Why Don't Teachers Get Paid Like Doctors?
That was a question Chris Matthews once posed to William Bennett on Matthews' program "Hardball." It's a question often posed by teachers themselves, and their unions. Bennett replied that teachers don't reach that level because their unions object to merit pay, or to some teachers earning more than others with equivalent experience and credits.
That is part of the story. But teachers didn't receive equivalent pay with doctors before there were effective teacher unions nor will they should unions disappear.
For one thing, teachers don't undergo the intensive preparation required of doctors. Qualifications required to enter a medical training program exceed anything required by any of the nation's 1200 teaching preparation programs.
Another reason is that there are several times as many public school teachers as doctors. Thus it would far more to pay teachers at the same average level as doctors.
In addition, while education has more specialized certificates than any other profession, the differences don't begin to match the distinctions in medicine between family practitioners, surgeons, anesthesiologists, and so on. All of these require lengthier, more detailed and costlier training than in education, and much stricter entry qualifications.
A key role that teacher unions, and most teachers themselves, play in limiting teacher salaries is their constant effort to reduce class size. Let it be clear, Class Size Does Make a Difference. But it is a difference that depends on many variables, including the subject matter, teacher qualities, grade level and teaching method. That there is a difference based on some arbitrary number - 25, 20, 15 - is incorrect. Economically this is about the most expensive "reform" that can be made. In the past few years California has spent billions of dollars reducing class sizes. Nowhere has it justified the cost and in some places student achievement has declined.
The insistence that more and more teachers should teach fewer and fewer pupils is a guarantee that average teacher salaries will be lower than would otherwise be the case. By and large, the public is not concerned about the salaries of individual teachers, anymore than they are about the income of individual doctors. What does concern them is the total bill, that is, the taxes they pay.
While it won't happen, one example should make this clear. If the salaries of public school teachers could be doubled while the taxes the public pays could be cut in half, do you think the public would go along with that?
Finally, while not exhaustive of this subject, teachers don't get paid like doctors because they don't get paid on a similar basis.
Doctors work in a mutually acceptable relationship with their patients. With rare exceptions, such as in the military and prisons, no one is required to use the services of a particular doctor and/or pay that doctor's fees. It is the number of patients they attract, and the fees they can charge, that determine how much each doctor is paid.
Parents rarely have a say as to which teacher(s) their children have, or what teachers do, and even less to say about what teachers get paid.
In brief, too many teachers, who want to be paid as much as doctors, or other professionals, are afraid to function like doctors and other professionals - on a mutually acceptable basis with those they serve. To their own detriment, they oppose implementing the constitutional right of parental choice, Pierce vs. the Society of Sisters, the U.S. Supreme Court , 268 U.S. 510, June 1, 1925. If this were widely implemented and they would have to attract students on a voluntary basis, they could then be paid accordingly.
Parental, or student, choice, will free teachers, more than students or parents, just as, in medicine, it is the doctors who are freer than their patients. Doctors make the basic medical decisions, and rightly so. What patients ask, and receive, is the right, and ability, to go to the doctor of their choice.
As long as teachers insist on having a captive audience and to be collectively paid on a standard basis, they will continue to be victimized by their own insecurity.
In 1831 the average salary for New York State teachers was $11.85. In 1832 it rose 3% to $12.22 In 1933, during the depression, some teachers worked for room and board, sometimes living in a "teacherage," provided by the school district.
By contrast, in 2000 the median salary in a Bucks County Pennsylvania school district was reported to be $85,395, above $70,000 in some other Pennsylvania districts. The national average was approaching $50,000.
Last September (2003) salary was reported to rank 16th among the top twenty reasons teachers why leave their jobs. Teacher unions hardly flatter their members by consistently stressing the need for higher salaries, suggesting this is what teachers most care about.
David W. Kirkpatrick is a Senior Education Fellow with the U.S. Freedom Foundation and The Buckeye Institute.
