Last week Bill Gates and Arne Duncan, Obama's Secretary of Education, spoke in favor of re-examining the extra bump in salary states give to teachers who hold a masters degree. This bump amounts to $11,000 per teacher in Washington, totaling $330 million. The University of Washington's Center for Reinventing Public Education has convincingly shown that these masters degrees (90% of which are masters in education)confer no benefit on student learning. See Stretching the School Dollar, edited by Frederick Hess and Eric Osberg.
Joel Klein, Chancellor of New York City Public Schools, took this criticism a step further and observed that we pay teachers like assembly line workers, not professionals. Teachers are given automatic salary increases each year based on the degrees and credits they have earned, regardless of whether they succeed at teaching students or not. He said : "That is not a system that is going to succeed. Systems that succeed are systems that are built on excellence, that reward people for excellence and have a real accountability for non-performance."
The Tacoma News Tribune says today in "Master's bump: $330 million a year for nothing," that teachers with masters degrees in more rigorous and high-demand subjects, like math and science, who do succeed at raising student achievement, actually receive less on the teacher pay scale than others, as they have typically less seniority.
So Washington's teacher pay scale creates incentives for highly qualified math and science teachers, who do succeed at raising student achievement, to leave the classroom and seek work in the private sector.
The factory model fails teachers and students. Good teachers deserve to be paid according to their ability to prepare the next generation for success in life. Bad teachers should not be teaching at all, much less receiving the same step increases, bonuses, benefits and pensions that good teachers receive. The factory model instead rewards teachers who resign themselves to this broken model of teacher pay, and must be a significant negative influence on the morale of good teachers.
I wonder how many great teachers have left public education for private schools because of this demeaning and disrespectful pay scale.
Public school teachers deserve better treatment. They should get what private school teachers take for granted: pay based on their ability to increase student learning, as judged by someone who knows them best ---their school principal.