September 02, 2011 09:54 PM UTC

Bennet: Pay Teachers What They're Worth, Sooner

•  
• by: Colorado Pols

A noteworthy op-ed from Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado on education this week published in the Boston Globe. Excerpt follows (H/T: Scot Kersgaard of the Colorado Independent):

When talented women had to choose between becoming teachers or nurses, we could convince them to teach “Julius Caesar” for 30 years with a small salary that built toward a generous pension in retirement. Fortunately, women today can choose from an array of lucrative professions. But our system of teacher compensation has yet to evolve to reflect this choice.

We pay new teachers extremely low starting salaries. They are eligible for only small increases as they advance through their careers. But instead of competitive salaries, we offer a pension system that is back-loaded. It invests potential early-career earnings into late-career rewards, causing teachers’ total compensation to swell at the end of their careers. The effective cost to the system can be $150,000 or more a year.

This setup provides perverse incentives: Teachers who are ready to move on might stick it out in the classroom until they qualify for full retirement benefits. Meanwhile, new teachers aren’t enticed. Nearly 50 percent of new teachers leave the profession within the first five years, well prior to achieving full benefits.

We urgently need a new system – one that provides competitive salaries from the start, and opportunity for growth, attracting talented people entering the workforce to the profession.

What Sen. Bennet holds up as an example, of course, is the ProComp teacher pay plan he helped implement at Denver Public Schools as superintendent. Developed collaboratively with the teacher’s union, ProComp both increased starting salaries and incentivized high performance–as well as willingness to work in challenging environments and fields of study.

We know that some aspects of ProComp remain the subject of debate. But just about everyone can agree that public school teachers should, absent any other consideration, be paid more than they are today. With a starting nationwide average salary for teachers under $35,000 a year, there really is a profound economic disincentive to entering the teaching profession–as a college grad with the ability to earn much more elsewhere.

And yes, it would help if they weren’t paying for their students’ paper and pencils.