further), (b) pay them all more money across the board, (c) pay yet more in added incentives and rewards for teachers in hard-to-staff schools and scarce specialties (which differentiation she insisted can be done via collective bargaining) and, along with all that, (d) boost preparation requirements, elevate entry barriers, and strengthen training opportunities so that teaching becomes more of an honored and coveted profession.
If only we could turn lead to gold, we might do all those things at once. Otherwise, even this non-economist can see that it's a fantasy. We need to talk about choices and tradeoffs. Then we need to make them.
To see Loeb's excellent paper, click here. For the EIA commentary on the NEA data, click here. For the recent NEA Rankings and Estimates, click here. And for Lakdawalla's thoughtful discussion of tradeoffs, click here.
