My family is full of teachers. I have many friends that are teachers.
It's amazing how "solutions" never seem to actually get around to simply paying teachers more, and maybe not expecting them to be child-rearers, in lieu of parents.
In a neighboring town parents tried to set up a "hotline" where teachers would have to be available at night to intervene on google chat related social incidents. They just don't seem to get that at 3:15, the kid is your fucking problem again. Leave these poor teachers alone.
Virtually everyone else has a boss that judges his or her performance. Sometimes those judgments are wrong or unfair. Almost every institution has determined that’s still better than nothing. But somehow not schools.
There is no logic in this affirmation. There are no such direct links between tenure and pay.
Saying that only confirms what the article says on the American public feeling about teachers' pay.
They are too low.
It will help, and we should certainly pay teachers more, but it isn't the whole solution.
It’s more complicated than paying more money automatically means better workers, but higher pay does let an industry be more selective.
No, it won't, because in the private sector you can have a growing career. If you are teaching it's very likely to be the very same job until you retire.
It does miss that a person's desire to educate can far exceed their desire to ply the trade and they are willing to sacrifice their pay at that particular altar. But given most teachers do not seem irrationally excited about teaching or being teachers that line of thought is quite diminished.
The best teachers that I ever had, were ones that were trained as teachers, and were not necessarily content matter experts.
The worst teachers that I ever had, were content matter experts. Almost universally, they had no patience for folks that had a hard time coming up to speed, or that weren't already at a level beyond the class they were teaching.
They would ridicule you for asking "stupid" questions (that's me -I ask questions that have the whole class in stitches, but by the end of the semester, I'm coaching my classmates). They would start from a baseline that actually assumed the student had already completed and passed the class they were taking.
I would sign up for a class, because of the bona fides of the teacher, but would end up regretting my decision.
If teaching was like a FANNG tech job, with limited availability due to demand and salary, then it would be "discovered" to be prestigious and valuable and important.
And moreover, everyone would be free to come up with their own performance management BS because you'd actually have the glut of incoming talent that supports failures removing people from the industry (or screw it up so bad that despite the money no one bothers - also a FANNG phenomenan).
Money is not sufficient to overcome the problem on its own, but it is necessary, and not having enough of it caused the problem.
because those who can go to industry for real cash
I think.
The level of demand, however, can vary. Do Americans even want good public education? Or it is an afterthought?
This very observation is telling us that the entire system is outside the market (why, for example, people from other locations cannot choose this particular school if it is better than others?)
Money does not come from the skies, it's about what the market agrees the value actually is (when it comes to private education) or what the government decides (for public education). Public education is a problem because in many western countries it's already the largest budget and it's still a shitshow so you are going to have a hard time to convince everyone that injecting more money is going to make it better.
My wife is (ex)teacher. Parents would flat-out say that they can't respect her because of her salary. Along the lines of, if you're smart and can do stuff, why the hell are you working for such a low pay? Ergo teachers are dumb and parents (along with their kids) feel free to make fun of dumbasses who work in schools.
On top of that, paying more would help with self-respect. It's damn hard to be an authority to kids when you live paycheck-to-paycheck. Especially in teens' world where appearance matters a lot.
Damn, that is so gut wrenching to read. It's so short sighted that society does not value teachers more highly. The next generation is the ultimate investment.
Another semi-related issue is school system used for virtue signalling first. For example „special needs“ kids integration. It sounds nice on paper, but in reality one kids holds up whole class. And then smarter kids riot because they get bored. But hey, that's teacher's fault..
IMO that will be the crucial piece for West decline. This is reverting the best bit in post-industrial-revolution welfare states. Teach the masses to fish out the brilliant mind from the whole pool. But now we're reducing the pool to those who can afford private schools. And loosing lots of talent in the rest of society. If that trend continues, soon we'll be back in nobility-peasants split with little social mobility. Which a loss not onlh for the society as a whole, but for neo-nobility as well. At first it may be cool to be richer-than-thou, but over time „richest in the room“ will turn out to be poor at global scale.
Attacking the teachers have been a long term goal. School funds already are now allowed to be directed to parochial (religious) schools from the state school coffers. This starves the public school systems one by one.
No Child Left Behind guaranteed that bad schools get less money, and get worse. This all but guarantees that low income areas have terrible school systems that are more just juvenile delinquency prevention and babysitting services.
Book bans are pushed by the "right" (which they rarely, if ever, are), with obvious canards like "Harry potter is evil occult and should be burned". Naturally, with the exception of https://www.vice.com/en/article/epzv9j/texas-school-bans-the... , most of the bans are done explicitly by the christian fascists forcing their beliefs on others.
Or, instead of more money and resources, we see Texas state legislature forcing schools to hang banners of "In god we trust." https://www.texastribune.org/2022/08/18/texas-schools-in-god... . Again, it's the forcing of one myopic direction of religion on the masses. It brings the parochial school into the public piece at a time.
All of these different directions have the ultimate effect - deprecate the "godless" education to something with their variant of religion in it. And naturally, we get pablum like "Noah and dinosaurs lived together", and other completely non-science garbage taught as fact.
https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/surveyed-lawyers-rep...
If our goal is to shovel new people into the system as quickly as others are quitting, I suppose lawyers are a good aspirational example. But if we assume that the best teachers are ones who like their jobs and have been around for a while, we might want to try a different model.
The much higher salary makes up for it, but you can't seriously expect teachers to get the same salary as lawyers.
One of the reasons that the NEA is such a powerful union, is that its members, are, by definition, educated to a Masters Degree, or better.
Although the bar exam specifically is probably harder than any single component of teacher licensure, overall they are comparable, as teachers have more components.
Lawyers will mostly attest how divorce/family practice has nothing on actual criminal practice, and it might be even harder. Most people don't know about the long hours, the case studies, etc. They think it's the romantic view of what they see on TV
Doctors have to know how to deal with bodly fluids. Of various kinds. They have to learn how to tell a family a dear person died. They have to literally survive residency.
Same with writing software. I get rather tired of running into people that obviously took it up for the money, then found they weren't particularly good at it. Being a good engineer (software, or otherwise) is hard.
In my experience, these folks tend to be quite concerned about the "culture," as opposed to the actual art of the field. They look and sound great, but don't rely on them to actually ship anything.
Delivering software is really difficult. I've been doing it for my entire adult life, so it's become pretty much habit. It's always shocking to encounter folks that aren't able to deliver software, yet have been in the field for a very long time.
But money is at least a big factor: even those who keep up with self-motivation and co-worker’s appreciation can’t go on if money isn’t there. Paying them fairer prices is the first step in any attempt to make teachers come back.
It is all about giving them tools to solve issues with those children that cause issues. And maybe cultural change back to state where it is most of the time kids fault. Not teachers... And lessening the work load where possible. Maybe increasing number of assistants available and resources of special education.
Most of the teachers that I know, personally, mention this as the first problem to solve. I don’t think any of them believe that it’s the only problem to address, but there’s not even a tiny doubt that the great majority of teachers believe it to be something that needs to be dealt with, before tackling the rest of the pile.
But looking at this very conversation, shows that the idea of paying teachers more, is quite unpopular. The verbal and mental gymnastics that people go through, to avoid coming to the conclusion that teachers simply need to be paid more, are kind of astonishing. We have no problem at all, coming to that conclusion for many other vocations (especially the one we happen to be in).
I guess, because of my own family/friend situation, I find this stance puzzling.
I assume, then, that a good place to start, is to find out why people don’t want to pay teachers more, and address that.