The New York Times misses the point. The *biggest* point.

[acroyear]

In Search of Good Teachers - New York Times:

With 50 million children set to return to school, districts all over the country are still scrambling to fill teaching positions and are having an especially difficult time finding qualified applicants to fill shortages in vital areas like math and science. These shortages will persist and the education reform effort will continue to lag until states, localities and the federal government start paying much more attention to how teachers are trained, hired and assigned.

Guess which word is missing there.

It's a big one.

A HUGE one.

"PAID"

Until this nation and these states and localities get off their collective anti-tax, anti-"socialist" arse and actually start PAYING people to be good teachers in those subjects, they will NEVER EVER EVER increase the candidate pool.  When the difference between a math major doing engineering work 3 years out of college and a math major being a public school teacher 3 years out of college is a factor of FOUR, then there is simply no contest.  To live well enough to match your own education and status, you need to be paid what your brain is worth or you will never find job satisfaction.

Giving a person a choice between a $26,000 teaching job and a $100,000 engineering or programming job?

Well, you could do the math if you ever had qualified teachers to teach you...

Teachers are not and have never been paid what they're worth.  Change that, and you change everything.

Comments

[thelongshot.livejournal.com]

If someone REALLY wants to be a teacher AND is (financially) rewarded for it, they would work to solve these other problems. Instead, we've had 3 decades of people just walking away from it because, "it just isn't worth my time anymore". Yes, that's an exact quote.

Getting paid more doesn't make a crappy job better, it just makes you more willing to put up with a greater amount of BS.

While I do agree that teachers should get paid more, I'm not under the illusion that it is going to solve problems in our school systems. When I hear BS like giraffeaholic's problems getting into Montgomery County's system, or the Post's series on the DC school system, it tells me that there are bigger problems out there that money isn't going to solve.

[faireraven.livejournal.com]

Actually, what I think part of the problem is, is that they're losing good teachers because they *aren't* willing to put up with the BS anymore, and more money might help them do so.

My dad was teacher of the year in his district, three years in a row. That's when he retired. His salary had been capped at a lower salary than I was earning only several years out of school, and he wasn't willing to put up with the BS anymore for what he was earning. Had he been able to earn more, he might have put up with more. His students lost one hell of a good teacher because he wasn't willing to put up with the garbage he got for the amount of money he was earning.

He retired and is now spending a lot of his time in investments, and earning a tidy sum there for a lot less work and a lot less bullshit.

The more money you pay, the bigger your applicant pool will become. The bigger your applicant pool, the more likely you will be to get someone who can actually *teach*.

Right now, a lot of the people who are teaching are the ones who couldn't make it elsewhere (no offense to people who are good teachers like my mother and griffinick). When I was taking classes in college, a lot of them were being taught by people who didn't WANT to teach, they were there because they were forced into it by the curriculum. Many would rather research, and many would rather not be in a classroom, period. Mind you, that's on a college level. On a grade school level, they're not being paid enough to really want to make it worth their while to deal with the crap they're getting, and the current "no child allowed ahead" programs mean the teachers are teaching to a test, and nothing more, which means kids are getting shit for an education.

No, money isn't the only factor, but you'll get a lot more people wanting to do it, and therefore more competition and more qualified teachers, if you offer them something other than "job satisfaction" that isn't there anymore.

[cozit.livejournal.com]

And that's one of the biggest differences between the teachers you get one place and teachers you get another... the level of BS and the level of support that you do or don't get from district, supervisors, and administration.

Number one reason that Howard Co.'s still got quite a lot of *great* teachers, and still pulls in many good applicants - pay's not as good in at least two or three other counties in the state (I think we were lower than that a couple years ago, but I haven't the foggiest now).

Parents too... not that I don't get garbage from some (hey, you all know that library media specialists don't do anything besides read kids stories and help them find books to check out, right? Yeah, bah humbug... hasn't been that way in well over 17 years to my knowledge, and probably more before that... and even less so now than then... but I had at *least* 10 parents and sadly 2 teachers that I had to "re-educate" last year.

Of course, now I'm just wishing I was a lot better at the job than I am (though I *think* I'm making improvements)... especially as it'd be considerably more work to get back into computers now than it would have been when I first got my degree (and I want to even less now... *g* Right now, most of what I do with computers is "play" with them, and teach kids to do all that fun stuff playing with Word, on-line databases, PowerPoint, etc.... hey, my definition of "play" doesn't always involve games! :-)