Teaching and Prestige

One big problem with trying to turn primary and secondary teaching into a "prestige" profession is that there are just so damn many teachers -- over 3.2 million in public schools plus about 470,000 additional ones in private schools. That's a lot of people -- several percent worth of the country's total labor force.

Teaching is already a somewhat prestigious profession that only educated people can do, and given the sheer numbers of people involved, it's unlikely to be feasible to transform it into something radically more prestigious or "elite" than it currently is. But good teachers matter! So what's to be done? Well, we should definitely work on changing elements of our current system that tend to leave the kids who are most in need without access to the best teachers available. And we also need to reform the certification process so that the qualifications needed to become a teacher are more in line with evidence about what's actually needed to teach effectively.

But we also need systems and curricula that can work when implemented by what amounts to a mass labor force of teachers. It's misleading to look at smallish programs like Teach for America and then start dreaming of what things might be like if that experience could be universalized -- it just can't be.

Photo by Flickr user iboy daniel used under a Creative Commons license

Comments

I dunno, 3.2 million times $20,000/year is only $64 billion. Okay, that's a lot of money. Still cheaper than Iraq though.

Posted by chris | April 4, 2008 5:50 PM

The FedEx driver at one of my jobs was a former middle school teacher. He switched because of the money. His goal was to be a FritoLay driver, because they're not just drivers but also salespeople, and get a percent.

If more talented people went into teaching, there'd be fewer talented people in retailing and business, and the economy would suffer. You get what you pay for.

Posted by John Emerson | April 4, 2008 5:53 PM

Attracting quality workers to any job requires offering a combination of attractive pay and benefits in compensation; that's part of the reason why the Mickey Kaus "just destroy the unions and education will magically be fixed" makes no sense. Teacher often earn significantly less than those who work jobs that require similar amounts of education; the payoff is a very competitive set of benefits, key among them job security and a powerful union. If you're going to cut those benefits to satisfy ideologues like Kaus, you had better replace those benefits with a significantly better pay scale. But, of course, we could solve many education problems if we actually adequately funded education in this country-- and more importantly, funded it uniformly so that vagaries of housing prices and property tax didn't result in wildly divergent standards of education.

Posted by Freddie | April 4, 2008 5:54 PM

There are about a million lawyers in the US, and there's plenty of prestige there.

Anyway, the whole subject is backward, IMO. Middle-class kids get a fine public education with the teachers and schools we already have. The porblme isn't that poor kids get a crappy education, it's that there are so many poor kids to begin with.

Posted by lemuel pitkin | April 4, 2008 5:56 PM

The porblme isn't that poor kids get a crappy education, it's that there are so many poor kids to begin with.

I think this is correct. We basically expect the education system to magically turn the underclass into the middle class.

Posted by blah | April 4, 2008 6:00 PM

I think this is correct. We basically expect the education system to magically turn the underclass into the middle class.

Yes. As I've said in this space and elsewhere, education is a surrogate for talking about larger, uncomfortable issues such as poverty and race. That's a big part of why the voucher argument is so essentially dishonest; it's proponents argue easy solutions to problems that are enormous and unsolvable without truly wide-spread, systemic change in basic American models of governance.

Posted by Freddie | April 4, 2008 6:03 PM

The biggest barrier in Michigan is the teacher's union. There is tremendous peer pressure on teachers to do little more than is required of them. The culture is stifling and crappy teachers can keep their jobs for 29 years.

I'm pro-union and I had to leave the public school system because it holds back creative, self-directed and dynamic people. One example - we tried to do a a simple teen help card with contact information for services kids in crisis. We had the information and external funding pulled together within a week. It took a full year to get it done--and the problem wasn't just administration, committee after committee felt entitled to have their say.

Posted by jf | April 4, 2008 6:04 PM

Yeah, it's a profession, but it is the one held in lowest regard. I live in a town with lots of intellectual professionals - lawyers, accountants, quant jockeys - we all think that if the roof caves in we could all become teachers.
Don't ask me how to solve the unfortunate situation. Just wanted to clarify m.y.'S point.

