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September-October 2004
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Left in the Chalk Dust |
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Working with Andrew Leigh, Ph.D. '04, then a doctoral student at the Kennedy School of Government, Hoxby set out to understand the troubling decline in the numbers of high-performing teachers. Is it that top women are shunning the profession due to the "pull" of better pay in alternative fields, or does the meager pay for top teachers "push" them out of the classroom?
For their study, published in May in the American Economics Review, Hoxby and Leigh used federal data from surveys of recent college graduates, which included information about 21,600 public-school teachers from 1961 to 1997. Because those data lacked ideal information on teachers' academic aptitude, the researchers settled on the teachers' Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) or American College Testing Assessment (ACT) scores, and the college they attended, as proxies for aptitude. Their calculations revealed that pay compression accounted for an amazing 80 percent of the drop in teacher aptitude, compared with 9 percent due to greater career opportunities, and a mere 1 percent because of an overall decline in teacher wages. "People often think that teacher pay has fallen a lot relative to other professions," but that's not an accurate assumption, Hoxby says. Although teachers' paychecks are smaller than those of doctors or other high-skill professionals, teacher pay has kept pace with average earnings in this country.
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Before the 1960s, she explains, public-sector teachers' unions were not legal in the United States. That changed when a teachers' strike in New York City led the state to legalize teachers' unions. Other states followed suit. Today, although some small and rural school districts in the United States still operate without teachers' unions, "most teachers are on contracts that look like union contracts," Hoxby says. One of the findings that most surprised her was just how widely teacher salaries varied before unionization. She and Leigh found large pay differentials between the best and worst teachers, "on the order of nearly 40 percent," Hoxby says.
Still, pay compression alone doesn't deserve all the blame. The reality is that pay compression and increased job opportunities interacted. "That was really a bad combination," Hoxby says. "Pay compression was squeezing women out while at the same time there was the siren call from all of these other occupations." Competing with those new career options requires rethinking pay structures. Hoxby suggests that policymakers leave current levels of pay where they are, but grant increases to the best teachers, those whose students perform well, "so that 10 years from now teaching is an occupation with more rewards for high-aptitude people of both sexes."
Hoxby hopes her study leaves readers with "a real sense of anxiety" about teacher ability in the United States. It's unclear how a lack of truly bright teachers is affecting American children. "But I think a lot of people have a feeling in their gut that it's probably not a good idea," she notes. "Shouldn't there be someone around the high school who's really good at education?"
She doesn't think bright people are opposed to teaching. They're interested, but turn away because it's tough work and, compared with other professions open to high-aptitude people, like law or medicine, "the rewards aren't that great," Hoxby says. "While other occupations were making more and more opportunities available to women, teaching was actually shutting down opportunities for women," she adds. "[Education] can't just sit there like a backwater and expect no impact."
~Erin O'Donnell
Caroline Hoxby e-mail address: choxby@harvard.edu
