Retooling Schooling We must change the way we pay teachers and get back to traditional reading methods. By Larry Sand
https://amgreatness.com/2025/03/07/retooling-schooling/
As I noted in January, the public school enrollment count for the 2023-24 school year showed that 9 of the top 10 and 38 of the 50 largest districts have lost students since 2019-20, while 31 of the 50 largest districts lost students between the 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 school year, according to a National Center for Education Statistics report.
Now, there is more bad news. The results of a Gallup poll released Feb. 5 show that Americans’ opinions about the quality of public education in the U.S. continue to tank.
The percentage of adults who are dissatisfied with public education increased from 62% to 73% between 2019 and 2025, making the percentage of adults who feel satisfied with public education the lowest since 2001. (The report tracks Americans’ satisfaction across 31 aspects of U.S. society or policy, such as the military, health care, and crime, and it found that public education ranked 29th among those 31 areas.)
What can be done to change this sorry state of affairs?
First, we must change the way we pay teachers. Whereas private sector employees are paid via merit, K-12 educators rarely are, courtesy of the teachers’ unions. Instead, teachers are part of an industrial-style “step and column” salary regimen, getting salary increases for the number of years they work and for taking (frequently meaningless) professional development classes. Great teachers are worth more—a lot more—and should receive higher pay than their less capable colleagues. Of course, any suggestion to augment any form of merit pay, turning teachers into independent professionals, is a red flag for the teachers’ unions, which view educators as identical dues-paying automatons.
One significant loss for the teachers’ union occurred in Wisconsin when Gov. Scott Walker’s Act 10 became law in 2011. The measure all but eliminated collective bargaining for teachers and created a marketplace where school districts could compete for better educators by paying valued teachers more.
Focusing on Act 10, Barbara Biasi, an assistant Professor of Economics at the Yale School of Management, found that there was a “34% increase in the quality of teachers moving from salary-schedule to individual-salary districts and a 17% decrease in the quality of teachers exiting individual-salary districts.” In fact, about half of Wisconsin’s school districts abandoned their lock-step salary schedules to the teachers’ unions’ great chagrin and began to pay teachers for performance, for having advanced math and science skills, taking difficult assignments, etc.
(Act 10 was overturned by a county judge in December. The ruling, however, has been appealed in state court by Republicans, who run the legislature.)
Eric Hanushek, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and long-time proponent of performance pay, simply states that we should provide monetary incentives to our better teachers to take on more students. This move would result in less proficient teachers educating fewer students.
Hanushek et al. looked at several large urban districts that implemented linked performance-based evaluations with new merit-based pay schedules. “In Washington, D.C., for example, the IMPACT system rated teachers based on a variety of outcomes, including student test scores and professional observations, and triggered boosts in pay, targeted supports, or dismissal notices for educators at the ends of the spectrum. A long-running study by Thomas Dee and James Wyckoff found substantial improvement in teacher quality after IMPACT began in 2009, with greater retention of high performers and quick exits or improvements among teachers with lower performance rankings.”
Also, Hanushek reports that starting in 2013, the Dallas Independent School District replaced its traditional pay scales for principals and teachers with an evaluation and compensation system based on multiple measures of effectiveness, including student achievement and student survey responses. “The district also established new, robust definitions of educator excellence, performance-based reviews for school principals, and cash incentives to encourage highly rated teachers to move to low-performing schools.”
Four years after Dallas adopted its new pay regimen, “student performance on standardized tests improved by 16% of a standard deviation in math and 6% in reading, while scores for a comparison group of similar Texas schools remained flat. Teacher turnover in the wake of these reforms was concentrated among lower-rated teachers.”
Another way to greatly improve student learning would be to teach them literacy skills using the traditional “science of reading” method. This research-based training focuses on methods to teach phonics and phonemic awareness.
But public schools, often driven by fads, persistently replace what works with what sounds good. Perhaps the best exemplar of this mentality is Lucy Calkins, who reigned as a reading guru beginning in 1981. Her language arts educational program built on “balanced literacy”—a vision of children as natural readers—dominated classrooms across the country for four decades. Calkins once asserted that a quarter of the country’s 67,000 elementary schools use it, and the curriculum’s publisher has claimed that it was used in “tens of thousands of schools around the world.”
However, in 2022, after 40 years of miseducating millions of children, Calkins admitted she was wrong. With tail planted firmly between her legs, she admitted, “All of us are imperfect. The last two or three years, what I’ve learned from the science of reading work has been transformational.”
Now, Calkins’s imperfections have set off a lawsuit. In December, two Massachusetts mothers filed a class action against Calkins and a few of her adherents, accusing them of promoting “deceptive” and “defective” reading programs that failed their children. The plaintiffs are arguing that the curriculum was misrepresented in that it relied on “discredited practices and, as a result, hindered their children’s ability to learn to read.”
One state that is doing it right is Louisiana, which was a rare bright spot on the recent NAEP results, jumping from 49th place nationwide to 32nd in overall reading scores.
In fact, Louisiana was the only state to recover its pre-pandemic scores in reading, improving six points above its 2019 results. Cade Brumley, the state’s superintendent of education, explains that the achievement was simply a case of “going back to basics.”
Additionally, in 2021, Louisiana’s Legislature implemented Act 108, mandating that all early-grade teachers, from kindergarten to third grade, complete a course on the science of reading.
It’s worth noting that Louisiana spends just $13,700 per student, while California spends $18,000, and New York spends $33,400. But on the most recent 4th grade NAEP reading test, Louisiana outpaced both states.
Moving to a business model to compensate teachers and restoring traditional methods of teaching reading would result in better educated students and restore confidence in a troubled public education system.
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