The World's Most Underpaid Profession (creating an economy for great teachers)

HN Version of the comment I posted on your site:

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As a teacher in Milwaukee Public Schools, I tend to think that there is a direct correlation between socioeconomic status (SES) and student performance. Students who come from homes where their parents are educated and have jobs and take care of their kids likely are not in the lowest SES categories so they are expected to do well and work hard on school. Kids in this situation generally meet their learning goals.

Kids that have no parental support are common in the lowest SES situations. These kids basically have to raise themselves and their younger siblings because mom or dad aren't there. It takes a lot of training and an amazing school environment to lift kids out of these situations and keep them on pace with their learning.

The big reason why performance based pay for teachers is such a hot issue (besides the fact that teachers WILL cheat on their students tests to get their bonuses) is that every community has such a wide array of challenges to overcome. Kids from one area of Milwaukee have very different environments from the kids across town, for example. It's hard to determine benchmarks for performance when the kids are operating at such different stages of development.

Part of me says, "Teacher evaluations come down to tests, and tests are b.s.", but another part of me thinks there has to be some way to evaluate whether students make progress. Our district tries to collect data on this but I'm not sure if it works all that great.

The economics solution would be to make teachers invest in students (paying cash to teach them!) in exchange for a percentage of future earnings. Taking a cheap student who everyone assumed would be a failure and inspiring and educating him into a successful entrepreneur might then be a better investment than finding a professor's son and providing an adequate education, due to a presumably kpmuch higher valuation of that child.

A problem is that a successful entrepreneur or hedgie is still more likely to come from a middle or upper class background and can easily make 1000x the return of other professions (which are more credential based, and hence a more level playing field for lower class students.). Hence, even at high valuations, investing in motivated, intelligent, well connected students may be the best investment.

Year on year changes would help ensure teachers were compensated fairly, as long as the market provided some kind of feedback to let parents and students evaluate teachers. I assume there is far greater variation among students and among teachers than between the teaching value offered by the same teacher to different students, but that may not be the case.

I don't really think this scheme is workable, but it provides the right economic incentives to everyone.

How would anyone know what percentage of my success went to each specific teacher of the 50 or more I had over my lifetime? Was it the teacher who taught me how to read and write, the one who taught me basic math or the one who taught me higher level skills that should earn the highest percentage? Maybe it was the one who showed the biggest interest in getting me on the right track when I deviated? There are so many arbitrary variables.

Yup - no pragmatic advice offered really, just a theoretical idea. Perhaps the most interesting point is simply that it's hard to put a value to the work of a teacher.