To Build a Nation of Non-Idiots
Jay
June 7, 2009, 2:40 pm

As a primer, you might want to read this previous short first.

One of my friends recently informed me that he took massive offense to that short, and told me the reasons why he thought American secondary education was so terrible. He then told me that he thinks one of the major issues is teacher salary and told me that in my essay, the top performing states also had the highest paid teachers.

I didn't have any information at the time, so I wasn't really in a position to argue against him at that point. So I made a mental note to remember the points in his argument and then see if they had any weight. This short essay is the result of that conversation between me and him.

Here are the highlights of that friend's argument that I remembered:

1. Even though certain underperforming states spend an extraordinary amount of money per pupil, most of that money is wasted by administrative and non-teacher expenses (one of my arguments as well), which negatively affects teacher salaries, which negatively affects student performance (I did not cover the issue of teacher salaries in my previous essay).

2. States which top the nationwide list are also comprised of very homogeneous (read: white) societies with lower than average rates of crime and poverty.

3. While school vouchers are effective for the students that use them, it is unfeasible to apply it nationwide. It is morally unconscionable to allow a few students escape the current system.

3b. The more students we enroll in voucher systems will only take away money from the regular public school system. This is akin to pouring gasoline on an already burgeoning fire.

4. I am a stupid, arrogant asshole

That's quite a list, and it appears to completely shit on my opinion on education reform. Obviously I can't let this go without a fight.

So let's get to it: teacher salaries, do they affect pupil performance? Below is a chart of average SAT scores by state. To prevent information overload, I chose only the top 5, bottom 5, middle 5, and 3 for particular emphasis:



What we can see there is quite a disparity from state to state. The score differential between the best and worst state is over 25%. That's over 2 letter grades (though technically, there are no letter grades for the SAT). Now let's look at the average teacher salaries for those states:



Statistics were culled from the American Federation of Teachers, a major teacher union in the United States. Figures are for the 06-07 school year. Note that the District of Columbia is not featured in the graph because no data was provided for it.

An analysis of the figures above yields no discernible pattern between teacher salary and student performance. "But wait!", you might say. "Living in New York is not the same as living in Iowa. I bet if you adjusted it for cost of living, we'll start seeing a pattern." Ask and ye shall receive. Below is a chart showing average teacher salaries by state adjusted for cost of living:



Cost of living figures were taken from MERIC's cost of living report, which took the cost of living index from the ACCRA national cost of living survey. ACCRA is a study conducted by the Council for Community and Economic Research, a nongovernmental organization.

With these adjusted figures, we still can't find a pattern relating teacher salary to pupil performance. In fact, most states with above average SAT performance also are below average in average teacher salaries. Two notable exceptions are Illinois and Hawaii. For these two cases, student achievement may very well be tied to teacher salary (especially in Hawaii's case), but it is a dubious proposition.

While it is generally true that more money attracts better talent, teaching seems to be a profession in which the available pool of talent is not primarily concerned with compensation. Hopefully this is enough data to put paid to the notion that student performance is positively correlated to total per pupil spending or teacher compensation.

Moving on down the list, we have another argument. High performing states are extremely white while low performing states have a greater proportion of minorities. This probably has much more validity, but there are notable exceptions. For example, New York and Illinois are very similar in terms of urbanization (both states' residents primarily live in one metropolitan area), demographics (above average proportion of foreign born residents, both states have same proportion of black people), and economics (Chicago and New York City are both major financial centers of the country), but Illinois' students score significantly higher than New York's students.

But ultimately, it is probably true that there is a positive correlation between student performance and an above average concentration of minorities. This makes sense, considering that every minority group (except for Asian/Pacific Islander) earns significantly less than the white population. I don't think anybody is arguing that earnings and academics are not positively correlated.

So what's a solution to the ethnic disparity of educational achievement? More study is needed to answer this question, but a good place to study would be high income communities and districts, as they tend to have the highest scores and grades. One thing is certain, throwing money towards corrupt/incompetent state and local bureaucrats does not seem to be working.

Alright, so we're close to the end of the list. One argument against school vouchers is that it is not feasible to implement it everywhere, and therefore it would be morally derelict to rescue some from the depths of hell and condemn the rest to burn.

This is nonsense. Voucher programs cost less per pupil and are effective in improving student performance when the students are taken out of the regular public school system and put into these voucher programs. Economic capital is not an issue in adopting a state-wide student voucher system. The thing that we lack is political capital and will to try something different. Such a shortcoming would be enviable for the vast majority of other countries.

Plus, why exactly is it wrong to save some and not all? It is a difficult decision to make and it may exact a terrible emotional toll on the person who makes it, but if we can't save everybody, we need help those we can. In the case of voucher systems, we should let as many students as we can, and make a mental note to expand these systems in the future to include more students. If a ship is sinking and only half of the people can be saved, then let's save half of them instead of letting everybody drown. That line of argument of "all or nothing" is just confusing and dumb.



Isaac Asimov once said, "There is a single light of science, and to brighten anywhere is to brighten it everywhere." The same can be said of education in the United States. The more pilot voucher programs that are created, the more people will take notice of them and demand change to the traditional system. As I've said before, money is not the issue. Publicity and political will to override the teachers' unions and entrenched upper middle class communities.

Lastly, I might be arrogant, and I might be an asshole. But I am not stupid.