When we ran our personalized learning lab in Houston nearly a decade ago, we paid our two learning coaches around $100,000 each to make 50 middle school-aged learners smarter and stronger. In order to earn that type of salary, these two coaches had to demonstrate 1 ½ years of academic growth for each of the 50 young learners in the areas of reading, writing, and problem-solving. We fired our first numeracy coach after one year due to the fact that she did not meet the expected achievement targets for all of the kids.
We were able to pay these two learning coaches a six-figure salary because we didn’t need to hire a science teacher, a social studies teacher, a foreign language teacher, and a physical education teacher to accompany the two learning coaches. We didn’t need to hire a principal and an assistant principal to help these two learning coaches make their young learners smarter and stronger. And we sure didn’t need to hire a superintendent and their companion central office to support making our 50 young learners smarter and stronger.
A couple of days ago, I read with interest Daniel Pink’s op-ed article in the Washington Post titled “Why Not Pay Teachers $100,000 a Year?” Pink is the author of seven bestselling nonfiction books on a range of topics – from human motivation to the science of timing to the elements of creativity.
Pink writes,
“Adam DiPerna always had to hold it in.”
“As a Spanish teacher at Gerald G. Huesken Middle School in Lancaster, Pa., he’d arrive in his classroom at 7:10 a.m. each day and cannonball into a morning that left no time for a bathroom break. He’d teach back-to-back-to-back-to-back classes until his lunch period, 27 minutes during which he also had to heat and eat the food he’d brought from home, email parents about problems and absences, and field questions from students. After school, he coached wrestling, advised the student council and chaired the GHMS world language department. Work, from grading papers to preparing lessons, spilled into the evenings and weekends he wanted to spend with his wife and three kids.”
“For his efforts, DiPerna – with a Bucknell University diploma and a master’s degree in education – earned less than any college graduate he knew. So, last year, after a decade and a half in the classroom, he quit teaching to take a job as a sales representative at a large packaging company, trading a life of conjugated verbs for a new life of corrugated cardboard. ‘I wanted to be a public servant,’ DiPerna, 42, told me. ‘I did not get into teaching to make a lot of money. But I also didn’t get into it to barely scrape by.’”
“He earned more in his first partial year as a paper salesman than in his 15th year as a top-rated teacher. ‘I get paid more money,’ he said. ‘And I can listen to the call of nature.’”
“DiPerna’s gain is America’s loss. Four years after the onset of the pandemic, students across the country are still struggling. Test scores are falling. Absenteeism is rising. Meanwhile, about 44 percent of U.S. schools face a teacher shortage.”
“If we’re serious about hanging on to capable educators, and attracting new ones, we should start treating them like true professionals. And one place to begin is compensation.”
“Why not pay America’s teachers a minimum salary of $100,000 a year?”
“The average annual salary for public school teachers during 2021-2022 was $66,397, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, a nearly 8 percent pay cut, in inflation-adjusted terms, from a decade ago. Salary isn’t the only reason educators exit the profession. But whether they work in suburban New York or rural Mississippi, teachers earn significantly less than they could in other fields.”
“The Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, calls this difference the ‘teacher pay penalty.’ EPI calculated that, in 2022, teachers earned only 74 cents on the dollar compared with comparably educated professionals. The right-leaning Hoover Institution reached a similar conclusion in its 2020 report on educator compensation, showing that, even adjusting for factors such as talent and experience, ‘teachers are paid 22 percent less than they would be if they were in jobs in the U.S. economy outside of teaching.’”
“Nothing against actuaries (median salary: $113,990), but isn’t helping a first-grader learn to read as valuable as assessing insurance premiums on your Hyundai Elantra?”
…
“A back-of-the-envelope calculation: If it requires about $35,000 per teacher just to raise average pay to six figures, and the United States employs more than 3 million public school teachers, the total cost would be north of $100 billion. Are you feeling defibrillated?”
“Although that figure represents just 5 ½ weeks of Medicare spending or well under half the Pentagon’s weapons budget, it’s still a massive annual sum. The federal government, which supplies about 7 percent of K-12 funding, shouldn’t finance the whole cost. It could establish a matching program to share the burden – say, $50 billion from states and localities. But that $100 billion would also likely mean raising taxes…”
“That’s why this hefty pay raise comes with two strings attached.”
“First, a longer school year. Eliminating summer break might spark a national uprising among 8-year-olds and tourism-industry executives. But the nine-month school year is a relic…Professionals work year-around. Teachers should, too. A longer school year could also reduce summer learning loss.”
“Second, greater accountability. Many teachers are excellent; some are heroic. But any parent knows that a few just aren’t up to the job. Under current employment arrangements, it’s difficult to steer these underperformers out of the profession. And with pay based largely on seniority, mediocre teachers lack much incentive to depart or even to improve. Low-performing, less-committed peers erode the morale of the majority of teachers who do their jobs well. Treating all teachers like professionals means showing a few teachers to the door.”
…
I would add one more string to Pink’s list of two. A new type of K-12 compensation package would be smart to create different professional job responsibilities like medicine and the law have over the years. Not all medical professionals are doctors. Not all legal professionals are lawyers. In a public school, most adults are teachers – not teachers in training, or master teachers – just teachers. And all those teachers receive similar compensation. Skill differentiation, along with requisite compensation, would benefit our current public school system, if they are serious about rewarding excellence from their adult learning leaders.
But it remains to be seen if our current public school system could act this way, or even think this way.
For job differentiation to occur, along with a change in compensation, it might require a new learning system.
Til tomorrow. SVB
A Better Path to Learning 
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