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The Cobra Effect of High Teacher Salaries
Doug Little, grinding his usual axe, sent in the following comment and so I decided to riff on it.
"One of the reasons we are a leader is good salaries. Good salaries attract the best to teach."
This got me thinking about incentives and the law of unintended consequences. I copied the following paragraph from Wikipedia.
"The term cobra effect stems from an anecdote set at the time of British rule of colonial India. The British government was concerned about the number of venomous cobra snakes in Delhi. The government therefore offered a bounty for every dead cobra. Initially this was a successful strategy as large numbers of snakes were killed for the reward. Eventually, however, enterprising persons began to breed cobras for the income. When the government became aware of this, the reward program was scrapped, causing the cobra breeders to set the now-worthless snakes free. As a result, the wild cobra population further increased. The apparent solution for the problem made the situation even worse."
A similar anecdote comes from Mexico City where the authorities sought to reduce the amount of car congestion and pollution by banning certain cars from the city on certain days based on the last digit on their licence plate. The result was an increase in congestion and pollution as many families bought a second car - an old beater with a licence plate that ended with a different digit - resulting in more pollution and congestion as a result of more emissions and a greater incidence of car break-downs.
And how does this apply to teachers? Well, this is only conjecture on my part but, based on what I have seen and read, I note that in Canada there is tremendous competition to get into teacher training programs, and that the successful applicants tend to be the ones with the highest marks. So far so good.
But high salaries are only one of the attractions of a teaching career (there's also the intrinsic rewards of working with kids, the Christmas, March Break, and summers off work schedule, the fantastic benefits and pensions, the iron-clad tenure, and so forth) and I am not convinced that the high salaries are the main attraction of a teaching career. I also note that there is a tremendous drop-out rate for teachers - as high as 50% - in the first five years of their careers. So for the teachers who were attracted by the prospect of high salaries, this attraction appears to dwindle ere long.
However, once teachers reach the top of the grid in about 10 years they are earning more than $90,000 a year - an amount that is difficult to walk away from even for teachers who are no longer enjoying their jobs, and at some point experienced teachers start getting invested in their accumulating pension credits. After 10 years, the incentives for teachers to stay in their jobs become stronger and stronger. It may be that the result is that some teachers who were never very good at their jobs and some teachers who have become burned out continue teaching even though they (and their students) would probably be happier if they switched to another career. In this scenario, high teacher salaries are counter-productive as they incentivize bad teachers to stick around for another 20 or 30 years.
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