The way most school districts and states pay teachers in this country (is) if you leave any time in the first 20 years, you leave with what you've contributed to your retirement system ... but if you stay for 30 years, you (get) a pension that's worth three times what your Social Security is worth.
No matter what else you want to do, you have to stay, (because) you've worked all these years just to get to that place. When you think that between 70 to 80 percent of what we spend on K-12 in this country is spent on compensation and this is the way that we spend it, you need to ask yourself, "Are we providing a set of incentives that actually makes sense?"
As a former teacher I can attest to the reverse incentive this places on young teachers who want to move between the public school system, academia, and policy work. You get none of the extra compensation that other educators get. This also puts pressure on bad teachers to stay in a job that they should not be in. What if we re-imagined retirement policy...
Say we shift to defined contribution (I'm generally against this, but seems like tilting at windmills at this point). Everyone gets an automatic contribution of, I don't know, $2,000 a year, and up to another $2,000 in matching contribution to a tax-free IRA/401(k). Then you incentivize staying. After 5 years you get a bonus contribution of an additional $5,000, after 10 years another $10,000, and so on.
That kind of incentive system might work to keep good teachers in the job, or at least give them the rewards they have earned. Other strategies for keeping good teachers in the job include a universal bonus of $2,000 after every four years of teaching, and scale it up for teachers who actually demonstrate improvement of student outcomes and teachers who work with the lowest performing students. Teacher quality has the largest impact on student performance out of all other variables and it is probably the most cost effective with which to 'tinker'.
Other important factors toward improving student outcome focus mostly on physical resources and dollars, some cost a lot, more support staff, new building construction and smaller class sizes, some not as much, hr reform and 'small' schools. We have a limited amount of dollars and we should therefore focus on what can get us the largest bang for the buck and that is improving teacher quality. There are many ways to do this: reform HR, performance pay, widening the recruitment pool, better professional development, but the most important is probably reforming teacher assessment, figuring out who are good teachers and who are not.
After working in a school for three years, I can name the bottom 10% of teachers, they are easy to spot. The best 10% are also pretty easy to spot, but telling the difference between the middle 80%, now that is hard, after all, when the bell rings the door closes. I bet that if you did some statistical analysis on test scores over the last three years at any school, correlated student improvement to previous teachers, and looked for a pattern, you would see one. I also bet that if you went to the teachers who are 'high' performers, and told them, I bet you would be the first person to tell them anything like that in years. There is no feedback for teachers, you have to create your own systems. I tried to. Skills testing at the beginning of the year, and at the end of the year. But, I'm no assessment 'expert' (no one teaches assessment in Ed. school programs). That's what's needed the most, better ways of evaluating teacher performance that are tied to student improvement.
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