One particularly good article is "Low Pay, Low Quality" by Peter Temin, Professor of Economics at M.I.T., on the Hoover Institution's Education Next site. (The Hoover Institution is part of Stanford University.) Here were a few comments that caught my eye:
Another good, but somewhat more scholarly article is "Do Alternatives Matter? The Role of Female Labor Markets in The Decline of Teacher Quality" by Marigee P. Bacolod, at UC-Irvine's Dept. of Economics.Teachers are thus underpaid in the sense that we are paying low salaries for low-quality teachers. If we wanted, we could reach a different point in the market, where we would pay high salaries for high-quality teachers. ... It has been hard to make this kind of radical change because of historical patterns in the workforce that once allowed schools to educate on the cheap.
Women once considered teaching a highly attractive profession because their opportunities were tightly circumscribed. Despite the low wages, teaching was a far better line of work than slaving away in a textile mill. However, the past half-century opened a vast new world of opportunities to educated women. The nation’s failure to accommodate these recent changes has kept teachers’ salaries artificially low.
The career choices open to women have expanded greatly in the past generation. This, coupled with the appearance of women with extensive experience in the workforce, has resulted in rising earnings for professional women. In addition, it has opened up jobs that are more interesting and challenging, careers that are more fulfilling.
Finding themselves with lower-quality teachers, school districts have imposed work standards on teachers to make sure they are doing their jobs. These restrictions on teachers’ creativity have made teaching an even less desirable job ...
The opportunities for women have expanded considerably, and their ability to get professional education has increased. In this new world, the brightest women go toward the best jobs. These jobs increasingly are not in teaching.
For decades the nation has been able to school its children on the cheap by exploiting a trapped workforce of educated women. Those days are long gone.
