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I&I - The back to school episode · A New Angle

• 0:09
  SPEAKER_02: This is A New Angle, a show about cool people doing awesome things in and around Montana.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_02: I'm your host, Justin Angle.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_02: This show is supported by First Security Bank,
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_02: Blackfoot Communications,
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_02: and the University of Montana College of Business.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_02: Hey folks, welcome back and thanks for tuning in.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_02: Today is our August edition of Incentives and Instincts,
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_02: a recurring series in which I speak with economist and friend Bryce Ward about some
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_02: of the broader challenges facing our society.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_02: Bryce, thanks for joining me.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks for having me as always.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_02: So winter is coming, the days are getting shorter, our kids are off the rails.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_02: In other words, it's back to school season.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_02: So to mark this emotional time of year, let's talk about teachers.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_02: The inspiration for this conversation is a working paper by two economists titled
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_02: The Rise and Fall of the Teaching Profession,
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_02: which takes a look at changes in status,
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_02: prestige,
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_02: and public perception of K-12 public school teachers over the last 50 years.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_02: First off, Bryce, let's describe what these two economists measured.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_02: What were they looking at?
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_01: The main way that they look at it is...
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: So there's just some direct survey questions about whether or not teaching is
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_01: prestigious or not.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_01: So just general public perceptions.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_01: But I think the more compelling stuff is...
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_01: Asking parents whether or not they want their children to be teachers.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: And then also just looking at,
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_01: so we do these giant surveys of incoming college freshmen or graduating high school seniors.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_01: And hundreds of thousands of people have taken these surveys.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_01: And they've been doing it since the late 60s.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_01: So just, are you interested in becoming a teacher?
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_01: Right, interest in joining the profession.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_01: Interest in joining the profession.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_01: And then you also look at actual joining of the profession,
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_01: completing licensure exams and all that kind of stuff.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_01: And then there's also some surveys of teachers.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_01: Job satisfaction.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_01: Job satisfaction and elements of job satisfaction.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_01: It's a really impressive,
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_01: compilation of kind of all of the data that exists that speak to this question
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_01: going back decades
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_01: to basically 1970, so 50 years.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_02: The basic finding is sort of a declining trend in the 70s.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_02: A swift rise in these metrics during the 80s through the 90s, somewhat steady for 15 years.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_02: And then since 2010,
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_02: there's been a precipitous decline to perhaps the lowest levels that we've ever seen.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, you have interest in the profession or perceptions of prestige.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_01: All of that stuff was really high in the earliest period, 1970.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_01: It collapses.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_01: Tanks in the 70s to the early 80s.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_01: Then it rises back up.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_01: When we were graduating from high school in the early 90s, you kind of reach this plateau.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_01: And that kind of sticks around at a relatively stable level.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_01: And then, yeah, Great Recession comes and it falls off a cliff again.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_02: It's worth mentioning that these measures that we've talked about a moment ago,
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_02: they're related in some ways,
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_02: right?
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_02: They sort of paint the picture of a bit of a cycle, I would imagine, right?
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_02: As public prestige goes down, that's got to be related to interest in the profession.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_02: And then as public prestige changes, there has to be changes in job satisfaction for teachers.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_02: And so these measures are related, and that's not necessarily a problem for the study.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_02: It's another interesting layer to it.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that's their model, right?
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_01: Is that these things are just all looping together, right?
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_01: So prestige feeds into interest,
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_01: which feeds into who goes into it,
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: which feeds into job satisfaction,
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: which feeds back into prestige.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_01: It's all endogenously related.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_01: When we were in high school,
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_01: the early 90s,
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_01: if you said percentage of people who viewed teaching as prestigious,
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_01: it was 80%.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_01: It is now less than 60.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_01: If you look at
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_01: Parents wanting their kids to be teachers, right?
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_01: In 1970, it was almost 80%.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: Then it collapses down to like 50%.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_01: But again, back when we were there, it's like two-thirds of parents.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: Like, you know, in the early 90s, almost 70% of parents were like, yeah, my kid became a teacher.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_01: That's great.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_01: Now it's less than 40%.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: It's important to understand, like almost 10% of college graduates are teachers.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's something like- 8%.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_02: 8% of the college educated workforce in the United States are teachers.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_02: K-12 teachers.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_02: K-12 teachers.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_01: So add in-
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_01: pre-K and post-secondary, and it's probably closer to 10.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_01: If you looked at college freshmen in 1970,
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_01: yeah,
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_01: like 20% were going to be teachers,
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_01: expressed interest in being a teacher.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_01: They became it, but that's interest.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_01: That collapses, again, it's like 10%, you know, when we were all there, and now it's less than five.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_01: It went up and down a lot, right?
