Better Teachers, Brighter Futures: How to Reverse Pandemic-Era Learning Losses

>> Eric Hanushek: The pandemic has done other things that I'll just mention briefly we can come back to if you want. There's been a movement to say, well, we can't test kids because not all kids are in class let's stop testing in all accountability. This is like running your small business without a profit and loss statement.

If you don't know where you're at, it's a little bit hard to know whether you're getting better or you have problems, okay. The other thing is there's been lots of distractions talking about mental health, which there are some mental health problems but I don't think that's the major thing.

Lots of fighting about the curriculum people, I think there's a couple people here from Florida that know that that's the only thing we talk about in Florida right now, is curriculum. Same in some other places and then on top of that, in California, both the Los Angeles teachers and the Oakland teachers went on strike this last spring.

Now, in the case of Oakland, which is my favorite example, they had an eight day teacher strike facing kids that are behind already from the COVID experience. They have an eight day teacher strike. But they'd already settled the benefits, pay and benefit issues, had fairly handsome salary increases, and I the state would, the city would pick up all the retirement costs for individuals and so forth.

They were striking over housing the homeless, reparations for families in the city, making sure that there were sustainable plantings around all the schools and the really important thing, a water cooler in every school. So you have an eight day strike at the egg facing this learning loss, which is not very encouraging, I would say, so what do you do?

Going over it quickly, what the research says quite clearly is that the first thing you want to do is improve teacher quality because we know that, good grief. You know that there is a difference in the quality of teachers that you get and some are a little bit better than others, right?

In fact, some of them aren't very good and some are really good, right? So the first thing we know from research is that you want to improve teacher quality. The second thing we know from research is that you want to improve teacher quality, you got it. There's always three things that you want to do and that is, the one thing that we know, seriously, is that if we improve teacher quality, we can deal with this.

Now, how do we do that? We have a couple examples one is Washington, DC, which ten years ago went around and added huge increases in the base salaries of the most effective teachers. And they fired 500 or 600 teachers now over the last ten years for being at the bottom end of the scale.

And in fact, while Washington, DC, isn't a great school system yet, it did much better in terms of improvement over the last ten years than any other large city in the country. Dallas, Texas, has introduced a similar kind of plan and it looks like the schools in Dallas have really benefited from this.

Now, finally, to the title of the talk, how can we do this in the face of teacher shortages? So what I've got here is a survey from a year ago as HR departments were trying to hire new teachers going into this last school year that we've just seen.

And they were surveyed and they said how many of you, if you have an opening, how many of you had a hard time finding teachers of the following characteristics? So you see at the top of the list, it's foreign language teachers, special ed teachers, career and technical education CTE teachers, math science teachers, computer science.

So that sort of around half, half of the schools said, we're having trouble hiring these people. Which is the argument that for what, well, the standard economic argument is, well, maybe you should raise salaries and, in fact, there's a drumbeat. There are bills in the California legislature today to have a 50% increase in teacher salaries in California facing these shortages.

So let me give you a couple other parts of the picture that aren't up there. One is, you can hire all the English and History teachers you want. At the current salaries, there's a half the shortages, in fact, at the bottom end, but more insightful, I think, is that same survey said, well, what about the fact that we've got bus drivers and custodians?

We're having a harder time finding bus drivers and custodians than we are finding computer science teachers. So what's this say, well, I was going to bring a prop in with me from my office, and I couldn't find it on the shelves. There's a book that was by two economists, Kershaw and McKean, called Teacher shortages and teacher salaries.

That discussed exactly this problem of the shortage of math and science teachers in the schools and talked about salaries and what their point was very simple one. If you have a shortage, you want to increase salaries. If you don't have a shortage, you don't want to increase salaries.

The other thing, the reason for bringing the prop in is that the copyright of this is 1962. This is not a new phenomenon talking about the shortages of math and science teachers, we've seen that for 60 years now. They've been written about for 60 years, so let me come back and say, well, what could we do today?

My complete solution is very simple, take the more effective teachers today in the schools and use them more intensively, more kids with the most effective teachers, and use the less effective teachers less intensively. Maybe use the Washington DC answer, and not have them use them at the zero amount, but just give them the small classes, which is exactly the opposite of what the common story is, right?

So I'll end by saying, what we hear is doing something like that is just too hard. And that means that we're willing politicians and the population is willing to accept a 6% lifetime tax for everybody who went through schooling during the pandemic, on average. And they're willing to accept the $28 trillion loss because it's too hard, I'll leave it at that.