Let's choose teachers from the top of the class

Guest Columnist By Guest Columnist The Oregonian
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on November 13, 2010 at 8:18 AM, updated November 13, 2010 at 3:32 PM
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Cream of the crop


Feldman was right to point out that we are entering a period of enormous turnover in our classrooms: With about half of America's 3.5 million teachers eligible to retire in the next decade, the question of who should teach looms especially large.

So why do top U.S. college students have so little interest in teaching careers compared with their counterparts in the world's best-performing nations?

Oregon educators respond
The Oregonian asked six people who are knowledgeable about teacher recruitment and training to react to this essay. Read their comments.
Partly, it's because we are stuck in a time warp. Up through the mid-1970s, the academic quality of the teacher corps in the United States was effectively subsidized by discrimination: Talented women and members of minorities became teachers at high rates in large part because they didn't have many opportunities outside the classroom.

When that changed, teaching lost its longtime labor supply and suddenly had to compete with more lucrative professions, even as educators' salaries were falling behind. In 1970 in New York City, for example, a starting lawyer at a prestigious firm earned about $2,000 a year more than a starting teacher in public schools. Today, that starting New York lawyer makes $160,000, including salary and bonus, while a new teacher across town earns $45,000. Nationally, teachers' starting salaries average $39,000 today, rising to an average career maximum of $67,000.

But it's not just pay that's a problem. A teaching career does not offer our nation's top college graduates a compelling peer group, opportunities for continued learning or the prestige of other professions. Moreover, our most needy schools mostly fail to offer the working conditions or the leadership needed to retain top talent once it has been recruited.

Our approach to teacher recruitment and development doesn't hold a candle to the methods used in Singapore, Finland and South Korea, where attracting high-quality people to the profession is considered a national priority. The good news, based on research that we and our colleagues at McKinsey & Co. recently completed, is that the United States could dramatically increase the number of top students who choose teaching by adopting some of these countries' practices.

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How do they do it? For starters, these countries make teacher-training programs highly selective, accepting no more than one out of every seven or eight applicants. Their governments also limit the number of training positions to match the expected demand for educators, so that those admitted are assured jobs. American teachers, by contrast, mostly enter the profession through programs that are not selective at all. As a result, more than half of newly certified teachers in the United States -- about 100,000 each year -- do not take jobs in the classroom.

Next, Singapore and Finland fully fund teacher education and pay students salaries or stipends. In the United States, meanwhile, students often must go into debt to attend education schools. In addition, the quality of teacher training in top-performing nations is first rate. Companies such as Nokia, for example, covet teachers who leave the classroom in Finland, because graduates of teacher training there are known to be exceptional talents.

These countries also foster a professional working environment. Finland, for example, grants teachers the kind of autonomy typically enjoyed by doctors in this country: They have wide latitude over how they teach, they share responsibility for their schools' operating budgets, and they belong to a culture that emphasizes the need to continually update one's skills.

In the United States, by contrast, teaching is often seen as an "unprofessional" career track, even by teachers. For example, we found that only 3 percent of the U.S. teachers we surveyed who were in the top third of their college class think that people who do well in teaching can advance professionally.

Crucially, these other countries provide competitive compensation. Of the three, South Korea puts the greatest emphasis on salary, with starting pay equivalent to about $55,000 and top salaries reaching $155,000. According to Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford University, those earnings place South Korea's teachers somewhere between its engineers and its doctors. Singapore, in addition to competitive pay, offers retention bonuses of $10,000 to $36,000 every three to five years.

To top it all off, these nations accord enormous cultural respect to teaching and teachers. Leaders in the United States routinely offer rhetorical tributes to teaching, but the profession here enjoys nothing like the exalted status it holds in these three countries.

Becoming a teacher in Oregon
Nearly 85 percent of teachers in Oregon public schools come from the 20 colleges and universities in Oregon that offer graduate programs for teacher preparation.
The Oregon Teacher Standards and Practices Commission sets general requirements for admission, further requirements to obtain initial Oregon licensure, and additional criteria to remain licensed in Oregon. Read the details.
What will it take to emulate Finland, South Korea and Singapore? In part, it will require a total makeover of the teaching profession's image. Our national survey of 900 top-third college students (as calculated based on self-reported SAT and ACT scores and grade-point averages) showed that such students simply aren't interested in teaching. The good news, though, is that the kind of makeover needed to win them over won't break the bank.

For example, we calculate that the United States could more than double the portion of top-third new hires in the worst-performing 5 percent of schools (serving about 2.5 million students nationwide) from 14 percent to 34 percent without raising teacher salaries. Under this scenario, which would cost about $1 billion a year, the government would pay for teacher training; schools would offer enhanced leadership and professional development; shabby, unsafe working conditions would be improved; high-performing teachers would be paid a bonus of 20 percent; and a national marketing campaign would promote teaching careers.

More ambitious efforts to close the talent gap would require higher salaries, which are the most powerful lever for attracting and retaining top graduates. For example, we found that in one scenario involving high-poverty schools serving about 8 million children nationally, increasing starting teacher salaries to $65,000 and maximum salaries to $150,000 would increase the percentage of new teachers drawn from the top third of their class from 14 percent to 68 percent.

This approach would cost something like $30 billion a year at current student/teacher ratios, or about 5 percent of national K-12 spending.

The cost of action is relatively low, in other words, particularly compared with the cost of inaction, which is staggeringly high. Separate research by McKinsey last year on the economic costs of the achievement gap between the United States and other countries suggests that the stakes are huge: If the United States had closed this gap between 1983 and 1998, raising its academic performance to the level of nations such as Finland and South Korea, U.S. GDP in 2008 would have been roughly $1.3 trillion higher than it was. The ongoing cost of that difference is the equivalent of a permanent national recession much larger than the one from which we are now emerging.

So, if recruiting and retaining teachers drawn from the top third could help close the achievement gap, even at a cost of $30 billion a year, the social and economic returns could be enormous.


(c) 2010, The Washington Post

Paul Kihn is an associate principal in McKinsey & Co.'s education practice. Matt Miller is a senior adviser to McKinsey. Together with Byron Auguste, they are co-authors of the report "Closing the Talent Gap: Attracting and Retaining Top Third Graduates to a Career in Teaching." Reach them at