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_01: It went down from 20% to 5% back to 10%, and now it's less than 5%, right, in terms of that
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_01: share of college freshmen interested in becoming a teacher.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_01: It's not just a precipitous decline.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_01: That makes it a little bit more interesting, right?
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_01: Because it suggests that there are things that we can do to improve this if we don't like it, right?
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_01: So the fact that we have this yo-yo gives us at least some ability to say,
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_01: oh,
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_01: well,
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_01: what caused it to go up and down?
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_01: And to the extent that we're concerned about this,
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_01: and maybe we need to talk about whether or not we should be concerned about this,
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_01: there's at least some historical evidence to suggest that you can recover.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_02: You know,
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_02: in previous episodes of this series,
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_02: you've described our decision as a country to invest in public education as one of
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_02: our most significant investments.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_02: Make that case again.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_02: Why is the fact that we've chosen to subsidize and sort of standardize K-12
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_02: education as a public good in many ways,
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_02: why is that important?
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_01: School works.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_01: Literally just yesterday I saw a paper on the impact of an additional year of schooling on IQ.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_01: It's five additional IQ points per year.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_01: and you get social skills we have you know there's the test score there's the iq
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_01: there's the social emotional component uh we have ample evidence that schooling
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_01: does impact these things it impacts them in ways that generate very large returns
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_01: there are big effects from having good teachers teach kids in ways that you know
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_01: generate
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_01: productive citizens uh that we all rely on the impetus behind the mass education
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_01: movement over 100 years ago was correct which is if we educate everybody uh we
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_01: collectively all get better off and you know that's what we see again again right
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_01: there's a reason we have rich countries in the world and that's highly correlated
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_01: with the amount of education in those places
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_02: Well established in the data that public investment in K-12 education pays huge returns.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_02: And that is largely attributable to the work that these teachers are doing.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_01: Teacher effects are large.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_01: And it's important to note, we now have papers on principal effects, on counselor effects.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_01: All of the different components of the school system at the individual level appear to matter.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_01: There's variation in quality and exposure to differential quality matters for a
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_01: host of long-term outcomes that we think we should care about.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_02: So let's talk about some of the reasons or the mechanisms that the authors postulate in this paper.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_02: And they break them into some categories.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_02: The first is economic.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_02: So what are some of the leading economic explanations for these fluctuations in teacher prestige?
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_01: So I would put them all into economics.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_01: A simple model of occupation choice to an economist is just, well,
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_01: If I'm looking at that job,
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_01: comparing it to the other jobs that I might get,
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_01: do I think I will like it more?
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_01: And what makes me like a job more or less?
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_01: And that's all the different hypotheses that they raise, right?
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_01: So first and foremost, how much will it pay me?
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_01: Do I think it's going to offer me opportunities to grow?
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_01: Is it secure and stable?
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_02: How much debt will I have to take on in education,
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_02: licensure,
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_02: all these other hurdles to enter the profession?
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_01: What kind of barriers to entry are there?
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_01: And then there's this other bucket that the economic jargon that you'll see in
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_01: papers are what we call non-pecuniary benefits.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, define that.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_01: That's a great term.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_01: That's just like...
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_01: Other conditions of the job,
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_01: autonomy and what students will I be teaching and will I feel safe and will I feel respected?
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, some of these prestige things are part of that.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_01: So,
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_01: and all this stuff gets bundled together and then we,
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_01: look at it and it's like,
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_01: oh,
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_01: and then,
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_01: of course,
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_01: that's just within teaching autonomy.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_01: All of those conditions in other jobs.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_01: Sure, how do they stack up?
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_01: What job might I be able to get?
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_01: What barriers do I face to getting those other jobs?
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_01: And the easiest way to think about this is just look at interest in the profession
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_01: because that's what's going to measure all of this stuff.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_01: So what drives interest in the profession?
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_01: What kind of feedback and information am I getting about all of these different things?