Posted by rz | April 4, 2008 6:06 PM

BTW - Around here teachers start at $40,000 and max out at $75,000 to $90,000. Not bad for 180 days of instruction.

Posted by jf | April 4, 2008 6:07 PM

Most public schools teach middle-class kids, and they're mostly getting decent enough results. The problem is that there are a lot of segregated urban schools where kids are not learning, and not graduating, and not getting decent jobs, and there is some evidence that the disadvantages faced by kids in those schools are deeply entrenched even by the time the kids get to kindergarten, and the only thing that will get those kids to achieve at a typical middle-class level is intensive KIPP-like schools that have much longer hours and much more dedicated and talented teachers. So the idea is to allow normal 40-hour/week, $50,000 teachers to continue to hold the majority of teaching jobs, but make it really difficult and prestigious to become a 70-hour/week $100,000 teacher at a school with disadvantaged kids. I think you could find 1 million of these special teachers without too much trouble.

Posted by Dave | April 4, 2008 6:11 PM

BTW - Around here teachers start at $40,000 and max out at $75,000 to $90,000. Not bad for 180 days of instruction.

Are those numbers prorated for the academic year?

Posted by Freddie | April 4, 2008 6:12 PM

One of the ways we could make teaching more of a profession that attracts the self-respecting and at the same make it more effective in a wide range of policies is remove the cornerstone taboo about talking about differences in student intelligence, especially cumulative differences in intelligence among the racial groups. These are the single most dominant facts about any urban school, but nobody is allowed to even mention that the Emperor has no clothes. The neckdeep BS that flows from this fact drives crazy those teachers with a basic respect for the truth and makes educational planning into a fairy world of ineffectuality. The results harm children of all races.

Posted by Steve Sailer | April 4, 2008 6:18 PM

Those are the typical annual salaries here in California, too ($40k-$80k). Teachers do work more than 180 days, but not a lot more. They get a solid 2 months off in the summer, and many of them work other jobs in that time. It's really not such a low-paying job.

Posted by too many steves | April 4, 2008 6:20 PM

Attracting quality workers to any job requires offering a combination of attractive pay and benefits in compensation; that's part of the reason why the Mickey Kaus "just destroy the unions and education will magically be fixed" makes no sense.

It's not supposed to make sense in a general "improved learning by kids" way. Public employees are the last major bastion of unionism, so naturally the plutocrats and their water carriers want to break them, too. The intended results would be 1) one less political obstacle in their way, and 2) lower wages to public school teachers, which leads to 3) lower local taxes. Their kids go to private school (where pay usually sucks), so it's no skin off their nose in the short term.

Posted by cmholm | April 4, 2008 6:20 PM

Matt's basically right, but beyond pay, I think we can do something to make the working conditions and image of the job more appealing. Teaching can be really nasty work in a bad school. Lots of energy-sapping misbehavior and lots of griping. But teaching has a lot of features that could be made more attractive. It can be creative, interpersonal, nurturing, and interesting. It's rewarding, stable, and a good job for parents. Teacher could even be local public intellectuals, of sorts. Let's encourage that. (I'm a TFA alum by the way, and currently a PhD student at a school with a strong teacher-professionalization agenda.)

Posted by Rob | April 4, 2008 6:21 PM

It's misleading to look at smallish programs like Teach for America and then start dreaming of what things might be like if that experience could be universalized -- it just can't be.

Well, why not?

Pump a few hundred million into Teach for America and you can massively expand its reach. So the program can effect change to an even greater extent: (1) directly with kids and (2) systemically since all these additional TFA participants are now well versed in the problems our educational system faces. The latter point is especially important.

Posted by TFA | April 4, 2008 6:23 PM

Actually, there are several things that aren't that hard to do, if we're serious about education.

The first is to reduce class size. There isn't a teacher in the land who wouldn't feel more honored and valued if that were done. The fact that it isn't consistently done, in spite of our knowledge that it's important, is a slap in the face to teachers and very directly makes every day more tiring and depressing to them.

