Two education-related articles appeared in the Outlook section of yesterday's Washington Post. One is worth reading. In ?Why aren't our teachers the best and brightest,? Paul Kihn and Matt Miller?who, with Byron Auguste, coauthored for McKinsey & Company the recently published report ?Closing the Talent Gap??explain why more of America's ?smartest, most accomplished college graduates? do not ?want to become teachers.? The reasons: in America, teaching doesn't pay well (or, at least, it doesn't pay as well as swankier professions such as medicine or law); most U.S. teacher-training programs are unselective in admissions and poor in quality; it is tricky for American teachers to be independent or self-directed in their work (they must bear sundry bureaucratic burdens); and, in the U.S., ?teaching is often seen as an ?unprofessional' career track, even by teachers.? Kihn and Miller offer cures:
. . . we calculate that the United States could more than double the portion of top-third new hires in the worst-performing 5 percent of schools (serving about 2.5 million students nationwide) from 14 percent to 34 percent, without raising teacher salaries. Under this scenario, which would cost about $1 billion a year, the government would pay for teacher training; schools would offer enhanced leadership and professional development; shabby, unsafe working conditions would be improved; high-performing teachers would be paid a bonus of 20 percent; and a national marketing campaign would promote teaching careers.
More ambitious efforts to close the talent gap would require higher salaries, which are the most powerful lever for attracting and retaining top graduates. For example, we found that in one scenario involving high-poverty schools serving about 8 million children nationally, increasing starting teacher salaries to $65,000 and maximum salaries to $150,000 would increase the percentage of new teachers drawn from the top third of their class from 14 percent to 68 percent. This approach would cost something like $30 billion a year at current student/teacher ratios, or about 5 percent of national K-12 spending.
Fine. But in their proposed solutions Kihn and Miller either forget or ignore the fact that few savvy 19-year-olds will willingly spend years sitting through dull, frustrating, often laughable education classes. I had a college friend who was an education major. One evening, her homework was to write each numeral, one through twenty, ten times. Other evenings, I would pop over to her apartment next door and find her at the kitchen table, coloring. Raise teacher salaries all you want. I couldn't even stand coloring when they made me do it in kindergarten.
?Liam Julian, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow