I will admit that I was skeptical when I learned Gov. Nathan Deal created a panel to study the possibility of updating the decades-old formula used to fund education in Georgia. It wasn’t necessarily the membership that made me suspicious, but the motives.
The real reason became evident recently when Erin Hames, who oversees education policy for Deal, said that if the panel doesn’t recommend doing away with paying teachers for training and experience, then “I’m not sure that we’re going to change anything about the way business is done,” explaining the research is “pretty clear” teachers with advanced degrees do no better in the classroom.
Quick — make a decision — you have a choice between two third grade teachers for your child. You can have the new one fresh out of college or you can have the one that’s been teaching for 12 years and that your neighbor’s kid loved. Seems like an easy one to answer, doesn’t it? Surely teaching experience and advanced education counts for something?
The research does indeed state that teacher training, including in-service training, undergraduate training and advanced degrees, play little or no part in improving student achievement as measured by standardized tests. Looking further, however, shows us extensive additional research indicates even the most effective teachers account for only 1 to 15 percent of student improvement on standardized tests in any given school year; socioeconomic factors account for about 60 percent.
Over the course of a nine-month school year (assuming there are no furlough days in effect) students spent 1,440 hours in school and around 2,880 hours at home, again not counting weekends. That is a rather large chunk of student time that teachers don’t have to teach that hasn’t really been part of the responsibility discussion.
Georgia’s reform leaders continue to ignore this research because it doesn’t fit in with their goals to allow more and more public money to be used to pay for private education and for private gain. They use research only when it can support the implementation of policies that increase the amount of public tax monies available to testing companies, charter schools and the private investors that support them.
Georgia doesn’t spend much on individual teachers. The base salary for a beginning teacher is $33,473 annually and a little under $2,800 per month. Teachers may earn incremental increases every few years for experience and may also earn increases for advanced degrees, as long as those degrees are in their field of teaching assignment. Without the raises for experience and advanced degrees, it would be safe to assume that a teacher with X years of experience might still be earning the same amount as a beginning teacher. It would also seem the removal of those incremental increases would serve to make teaching even less attractive than it already is.
Deal recently announced 10 percent raises for much of his staff. These raises come in addition to the performance review incentives, bonuses and other added income for key members of his staff. The governor failed to mention any research citations that supported the necessity of his staff salaries, but did say “they could all make higher salaries in the private sector.” So, it’s necessary for the governor to keep his staff from going to other positions by raising their salaries but it’s OK to cut teacher salaries and expect them to keep working at their jobs without any hope for an incremental raise that doesn’t even approach the 10 percent given his staff.
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