The second is to put a stop to the anti-teacher raving that has become commonplace among the rightwingers. To stand by silently while the usual suspects say that the NEA is just another union like the one Marlon Brando fought in On The Waterfront is another slap in the face to teachers. Teachers work long unpaid hours and improve their own educations during their "summer vacation". The personal attacks on them and their professional organization should be responded to sharply.

This post by Matt is typical of the rightwing fellow traveler- with a hat tip towards increasing teacher prestige, he goes on to say we should reduce the entry requirements for the profession.

Now, maybe Matt really thinks teachers should be taken down a peg or two, and reminded they can be replaced by untrained aides, machines, and drug-sniffing dogs. He doesn't really advocate raising teacher prestige in this post, so that's unclear.

However, if he does think raising teacher prestige would be a good idea, I've got a memo for him- you don't raise prestige by lowering qualifications. And it's just plain nuts to think professors at schools of education don't think a lot about whether teachers are learning the right things.

If the public will do their part by providing adequate funding for smaller classes and modern reference materials, I'm sure our teachers will know how to make that investment pay off.

Posted by serial catowner | April 4, 2008 6:23 PM

I know a lot of teachers, and I've never heard a single one of them say the biggest frustration in their job is not being able to say that white kids are smarter than black and Hispanic kids.

Posted by too many steves | April 4, 2008 6:23 PM

Sorry, Matt wasn't talking about pay. Got it confused with Ezra and some of the comments.

Posted by Rob | April 4, 2008 6:26 PM

Prestige depends partly on a perception of difficulty and rigor. Being a physician is prestigious because everyone knows medical school is a pain in the ass; same with being an engineer. Being a teacher isn't as prestigious because everyone knows that classes in education are a joke. And teachers unions generally refuse to offer higher salaries to teachers who have studied more difficult and in-demand subjects, such as mathematics and science.

"Anyway, the whole subject is backward, IMO. Middle-class kids get a fine public education with the teachers and schools we already have. The porblme isn't that poor kids get a crappy education, it's that there are so many poor kids to begin with."

This is true. That's what happens when our immigration system is skewed toward importing poor people and poor people tend to have more kids while more educated and affluent people have fewer kids.

"That's a big part of why the voucher argument is so essentially dishonest; it's proponents argue easy solutions to problems that are enormous and unsolvable"

That's a straw man. Vouchers wouldn't be a panacea, but they would provide funding for more effective approaches. Even if that results in better educations for 10% or 20% of poor, minority kids that would be a huge improvement over the situation today.

Posted by Fred | April 4, 2008 6:26 PM

Much more balanced funding, more merit pay (as opposed to pure seniorty pay), and more open hiring practices would probably go a long way.

Posted by DTM | April 4, 2008 6:26 PM

The primary problem (in the U.S., anyway) is that we still have an education system developed for a technological culture that hit its stride a few hundred years ago, in which only a relatively small number of people received an education and in which information was comparatively scarce and had to be disseminated by an authority like a professional scholar.

That culture began to change abruptly in the 20th century. First, the number of kids getting educated skyrocketed. Then, electronics started moving information around really rapidly, so that kids were already getting a tremendous immediate education outside the schools, and questions like "When was the Thirty Years' War fought?" started to lose what little relevance they'd ever appeared to have. With the rise of TV, especially, kids have gotten a lot more sophisticated; they can't see how so much of what they learn applies to their lives outside of school, and most of the time, we can't really give them a good answer. The ultimate result is that the people who have the most curiosity about the world -- children -- end up not wanting to learn things. That's so telling that we should pay a lot more attention to it.

But anyway, Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner's Teaching as a Subversive Activity outlines the problem awfully well, and the authors are smart enough to pretty much say outright they have no serious hope of their ideas being adopted anytime soon. The book's worth a look, though, especially if you're someone like me, who did well in school but knew it had a lot more to do with some natural talent and an ability to work the system than because the paradigm or curriculum were well constructed.

