Perhaps the most important way to improve students’ educational experience is to elevate the teaching profession. However, where teachers’ unions hold sway, that task is extremely difficult.
The heart of the problem is that collective bargaining agreements, in effect throughout most of the country, ensure that teachers’ unions treat teachers not as professionals but as interchangeable widgets, all of equal value and competence. Differentiating between effective and ineffective educators based on what their students actually learn would require eliminating the union’s industrial-style work rules. These include one-size-fits-all salary scales, tenure (contractually known as “permanence”), and seniority, or “last in, first out (LIFO),” under which, if a teacher must be laid off due to budgetary belt-tightening, the newest hire is on the chopping block rather than the least talented teacher.
Union interference aside, what would help make for better students?
One important step would be to adopt value-added measures that typically use standardized test scores to calculate a teacher’s contribution to student growth over a school year. As Stanford professors Eric Hanushek and Caroline Hoxby explain, to compute a teacher’s value-added, the educator is not given credit for students’ incoming achievement levels, “but rather for the achievement gains that students regularly make under her guidance. In this way, we separate a teacher’s effect from what her students bring to the classroom.”
An in-depth study by three Ivy League economists reveals how the quality of individual teachers affects their students over the long term. The paper, by Raj Chetty and John Friedman of Harvard and Jonah Rockoff of Columbia, tracked 2.5 million students over 20 years and, using a value-added approach, found that teachers who help students raise their standardized test scores have a lasting positive effect on those students’ lives beyond academics, including lower teenage pregnancy rates, greater college matriculation, and higher adult earnings.
Cory Koedel, a professor of economics and public policy at the University of Missouri, adds that value-added measures are most useful for identifying the highest- and lowest-performing teachers, while distinguishing among those in the middle is much more difficult.
After instituting value-added techniques, “merit pay” or “pay for performance” should be established so that educators who demonstrate classroom excellence are paid more than their less talented peers.
Researchers have found significant benefits from Dallas’s performance-based pay system, which has been in place since 2013. The system features comprehensive evaluations that include test scores, classroom observations, and student ratings. In addition to paying better-performing teachers more, the system offers bonuses to skilled teachers who volunteer to teach in high-need schools.
A 2013 study of Washington, DC’s performance-pay system—which, importantly, includes provisions that make it easier to fire low-performing teachers—found notable short-term results, with low-scoring teachers either improving or quitting. Not surprisingly, a 2019 follow-up found that teacher quality in the city is rising.
Internationally, the performance-pay system in rural Andhra Pradesh, India, has also proven to be highly effective.
Another way to improve teaching and rein in misbehavior at the same time would be to install cameras in classrooms. We do this for cops; why not for teachers? In fact, recording real-time police activity has become increasingly common. A University of Maryland poll found that nearly 90 percent of respondents support body cameras, including 85 percent of Republicans, 86 percent of independents, and 94 percent of Democrats. This aligns with a Cato Institute poll, which found that 89 percent of Americans support “requiring police officers to wear body cameras to record their on-duty interactions.”
In schools, cameras would give administrators a window into how well an educator teaches, highlighting both effective and ineffective techniques. The cameras would also have a major effect on student behavior.
Across the nation, instances of classroom misbehavior have reached epic proportions, surging since the COVID-related shutdowns, with more than 70 percent of educators reporting that students misbehave more often than in 2019. An increasing number of students are abrasive and disrespectful, refuse to complete tasks, and, in severe cases, are violent toward peers and teachers. Verbal abuse, physical fights, and chronic lack of focus have a detrimental effect on teaching and staff morale across most U.S. schools.
However, most students, if they know they are being recorded, would be much less likely to act out.
A few schools in England use the technology as a way to reduce attacks on teachers. Larry Davis, deputy headteacher of Southfields Academy in Wimbledon, said that the use of body cameras by a small number of staff “had improved behavior and lessened the number of dangerous confrontations since they were introduced at the start of the school year.” A school official also said that police found that “evidence from the body cameras was more useful in making arrests, and that their presence was deterring disruptive behavior….”
In Louisiana, Act 479, which took effect on February 1, mandates that schools install cameras in self-contained special education classrooms and maintain continuous audio and video recording during school hours. The requirement applies statewide, and every local district must comply.
Lafayette Parish officials say the district has already equipped about 124 classrooms with the new cameras. District leaders say the goal is to protect vulnerable students and provide teachers with a clear record if incidents are questioned.
To sum up, an increasing number of students aren’t learning, and many classrooms have become battlegrounds. According to the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), reading scores have declined nationwide among 4th- and 8th-grade students. No state recorded reading gains in either grade compared with 2022.
Additionally, 33 percent of 8th graders are not even reading at the NAEP Basic level—a greater percentage than ever before. This means that a third of 8th graders likely cannot identify basic literary elements in a text, such as the order of events, character traits, and the main idea.
As such, it’s time to end the practice of treating teachers as unionized widgets, adopt a value-added system, and pay good teachers more. Introducing these changes and using classroom cameras to monitor instruction and student behavior would significantly improve education in the United States.
Larry Sand is former president of the California Teachers Empowerment Network.
