THE REASON TEACHERS DON’T DESERVE MORE MONEY

Harsh. But True.

*I’m currently in Colombia for my second week properly enjoying summer break. I have over 12 hours of salsa dance lessons under my belt, I have confirmed that Colombian women are indeed more beautiful than average, and yes, I have used said salsa dance moves on said beautiful Colombian woman. Life is good. In the meantime, this is a repost of an article I wrote back in 2023. I think I had about 100 subscribers at the time. For the other 1,700 subs, ENJOY!

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Here’s a resume that’ll make you pause.

Brilliant at interpreting individuals’ emotional needs. Can engage, inspire, and trigger thinking. Can modify strategy on the fly depending on the situation. Collects, interprets, and makes changes according to data. Can simultaneously lead and listen. Knows when to step back and let less experienced people take the reins. Knows when to step up and stop a situation from becoming a dumpster fire. Constantly reflects. Sharp as a scholar. Mean as a drill sergeant. When facing a multi-pronged attack on personal emotions and every brain cell is screaming to unleash the beast and murder the idiots contradicting perfectly reasonable logic…has the ability to breathe. Creates the standard. Holds the standard. Knows when to break it.

Maker of memories that echo in eternity.

If I told you I was describing the skill set of a fortune 500 company CEO or a brilliant leader you wouldn’t blink. If I told you this person is making over $600,000 a year you’d probably nod along and think, “well deserved.” However, this is just the resume of a particularly good teacher, quite possibly trying to decide which health insurance is cheaper and wondering whether buying the 6 year old version of the Toyota Camry is too much of a stretch at the moment.

There is a fascinating disconnect between the monetary value teachers receive and the value society knows teachers deserve. If I had a nickel for every time I heard, “what you’re doing for those kids is so important!” followed by, “I can’t believe how poorly they pay you!” then I’d still be poor with a whole lot of nickels. Aggregate data points to the fact that on average, over the course of a lifetime a person with a finance degree will earn 2x what a person with an education degree will earn and those who walk out with science degrees end up with about 1.5x the amount of money. The gut punch is all the degrees cost the same.

What’s interesting is almost everybody has the following cookie-cutter story. “Man, I had this one teacher that really taught me how to -blah blah blah- and it really left an impact on me. They helped me become who I am today.” Perhaps a particular teacher’s face springs to mind after reading that line. I can’t think of any other profession that has such a ubiquitous meaningful impact on so many people on a personal level.

For instance, I can’t think of a single scientist who has changed who I am as a person. (However, big ups to guys who made a bunch of vaccines and made sure I didn’t get a crippling case of polio at a young age.) And while I can see the progress for humanity in excellent scientists, the financial reward for people moving money around for enormous corporations is quite the head scratcher. I mean, the only thing I can really think of when it comes to finance people impacting my life was the economic collapse of 2008.

So what’s the deal here? Why aren’t teachers making money hand over fist? There is beyond obvious recognition and massive appreciation for the impact teachers make on society. In the land of capitalism, people are usually rewarded for the services they render to others. To find a clear answer here, let’s check out another resume.

Totally unmotivated. Absent often. No attempts made to professionally develop. Punching in and punching out solely for the paycheck. Minimal attempts to creatively express work. Doesn’t get along with co-workers. Disillusioned with the purpose of the job. Constantly looking at the clock. Makes people around him worse. Easily frustrated. Easily tired. Masters degree in the art of complaining.

Now here’s a guy we can all pin as a miserable fuck. And guess what, we’ve all experienced this guy in the classroom. He’s the teacher that makes us want to take a gun and clean out the space between our ears. He’s either so boring, or so confrontational with his students that he is actively making the world a worse place to live. How many Einsteins have we lost because someone with an immense predisposition for calculation experienced a math class so boring that they simply decided, “you know what, this math thing just ain’t for me.” Did the teacher ignoring the slightly autistic kid in the back just rob us of the next generation's Elon Musk? Quite possibly. Teachers can fuck shit up in a bad way. You could even argue that teachers do more harm than good.

This is why when people drop the classic line, “We just don’t pay teachers enough for what they do,” I shrug my shoulders and weakly agree. Because what people should be saying is we don’t pay good teachers enough. The bad ones deserve less money along with a Kit Kat bar full of glass shards to munch on. So let's just say something out loud which is painful but true, some teachers deserve more money than other teachers.

