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The Daily Signal
How School
Choice Could Improve Life for Teachers
Mary Clare Reim
January 26, 2016
During National School Choice Week, advocates are demonstrating how
students thrive when they have more education options.
While it’s often easy to see the success school choice programs have on
students, what’s often missing from this conversation is the
acknowledgment that teachers are also empowered by school choice.
Schools of choice, be they private or charter, typically have more
flexibility with personnel decisions and teacher pay, meaning great
teachers can be rewarded for the important value they provide. Unlike
traditional district-run school systems, which pay teachers based on
the time in the classroom instead of the value they add to student
learning, schools of choice often have more flexibility to reward great
teachers through initiatives such as performance pay.
Although that’s important, it’s the promise that education choice holds
to reform education financing in more fundamental ways that could
really be a boon to teachers.
Take the education savings account approach to choice. Education
savings accounts, which are now in place in five states and under
consideration in several more, empower families to direct the funding
that would have been spent on their children in the public system to
multiple education services, products, and providers. That includes
private school tuition, but it also includes options like education
therapies and private tutors.
Imagine what that could mean for teachers. It could mean supplementing
their exiting teaching income through tutoring, with parents paying
teachers directly after each lesson. Or it could mean teaching a course
statewide online, with a teacher eligible to earn a salary that
reflects how many students want to take her course—and pay her with
their education savings account funds—as sign-up.
Although this hasn’t come to full fruition yet, it’s not outside the
realm of possibility. And think of the talent and energy such a system
of educator remuneration could foster.
South Korea’s decentralized education system demonstrates the amazing
power of market-driven education. Currently, the demand for private
tutors (rather than traditional schooling) is booming in South Korea,
with one particular tutor earning $4 million per year—as much as an NBA
star.
Although he is an exception, Forbes notes that rewarding teachers much
more handsomely could be possible in the U.S., but that “strict
government regulation and omnipresent state involvement in the
education marketplace—combined with powerful unions preventing any one
teacher from garnering a far bigger slice of the profit pie, let alone
profitably branching out on his or her own—has insured that wage
increases remain relatively constant and predictable.”
Reforms to public education financing, such as education savings
accounts, allow parents to customize their child’s education and choose
which teachers work best for them. This private negotiation for an
exchange of services allow for good teachers to be paid for good work.
As seen in South Korea, the sky is the limit for teacher pay in a
market system.
Even though schools of choice occupy a very limited percentage of the
market share (about 350,000 students out of 50 million nationwide have
access to private school choice programs), teacher support for school
choice remains positive. According to a 2015 Education Next Poll, a
plurality of teachers support public charter schools, and 43 percent
support tax credit scholarship programs.
The concept of choice in education expands beyond parents and families
to teachers who wish to work in an environment that fits their own
personal philosophies, skill sets, and goals. School choice could hold
the key to transforming the teaching profession into a competitive and
flexible field of educators who are rewarded for their unique skills
and abilities.
Read this and other articles at The Daily Signal
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