The subject fascinates me, and it rolled around my head as I ate lunch, so you get at least one more post
Seems to me it is equally valid to look at this from another viewpoint. If one view is to attribute higher lifetime earnings of a class to the good teachers, then in turn one could also attribute the lower earnings of some kids to the less capable teachers. In that case, do we 'charge' those less capable teachers $320,000 per year for hurting the future earnings of their class?
Yes, that would be an equally valid or invalid way of looking at it, depending on perspective. The study showed a $320,000 lifetime earnings diffferential based on KG teachers. BTW, I'm not sure I accept these results, and they are yet to be peer reviewed. But, for the sake of argument, assuming this is correct, then you could just as validly dock poor teachers as reward good teachers.
The issue is performance-based compensation. For the ditch digger example you mentioned, the work and its results are fairly transparent, so it's easy to evaluate the compensation. For teachers it's very difficult. As the article points out, using test scores -- the current vogue -- has a lot of problems, and can lead to teaching the test rather than the basics. And those gains are short term.
Sounds like all this is leaning to 'pay for performance', and 'pay what the market will bear' (yes, the market does assign value to better performance). The taxpayers would probably benefit, and the children would benefit. But the teachers support an organization that is opposed to those principles. What to think?
-ERD50
When "pay for performance" and "pay what the market will bear" are well correlated, as in the case of the ditch digger, then everyone benefits. But the market is, at best, only loosely correlated with performance in the teaching field. Or, you might say, the market is very inefficient when it comes to rewarding good teaching.
This is not to say the market is a bad compensator, just that it lacks criteria for judging good teaching -- we all lack such criteria. I have no idea what makes a good teacher. I know what makes a likeable teacher, or an easy teacher, a hard teacher, etc. But what makes a teacher impart skills that show up over a lifetime? That's what this study claims to dig out, but I suspect all they are finding is that some teachers do better than others for, as they admit, reasons that they don't understand. And I suspect those reasons have more to do with randomness and the luck of having students who will later perform well than with teacher factors. At least in KG. But who knows? It's worth studying, and that's why I said that I like the way they are thinking -- exploring these areas.
As to teachers being opposed to these principles, I don't know, but if I were a teacher I would be opposed to performance based salaries unless it was proven to me that there was valid criteria for measuring performance. So maybe this study is a step in that direction.