Turning Teachers Into Rockstars
From the NYTimes last week on hedge fund manager salaries:
To make Alpha’s list, a manager needed to earn at least $240 million last year, nearly double the amount in 2005. That is up from a minimum of $30 million in 2001 and 2002. Combined, the top 25 hedge fund managers last year earned $14 billion — enough to pay New York City’s 80,000 public school teachers for nearly three years.
Doing the math means that each NYC public school teacher makes, on average, $58k per year.
Now, last year a report on education in the US found that this country is on the brink of an educational crisis:
The Teaching Commission notes that “our schools are only as good as their teachers,” yet this “occupation that makes all others possible is eroding at its foundations.” Top students are far less likely to go into teaching today; salaries are stagnant; nearly 50 percent of new teachers leave within five years. To remedy this, the commission calls for raising teachers’ base pay, finding ways to reward the best teachers, raising standards for acquiring a teaching degree and testing would-be teachers, on the basis of national standards, to be certain they have mastered the subjects they will teach.
People don’t work for money, they work for meaning. But when the disparity between the upside of working at a teacher (avg 58k to maybe 80-90k after a lifetime of service) versus working in another white-collar job (6 figures after a few years, up to $1.7B if you’re the hotshot hedge fund manager) is too large to ignore for many of the most talented folks.
The question then becomes, how to close the upside gap between being a teacher, and working in another, more lucrative job?
There are incremental solutions, like the findings in this report released by the Center for Teaching Quality in North Carolina. It calls for pay based on performance, and not seniority… rewards should go to teachers with better-performing students, and to teachers that do more work outside of the classroom. We fully endorse that idea, but there are more dramatic ways to close the upside gap.
The way we’re approaching it here it to help teachers scale their expertise by enabling teachers to reach more students. The best teachers in the world shouldn’t be constrained by physical walls that enable them to reach a few thousand students a year at most. Those best of the best should be rock stars, and should make more money than crappy teachers whose lectures you have to struggle to stay awake in.
Helping education scale effectively is a problem we’re working to solve at Education Revolution. It excites me that by achieving this, we’ll not only be incentivizing super smart people who might otherwise go into I-banking to help the world become a smarter place, but also help drive change in an industry that badly needs it.
April 30th, 2007 at 6:10 pm
Are the students going to get any kind of certifications after completing your online courses? Do you foresee your certifications to have the same public recognition as those awarded by traditional schools?
April 30th, 2007 at 8:42 pm
thanks for the comment, mary. certifications are something we’re thinking about.
and if we DO offer certifications, hopefully we’re big enough that they do carry meaning
kareem
May 6th, 2007 at 12:31 am
Great post. I think what’s interesting is to tap into the latent potential of all the people who would love to teach but don’t because they currently can’t achieve the lifestyle they want as an educator. My guess is that for every teacher out there there’s probably 10 or even 100 times as many people who would have considered teaching if the economic incentives were different. That’s both a shame and a tremendous opportunity.
As for certifications, I personally think that is an area where there will be considerable upheaval in coming years. Think “open source” here and you’ll have a sense of where this will probably go. In other words, it’s highly likely that someone could come up with an exam that does a much better job of determining college aptitude than the SAT. If there were an economic incentive to create this (hint: there is) and if it was technologically feasible to administer this at scale (hint: it is) then something interesting will emerge.
Stay tuned…
May 10th, 2007 at 11:49 am
[...] I recently came across an interesting article entitled “Turning Teachers Into Rockstars” from the folks over at Education Revolution. With a title like that, how can you not read the article? Their basic premise is as follows: [...]
May 10th, 2007 at 11:55 am
Turning teachers into celebrities, such as the food industry has done for the likes of Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson, is a pretty cool idea. In some ways we’ve already seen this. Who can forget sitting through Carl Sagan’s ‘Billons and billions’ lectures in high school? Or even the Mr. Rogers’ series for early childhood education.
It’s more difficult to name recent ‘Edu-stars’, however. Teaching and learning has changed significantly, even since Carl Sagan’s heyday in the mid-1980s. The idea of the ‘sage on the stage’ has fallen out of favour. There is a realization that real learning is a constructed process that it involves more than just one person (the teacher).1 The Rock Star model is part of the old paradigm of education where you have an instructor at the front of the room ‘talk at’ people until they understand.2 In the new world of distributed, collaborative education, it’s going to become more and more difficult to create Rock Star educators. This is not to say that there won’t be great teachers any more. But rather the great teachers are going to be those who are willing to step out of the way once in a while and let the students become the stars.
1. Kearsley, G. (1994, 1999). Explorations in learning & instruction: The theory into practice database. Washington, DC: George Washington University. Retrieved May 1999, from http://www.gwu.edu/~tip/
2. Bligh, D. A. (n.d.). What’s the use of lectures? Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books.
May 10th, 2007 at 3:26 pm
Great comment Jody. One example of an “Edu-star” might be Al Gore. If I want to teach my high school class about global warming I could go out and do a bunch of research on the subject and read a lot of books, etc. At the end of the day, I’m never going to be able to teach the subject with as much authority or passion as Gore.
So I think a great alternative is to do the following. Rather than me teaching the subject I bring Al Gore into the classroom (through the magic of video) and let him teach. But I don’t just stop there. What I do is spend my time and energy developing an environment around Gore’s teaching the deepens the learning experience. For example, I foster discussion about the movie, create innovative assignments (such as having the students compute their C02 impact), etc. I become a facilitator of learning rather than the sole source of wisdom.
I went to b-school at UCLA and saw this happening there all the time. Professors would bring in guests who would teach from their experience and usually had much deeper knowledge in that area than the professor. We see the opportunity for this to happen on a larger scale through tech.
I think an ideal course on entrepreneurship would consist of Michael Dell or Bill Gates sharing their thoughts via high-definition video while a classroom teacher facilitates discussion, creates assignments and gauges mastery. I think that’s the paradigm for education that we’ll move closer to while certainly not entirely abandoning the existing model.
May 10th, 2007 at 3:27 pm
P.S. I think your comment about stepping away to allowing students to become stars is bang on.
December 11th, 2007 at 3:59 pm
[...] For instance, look at South Korea as a harbinger of what’s to come (as Aydin Senkut is doing). In South Korea companies like Megastudy (fascinating article here) are starting to turn teachers into rock stars. These teachers are featured on billboards, have fan clubs and can (unbelievably it seems) make seven figures a year. [...]