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

[aliastaken.livejournal.com]

Low salary + Impossible Parental Bullshit + Petty Politics = Why I wish I'd chosen a different profession

Sincerely,
A Great Teacher

[griffinick.livejournal.com]

I have an immense amount of respect and awe for anyone willing to become a teacher these days. My mother retired about three years ago as a primary special education teacher. Talk about a thankless job!

There are many reasons I chose to teach, but chose to teach at the college level. While there is still plenty of petty politicking (I fear this might happen in any industry!) and the pay feels low when considering that I had to achieve a PhD in order to have the credentials to teach at this level, at least I don't need to put up with parental BS. AND I have more flexibility with curriculum development and (thankfully right now) more one-on-one with my students.

However, anyone who thinks that teachers automatically get so much extra time off for vacations, etc is completely delusional. Obviously at the college level there are still breaks, but it's during those times that I have to fit in all the research, traveling to conferences, and publishing that I'm expected to do on top of teaching and all the administrative stuff that goes along with teaching (I have more all-day meetings this school year than you can shake a stick at). So, there really is no such thing as summer "vacation"; it becomes valuable no-student work time. And my mother, who taught at the primary level, also had things that occupied her not-in-class time, such as prep work. I think people often forget how much of teaching is done outside the classroom, including all the work they take home with them: prep, grading, meetings with school admin and parents, and in my mom's case, preparing IEP's for her students and having tons of parental conferences. Summers were often filled with meetings and additional prep work, when she wasn't teaching summer school to help bring in more income.