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There are over three million teachers in America. Debates rage over how to prepare them, recruit them, retain them, compensate them, and remove them should they not work out.
Much hullaballoo is made over the academic characteristics of teachers. There has been back and forth for years over where teachers fall in the spectrum of college graduates. But there is another teacher attribute that may also be important—how tolerant teachers are of risk.
If teachers are risk-loving, they might be enticed by merit-pay programs that stake pay to student performance. They might want more freedom in how they invest their retirement dollars to try and maximize their return. They might see a charter sector in which high performing schools are allowed to scale and low performing schools are shuttered as an ideal industry to get involved in.
But, if they are risk-averse, step and lane pay scales, defined benefit pensions, and stable, geographically zoned schools might be more up their alley. Until just recently, we knew little about the risk preferences of teachers. That is, until an intrepid band of researchers (and former colleagues of mine) from the University of Arkansas set out to try and measure them.
This table was presented to 65 teachers in a large Midwestern university’s Masters of Teaching program, 43 students in that university’s MBA program, and 24 students in its law school.
For each of the 10 lotteries, students were asked to choose option A or B. Then the experimenters rolled a 10-sided dice twice, first to select which lottery the student would participate in and then again to determine how much the student won (each student only ended up playing once).
Afterward, the researchers analyzed the patterns of choices from each of the groups. A “risk neutral” individual (or one who simply is attempting to maximize the expected value of the payoff) would pick Option A for Lotteries 1,2,3, and 4, and then pick Option B for the rest. Someone with more risk tolerance would move from selecting option A to selecting option B sooner than someone who is risk averse.
They found that prospective teachers were consistently more risk averse than their peers in other career tracks. On average, MAT students picked 5 out of 10 safe choices, while non-MAT students picked only 4.3.
It is true that this was a small experiment and it looked at students in a relatively traditional preparation program. Perhaps looking at a cohort of Teach for America teaches might have yielded more risk-lovers. But TFA is still a small program, relatively speaking, so it’s possible that this study is representative of a very large swath of American educators.
If teachers are, on average, more risk averse, it has serious implications for education policy:
1.) Although advocates might be super excited about merit pay programs or educational marketplaces with a lot of creative destruction, it might be hard to recruit teachers who want to participate. If reformers want to restructure pensions to allow for flexibility (like portable 401Ks), they could run headlong into preferences aligned against them. They risk becoming leaders without followers, or, as the old management chestnut describes, just folks out talking a walk.
2.) Maybe that means reformers who advocate for these policy changes need to work with teacher preparation programs to recruit more risk-loving people to be teachers, or open up alternative avenues aimed at those with more tolerance for risk. That is, for the policies they support to get traction, it might be as important to change the composition of the teaching force as it is the behavior of current teachers.
3.) It is also possible that teachers only have so much tolerance for change and uncertainty, so reformers will be at a perpetual disadvantage to entrenched policies and practices. This might call for a moderation in expectation for change, given that the agents in charge of making it happen are inclined against it.
4.) There is also an argument to be made that we don’t want risk-loving people as teachers! There is good reason to prize stability and predictability, especially in creating safe and welcoming environments for children.
Wherever you come down on these questions, coming to a better understanding of the risk preferences of teachers is important. As you can probably tell, I’m still thinking through the implications of this paper myself, and imagine I will be for some time to come. I would love to hear your thoughts!
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Interesting data, although I think this is widely assumed already. A few scattered thoughts:
This appears to be a self-sustaining dynamic. It’s not clear that a more dynamic educational workplace wouldn’t attract a wider variety of personalities.
I’d also note that merit-based compensation can still be very motivating to a risk-adverse individual. Perhaps more motivating to the risk-adverse than anyone else.
“Risk” itself is relative. To many people in the corporate world, a 401k feels less risky than a pension.
Perhaps the monetary worth of being insulated from risk isn’t quite a bit higher than the public assumes.
Conversely, are risk-adverse teachers area of the “risks” private workers take? In my personal experience, there is often a huge disconnect there.
There is also the matter of the “risky” private sector funding “less risky” educational public education, and if this is fair/healthy.
I mean, they work with kids. One would hope they’d be risk averse than MBAs or lawyers.
This is an excellent article and a new take on a well-worn subject. I am glad you rounded out the article with concern #4. It is worth asking how risk-loving we want teachers to be. A silicon-valley-esque level of competition doesn’t seem like a great environment for most kids, especially those who need a lot of trust- and relationship-building with adults before the learning can sink in. It’s also worth noting that teachers have some real concerns about how much of what others might consider reasonable risk depends on the widely-varying conditions under which we do our jobs. There are many inputs over which we have little control. I’d imagine most people become more risk averse when they’re worried the dice are loaded.