THE QUESTION

Here’s the true problem teachers face if they ever want the work they do to reflect a higher paycheck.

How do you quantify the difference between a good teacher and a bad one?

If you didn’t need to be scientific about this, or attach numbers to the situation, this isn’t much of a difficult task. You’d go around the school and ask about 100 kids to rank their teachers from best to worst. You could even get fancy about it and get a little survey that asked multiple questions such as, “which teachers are the toughest and the fairest?” and, “from which teacher do you feel you learn the most?”

Chances are a lot of the same names would pop up at the top of the lists. And for those of you thinking that the students would just choose the easiest teachers, or the teacher’s they felt the friendliest towards, I’ve only observed the opposite. In my current school the toughest teacher from a grading standpoint and a workload standpoint is asked to speak at graduation every year. In most cases the student body usually has a solid pulse on which teacher is excellent at their job.

However, the problem is not identifying great teachers, the problem is quantifying great teachers. Here’s a story to illustrate the issue. Around my third year of teaching I had really started to find my stride. I was starting to enjoy the respect of the student body and I had finally gained some control of the gymnasium. My first two years were basically a shit show that included trying to kick kids out of the gym who didn’t have the class, being ignored, and failed attempts to control my temper.

One day in my third year of teaching, I took a sick day. When I walked back into school the next day the entire staff looked at me as if they were Vietnam war vets and I had dodged the draft. Turns out, without me, they needed three staff members for each class to cover the gym, control the chaos, and kick out kids who didn’t actually have P.E.. Apparently half the school just said fuck it, treated the whole day like a day off, and ran into the gymnasium because I wasn’t there. That next day I received more thank yous for doing my job than I had ever had recieved in the entire first two years combined. In a way, by taking a day off, the work I was doing suddenly became visible to the staff.

I was telling one of my friends who works in insurance about this and he said, “Dude, what a great opportunity! This is the perfect time to go to your principal and ask for a raise.” I almost laughed. I had to explain to him that the relationship between teaching ability and salary had nothing to do with merit.

If you’re not in the know, the public education system pays teachers based on seniority. That’s it. “How long have they been there?” Do kids hate the class and routinely skip it because the teacher put on yet another movie? Doesn’t matter. That teacher is making well over $100,000 because they have tenure and they’ve been there 20 years.

Even if we ignore the seniority based system and I walked into the principal's office after my day off and asked for a raise, the following conversation would have been a strange one. “Hey boss, don’t know if you noticed yesterday, but the place kinda fell apart without me. I want 10k added to my salary.” It’s a fun anecdote, but it doesn’t really measure my effectiveness.

When someone in finance or sales walks in for a salary negotiation they are armed to the teeth with quantifiable facts. “I brought x amount of dollars for this company and outperformed 90% of your employees.” An engineer or a scientist can point to a product they contributed to and explain how that product has benefited the company. The problem with teaching is that our product is the holistic growth of a child

…and that is fiendishly difficult to measure.

Measuring the Impossible

So what do we currently use to measure student growth? Answer: Graduation rate and test scores. There are enormous problems with both of these measurements. The graduation rate is already suspect due to the incredible pressure on teachers to inflate grades. (If you’d like to learn more about that then definitely give Delusional Education a read.) But let’s jump into a fantasy world where students earn their grades and teachers are allowed to fail students.

Even if a school improves its graduation rate and the principal beats his chest about the student growth the school has achieved, there’s no way to differentiate between which teachers were effective and which teachers just went through the motions. The graduation rate might reflect well on the overall culture of the school, but this in no way means every teacher equally contributed to the growth of each student.

The second way we are currently measuring student progress is through individual state mandated tests. These are currently the only way a third party measures individual student progress that relates to an individual teacher. If a particular class of students in New York State does well on the biology regents test, the state could potentially point to that biology teacher and say “look, that teacher is highly effective! Give her a raise!” Indeed, back in the No Child Left Behind era certain states created monetary incentives for teachers that showed their kids could improve their state test scores. This lead to a number of spicy cheating scandals where certain teachers doctored their student’s answer sheets before they were graded.

