"The Fiscal Cliff" Really???

[kandrathe]

Where the incentives need to change is at the level of good students picking their college majors, and at the level of the certification necessary to teach. If you raise the wages and raise the bar for entry, making teachers less like civil servants and more like lawyers or doctors, then you will get a better qualified body of teachers. But so long as wages are mediocre, working conditions pretty miserable, and barriers to entry very low (easiest degree in most universities), then you're going to end up with low quality teachers.

Since there is no quality control on the education the kids get, then there is no difference between paying mediocre, or high wages since the outcome on average is mediocre. The government is taking health care in that direction, but sometimes people get to choose their doctors now which creates demand (and higher wages) for the good ones. Simply paying them more does not make them perform better. If you raise the bar for entry in a profession, you will raise the costs (due to shortage) and possibly the quality, but you will have shortage resulting in more students per teacher and thereby lower quality. This may make teaching more attractive, but I'm not sure it would resolve the issues.

Unless we move it to the private sector (or ape it better), there will not be anything other than a "civil servent" feeling to the teaching profession.