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_01: And then those are their hypotheses.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_01: So what they call economic hypotheses are,
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_01: are mostly the stuff related to kind of wages and job security or barriers to other professions.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_01: If you go back pre 1970, there are real barriers to other jobs for women and minorities.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_01: Right, exactly.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_01: And so teaching was one of the few jobs that a
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_01: high ability woman or minority could get.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_01: If you're a college educated woman, like, yeah, you can be a teacher.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_01: We may not let you be other things or it might be hard, but you can absolutely be a teacher.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_02: And so the opening up of a broader array of opportunities for women and minorities
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_02: in the ensuing years is
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_02: a good thing, yet it put pressure on the demand for- Well, it changes the perception of teachers.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_01: So you just had this shift of opportunity, so that allows a bunch of people who this was the best option.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_01: I can now be a doctor or a lawyer.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_01: And so it siphoned off a lot of potentially highly respected people in the community who were teachers.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_01: And then they had all of those skills that they had and they were then bringing
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_01: them into the rest of the community.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_01: And it's like, oh, well, teachers are of this quality.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_01: And then it's kind of changed the composition of the teaching profession.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_01: It just opened up.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_01: If you're talking about interest in the profession, well, I don't have any interest.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_01: I can't go anywhere else.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm interested in that.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_01: And now I can go all these other places.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I'm not interested in that anymore because there were...
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_01: Other highly prestigious professions that you could go into that were more lucrative.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_02: Sure.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_02: So the array of opportunities just widened and that changed both the perception of teaching,
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_02: but also the supply of folks opting into that.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_01: There used to be barriers for at least some people.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_01: Those barriers got reduced.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_01: People flew across that barrier,
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_01: changed the relative weights of different perceptions of the profession and what I
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_01: could do and interest in the profession.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_01: So certainly for that early period decline, this is a big part of it.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_01: It probably is still to some degree part of it as well going forward,
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_01: but we've now had 50 years of experience with this.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_01: So it's probably not maybe driving the recent decline in interest because it
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_01: probably should have been mostly baked in.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_01: Fairly stable at this point.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_02: We'll be back to my conversation with Bryce Ward after this short break.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_02: A New Angle is proudly presented by First Security Bank,
• 12:23
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• 12:24
  SPEAKER_02: and the University of Montana College of Business.
• 12:27
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• 12:30
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• 12:33
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• 12:43
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• 12:48
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• 12:51
  SPEAKER_01: Hey, this is Colter Nuanez from ESPN Missoula, and you're listening to A New Angle.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome back to A New Angle.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_02: I'm here with Bryce Ward discussing public perception of teaching.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_02: So some other possible hypotheses we've talked about or the authors talk about,
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_02: poor funding,
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_02: stagnant pay,
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_02: rising college tuition.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_02: So that's a barrier to entry.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_02: It's more expensive to acquire the education and licensure to become a teacher.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_01: Sticker prices are up.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_01: But, you know, when you kind of weight it by available resources,
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_01: financial aid and all that kind of stuff, it's not as steep as we often talk about it.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_01: The other two,
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_01: like declining funding,
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_01: perceived growth in job security and wages,
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_01: to me,
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_01: those are the big ones,
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_01: right?
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_01: These are the most likely.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_01: They line up with the data appropriately.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_01: In the 70s, there was declining cohort sizes.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_01: The baby boomers went out.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_01: Then it kind of stabilizes and starts going up.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_01: There was also a big change in interest in funding schools in the 80s and 90s.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_01: They got more funding.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_01: So teaching became more stable and more interesting.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_02: Sure, we see an increase in the prestige there.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_01: And it's not surprising that what breaks this is the Great Recession when we
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_01: slashed education budgets and reduced the teaching workforce volumes.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_01: by an amount that was bigger than occurred in the 1970s.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_01: So the perception of job stability changed.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_01: You also have, like right now, we're kind of looking at declining cohort sizes.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_01: We don't have as many babies.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_01: Without as many babies, you don't need as many teachers.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_01: And people are sitting there saying, I'm going to be doing this for 40 years.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_01: Well, maybe I don't want to go into that.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_01: Like I foresee some bumps there.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_02: A subtext of this changing job market opportunities,
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_02: there's also a change in how we interact with our jobs.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_02: The notion of going to work for Procter & Gamble or a big corporation and staying
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_02: there 50 years and then retiring with your pension.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_02: That doesn't really work in corporate space anymore.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_02: And so,
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_02: you know,
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_02: the teaching profession is maybe some of that cultural shift in our attachment to
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_02: our jobs,
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_02: our longevity in our jobs has changed a little bit in general in that some of that
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_02: general shift spills over into the teaching profession.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_01: Teachers are selected based on their preference for job stability.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_01: It's one of the biggest things that explains going into teaching is risk aversion.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_01: People who are risk averse are more likely to select into teaching.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_01: Now, is that necessarily who we want to select into teaching?
