How Opec would Manipulate The Teacher Labor Pool

Teachers fuel the school. They really do. But traditional schools can only fill up the tank with conventional “certified-grade” teachers, while charter schools can use flex-fuel, traditional, hybrid, and other, less metaphorical, fuel sources.

When teachers are passionate, virtuous, and knowledgeable, they can make up for lots of facility, administrative, and legislative deficits. That’s the lesson of the high performing teachers joining Teach For America. But there are some in education who want to suppress the size and quality of the teacher labor pool. If you are a mediocre career professional, and you were not protected by tenure, would you want to compete for your job against some of the best and brightest from our nation’ greatest universities?

In a rather draconian move recently, the NY schools chancellor put a freeze on hiring teachers from outside the system. According to the NY Times, this includes Teach For America (TFA) (bright, young, rising stars) as well as teaching fellows—(often some highly motivated candidates with significant life experience.)

What does this do to the labor pool for teachers in the Northeast? I say it is a huge boon for private, charter and alternative schools. Normally these schools have some difficulty competing on price. Many of the teachers who end up in these non-traditional public schools are motivated by something other than pay. In economic terms, they are not price-sensitive customers. (In one sense the teacher is the seller, but in another sense the teacher is “buying” a job.) With the move by the NYC DOE, some of these teachers will try out alternative schools, fall in love, and stick.

That would be fine with the cartel who want to keep public school teaching jobs safe for existing teachers. If you are part of a collective of teachers and you want to suppress competition within the collective while raising the price you can charge for your commodity, then it makes absolute economic sense to constrain the supply? How do you do that? One way would be to increase the barriers to entry in the profession. Make certification overly laborious and expensive. Make sure to expel members from the union cartel collective if they don’t pay their dues.

Traditionalists fear the power shift if schools have more hiring options. When school leaders can hire from a broader pool, they tend to diversify the teaching staff with some teachers who are not traditionally certified. On my staff I have former college professors, military retirees, personal trainers, professional athletes, business leaders, and scads of professionals who never considered traditional public education. 100% of our teachers are highly qualified according to the NCLB guidelines and the Colorado standards for charter schools. Since I can hire from a larger pool, and often hire teachers who are not certified, my financial options are more dynamic. And on a pay-per-student basis, my teachers have the best deal in town because our school caps class size at 22 and keeps a teacher average at 18. I don’t just compete with the neighboring district. I compete against a salary range that includes industry, defense contractors, the non-profit sector, ministry organizations, international markets, etc. Our school pays less that the traditional district on an absolute average, but we pay more than the private and charter schools around us. That means we draw from a larger pool of excellent professionals who want to be teachers.

Because of that freedom, I’d put the quality of our teaching staff against any school in Colorado. We are younger and less experienced than most, but in terms of value delivered, we compete very well. As this staff gains experience in our philosophy, the upside is unlimited. That wouldn’t be true unless I had alternative options to fuel the school.