Rick Nelson

Doubling teachers' pay
September 15, 2005

Commenting on my September "Editor's Note," Ren Preston writes, "I agree with your column in the latest issue," which expressed the hope that educational resources from industry be available to assist educators." He adds, "We should celebrate and reward outstanding teachers, too."

That's a topic I touched on earlier, commenting on a proposal to pay more, at least to math and science teachers.

Now today, in a Washington Post article, Chris Whittle, founder and chief executive of the for-profit Edison Schools Inc. and the author of Crash Course: Imagining a Better Future for Public Education, advocates doubling public-school teachers' pay from the current average of $46,000 a year.

Doing that within the current system, he writes, would increase taxes on every U.S. household an average of more than $1000 per year, a step that's politically untenable. So he advocates a complete redesign of the "inherited hodgepodge of programs and initiatives" that makes up public schooling today. He envisions an effort analogous to Boeing's development of the 777 aircraft. Among the questions he suggests need to be addressed: "Is a class of 30 with a great teacher educationally inferior to a class of 15 with a so-so teacher?"  He says his plan would not involve any involuntary loss of teachers' jobs, claiming that the 50% reduction in the number of teachers in public schools (which today is 3 million) would be accomplished through normal attrition over five years.

Radical redesign of the current system may be no more politically tenable than a $1000-per-household tax increase, but it's worth consideration.

Posted by Rick Nelson on September 15, 2005 | Comments (0)