On August 31, Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado wrote an op-ed piece for the Boston Globe, demanding a re-evaluation of teacher compensation in this country. Senator Bennet served as superintendent of Denver Public Schools from 2005 to 2009, and was named by Time as one of the leading educational activists for 2011. A portion of his op-ed piece is below:
“Our ability to compete for the jobs of tomorrow depends, above all, on our capacity to educate children today. Yet we are still operating under yesterday’s system to attract and retain new, talented teachers. It is outdated and designed to fail.
Study after study affirms what I saw in the classroom every day as superintendent of Denver Public Schools: Nothing makes a bigger difference for student learning than great teaching. To get enough of the teachers we need, teaching has to be a great job where talented people are supported and rewarded.
That won’t happen without reforming a compensation system that was designed deep in the last century for a labor market that no longer exists. It’s based on a society that discriminated against women, and left them with limited professional options[…]
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[…]
Top-performing teachers who take on the toughest challenges should have the opportunity to make six-figure incomes early in their careers. We should differentiate their salaries based on the difficulty of their assignments and their ability to drive results in the classroom. And when those teachers are ready to leave the classroom, they’ll have the same flexibility so many of their peers have in today’s workforce.
Every teacher who has entered under the current system is owed what they were promised. Honoring the commitments that have been made while financing a new system will take some creativity. But we have to do it to be successful[…]
Teacher compensation isn’t the only factor in cultivating great teaching. Other important priorities include changing how we measure student performance, providing more flexibility to teacher-preparation programs, and improving how we train and support principals.
Yet with a million teachers set to retire nationwide in the next few years, an inadequate system to recruit and retain new teachers, and schools that are struggling to meet high expectations, we can no longer afford to continue a 20th-century system in a 21st-century world. It is time we reform our compensation structure to allow us to recruit from a strong pool of talent and to prevent us from losing our most successful newcomers to other jobs.”
To read the full piece, please visit http://articles.boston.com/2011-08-31/bostonglobe/29949885_1_new-teachers-top-performing-teachers-pension-system
