During the recent campaign, education took center stage in almost every race. In order to boost student achievement, voters were told, our teachers need to be paid more, not only to attract the best and brightest, but to avoid a massive teacher shortage. These mistaken ideas are all refuted in a new study by the Pacific Research Institute.

Unsatisfactory Performance: How California’s K-12 Education System Protects Mediocrity and How Teacher Quality Can Be Improved, by Thomas C. Dawson and K. Lloyd Billingsley, focuses on eight California school districts and examines the myriad of problems that impact teacher quality in the Golden State, and throughout the country. The study finds that California does not suffer from low uniform salaries or a general teacher shortage, and that simply paying teachers more will not improve student performance.

California teachers lack incentives to perform in the classroom and are not held individually accountable for the academic progress their students make. Teacher compensation is determined not by classroom performance but rigid salary schedules, based on credentials and seniority. Across-the-board pay increases boost the salaries of good and bad teachers alike. Even more damaging is the state’s tenure law, originally passed in the 1920s.

California teachers automatically receive tenure after just two years, without even having to pass a test. Tenured teacher are virtually impossible to fire, however devastating their impact on children. A maze of procedures, often taking years to complete, makes firing a tenured teacher practically impossible. With costs in the range of $300,000, few administrators even attempt to dismiss a failing teacher.

Unsatisfactory Performance cites the latest research confirming that teachers are the most important factor in a child’s education. The difference between a good and bad teacher can amount to a grade level, and successive years of bad teachers can be devastating. California employs approximately 300,000 teachers, many of them exemplary but many also incompetent, as the state’s ranking at or near the bottom of National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) math and science tests will confirm.

According to state records, between 1990 and 1999, only 227 tenured teachers went through the dismissal process from start to finish. If all these cases occurred in 1998-99 alone, they would represent only about one-tenth of one percent. Since they were spread out over 10 years and not every case resulted in a dismissal, the actual number of firings is lower, a virtual proxy for zero. The news is even worse on the district level.

In a district that spends more than $9,000 per student per year, far above the state and national average, but where the vast majority of students performs below state averages, there is likely more than one tenured teacher who should be replaced. But from 1990 through 1999 in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the state’s largest, only one tenured teacher went through the entire dismissal procedure.

If improving teacher quality is a goal for policymakers, then streamlining the dismissal system to fire incompetent teachers is imperative. Despite impassioned pleas from several candidates that California teachers are underpaid, these critics fail to mention that teacher pay has increased in the state, while student test scores have worsened. The adjoining table demonstrates the lack of correlation between district salaries and student performance.

While California students are bottom-level achievers, California teachers rank eighth in the country in terms of pay. While students continue to fall further behind, some of the worst districts, such as Oakland Unified, have recently announced huge pay raises. But as in the rest of the state, teacher pay is not tied to results.

Salaries are negotiated through collective bargaining, and reward teachers only for years on the job and the number of degrees and credentials they possess. If districts are interested in attracting talented young teachers, they should reward teachers for what skills they impart to students, not how long they’ve been in the system. Not all teachers are created equal and not all perform at high levels. Those that do, measured by student gains on standardized tests, should be rewarded; those that don’t should be given incentives to improve and held accountable if they fall short.

Meanwhile, the Clinton administration and others have decried how the nation faces a shortfall of 2.2 million teachers over the next decade. But according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, school districts across the country usually hire two million teachers per decade, hardly the general shortage that many have reported. In California and elsewhere, there is a shortage of teachers in only certain subjects, namely math and science.

According to the most recent figures, in 1997-98, 43 percent of emergency teaching permits were issued in math and science, compared to 15 percent in English and 10 percent in the social sciences. Yet California fails to offer higher pay to a talented young math teacher with higher-paying career options in Silicon Valley, paying him or her the same as an English teacher with fewer lucrative alternatives.

The education establishment has adamantly resisted common-sense reforms like performance pay, replacing tenure with renewable contracts, and differential pay depending on subject. In Los Angeles, the local teacher union has threatened to strike over a proposed contract that includes a general pay raise, performance incentives, and bonuses for math and science teachers. Until policymakers implement reforms based on performance and accountability, California will continue to trail the rest of the country, where the news is more encouraging.

The state of Georgia has recently abolished tenure in favor of renewable teacher contracts, and school districts in Cincinnati and outside Philadelphia are implementing performance pay, to name just a few examples. This movement has yet to hit the Golden State, which continues to rank the protection of incompetence above the well being of students.

Thomas Dawson is the Assistant Director for the Center for School Reform at the Pacific Research Institute. He can be reached via email at tdawson@pacificresearch.org.