This concluding interview focuses on a chapter from A Nation at Risk +40, a report by the Hoover Education Success Initiative (HESI) that looks back at the birth, struggles, and future of the modern school reform movement. (Download the publication here.)
Michael Hansen is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy. His chapter deals with improving the quantity and quality of public school teachers in the United States. He spoke with Chris Herhalt about the best ways to achieve those goals.
Chris Herhalt: In the book, you write that states have worked to develop solutions to many of the challenges posed by the original A Nation at Risk report of 1983. You mention several, including alternative certifications and student loan forgiveness. In which area are US schools still closest to the circumstances of 1983? I suspect it’s teacher pay.
Mike Hansen: I agree. I do believe that teacher pay, and specifically the step-and-lane compensation structure most commonly used to determine pay, is an area that has remained most similar to where it was forty years ago. Now, generally speaking, there are a couple of characteristics of teacher pay that differentiate it from that of other occupations.
First, we pay teachers relatively less than we do similarly qualified and experienced individuals, and these differences grow over time. In comparison to the private sector, starting wages for teaching are about the same as in other fields. But within about five or ten years outside of teaching, you get to a significantly higher pay grade pretty quickly, and then typically level off. Often, this is about the stage when people in other fields start looking for promotion opportunities. In teaching, though, it tends to be a much more linear progression where teachers lag behind the private sector for most of their careers, but they slowly catch up later. And, as in 1983, there are still relatively few promotion opportunities that will keep teachers engaged in the classroom.
And a second characteristic is that the teaching salary schedule is largely determined by your educational attainment level and your experience. Of course, different districts have differing levels of funding they devote to teacher pay and how much they reward each qualification, but those are the main things that will determine how much you make. That was true back then and is still largely true today.
Now, that’s not to say that teacher pay has not been experimented with over the past forty years. We’ve seen experiments along the lines of merit pay, teacher incentives, teacher evaluation, and career ladder policies. Various districts are trying to do different things. Also, charter schools, which are not unionized, have a lot more freedom and flexibility to experiment with teacher pay, too—but they don’t innovate as much as many people think.
In other words, teacher pay has just been resilient to policy and other pressures. And maybe part of that resilience is that it works for many of the people in teaching. Unions, generally speaking, are supportive of the way that the single salary schedule works. It’s transparent, it’s fair, it’s equitable. I suppose many policy makers, school system leaders, also prefer this kind of model because it is predictable. It is something you can build a budget around. You don’t have expanding labor costs in various ways, which was one of the reasons why merit pay policies have not been successful in the past. Of course, that’s not the only reason, but I think there are reasons why this compensation structure sticks around, and it’s because many people like it.
I also want to point out that teachers are government workers, and their compensation is largely dictated by lawmakers or other people who have spending power in government. And there is a tendency, not just in public school teaching, to heavily reward experience later on down the line and pay based on a single salary schedule using qualifications. So, while teachers do stand out in comparison to other industries, they’re not anomalous in comparison to other government workers. Government worker policies are very consistent and predictable, so there’s a lot of policy inertia.
Herhalt: Many of the chapters of A Nation at Risk +40 take a critical view of unions, suggesting they are a barrier to progress across the board. In your chapter, you’re more ambivalent. Can you talk about whether they’re a positive or a negative?
Hansen: I agree that I am a little more ambivalent about teachers’ unions, and I agree that in some ways they can be a hindrance but in some ways they can actually be advocates for reform. As part of writing this chapter, I was researching, with A Nation at Risk as a starting point, how did policies play out? I saw two diverging paths that became the narrative arc of my chapter. I saw unions very active in one of those paths, that of trying to improve the teaching profession, the “change from within” model. To me, it feels as if unions were very much part of that reform effort.
Now, I acknowledge that this way of looking at unions as agents of reform is perhaps not the type of reform that often dominates education policy discussion, which is typically more about incorporating market-based approaches into public education. If we’re looking at reform from that narrow definition, then yes, I would say unions are generally quite resistant and are a hindrance to that reform. But I don’t see that type of reform as being the only game in town. Unions have been advocates of trying to offer a different flavor of reform: reforming the professionalism of teaching, reforming how teachers are taught and how they are treated in the classroom. Often, they have come into conflict with more market-oriented reform models, but that’s not the same as being a hindrance to reform because they are trying to make improvements.
