Osugi Sakae

Who, outside of your immediate family, has had the biggest influence on your success in life? It is probably your teachers and coaches.

Peers, of course, also have a huge influence on young people, but not in an organized or necessarily positive way. Good teachers work hard to positively influence their students while equipping them with the knowledge and skills they will need to succeed in life.

Teaching and education are long-term investments; yet teacher incentives, when they exist at all, are usually short-term and often actually just the lack of a punishment — like loss of funding or cancelled programs. All stick, no carrot.

Programs to improve education are usually graded on easily measurable factors like test scores or graduation rates. These are just snapshots of the school or students at that one point in time. This sort of grading does not allow teachers and administrators to focus on long-term solutions. In fact, they discourage it.

Imagine a high school that has a 100% graduation rate. Great school, right? Well, now imaging that five years after graduation, the best job any of those graduates is working involves asking Would you like fries with that? Now how successful a school do you think it would be?

There must be a better way, a way that recognizes the long-term importance of education in every student’s life. A way that gives a real incentive for teachers to see that their students succeed, not just this year, but throughout their lives.

Just raising salaries would not be a useful incentive, since it would go to good teachers and bad teachers equally (or based on flawed measures like graduation rates). Besides, few governments can afford to raise teachers’ pay. At best higher salaries might attract more people into the teaching profession — not a bad thing necessarily, but higher salary by itself isn’t a long-term solution.

Instead, I suggest a small tax on everyone’s earnings, to be collected by some agency and distributed to each person’s teachers.

To be fair while also encouraging teachers, this money would be distributed to teachers based on how much their students paid into the system. A student who went on to make lots of money would pay a larger amount (but the same percentage as his or her less financially successful peers) into the system and that money would go to his or her teachers.

Arguments Against The Tax

Some may say that such a system would be impractical but there are already similar systems in use worldwide. Musicians, songwriters, and other copyright holders already have agencies to collect royalties from public performances and other copyright related incomes and distribute those monies to the proper people. The teacher tax would be similar but on a larger scale.

Some may claim that such a teacher’s tax would be communist or somehow liberal. Quite the reverse. The teacher’s tax would bring a measure of accountability to the teaching profession, based on the real world of the free market. Teachers who can motivate and educate their students better than other teachers deserve to be rewarded for their efforts. In today’s world, the marketplace is one common measure of success. Being rewarded through students’ income makes much more sense (and is much less communist) than a solution like taxing everyone for an across-the-board pay raise.

Let’s be brutally honest here : teaching is the backbone of almost any industry that requires workers to do more than show up. Teaching is the industry that creates the content creation and other intellectual property industries. Writers, programmers, and entrepreneurs (to name just a few) are the product, in part, of their own teachers.

Surely, the creators of so much value for the economy deserve to be rewarded for their part in creating that value? After all, without the proper incentives and rewards, why would anyone continue to teach?

Economic Impact

The benefits to the economy of the teacher’s tax would be significant. Currently, teachers for the most part are not financially well off. Thus it seems likely that they would spend a large part of their new income on everyday things like cars, clothes, health care, food, school supplies, and the like.

Governments would see increased income from taxes that the teachers would have to pay on their extra income.

Let us not forget the extra jobs and other spending that creating an entirely new level of bureaucracy would create.

The teacher’s tax is a good idea. It would solve real problems with a minimum of government interference. It would encourage more people to consider teaching while providing an objective way to separate the effective teachers from the ineffective teachers. Teachers would have a continuing, positive, incentive to teach their students the skills they needs, rather than just preparing them for a standardized test.

Everyone wins.