U.S. Urged to Raise Teachers’ Status

Source: The New York TImes

To improve its public schools, the United States should raise the status of the teaching profession by recruiting more qualified candidates, training them better and paying them more, according to a new report on comparative educational systems.

Andreas Schleicher, who oversees the international achievement test known by its acronym Pisa, says in his report that top-scoring countries like Korea, Singapore and Finland recruit only high-performing college graduates for teaching positions, support them with mentoring and other help in the classroom, and take steps to raise respect for the profession.

“Teaching in the U.S. is unfortunately no longer a high-status occupation,” Mr. Schleicher says in the report, prepared in advance of an educational conference that opens in New York on Wednesday. “Despite the characterization of some that teaching is an easy job, with short hours and summers off, the fact is that successful, dedicated teachers in the U.S. work long hours for little pay and, in many cases, insufficient support from their leadership.”

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/16/education/16teachers.html

lack of a program to develop jobs. As long as we aren't developing jobs that require education, why should we "waste" resources on education? In addition, if we see that there will be a huge underclass, the ptb don't want them highly educated--the educated ones are much more dificult to control.

The "educated" ones are the easiest to control, as they have been subject to the most lengthy period of social conditioning, and have the biggest average stake in the status quo.

It's the intelligent-but-uneducated ones who are the real danger to the system, the people smart enough to figure out what is wrong, yet have not been indoctrinated into believing that wrongs are rights.

"University teaching programs in the high-scoring countries admit only the best students, and “teaching education programs in the U.S. must become more selective and more rigorous,” the report says.

Raising teachers’ status is not mainly about raising salaries, the report says, but pay is a factor.

According to O.E.C.D. data, the average salary of a veteran elementary teacher here was $44,172 in 2008, higher than the average of $39,426 across all O.E.C.D countries (the figures were converted to compare the purchasing power of each currency). But that salary level was 40 percent below the average salary of other American college graduates. In Finland, by comparison, the veteran teacher’s salary was 13 percent less than that of the average college graduate’s.

In an interview, Mr. Schleicher said the point was not that the United States spends too little on public education — only Luxembourg among the O.E.C.D. countries spends more per elementary student — but rather that American schools spend disproportionately on other areas, like bus transportation and sports facilities.

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Kristoff: Pay Teachers More

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/opinion/13kristof.html?src=twrhp

From the debates in Wisconsin and elsewhere about public sector unions, you might get the impression that we’re going bust because teachers are overpaid.

That’s a pernicious fallacy. A basic educational challenge is not that teachers are raking it in, but that they are underpaid. If we want to compete with other countries, and chip away at poverty across America, then we need to pay teachers more so as to attract better people into the profession.

Until a few decades ago, employment discrimination perversely strengthened our teaching force. Brilliant women became elementary school teachers, because better jobs weren’t open to them. It was profoundly unfair, but the discrimination did benefit America’s children.

Changes in relative pay have reinforced the problem. In 1970, in New York City, a newly minted teacher at a public school earned about $2,000 less in salary than a starting lawyer at a prominent law firm. These days the lawyer takes home, including bonus, $115,000 more than the teacher, the McKinsey study found.

Consider three other countries renowned for their educational performance: Singapore, South Korea and Finland. In each country, teachers are drawn from the top third of their cohort, are hugely respected and are paid well (although that’s less true in Finland). In South Korea and Singapore, teachers on average earn more than lawyers and engineers, the McKinsey study found.

from a Defend the Dream rally, a guy walking past us turned to her and said "you teachers are such greedy bastards."

whine that bemoans the poor quality of American teachers and assumes that there are better people out there to recruit for the teaching profession if only they were better paid, or picked from the top quartile of SAT scores or some other such bullshit. Show me the data to support such a contention, but not by drawing unwarranted conclusions from research in Finland. As for the sycophants who ascribe to this canard, it reflects more on their own credulity than on the quality of the people who educated them.

I don't think anybody would want to collect it.

The problem isn't whether the teachers are educated enough to get a degree or have a teaching certificate. It's whether they know the material needed to teach the classes they're put in charge of. Yes, I've known people teaching classes that they barely could cope with--it had been years since they had taken classes or learned the material and it was the first time teaching the subject.

That said, you don't really need to know much about partial differential equations to teach high school algebra.

But could the cohort of teachers be improved? Sure. In some cases those who go into teaching do it because they need a job and were in the bottom 1/3 of their classes. They aren't as hardworking, they went to less prestigious (and often less rigorous) schools, they don't care as much. In many cases they do care, a lot, but it just takes one indifferent algebra teacher in 9th grade to really mess up an 11th grade physics class.

In some cases the teachers aren't trained well in classroom management, or they feel too sorry to be effectively hard-nosed with the kids that need it (or too hard-nosed with the kids who need a softer touch). They have low expectations of their students, and get what they expect.

In many cases the teachers are worn down. Too much paperwork. Too many restrictions. Too much being jerked around--"this year you teach X because it's essential knowledge, next year Y will be essential knowledge, and you'll be expected to revise how you teach each year to dispose of the previous year's unscientific practices." Too much headwind from administrators and students and parents. Too many threats that are widely perceived to be unjust and unfair, but which exist because the people responsible can't be named and so somebody has to be blamed and threatened. They keep changing the curriculum, not in response to new knowledge but in response to new theories and new political requirements, because the testing requirements have changed.

Pay isn't the point; we pay our teachers more (using purchasing parity power, the only fair way of doing it) and get less, even though we "disproportionately" spend more on athletics (presumably in exchange-rate dollars, making the comparison a bit less than fair). We spend more per pupil than most other countries that get far better results.

Increasing the status of teachers has two pay offs: (1) You get a better qualified pool of applicants so that you don't have to hire, in lean years, crappy science and math teachers. (2) The parents treat the teachers differently and *that* means the kids treat the teachers differently. It also means the administrators treat the teachers differently.

Of course, things aren't going to change. The educational philosophy among theorists and parents in the US is different. You can't just replace all the tired teachers, or provide the flexibility needed to ensure that every teacher is really qualified to teach his/her subject. You can't alter minds and hearts overnight.

suggesting that individual teachers affect student academic outcomes over time. Data does exist correlating academic achievement to the following: Income and educational levels of parents, number of parents in the home, the amount of money spent per pupil in relation to the former demographic and the percentage of poor students in the school.

American K-12 public schools with enrollments of children meeting federal poverty guidelines of less than 20% score in the top quartile on the PISA. Approximately 25% of American school age children meet the poverty guidelines. These schools score in the bottom quartile internationally. The others fall in between. As a result, the average for American schools is about the 50th percentile or less.

It's about prejudice and poverty. It's not about good or bad teachers. However good and bad are defined they are not defined by standardized test scores. Furthermore, I am a teacher. I attended a very prestigious university. I placed in the top third of my college class. The range between the top and bottom third of my class was 0.4 of a grade point. I've known hundreds of teachers. No more than a handful of them were either lazy or incompetent. The others all worked and planned very hard and diligently.

You need to ask yourself how it is that good vs. bad teachers came to be the endless topic of educational debate and who benefits.

Guess which one won't.

Do people think the best and brightest would want to be lawyers and doctors if their starting pay was around $30,000/yr, if that? Hell, in France, being a waiter is considered an CAREER, not just a job. Put a couple thoughts behind this.

teachers.