An Economic Approach to Education Reform

The goal of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was to achieve 100% student proficiency by 2014, and it was originally seen as a revolutionary victory for disadvantaged students. However, despite dramatic increases in federal allocations, NCLB has failed to create measurable gains in student performance.

Nevertheless, NCLB has proven to be an effective spotlight for many problems in the public education system. Most importantly, NCLB statistics reveal the importance of qualified and effective teachers. Therefore, education reform at the federal level must consist of incentivizing “the best and the brightest” to become teachers, as well as allowing schools to enforce necessarily high standards. This could be achieved through the addition of economic incentives, a change in the current marketing strategy, and the elimination of tenure for primary and secondary school teachers.

The average starting salary for elementary, middle, and high school teachers ranges from $40-45 thousand. When compared with lawyers, doctors, and other professionals, a teacher’s salary is quite small. To counteract this disparity, the federal government must sharply decrease federal taxes. Under the current system, a teacher’s income falls under the 25% tax bracket, which makes the average teacher’s usable income just over $30 thousand. This is unacceptable, considering the importance of teachers to our society. The time has come to not only recognize this, but also to attract more qualified and effective teachers through economic incentives such as tax relief.

In addition to tax breaks, federal college loan forgiveness programs could be implemented to attract more qualified professionals to secondary education. The increased price of higher education (tuition alone at public colleges is $7,000 per year, while at private colleges it is over $26,000 per year) has forced college students to borrow more from the federal government. Financially, it becomes necessary for students to seek jobs whose salaries are large enough to pay back these loans. In order to help students transition into the teaching profession, loan forgiveness programs must be expanded to all teachers working in public school districts. Certainly these spending programs are expensive, but NCLB’s current budget will more than cover the costs.

Perhaps more importantly, these economic incentives must be implemented in conjunction with a new marketing strategy which helps to “elevate the teaching profession.” These programs will help highlight the importance of teachers, as well as the civic responsibility surrounding the profession. Every year, the Marines meet their enlistment quota while other branches of the military fail to do so. This is not because of economic incentives. Rather, it is because of the pride and satisfaction associated with the line of duty. The same sense of accomplishment must be instilled in prospective teachers through a national campaign.
Finally, schools must be able to release teachers who have been proven unfit to educate our nation’s youth. This goal can only be achieved through weakening teacher tenure in school districts. Under the current system in many states, after a certain number of years it becomes nearly impossible to fire ineffective teachers, which hurts not only the authority of the school district, but also the overall education that students receive.

Debate on education reform must begin and end with improving student performance. Programs like NCLB focus too much on testing, and too little on truly investing in our nation’s youth and their teachers. However, NCLB was effective in demonstrating the importance of quality teachers, and their impact on student performance. Therefore, a comprehensive agenda which focuses on establishing economic incentives to attract better instructors, enacting marketing campaign to elevate the status of teachers, and giving schools the control they need to enforce higher standards is needed to enact effective policy reform.