Charles Wheelan, Ph.D. The Naked Economist

America needs good teachers. That statement is so obvious as to be silly. What's less obvious is that our current teacher certification laws actively discourage talented people from entering the profession.

To understand why the current process for training teachers is so broken, let's use a business example. Imagine two companies. Company A hires the best people it can. Those who are hired are paid and promoted based on performance. This is not easy, as it's often hard to determine who is really doing a good job. The compensation and promotion process is prone to politics and personal preferences.

Still, most people at Company A recognize that there is a connection between pay and productivity. The true superstars get recognized eventually. Those who come to work but never contribute are fired eventually. Everyone in between believes that there is at least a tenuous connection between how hard they work and how well they do at the firm. It's not a perfect meritocracy, but it's not the Soviet Union either.

That brings us to Company B. Company B also seeks to hire the best people it can, with several caveats. First, all prospective employees must undertake two years of full-time specialized training, at their own expense, just to be considered for a job. Study after study has shown that this training has zero connection to subsequent performance at the firm, but Company B sticks to this screening mechanism anyway.

Second, all employees eventually hired by Company B are paid based on their years of experience at the firm, which also been shown to have little or no connection with job performance. Finally, Company B promises that no one who has worked at the company for three years or more will ever be fired, even if their performance is mediocre or poor, year after year.

Company B is not a meritocracy. Employees who come to work and don't actually work may get fired, but they probably will only if they dent the boss's car in the parking lot. The superstars get nothing extra. They aren't paid more or promoted faster. In fact, if they are young, they are probably paid less than the burned-out worker several desks over, since pay is strictly tied to years on the job.

Discouraging the Best?

As you may have guessed, Company B is public education. Company A is the rest of the economy. That's not news. Much has been written about the broken incentives within education. The idea of some kind of merit pay has been kicking around for 20 years, if not longer. But this discussion almost always focuses on how compensation practices affect the incentives (and therefore the behavior) of existing teachers.

That makes sense -- but it also misses a crucial point. The most pernicious aspect of the public education pay structure is that it discourages motivated, productive, energetic people from entering the profession in the first place. 

Think about it. If you are a really talented person, where would you prefer to work: At Company A, where the success you anticipate will be rewarded?  Or Company B, where your promotions and pay raises are linked primarily to staying alive?

If you offered Alex Rodriguez a choice between playing in Major League Baseball, where guys like him can make $275 million, or playing in an alternative league, in which all the players get the same contract and can't be cut, where is he going to play?

More importantly, who is going to play in the alternative league? It's going to be players who are less talented and more concerned about being cut.

Economists refer to this phenomenon as adverse selection. Individuals use private information (their expected productivity in this case) to sort themselves into a job with a compensation structure that suits them best.  Public education is the equivalent of the alternative league.

We compound that problem with ridiculous teacher certification laws.  Despite a steady flow of evidence that our current teacher training requirements have essentially no correlation with performance in the classroom, most states continue to mandate that prospective teachers undertake expensive and time-consuming courses. That, too, is a huge deterrent for bright young people who might otherwise be attracted to teaching.

Make Training Make Sense

In fact, highly talented people have the most attractive career alternatives and therefore the highest "cost of time." They are the ones most likely to be deterred by time-consuming certification requirements that don't improve productivity.

The best way to improve teacher training would be to make it optional. If a certain kind of training proves effective, such as lots of hands-on experience in the classroom, then administrators will seek out candidates with that background. And once it's easier to get a job with that background (and/or a higher salary), then more prospective teachers will be willing to invest in such training. That's how the market normally induces training and education. 

Teacher training is the opposite. Prospective teachers jump through hoops because state law says they have to. If a state requires that all public school teachers take a course on the history of discrimination against left-handed children, then training programs will make a fat living offering courses on the history of discrimination against left-handed children. The state requires the course, education schools offer it, and future teachers must take it. There is nothing in that process to ensure that it actually produces better teachers. 

I recognize that a lot of talented people persevere through all of this and become extraordinary teachers. (My wife is in the process of a mid-career change to teach math.) I also know that many committed teachers complain bitterly about the hacks in the classroom down the hall who have been comfortably ensconced in the alternative league for decades even though they have no business teaching children.    

Good teachers matter. The data on that are clear. If we want more talented people in the classroom, a first step toward encouraging them would be to stop discouraging them.