“Save Money, Improve Student Learning, and Boost The Economy By Paying Teachers to Quit Their Jobs“, writes Slate‘s Matt Yglesias.
The rationale is simple. Teaching, particularly American teaching, is a profession where pay scales very strongly with experience. Thanks to strong unions and a relatively flat hierarchy, it’s common for teachers to receive annual pay increases. As such, a teacher with 25 years experience will end up having a salary significantly higher than a teacher with five years experience.
That’s fine if talent also scales with experience; but if it doesn’t, it may be the case that it’s cheaper to pay veteran teachers off, and hire younger ones. Yglesias writes:
Yet when Maria Fitzpatrick and Michael Lovenheim looked at an early retirement incentive program that Illinois implemented in the mid-1990s they did not find evidence of this adverse impact: “We find the program did not reduce test scores” they write “likely, it increased them, with positive effects most pronounced in lower-SES schools.”
That finding probably isn’t applicable to the British education system for a number of reasons: our pay agreements are different, our school structures are different, and frankly, the fact that American test results are the determining factor of success in the study does not inspire confidence. But Yglesias’ suggestion of how that finding be used is generalisable. He argues:
The federal government could borrow a bunch of money at today’s low interest rates and make it available to states and cities that want to pursue cost-saving early retirement incentive programs. The cash up front aspect of the ERI program would goose the economy in all the usual ways. But the long-term savings to state and city governments would improve the long-term fiscal outlook and thus boost “confidence” (or whatever). Kids would be no worse off in school. Districts would have to hire a bunch of new teachers, opening up some job opportunities for young people. And it’s all voluntary—veteran teachers who’d rather stay on the job and get paid what they’re owed can do so.
There’s a gaping disconnect between the number of interventions which we know pretty well can save money in the long term, and the number we actually enact. Whether or not this particular one would work remains to be seen, but in general there are, at any one time, a huge number of things the state could do to lower its spending in the long term.
In the British context, a lot of them fall under the banner of “reversing the cuts”; the false economy by which funding for crucial services like legal aid or preventative healthcare was cut means that, while spending in the first years will be lower, in the long term they won’t do anything for the deficit at all. (Or, even worse, a hard limit on all spending might result in the deficit genuinely being reduced, but at the cost of vast reductions in human welfare).
Of course, rhetoric mocking the concept of “borrowing more to borrow less” renders this entire category of valuable policies unsupportable, either by the Government, which would be accused of hypocrisy, or by the Opposition, which appears to have been stung too frequently by the barb to risk giving more ammo. So we’re not likely to see deficit funded payoffs of veteran teachers any time soon, and so the government will continue to struggle to keep its borrowing low in the long term.
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