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_01: Is a good question, but it is certainly part of the selection mechanism that exists currently.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_01: It's why the great recession layoffs were potentially such a major shock.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_01: Because it upended that perception of teaching as stable.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_02: Let's maybe press on that short history there.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_02: Some listeners might not remember the massive changes that the Great Recession sort of led to.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_01: The Great Recession, obviously, when you have that kind of economic contraction, tax revenue collapses.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_01: And we did not fill the hole with some form of higher level government borrowing.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_01: So we massively cut public sector employment,
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_01: particularly teachers,
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_01: with no change in,
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_01: at that point,
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_01: student supply.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_01: But you have this change in job security and funding.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_01: And then the last component, which we haven't talked about, is real wages.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_01: So inflation adjusted wages, they track this rise and fall almost perfectly.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_01: In the 70s, you have stagflation, real wages for teachers fall.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_01: In the 80s, it comes back.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_01: In the 90s, it comes back, reaches kind of its peak.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_01: And then the Great Recession comes and it falls again.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_01: And the most recent inflation, they fell again, right?
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_01: And so those are the economic factors, right?
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_01: So it's basically what you expect, right?
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_01: Which is, well,
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_01: interest in the profession,
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_01: prestige of the profession,
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_01: very much tracks expected growth in the profession,
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_01: the stability of the profession,
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_01: and the wages offered by the profession.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_01: So now we can move to the other,
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_01: what they call sociopolitical education policy school environment,
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_01: which I'm going to group under these non-pecuniary aspects of the profession.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_02: Let's touch on what you think are the leading candidates in that category.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_01: So there's a unionization piece.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_01: And they frame it as unionization affects occupational prestige.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if I agree with their framing of it.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_01: And their framing of it basically is in the 60s and 70s is when collective
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_01: bargaining is extended to teachers nationwide.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_02: And that that leads to a decline in prestige because it's associated with organized
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_02: labor and manufacturing and those sorts of things.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_01: Their argument is that people associate unions with working class.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_01: I think one of the bigger potential issues is collective bargaining.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_01: The main impact in the education space is what we all know is the rigid
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_01: compensation structure for teachers that is a matrix based on experience and degree.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_01: And we now have interesting evidence, particularly from Wisconsin, where they broke that a decade ago.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_01: In the wake of those reforms,
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_01: there were actually several states that did,
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_01: but Wisconsin was the most extreme.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_01: Got the most coverage.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it was also just the biggest change in the collective bargaining space, right?
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_01: They basically banned collective bargaining.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_01: And so, and like half of districts got rid of it.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_01: So half of districts got rid of the rigid pay structure and went to flexible performance-based pay.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_01: Nice natural experiment for economists.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_01: Well,
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_01: and the key part of the natural experiment is you could only do that after the
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_01: collective bargaining agreement ran out.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_01: So you have variation in timing, right?
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_01: So you have some districts that ended in one year and then others that had...
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_01: several years before they could change.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_01: So you get this change in timing and you have some districts that do and don't do it.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_01: When you move to flexible pay, you start paying teachers differently and you start paying based on need.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_01: And so you get something that's a little bit more akin to what we see at universities, right?
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_01: where you're paid based on the value of your outside option.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, but there's variation, right?
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_01: There's variation across universities in what different faculty get paid.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_01: And to some degree,
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_01: at least that is based on the fact that to fill positions,
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_01: I have to pay more because the people that can fill those positions have other options.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_01: And in particular, it was at more selective institutions, right?
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_01: It was all, oh, I can now, I'll be able to go and- Which presumably is a higher caliber candidate.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's important to note there's drawbacks, right?
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_01: You know, again, we've studied this now extensively, right?
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_01: So men do better in this scenario than women.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_01: And this kind of taps into a much larger literature on men's willingness to
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_01: negotiate versus women and how those negotiations go.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely disruptive at the start.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_01: Like it had adverse short run impacts on education outcomes as teachers left
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_01: certain places and turned over and there was all this sorts of turnover.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, all sorts of disruptions.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_01: And then, you know, from an efficiency perspective,
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_01: We think this is good.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_01: Flexible pay allows us to kind of match the right teacher to the right school
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_01: because teachers have different comparative advantages,
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_01: right?
