Supplementary Materials

American teachers deserve a New Deal that treats them like true professionals.

The Problem

About three out of every four education dollars are invested in human capital and even though there have been advances in educational technology, schools rely on people to deliver instruction in most classrooms. In other words, teachers matter. Every student and parent intuitively grasps this and studies back it up: Studies by researcher William Sanders have found that having outstanding teachers three years in a row compensates for the negative effects of poverty on students’ test scores.

Yet despite the centrality of teacher quality to school effectiveness, many teachers are not well-selected, well-prepared, or well-trained. In fact, although the demands on public education have changed dramatically over the past 40 years, teachers are still treated mostly the same.

As the labor market for education has changed, teachers are now disproportionately drawn from among students with lower test scores on national exams such as the SAT, ACT, and GRE, and those with higher scores on the SAT and ACT are more likely than low-scorers to leave teaching after a few years.

To make matters worse, the best teachers in public education are distributed unevenly among schools. National research, most notably by Richard Ingersoll of the University of Pennsylvania and The Education Trust, shows that poor and minority students are much less likely than others to have teachers with a college major in the subject they are teaching. Ingersoll and his colleagues found, for example, that one-third of classes are taught by “out-of-field” teachers in high-poverty schools, compared to less than one-fifth in low-poverty schools. It’s also the case that experienced teachers migrate to more affluent schools during their careers, placing low-income and minority students at an even greater disadvantage.

And while there are plenty of candidates to teach in some academic disciplines, others such as math, science, and special education suffer from acute shortages. U.S. Department of Education figures show that about one-fourth of high school math and one-fifth of high school science teachers lack a major or minor in their field. Likewise, more than 10 percent of the nation’s special education teachers lack expertise in the field, while there are no qualified teachers at all for 12,000 special education classrooms.

Finally, many of today’s teachers entered the profession before the personal-computing and Internet eras and their familiarity with new technology lags behind that of many of their students. Public education remains organized pretty much as it has been since the Industrial Age (e.g., large schools, students rotating between classes, summers off), and its most important human resources are ill-equipped for the Information Age.

Reformers have proposed a range of reforms to tackle these problems: differential pay, performance-based or merit pay, across-the-board salary increases, improving teachers’ “working conditions,” improving mentoring and induction for new teachers, and improving teacher preparation.

Some states and cities are experimenting with differential pay as an alternative to the prevailing approach of rewarding seniority and advanced course work and degrees. The federal government is sponsoring a relatively small, $99 million initiative to encourage states and cities to experiment with such reforms.

America needs a New Deal for Teachers that entirely revamps teacher recruitment, training, induction, mentoring, and compensation. The federal government currently spends about $3 billion on teachers, mainly on professional development and class-size reduction. It should boost that to $5 billion and invest the entire amount in promising state-level teacher quality reforms. Doing so would shift the national debate about teaching from qualifications to effectiveness. It would also empower states and school districts to tailor teaching reforms to local needs.

This New Deal for Teachers would:

• Invest in states and school districts that reward teachers who work in challenging schools or teach in shortage areas;

• Invest in states and school districts that create school- or teacher-based rewards systems for outstanding performance;

• Invest in alternative teacher-preparation programs and charter colleges of education run by school districts and nonprofit organizations;

• Invest in teacher-mentoring programs and peer-support networks in high-need schools;

• Urge states to create rigorous peer-review or value added measurement programs that identify effective teachers and remediate or remove low performers;

• and Invest in states that create effective, accountable programs to train school leaders.

States and school districts that agree to pursue significant reforms and investments in teaching would receive a mix of competitive and formula-based federal grants. They would have to match their awards and demonstrate that their reforms are sustainable, further leveraging Washington’s investment.

The New Deal for Teachers would create a partnership with states and districts. It would not present them with a list of “allowable” uses nor guarantee them a steady flow of funds for meeting eligibility requirements, as is common in other federal teacher-quality programs. Rather, it would let them tailor their grants to their unique needs. The partnership would be built around real reform of the teaching profession.

The National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) dwarf all other education lobbies. The NEA would fight tooth and nail against differential pay, meaningful alternative certification, and teacher-accountability schemes with teeth. Although the AFT is more open-minded about such reforms at the national level, its rank and file is dubious about them at best. Both unions would protest phasing out federal funds for class-size reductions, notwithstanding the fact that those funds were never meant to last forever.

The political right, meanwhile, will object to almost any plan that hikes spending on teachers or initiatives that have the potential to involve progressive teachers unions in reform, as this idea does.

A bold proposal of the sort we outline, however, would find a very receptive audience. Parents intuitively understand the need for change as do many teachers, who see that the current system is not working for them.

Reform-oriented state and local union affiliates could also be won over, especially if they were made eligible for funding.

Idea Two: Offer Teachers a New Deal (62K) [download]

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