Herhalt: Do you think school districts today are doing a better job at recruiting with a diverse perspective and retaining nonwhite teaching staff?
Hansen: From what I can tell, it seems that most states and districts have come to realize that there is a great amount of importance and urgency to promoting a diverse teacher workforce. I think there has been policy movement in this direction since, let’s say, 2015. In recent years, diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives—DEI and critical race theory (CRT)—they have become poisonous political words and labels, especially in schools. But as far as I can tell, it seems that most districts seem to be more or less staying the course with their diversity policies. Maybe they’re not labeling things as DEI anymore, though they’re not actually changing the way their policies are trying to promote diversity. I think this is an important area of policy, and something that I’m happy to see that states and districts mostly seem to be continuing with it. Despite the politics, it does seem to me that there’s a lot more buy-in about teacher diversity than resistance to it at this point.
Now, I do think there are smart ways to promote teacher diversity and also not-so-smart ways. I must mention my recent book, Teacher Diversity and Student Success, with co-authors Seth Gershenson and Constance Lindsay, in which we explore the evidence on teacher diversity, its impact on students, and where it’s already happening in schools. We also make recommendations for how to go about implementing policies to promote teacher diversity, based on the current evidence.
I do want to point out that the Supreme Court’s recent decision to end affirmative action [in higher education] could potentially shift the viability of some of these policies. But at the same time, I think there’s a lot of diversity-promoting policies still on the table that districts could pursue to promote a diverse teacher workforce.
Herhalt: You point out that the pool of certified teaching graduates was 40 percent smaller in 2023 than it was in 1970, but that the overall student body is actually larger than it was back then. So how can we do all the things you mentioned about fostering teacher quality when, at least from the HR side, it looks as if schools have to do more with less?
Hansen: You are right that there’s been a sharp reduction in teacher supply. And yes, there’s increased demand from the student side because of increases in student enrollment over time. This gets at the crux of the issue and is part of what motivated the chapter I wrote. One way to approach this is to focus on developing the quality of the teachers who are actually showing up, and that was model advocated by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, the teachers’ unions, and others. They were heavily invested in trying to promote the professionalism of teaching and trying to develop people from within. The other approach was one that said, “There are people we can bring into the profession, but we just have to be careful about keeping them once they come,” and this approach assumed a larger pool of potential candidates and was more selective after entering teaching. And truly, I think both approaches have a lot of merit.
On the professional development side, I think we now have a lot of evidence that general teacher development—the way districts typically do PD [professional development] days—generally does not work very well. It’s an expensive item in schools’ budgets, and there’s really not a lot to endorse about the status quo (Professor Dee’s chapter examines this issue in a lot of detail).
However, that’s not to say that teachers don’t develop. They can, and there are approaches that show they can develop under the right circumstances—if they have, for example, instructional coaching, or for new teachers, a mentor helping with onboarding. There are certainly ways we could be better about promoting professional development, but not through the typical programs that are the lowest common denominator.
So, how do we do more with less? We can be smarter about our staffing models and who needs what and where. One potential way to approach this is not to rely on teachers being the sole professional in the classroom. We can put a greater emphasis on teacher aides or paraprofessionals. And if we had more of them, we could also increase class sizes a bit, employing fewer teachers but paying them more. Rick Hess has written a lot about unbundling the teaching profession.
And this gets to the real punchline about increasing the teacher pipeline: we could simply start paying teachers more and get the word out about it. In public opinion polls and surveys of young college graduates, young professionals, it appears there are actually a lot of people willing to consider education and teaching, but there’s a negative perception of long-term earnings potential. If we change the conversation and start paying teachers more, especially in high school settings and in high-need areas like STEM subjects, I don’t think it would take that much more money to attract more people into the profession. So, I think we probably should be paying teachers more, but I don’t think it’ll take much to turn the tide.
Herhalt: You’ve written about teacher scholarship options. How do we get more people to consider this and break through the perception that teaching is a low-paid, not-long-term career? You say that the average teacher scholarship is perhaps a few thousand dollars, not the incentive it needs to be. How big do you think it needs to be to move the needle?
Hansen: Well, I don’t think it’s unreasonable for states to say something like, “You can go to college tuition-free if you are committing to teach for five or six years”—something along those lines.