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_01: Some teachers are good at teaching struggling students and some teachers are good at advancing high.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_01: We'll figure this out and we'll match you.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_01: But there appears to be some equity issues because if I'm a high resource school district,
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_01: well,
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_01: I'll just get all the best teachers.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_01: There's efficiency, equity, trade-offs that are real associated with this.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_01: But getting back to the larger issue,
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_01: Like unionization through collective bargaining and the compression of the pay scale,
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_01: particularly for people who have more lucrative outside options,
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_01: that compression of the pay scale makes them less interested in the profession.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_01: But to me, the big thing that it did was it made it so that I could be the best teacher in the world
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_01: I'm only going to get to the upper end of the matrix and I'm going to be treated
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_01: the exact same as the worst teacher in the world in my district.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that does feed into interest in the profession,
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_01: particularly in a world where those market efficient mechanisms are so well
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_01: established in other places.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_01: So when everybody is on a compressed wage scale,
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_01: doesn't matter as much.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_01: But that big giant rise in superstar effects and inequality that we've talked about
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_01: in various other issues.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_01: Do I want to be a teacher and accept a nice, stable, compressed pay scale?
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_01: Or do I want to go see if I can get a golden ticket?
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah,
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_02: and considering rising tuition and the increase in the debt that students are
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_02: taking on,
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_02: I mean,
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: the prospect of a higher or an unlimited rate of return on that investment,
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_02: if you're foreclosing that opportunity going into a higher debt situation,
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_02: I can see how that would just sort of take that option off the board for folks.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_01: There is variation in where there's teacher shortages, right?
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_01: And a lot of that has to do with the fact that if you're at all good at math and science,
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_01: you can get a very high wage entry job.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_01: And that appeal of teaching is much less salient because it's like,
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_01: I can go be a first year teacher and make $40,000,
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_01: $50,000,
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_01: or I can go
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_01: get an entry-level engineering, computer software, science job at 100.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_01: With similar entry investment, right?
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_01: Similar price of education.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_01: I'm just going out of college, right?
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_01: So if I'm going to take on debt,
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_01: you can,
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_01: and we know this happens,
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_01: the parents in my ear,
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_01: if I'm taking on debt are,
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_01: yeah,
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_01: you should go get that $100,000 a year job and not that $50,000 a year job.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_01: For sure.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_01: know in spite of the fact that teaching has other non-pecuniary benefits like uh
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_01: you get summers and christmas and spring break i know once i sign up i pretty much
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_01: know what my trajectory is and it has nothing to do with my performance my ability
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_01: yeah i mean i think there's a lot of people who are because they're seeing what
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_01: happens elsewhere in the economy again if i'm highly risk averse that's appealing
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_01: But you have this whole section of the population that is less risk averse and
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_01: you're just turning that off to them.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_01: So we've basically taken autonomy out of a lot of teachers' hands.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_01: And we did it through, you know, they phrase it as teacher accountability stuff.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_01: But,
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's just a general,
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_01: there's been a widespread attempt to try and standardize education,
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_01: right?
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_01: Because we know that teachers matter.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_01: We know all this stuff matters.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_01: And so we're going to try and make it so that it's harder to be a low performing
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_01: teacher because we're going to make you do things that we know work.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_02: And that often gets measured with tests and test scores.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_02: And so teachers then test their teaching to the test and all the downstream
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_02: implications of those sorts of policies.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_02: We've also increased the size of administration.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_01: And we also have this enormous corpus of education research, which says, well, these things work.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_01: So you should do these things, right?
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_01: So to the extent that teachers used to have the ability to be like, well, I'm a professional.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_01: I have education and training and experience.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm going to now pick how I'm going to run my classroom.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_01: And this is how I'm going to do discipline.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_01: And this is how I'm going to...
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_01: even what textbooks I might use, all that kind of stuff.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_01: We've kind of siphoned that to different levels of the system.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_01: And we've made teachers just narrowed their scope.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_01: They're more cogs in a larger machine.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_01: And whether or not that really works or not is an open question.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_01: One of the major debates in education spaces is like, well, should we just...
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_01: hire professionals and say, you're a professional?
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_01: Are we afraid of the variance that that introduces?
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_01: And we should basically try and narrow the variance of teachers by constraining their choices.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_01: Essentially,
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_01: what you give up is you give up some great innovative teacher who has their own
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_01: method that really works for the students that they happen to teach.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_01: So you give that up in exchange for avoiding the fact that there's some teachers
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_01: who think that they may have some innovative method that doesn't work.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah,
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_02: and within that is also an issue we've talked about on this show before,
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_02: and that is the culture wars.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_02: And culture wars are not necessarily new,
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_02: and certainly schools are not a new environment in which the culture wars gets waged.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_02: However,
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_02: you know,
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_02: there is some possibility that as those cultural issues have just become so
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_02: dominant in the last 10 or so years that the focus on curriculum,
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_02: what schools are teaching and what teachers are not teaching is just maybe
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_02: contributing to the decline in interest in the field.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_01: And again, the survey evidence is at least somewhat consistent, right?
