Edweek's Quality Counts for '08 is on your newstands now. As usual, there is a wealth of good information and a lot to think about. I'm particularly fascinated by the state rankings on teacher professionalism.  But I want to start blogging on the piece I know the most about: teacher pay.   Quality Counts does a state-level analysis of how teacher pay compares to pay for folks in comparable professions.  They find that teachers are making 88 cents on the dollar overall.  If you look at the AFT salary survey you'll find this is the result in part of recent trends wherein growth in teacher pay has lagged growth in pay in the private sector.  Simply put, we're falling behind. 

It leaves open the question of why people go into teaching. As the song says "it's not about a salary, it's all about reality, teachers teach and do the world good..."   I think the results here should concern people whose main focus is on incentivizing the current pay structure.  If fiscal incentives matter, the first decision for a lot of people is going to be to go into a different field.  People motivated by salaries will, rather than wanting to climb to the top of 88 cents on the dollar, go get the dollar itself.

I'm of the belief that we're going to have to make changes to how teachers are paid in order to raise compensation broadly. And that this could be a really good thing for education overall.  I do have a lot of concerns about how to do it right.    My experience with pay for performance is that you can't trust that the investment will be real and sustained.  What you get then, are new burdens, but really no new rewards.  As for the song, click on the pic to go old school with KRS-One and DJ Scott La Rock (and note that this implies no endorsement of either side in the bridge wars -- Wikipedia is a strange and sometimes marvelous place)