A Lesson For Good Teachers: Get Out and Earn More

Hard-working Florida teachers who want to earn more money can do so -- if they get out of education.

That, according to a new Harvard University study, is the sad legacy of the state's restrictive teacher-compensation system -- a legacy that continues with the demise of the performance-pay programs promoted in Senate Bill 6.

Researchers Matthew Chingos and Martin West examined Florida public school income records and "value-added" data between 2001-02 and 2006-07 for 90,000 classroom teachers and 20,000 teachers who left the classroom during that time.

"Correlating the relationship between pay (in the real world) and teacher effectiveness (in the classroom), they found that when teachers entered other industries, teachers had much wider variation in earnings than when they were in schools," according to a review by the Fordham Institute.

Read the study here.