Pay to Learn

Will better-paid teachers lead to smarter students?

Finland is often hailed as an educator's utopia, where teacher prestige and commensurate salary correspond with students' high academic rankings among peers worldwide.

Furthermore, there is some evidence in the US linking a school district's teacher pay with its students' performance on standardised tests.

Prevailing logic says that higher salaries will attract more candidates to the teaching profession, expanding the pool of talent from which to pick.

However, international data is mixed:

Teachers in Germany have higher incomes than teachers in Canada and Japan. Students in Germany have achieved above average results but their educational achievements are still lower from the results of their peers in Canada and Japan.

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Although the educational achievements of students partially does not correlate with the amount of teacher’s revenue, based on the obtained results it is visible that students have significantly better educational achievements and exam results in countries where salaries are significantly above 50,000 $ (except in Denmark and Spain where salaries are only slightly above 50,000 $).

Hmm, hard to interpret without charts. I couldn't find any, so I made one.

Let me explain some of the simplifications used so that you can get a sense of how much nuance remains hidden.

PISA measures student proficiency in a range of subjects. To boil it down to one number for each country would be reductive if we were measuring absolute, rather than relative, ability. For cross-country comparison it's still a better measure than, say, pass rates in respective education systems. Why? Because at least PISA is standardised, and while dummies may ace 'A' levels in countries that vow not to leave kids behind, swotters competing in another may need to be hot-housed in cram-schools just to eke out a 'C'.

We don't need no education

Even PISA is subject to national differences. China, for instance, only grades several of its most urbanised coastal provinces, rendering rural students invisible.

Teacher pay is also clearly hard to reduce to single figures. I use as a proxy the ratio of lower secondary teacher starting salary to mean salary. Why? Because those two data sets had the fewest gaps to fill.

Some outliers stand out. Teachers in China are paid as civil servants, but I think it is income tax classification that skews reported Chinese average wages sharply down, leading to starting teachers seemingly paid a princely 2000 times the average worker, and necessitating logarithmic scale on the chart.

If roughly accurate, China on its own bolsters the notion that boosting teacher pay boosts student results, given its strong - albeit unrepresentative - PISA scores.

However, remove China and the correlation between teacher pay and PISA score drops to -0.22; weakly negative.

Singapore then becomes the illustrative outlier: low starting teacher salary and high PISA score. 

Not for Teacher

That is not to say that bean counters should sharpen their knives for educators, nor should teachers be paid as surgeons.

Low relative teacher pay may signal an excellent education system if it means that students graduate into jobs that add more value and attract higher pay than teaching.

Conversely, a country in which 'teacher' is the apex career could be said to have deficient labour opportunities.

Scholars suggest redirecting education spending, not merely its increase. Teachers may agree. Indeed, pay is but one issue in the U.S. teacher strikes predating the pandemic. While it is easy to paint strikers as self-interested, their demands also include basics such as rudimentary resources and air-conditioned classrooms.

Performance-based pay is one recommendation, which may sit uneasily with those philosophically opposed to the standardisation required to measure said performance.

Such standardisation, they argue, would incentivise 'teaching-to-the-test'. This however ignores the alternative risks of 'teaching-at-discretion'. 

Which is a pity, because industrial education really comes into its own when standardised evaluation leads to standardised curricula and standardised, easily-shared resources.

My own experiences as a student (in Singapore and Australia) and as an instructor (in Japan) taught me how clear objectives accompanied by common materials could in fact be reassuring, time-saving, and more effective than frontline 'professionals' who think they know better. The trope of a teacher lazily 'reading from a script' is actually not that scary if the script is any good. If that makes me a subpar education consumer and producer, so be it.

Teachers historically turned their job into a profession by talking up their individual ability to plan lessons, tailor delivery, and control classrooms. They may resist relinquishing the responsibility (and clout) associated with this professionalisation.

Back to Childhood

Bottom line: teachers not getting (bigger) raises is not the primary reason your kid can't read.

I've revisited education through a strange route: helping a nephew with homework. Education has certainly changed since my days of dodging phys-ed. Deadlines and standards are looser, yet his parents are shedding cash for him to meet - or miss - them.

Does the money heaped on developed-world education translate proportionately into young Einsteins? I game with my nephew (bad uncle, I know). But I also game with his peers and rivals in developing Asia who, apart from clearly having the numeracy to excel at math-heavy game mechanics, are also by-and-large efficient, polite, polyglots.

Globalisation has brought them closer together. Education has not prepared them for that.