WE DON'T NEED NO EDUCATORS? (Part 2)

The system is screwing over teachers (updated)

I billed this as a two-part post concluding with comments on how to make Australian schools great again, but it is important to talk about how poorly teachers are remunerated in this interim post.

Are teachers underpaid? Yes, but …

TEACHER SALARIES HAVE FALLEN SHARPLY OVER THE PAST 50 YEARS

The first issue we need to acknowledge is that teachers used to be paid well, reflecting both the reverence that society paid them and their work, and the difficulty of funding ones way through university at the time (outside a teaching scholarship). They no longer are.

There is no single time series of school teacher wages, but it is possible to stitch together series which overall tell a cohesive story.

TEACHER WAGES SINCE 1974
Earnings of full-time workers, $ per week, nominal

Source: 1hand calculations based on Independent Education Union of Australia, ABS Employee Earnings and Hours and ABS Census.

How does that compare to average earnings across the economy? The cleanest measure as a comparator is average weekly ordinary time earnings of full-time earnings across the whole economy. Broadly speaking, teachers earned about 40% more than the average full-time worker in the 1970s, but that had fallen to about 10% more than the average full-time worker by the mid 1990s. Since then, the data suggests teacher earnings have slipped up to 5 percentage points further compared to economy-wide averages.

TEACHER WAGES COMPARED WITH ECONOMY-WIDE WAGES
Full time workers, Average weekly ordinary time earnings of adults = 100

Source: 1hand calculations based on Independent Education Union of Australia, ABS Employee Earnings and Hours and ABS Census.

WAGES DON’T INCREASE MUCH WITH TEACHER CAPABILITY

We don’t pay teachers enough. I say that with a heavy heart because my kids are in private schools, so I’m paying those wages.

Part of the problem is that new teachers are paid too much, and experienced teachers too little. Salary progression would be best described as flat.

NSW PUBLIC SCHOOL ENTERPRISE AGREEMENT
High school teacher salary points, 1 January 2023

Source: NSW Government

Okay, those aren’t terrible wages. As a graduate the wage is actually quite good.

One way to cut this is looking at teacher salaries by age and compare across countries. Young Australian teachers earn well compared with their colleagues in other countries. Experienced Australian teachers earn less than those in comparable countries.

Source: Grattan Attracting High Achievers to Teaching

HIGH PERFORMING YOUNG PEOPLE NO LONGER TAKE EDUCATION DEGREES

So then we wonder why top performing students don’t take teaching degrees. The best students coming through the system by and large want to be rewarded for their ability to create public value. There’s no career trajectory within teaching that, by working hard, will deliver a comfortable lifestyle.

Source: Grattan Attracting High Achievers to Teaching

This is in contrast to earlier times. Through the 1970s, many highly talented school students went through university on teaching scholarships in part because tuition fees outside of teaching were prohibitively expensive.

Of course that would be a ridiculous pattern to return to, HELP (previously HECS) loans have allowed people to choose their own career paths. My point is merely that there was a stock of high performing teachers as a result of those policies at the time that have now largely retired.

IT’S TIME TO STOP TREATING SCHOOLING AS A COTTAGE INDUSTRY

State-Education Union negotiations have established a system characterised by:

• high starting salaries for teaching graduates

• low salaries for experienced educators

• practically no prospect of firing a teacher.

There is no carrot. There is no financial incentive for a teacher to improve.

And there is no stick. Short of criminal activity it’s practically impossible for a State Government to fire a teacher.

At least at primary school level, experience has little effect on teacher performance.

“It also shows that on-the-job experience is insufficient on its own to raise teaching quality. While experienced teachers make many valuable contributions in schools including through leadership and mentoring, it could be that much of the professional development they do over the course of their careers makes little difference to the quality of their pedagogy.”

Source: University of Newcastle’s Teachers and Teaching Research Centre

My guess is that this is because the benefits of experience in the job are roughly offset by the attrition of the most competent for higher paying roles in other industries. We have set up a system in which the financial incentives are for the most competent young educators to leave the system after a few years and pursue higher earning roles in other industries, and incentives for the least competent young educators to remain in the system.

We have more and more teachers with lower subject knowledge than their best students aspire to. When I was in high school, my Year 11 Physics Teacher lent me Nobel Prize-winning Richard Feynman’s QED — quantum electrodynamics — a composed transcript of three lectures he delivered in Auckland, of all places, that is 4th year university physics. It blew my mind at the time. In fact, I read it again last year and it blew my mind again. My guess is that those sorts of life-changing gifts to high school students happen more rarely these days.

Of course, many high-performing teachers have remained because of their passion to improve outcomes for their students, despite financial incentives to leave. These are the heroes of the education system.

Yet we wonder why student achievement falls every year.

And why are my children in private high-schooling? Teacher quality was too up and down in the public system.

SUMMING UP

School teachers need to be paid a lot more than they currently are in return for delivering better outcomes for students.

To quote Ms. Hill, it’s funny how money changes situations.

More in part 3 of this post.