Positively American: Winning Back the Middle-Class Majority One Family at A Time by Senator Chuck Schumer

Author:Senator Chuck Schumer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rodale Press
Published: 2007-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Salary Stipends for Highly Qualified Math and Science Teachers

Under this education plan, in addition to the funding described above, the federal government will make an immediate investment in recruiting and retaining talented teachers in math and science, where they are most needed. Teachers with subject matter mastery and demonstrated teaching skills will get an annual increase in salary of up to $20,000 a year paid for by the federal government. The equation is simple: If salaries are higher for qualified teachers, more qualified people will choose to teach and continue to teach.

More than anything, our schools depend on high-quality teachers. Other than the values that are taught to children at home, teacher quality is the most important factor in student achievement. A troublesome family situation can’t be solved in schools. Teacher quality can.

Study after study shows that the most important factor in student performance is teacher quality (defined as some combination of educational background, literacy level, years of experience, subject matter knowledge and teaching skill). One large-scale example is a study of the entire Illinois high school class of 2002, which found that teacher quality was the most important factor in students’ college readiness. Even more striking, it found that students in low-level math classes taught by high-quality teachers did better than students in high-level math classes taught by low-quality teachers.

On the other hand, while it’s a popular rallying cry, there is less evidence that class size has an effect on student achievement after third grade. Great schools usually don’t have the most teachers; they have the best teachers. While it would be great to both lower class size and have great teachers, if I could choose between a great teacher with twenty-five kids in a class and a mediocre teacher with seventeen, I’d take the former every time.

There are lots of incredible teachers in our schools, but overall, teacher quality has declined in the last generation. In 1964, more than one in five high schoolers who scored in the top 10% on their achievement tests went on to become teachers. Between 1971 and 1974, almost a quarter of those in the top 10% went on to teach. By 2000, that number had declined to about one in ten. In other words, top achievers are less than half as likely to choose teaching today as they were thirty years ago.

This is because choosing and staying in teaching involves a huge financial sacrifice. As a result, many excellent candidates do not become teachers. I know this from my own experience. I was brought up in a home where we always had to be careful about money; my parents wanted me to be free of that. They urged me to be a doctor or a lawyer because those were esteemed and lucrative professions. Instead, I rebelled and ran for the Assembly at age twenty-three.

During my first year in the Assembly, I was regularly asked to teach for an afternoon at schools in my district. I taught history classes at my alma mater, Madison High School.

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