I think a real problem with many teacher scholarship and loan forgiveness programs is that there are a lot of options out there to choose from, and it becomes hard for a potential teacher candidate to choose the best. That is one limiting factor. The second is that you have different types of people interested in becoming teachers, though on different terms. For example, some people know they want to teach for their career, and they may not think twice about committing to a length of time to get free undergraduate tuition paid for. Another person may be open to the idea, but only for a certain length of time or certain conditions to try it out. It’s hard for any single model to work well for all the different types of potential teacher candidates. Of course, these two problems—the diversity of the available programs and the diversity of possible teacher candidates—don’t have to work against each other and could even be complementary. But my sense is that these programs are often more redundant than not, making the choice among various options difficult to navigate without really offering anything that would help differentiate, for example, the career teacher from those willing to give teaching a try.
Stepping back for a moment, there’s an overinflated public perception about how much college really costs. It’s true that it is expensive, and it’s a major investment to send your kids to college. But more states than not have developed programs under which a student, even one pretty high into middle-class-income territory, can attend a quality state school for a relatively low amount of money. It’s not free by any means (unless you’re really low income or earn other scholarship support), but it’s not that expensive to make use of state programs.
Along with that, there’s a public misperception about how much teachers make. As I said a moment ago, I do think we should be paying teachers more—but we should be paying them perhaps 10 or 15 percent more. The amount needed also varies across states—it will take more to bring teachers up to other workers’ comparable earnings in Arizona than it would in Massachusetts. It’s not a huge amount overall, but raises like these would make a big difference in people’s willingness to consider the profession.
In short, there are two different misperceptions about the nature of teaching and how much you’re going to get paid to do it, and there’s also a misperception about the cost of college. These misperceptions overlap and lead many people not to consider teaching because they don’t feel it’s a viable option when the reality is that both pieces can be within reach of both policy makers and potential teacher candidates.
To return to your question, given that states are already doing quite a bit to reduce the cost of college, especially for middle- and lower-income families, they could use their programs to provide a little bit more for those willing to take education classes, major in education, or even commit multiple years to teaching in the classroom. Scholarship amounts are commensurate with people’s willingness to commit to teaching. Additionally, state leaders should invest resources in making it clear how potential teacher candidates should choose among the various options based on their own preferences and willingness. An important part of my thinking here is that with a flexible scholarship model, many students can be eligible for some benefit even if they simply take a few classes and choose not to ultimately pursue a career in teaching. There’s evidence that just trying it out can improve people’s willingness to be a teacher. Even if not everybody becomes a teacher after taking a few classes, that’s a worthwhile investment. After all, the teacher labor market is dynamic, and people enter at different points in their careers. Even if students aren’t going to teach right out of college, they might decide two, five, or twenty years later to give it a try. I don’t think any of those are bad options. If designed thoughtfully, I believe this could be money well spent.
Herhalt: You write that the education profession feels as if it’s at a generational low point. Why is this, and what’s the remedy?
Hansen: I can’t point to any single cause. I want to point to Matthew Kraft and Melissa Lyon’s paper for evidence. They examined forty years of teacher surveys, public opinion surveys, teacher pay, and other measures to create an argument about how historically these things go together. Perception about the desirability of being a teacher relates to how well you’re being paid as a teacher, for example. And all of these measures point to things being pretty bad for teaching right now.
Money is not going to be the panacea, but I think it would cure quite a few symptoms. It could change some negative public perceptions, and also increase the desire to be a teacher.
Moreover, I think the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted what school means to students and the shared value of schools, and this factor cannot be ignored. Brian Jacob and Cristina Stanojevich make a compelling case that schools today (and, by extension, teaching) are different post-pandemic, partly because of policy shifts and partly because we’re looking at schools to fill different functions than in the past. This would include mental health support and community services. Today’s schools are taking on a lot because nobody else is doing it, but are schools the best people and institutions to do it?
My personal view is that we should experiment more with this on a separate, parallel track. If we want to improve students’ educational outcomes, I think we should have educators focus on the schooling function. I acknowledge there’s real value in the community and public-services aspects schools have been increasingly providing, though I don’t think the schools and the school administrators are necessarily the best people to do that. If we can help teachers focus on being the best educators they can be without needing them to be superhuman, this makes expectations for those going into the classroom more realistic.