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_01: Teachers do feel like they have a loss of autonomy and authority and their job
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_01: satisfaction has moved in line with that.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_01: it's not as huge as some of the other swings,
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_01: but there's definitely some erosion there that may be contributing.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_01: The last area to talk about is just safety and security.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_01: And there,
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_01: I mean,
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_01: in terms of teachers actually getting assaulted or being afraid of being assaulted
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_01: by their students,
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_01: There was a slight uptick in around 2010, but probably not big enough to explain anything.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_01: And it's kind of come back down.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_01: The obvious change in safety and security is school shootings.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_02: And again,
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_02: like that might be an area where like your actual risk as a teacher being in a
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_02: school shooting is very low,
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_02: right?
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_02: But the salience of the events is very high.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_02: It's like, I'm scared of sharks.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_02: I know my chances if I go surfing of getting bitten by a shark are very low,
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_02: but they're zero if I don't go surfing.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_01: Well,
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_01: and again,
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_01: if you're talking about a profession that is select on risk aversion,
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_01: anything that adds risk makes it less appealing to the people who are avoiding risk.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_01: So basically the big picture to me is, yeah, it's economic stuff.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_01: Economic stuff.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_01: But,
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_01: there definitely are some aspects of the teaching profession that if you wanted to tweak,
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_01: you might be able to increase prestige and interest.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_02: So I'd love to hear from anyone in the audience that has thoughts on this.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_02: Again,
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_02: this is just one paper that compiles a lot of data,
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_02: makes some provocative points,
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_02: draws some interesting conclusions,
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_02: but hopefully this is a starting point for an ongoing discussion about this
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_02: important topic.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_02: Bryce,
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_02: as always,
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_02: thank you for not only flagging this paper,
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_02: but helping us understand its implications in such a profound way.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_02: Happy as always.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_02: So let's tee up our listener question for the month.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_02: This question comes from a dear friend and colleague of Montana Public Radio, Lauren Korn.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_02: She's got a question about hope.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_02: Let's have a listen.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like the U.S.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_00: is navigating some complicated or mixed feelings right now.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_00: The country is, as we have all come to expect and fear each summer, it's on fire.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_00: The Olympics are taking place,
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_00: which at least for me,
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_00: unearths long buried or usually absent feelings of pride or something like it.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_00: And to the point of my question,
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_00: after most of us were becoming resigned to another Trump presidency,
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_00: there does seem to be something like hope on the horizon with Harris.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I will add that is hope in spite of or in the face of even wars raging in the
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_00: world like those in Ukraine and in Gaza.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_00: So if I'm being asked to articulate these mixed feelings in the form of a question,
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_00: I suppose my question is this.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_00: Is it naive to be hopeful right now?
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_00: What does it mean to be hopeful right now, to have hope politically, culturally, personally even?
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, thanks, Lauren.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_02: You ask an important question about hope and hope.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_02: It's utility.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_02: That seems like an odd sort of way to frame it in terms of the utility of hope,
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_02: but it does have a lot of,
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_02: hope in itself has a lot of benefits.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_01: It does.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm going to break hope into something far less poetic and interesting.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_01: Because that's what- That's what economists do.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_01: Lemon sucking economists do.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_02: Lemon sucking, where's that phrase come from?
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_01: My undergraduate advisor and former boss,
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_01: he always called economists lemon suckers because basically we take the fun out of everything.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_01: Bryce, you're a lot more fun.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm going to take the fun out of hope here real fast.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_01: So what is hope, right?
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_01: Hope is just expectation.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_02: That's all the time we have for this episode.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_02: If you'd like to hear more of this conversation and receive other exclusive content,
• 30:16
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• 30:19
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks for listening to A New Angle.
• 30:21
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• 30:23
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• 30:29
  SPEAKER_02: A New Angle is recorded at Studio 49.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_02: A generous gift from UM alums Michelle and Lauren Hansen.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_02: Our presenting sponsors are First Security Bank,
• 30:38
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• 30:39
  SPEAKER_02: and the University of Montana College of Business.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_02: Kelly Larson is our producer.
• 30:45
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• 30:47
  SPEAKER_02: VTO Jeff Ament and John Wicks made our music.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_02: And Jeff Meese is our master of all things sound.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks a lot, and see you next time.