The problem with test scores is obvious. They are an indecently narrow view of a human being. For funsies let’s apply this scenario to P.E.. Let’s say I get a $10,000 bonus if my students place in the top 80% of the state on the pacer test. I would create an entire curriculum on how to increase a student's aerobic capacity. We would break down strategic ways to efficiently plant the foot and change direction. Running form would take front and center stage of instruction. Classes would contain a mix of interval training and longer low intensity aerobic sessions. Top grades to the students who actually completed the training. I would have army of meat robots ready to run between two lines in the gym and fuck up the pacer test.

…But is this what we want? Students with fantastic blood pressure and a sincere hatred for P.E.? Should I just ignore all the awesome beauty to be found in sport and simply focus on a 10k bonus? I think not. Any rewards based on test scores only incentivizes teachers to teach to the test, and that inherently ignores all the skills that are actually important. Like learning how to speak one's mind. Like learning how to successfully manage your own emotions. Like learning all the weird and janky knowledge that teachers can throw out there when they aren’t confined to increasing their students' performance on a test. Some of the best moments in teaching have nothing to do with curriculum and everything to do with the social emotional skills kids form in the classroom.

But again, how do you quantify relationships? How do you quantify the holistic growth of a human being? What stat could a teacher point to outside of test results and say, “hey boss, I’m killin it” and then that boss goes to his boss and says, “hey boss, this teacher is killin it, let’s give him a raise,” and then that boss goes to the taxpayers and says, “hey tax payers, this teacher is making phenomenal human beings. That’s why we’re giving him more of your money.” The painful truth is you can’t. Quantifying everything a great teacher does is an impossibility.

Final story to illustrate my point. I had a student that I had worked with closely from freshman year to senior year. He was part of the weightlifting club, and he loved it. He enjoyed the weights, he enjoyed the struggle, he enjoyed all the tiny lessons that constant self imposed physical stress can teach. By the time he was a senior he was one of the strongest kids I had ever had the pleasure of coaching, and a natural leader in the weight room. He had grown from a shy, nervous kid to the kind of person that brought other people up. Kind of a slam dunk from a teaching standpoint if I do say so myself.

At the end of senior year this student handed me an envelope with a letter in it. We were in the gym, just me and him. I asked him whether or not I should open the letter in front of him. He gave me a look and a smile and said I could open it. When I read the letter I started fighting back tears. The student explained that he had been thinking of committing suicide and that the biggest factors that stopped him from pulling the trigger were me and the weightlifting club. The letter was a thank you for all the time we had spent together and the lessons I had taught him. I ran up and hugged him and told him he was an idiot and that the world would have been a way worse place without him.

The letter is priceless, quite literally. And that’s kind of the point. It’s unmeasurable. At no point could I bring that letter to a boss and say, “hey man, what’s a kid’s life worth, because that’s what you need to pay me.” The unquantifiable nature of teaching would halt that conversation dead in its tracks. Not to mention, it would totally miss the point. There is no monetary reward for saving someone's life, the reward is saving the life itself.

So here’s the deal. I love teaching. Doing the job is the end goal for me. I wake up, kick ass, and take names by teaching kids everyday. But I’d be a goddamn liar if I said it doesn’t cut me that I can barely afford a studio apartment on my own, or that I’m perfectly fine when I hear one of my friends who works a corporate job just got his bonus and it amounts to over a third of the money I make in a single year. The disconnect between the amount of money a teacher makes and the contributions great teachers make to society drives me batshit sometimes. I crave a world where regular teachers don’t have to worry about rent, good teachers can afford a car they actually want, and great teachers are damn close to celebrity status.

But until teachers find a quantifiable measurement that doesn’t completely dehumanize a student, teachers’ salaries are stuck. They are beholden to a quote Albert Einstein probably didn’t say, but the internet attributes to him anyway.

“Everything we can measure, counts. But the things that count the most can’t be measured.”

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*4 years ago, I read Kevin Kelly’s article, “1000 True Fans.” The gist of it goes like this. Create a following of people who become fans of what you do. Be so damn good at what you do that people want to give you money so you continue doing it.

Here’s what I do. I teach, and I write stories about it.

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