Kitchen Conversations

When you spend a week at a vacation lake house in northern Minnesota with family, there’s always a chance the topic of “how to fix public education” might pop up as a kitchen conversation.

This visit, while I was washing the breakfast dishes, my sister-in-law wondered out loud if we should pay our public school teachers more. Her thinking, and many others like her, believe that if we only paid classroom instructors more, then our public education system would improve.

I countered with a question of my own:

If paying teachers more was the solution to making our kids smarter and stronger, then why haven’t we done it in a large way over the past 50 years?

Sure, we’ve seen pockets of salary increase for teachers in districts or states over the past half century, but there has been little effort to insure top-performing teachers are compensated for making our young learners better readers, writers, and problem-solvers.

According to the NEA, one of the nation’s largest teacher unions, average teacher pay has failed to keep up with inflation over the past decade. Adjusted for inflation, on average, teachers are making 5% less than they did 10 years ago. In 2024, at 3.9%, the increase in the average starting salary was the largest in the 14 years that NEA has been tracking teacher salary benchmarks. However, when adjusted for inflation, the starting teacher salaries are now $4,273 below the 2008-2009 levels.

The average starting teacher salary in the U.S. is $44,530, while the average teacher salary at large is a bit shy of $70,000 – $69,544.

As I picked up the towel to start drying the dishes, the question was asked, “Well, why don’t we pay our teachers more?”

Books have been written attempting to answer this question, but my experience as a school leader tells me that we don’t compensate teachers the way we do other professionals because there are just too many low performers in schools to justify such high salaries.

I shared this story with my sister-in-law and brother-in-law while drying:

When I was a high school principal, I had around 15 math teachers. Five of those teachers were highly effective and could have commanded pay far beyond the salary scale our district offered. A second five, although not as effective as the top five, had potential to become outstanding classroom instructors over time. But the last five, the five who were probably last hired before school started the new year, were struggling low performers. The sad fact, and something I live with every day, is that I knew these five low performers were never going to improve to even average. I hired them so that we wouldn’t have teacher vacancies as we launched a new year.

Now, if we could have somehow used a different human resource strategy and utilize additional technology support to redistribute students to the 10 math teachers who were either highly effective or poised to become highly effective, and not hire the five who were duds, then might have been better for making our young learners smarter and stronger when it came to their reading, writing, and problem-solving abilities.

The sad fact is that, even in high-performing schools like the one I led, approximately 30% to 35% of classroom teachers need improvement, and that number drastically increases when you consider low-performing schools that serve primarily black, brown, and poor kids.

As I was finishing up the dishes, my sister-in-law asked me what I thought needed to happen to improve our public education system. I answered this way.

First, we spend too much time on learning content and not enough time building relationships between adult learning leaders and young learners – especially in our middle schools and high schools.

Second, we need to stress media literacy, so that our young learners are prepared to maneuver through disinformation that social media and artificial intelligence sometimes offers.

Third, our nation’s curriculum needs to focus on developing skills so our young learners can become strong readers, writers, and problem-solvers. Instead, we focus too much on learning content.

Fourth, we need to re-engineer how we go about learning, and that will require a new system. To me, and other learner-centered thinkers, that new system will require a new training program for adult learning leaders, one that focuses on “deep learning” instead of traditional teaching strategies. The new system will expect groups of 20 young learners to team up with an adult learning coach that can help improve their reading, writing, and problem-solving skills. Some adult learning leaders should be expected to be specialists in areas like foreign language, the sciences, and mathematics.

I’m sure there are other steps needed, but a kitchen conversation can only be so long.

By that time, I had finished drying the dishes, so I stopped with my suggestions, realizing that what I had just shared is a lot for anyone to take in.

After a long pause, my sister-in-law and her husband decided to go on a canoe ride, and I went outside to read articles from The Atlantic on the deck, looking out over a beautiful Minnesota lake shore.

The sad part of this story is this seems to be the way most conversations end when it comes to improving our current public education system. What we have to do to change seems too difficult to do, so we paddle a canoe and sit in a comfy deck chair while reading instead.

Til tomorrow. SVB