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By Jocelyn Huber, DFER’s Director of Teacher Advocacy
Several heavyweights in the education advocacy world, including Andrew Rotherham of TIME and Frederick Hess, the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), have already weighed in on the joint report by AEI and the Heritage Foundation, “Assessing the Compensation of Public School Teachers.” Even DFER’s own Charlie Barone chimed in with his take on the issue. Now, as the buzz around the study has quieted, it’s my turn to jump in to make sure no one missed the importance of the debate.
I had the unfortunate opportunity to attend the “Are Public School Teachers Overpaid?” presentation at AEI and hear the authors speak about their work. And as much as I’ve tried to be objective and resist the urge to react to what seems to be deliberate baiting, I can’t hold back any longer. As a former teacher turned education reformer, the whole experience made me angry. I have rarely witnessed such pervasive, snide disrespect, disregard for, and ignorance about teachers, especially early elementary school teachers, as I saw spouted on that panel.
You can watch it for yourself here:
I desperately want to lock the authors, Andrew Biggs and Jason Richwine, in a first grade classroom in a low-income district for a month and then see if they still think that teaching is such a skill-less, worthless endeavor. I mean, they’d only have to teach the next generation of voters and citizens to read. Certainly, that isn’t terribly important or challenging, right?
When I read the written report, I was somewhat heartened to see that the authors showed slightly more understanding and respect for the teaching profession on paper than they did in their presentation. But it is difficult to ignore the mistaken assumptions and disregard for teachers at the heart of their investigation. The authors seem to think that teaching is a profession for those who have no better options. This report is based in the assumption that people who teach lack marketable skills that would allow them to be more financially successful in other professions. The panelists seemed to believe that this is especially true for elementary school teachers. Despite the fact that early elementary years are the most crucial for a student’s future learning, the panel felt high school teachers were more likely to have valuable skills (though still not terribly worthwhile or worth compensating) – fast forward to around 1 hour 7 minutes of the presentation to see what I mean.