Raj Chetty: belief

Transcript context

…Do you think this means it makes sense to pay teachers on some kind of seniority basis? No, actually. I think paying teachers who are more experienced a bit more can make sense — the novice teachers versus teachers who have two or three years of experience. However, the current system of pay essentially is a function entirely of experience, so the more experience you have, if you have 5 years, or 7 years, or 10 years, or 15 years, your pay continuously goes up. Your pay does not depend in any way on any measure of performance. As I was saying earlier, while experience is one predictor of teachers’ impacts, in a way a much more important predictor are these value-added or other types of measures of performance. And I think tying pay or bonuses or efforts to retain teachers to performance measures — whether they’re test-score-based, value-added measures, or principal ratings or something else — is quite sensible. That is not something that’s currently done in most US school systems. It’s a common view heard anecdotally, though I’ve never seen it tested, that kindergarten teaching in this country became much worse once smart women had better labor market opportunities. Do you think that’s true?…

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