NJ Education Report

Why would we want a school system where essentially everyone over the age of thirty is a lifer, locked into a single district? It’s bad for labor mobility; it’s bad for the natural cross-fertilization of ideas that helps other professions advance; and it’s not so great for teachers unless they’re so incompetent that they couldn’t get a job anywhere else. The whole system where we get people to work at artificially low pay in the early years, in exchange for an outsized payoff that they can only collect by staying in the same system for most of their life, doesn’t seem destined to promote excellence…

I’m proposing repeal of the entire Faustian bargain where teachers get systemic bumps merely for aging in place: pay younger teachers more, and make the raises less generous, so everyone gets the same pay for doing the same job. (For the first five years, I think there’s some argument for teachers working at a discount. But teacher effectiveness seems to plateau after five years*.) The system should neither punish longevity, nor reward it. And if that were true, principals would have no incentive to fire teachers by age group rather than performance.

Megan McArdle in The Atlantic