At the rate of counting one dollar per second, it would take more than 7,000 years to count the $225 billion of salaries and benefits paid by local, state, and Federal funds to U.S. public school teachers in a year.
It would take more than 24,000 years to count the estimated cost $829 billion of the Baucus health bill just voted out of the U.S. Senate committee he chairs. That’s longer than there have been human civilizations on earth.
Wow! That’s a different perspective from the ones I’ve seen before.
Given this frequency count procedure, it appears possible to calculate the dollar cost of academic performance increases in classrooms.
I wonder, then, what it costs for a student to learn /a/ and then how much more to learn /b/? When that’s known, we can calculate the distribution of costs across teaching methods and instructional material teachers use, including costs of Tablet and other mobile PCs.
In turn, I think I see a way then to figure teacher performance pay increases based in part on allocating part of the learning cost savings to teachers. I wonder if I can include this line of logic with aLEAP? I wish I’d had something like this as a way to monitor instruction/learning cost ratios while instructing.
First, did I calculate the length of time correctly, Math Teacher?
Second, I wonder if anyone else has followed the same or a similar track?
References
Good information. Thanks. Setting aside the conspiracy, political, economic, humanitarian, etc. theories, I wonder how one more dollar of income to any teacher causes changes in measured student learning? Why should anyone expect a causal link between a teacher's salary change and a change in learning of any student? Any suggestions?
Thanks for reviewing your thoughts about teacher salaries and performance pay. I follow your argument and it makes sense. I hadn't considered that view when I drafted the post. I use different assumptions, all unrelated to the merits of any salary for any teacher. I'm developing a way to describe the cost of learning. Teacher salaries are the major, but only one part of that cost. The figures presented seem relevant to that description, at least as place holders for more current and perhaps precise figures. I have not finalized ways to link learning costs to teacher salaries. But, today I would likely use a model that includes a base pay plus a percentage of learning cost saved as performance pay for a teacher. I will probably use aLEAP to get to these costs. Does this help clarify the original post?