How much do we as a society value the intergenerational transmission of information? How well do we compensate those doing the work? Are we attempting to hold educators responsible for aspects of learners lives that they have no influence on? Most teachers are tasked with being childcare, social workers, resource procurement, and behavioral experts. There are a glut of stories about teachers selling plasma to make ends meet, working extra jobs, etc.
Certainly it’s challenging to couple “performance” to pay, with social-economic-status the largest driver of educational outcomes, what kind of measurable impact over a short feed-back cycle can we expect? However, the data-driven effective altruism movement tallies social benefit / salary, and shows that teachers have a 4:1 ratio return on investment (ROI)! Compare that to my own “excessive?” salary and ROI as a physician of 0.1! Why the heck am I paid so darn much for little societal benefit? The answer lies in innate cognitive biases, in which we humans find emergencies incredibly salient, and long term prevention boring and hard to conceptualize. That’s why we pay for amazing biomedical research and acute care but underfund preventative / primary care. Even as an overpaid physician I’m underpaid because I’m in primary care (so maybe I’m paid just right?).
Teacher salaries account for 80% of school budgets, so it’s not hard to imagine the resistance to multiplying the budget, either for more teachers and/or higher pay. But, we’re already robbing Peter to pay Paul, as it’s well established that education influences health outcomes. So by silo-ing the budgets, we don’t’ get an accurate account of how spending in 1 field influences costs in another. We cannot afford to be myopic about arbitrary budget boundaries. WE ARE ALL PAYING FOR IT ALREADY! Either through healthy people paying exorbitant premiums to subsidize the “unhealthy”, criminal justice costs (i.e. recidivism), deficiency of high skilled labor in the workforce (lost possible tax revenue).
Human well being is a complex system, of chaotic outputs based on highly variable initial conditions. If we attempt to model as a complicated system all we’ll have is a bloated bureaucracy aiming for misaligned incentives. But, the one thing that has shown to improve well being is healthy human interaction. Imagine what education might look like if there were more, well resourced educators for each student? Imagine if those teachers had fewer distractions (no 2nd job and unpaid school tasks)?
So, I ask of my readers, are we willing to be a voice to subsidize educator education, increased student teacher ratios, and increased teacher salaries by a minimum of 2x?