To Attract and Keep Good Teachers, Solve for X

Jeff Bezos touched a nerve last week when he argued that taxing billionaires would not solve public education’s problems or meaningfully improve teacher pay. Speaking on CNBC, the Amazon founder said he already pays “billions of dollars in taxes” and pointed out that New York City already spends $44,000 per student per year with underwhelming outcomes. He added, “you could double the taxes I pay and it’s not going to help that teacher in Queens, I promise you.” In a post on X, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani responded, “I know a few teachers in Queens who would beg to differ.” Meanwhile Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and California Congressman Ro Khanna have proposed a federally mandated $60,000 starting salary for public school teachers funded by taxing billionaires. Predictably, the debate that followed mostly talked past the real issue, which is not just paying but working conditions. Teachers are not simply saying, “I don’t get paid enough.” They’re saying, “I don’t get paid enough to put up with X.” We need to solve for X. X equals classrooms where chronic disruption and disorder make teaching nearly impossible. X equals the steady expansion of the teacher’s role from instructor to counselor, therapist, social worker, and surrogate parent. X equals the bureaucratic burdens of meetings, paperwork, compliance mandates, and initiative overload. X equals the simple exhaustion of trying to do too many things at once. It’s expecting teachers to solve every social problem that manifests itself inside a schoolhouse door. Sanders and Khanna’s proposal is not a new one. In 2024, I testified before the Senate HELP Committee on the same basic proposal, arguing that “higher pay does not make a hard job easier to perform. It lifts no burden off a teacher’s shoulders, nor does it add hours to a teacher’s day.” That remains unchanged today. Sure, higher salaries might help recruit some teachers into the profession. But unless the conditions of the work itself improve, higher pay alone is unlikely to persuade large numbers of good teachers to remain there. As I noted in my Senate testimony, “We are asking teachers to do too many things to do any of them well at any salary.” There’s an uncomfortable tension at the heart of the teacher pay debate: Many of the same educational and political voices most passionate about raising teacher salaries are the same ones that championed policies and norms that expanded the burdens teachers carry. Every new responsibility enters schools under the banner of compassion, justice, or equity. Almost none are ever removed; nor do they make the core work of teaching any easier. Teachers must manage classrooms, build knowledge, cultivate literacy, explain difficult concepts clearly, motivate reluctant students, communicate with parents, assess learning, and maintain order for 25 or 30 young people at a time. And increasingly, they are expected to do all of this while navigating deteriorating student behavior, chronic absenteeism, mounting mental health concerns, and a culture that often treats teacher authority itself with suspicion. In other words, the problem is not simply salary. It’s job design. This matters because America does not need a few thousand miracle-working teachers. It needs millions of competent, capable, ordinary people willing to do one of the most important jobs in society well. Indeed, a 2023 RAND study concluded that “pay increases alone—without improvements in teachers’ working hours or conditions—are unlikely to induce large shifts in teachers’ well-being or intentions to leave.” Higher salaries can compensate for difficult work. They cannot compensate for work that increasingly feels impossible or for school and classroom conditions that forbid teachers from going home feeling successful. Again, none of this is an argument against paying teachers more. Good teachers deserve better compensation. But if we genuinely want more people to enter teaching—and good teachers to stay—we cannot merely adjust salaries while leaving untouched the conditions that make the work feel unsustainable. It’s not just salary. Solve for X. The post To Attract and Keep Good Teachers, Solve for X appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI .