I’ve been eagerly awaiting Terry Moe’s Special Interest, and this Daniel DiSalvo post, the first of several, tells me it will be well worth it:
One of Moe’s fascinating findings is that teacher pay (base salary) has not increased that dramatically over the last few decades because the number of teachers being hired has increased and the student-teacher ratio has fallen. If fewer teachers had been hired, salaries would be greater. Despite persistent cries that teachers are “underpaid,” the unions are responsible for this outcome because they have competing motivations. One is to secure greater compensation for current members; the other is to get more teacher’s hired, which increases the unions’ power. The goal of increasing pay thus collides with government unions’ incentive to expand public employment.
Of course, one could try to increase pay with a heavy emphasis on deferred compensation while also expanding public employment to an unsustainable level and hope asset bubbles will somehow keep the wheels from flying off. I wouldn’t recommend it, but it’s proven pretty popular so far. Matt Yglesias makes a related observation:
Both private schools and public schools are responding to the fact that parents want to send kids to schools with small class sizes. At the same time, we clearly don’t “need” as many teachers as we currently have. Forget the internet, we got by with fewer in 1970. When I was losing weight, I worked with a personal trainer. I didn’t “need” one-on-one attention to instruct me into how to lift the weights properly. But it’s helpful to have someone standing there, paying attention, making sure you’re doing it right, encouraging/cajoling you to continue, etc. And at gyms and yoga studios all across America you see that people like to take exercise classes with a human leader rather than learn on YouTube. It seems to me that the increasing popularity of television programs that have a cooking instruction component has led to anincrease in demand for live cooking classes, not a decline.
This is why I’m a believer in the Hess-Meeks approach: increase the level of cost-consciousness to achieve system-wide savings. If parents are given a K-12 spending account, and half of the money saved by choosing a Rosetta Stone Mandarin course over a “live” French class will flow into a college account while the other half will represent a boon to taxpayers, one can see how spending might decline over time.