Posted by moff | April 4, 2008 6:27 PM

I agree with you regarding Teach for America. Speaking as a former TFA "corps member" (that's what they call their teachers), it's pretty clear that the whole thing is just a band-aid for a bullet wound. There's no way that a program that employs a few thousand teachers can solve endemic national problems.

Plus, even within its limited scope, I doubt that it's effective. I know Stanford did a study that indicated that TFA teachers were less effective than fully certified classroom teachers.

It gets tiresome to see it cited so often as a model for educational policy. You can't solve every problem by throwing Ivy Leaguers at it.

Posted by Mark | April 4, 2008 6:28 PM

Someone once opined that public schools are optimized to teach well-fed children who live in homes where they have the personal space and privacy to do homework. Make sure all the students have that, and you're almost all of the way there.

If teaching pays so much money and is such a great job, why are so many people becoming sales reps or in white-collar-but-low-pay jobs?

As it is, it seems to me that teaching attracts the sort of people for whom the profession is a "step up" financially for them or people for whom teaching is a temporary experience for those of higher social class before they leave for greener pa$ture$. What you want is for teaching to attract the same sort of people who would otherwise go into accounting or engineering. Why do people go into accounting and engineering? Because they have high starting salaries.

Posted by Tyro | April 4, 2008 6:30 PM

Are those numbers prorated for the academic year?

Nope. I should clarify though. Those number would apply to southeastern Michigan and those maximums would apply to teachers with masters degrees and were not average top-end salaries. Here's a story on salaries in Washtenaw County, Michigan.

http://blog.mlive.com/ann_arbor_news_extra/2007/08/how_much_pay_for_teachers.html

Posted by jf | April 4, 2008 6:33 PM

...especially cumulative differences in intelligence among the racial groups.

Steve, you're bell-curving. The unfortunate byproduct of the firestorm over "The Bell Curve" was that the normal process of academic peer review was drowned out by the shouting. With a bit of digging, you'll find reasoned debate over the issues with Herrnstein and Murray's research. Upshot: they didn't seem to put enough effort into teasing the nature/nurture effects out of their data set.

Frankly, with the cultural baggage we're carrying, we're just not going to know for sure. So, best to stop assuming that it's just because certain kids are and will remain too stupid, and move on. Otherwise, the your future Asian-American overlords will beat you with your own stick, once they've graduated from Berkeley.

Posted by cmholm | April 4, 2008 6:37 PM

Thank you Matt.

I'm glad that someone can see what a waste it would be to put highly educated and skilled adults to work babysitting teenagers.

There is no reason to believe that education has anything to do with the ability to teach basic math. What exactly is wrong with having highly motivated but relatively unskilled workers as teachers?

Instead, we need to focus on better teaching methods that work for everyone( HREF="http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2007/09/heroes-are-not-.html" Possibly something like this ) and new incentive systems for both students and teachers.

And in the meantime, can someone explain to me why we can't implement a European styled voucher system? It seems to have worked very well for France. While this would not be an end all, but it would do a good deal to help solve the problem.

Posted by David Shor | April 4, 2008 6:38 PM

The $40k to $80 numbers are about what teachers earn in my district. In big cities the numbers can go even higher. Teaching contracts here are for 37 weeks, or 185 days a year, which does not include sick days.

I think many, many professionals would prefer to earn $80k a year, leave work at 2:40 p.m. each day, get Christmas break and Spring Break, and spend the summer sitting around doing nothing. Oh, and with zero chance to get laid off when the economy turns sour.

Furthermore, I don't know that very many jobs are all are "high prestige." Doctors and lawyers, yes, business executives, yes. But that's about it. Nobody I know shits themselves when the neighbor is an engineer or accountant.

Posted by Kevin | April 4, 2008 6:40 PM

Nevermind policy discussion. Where's the BSG blogging? The 1st episode of the new season streamed earlier today, and not a peep out of Matt yet.

Posted by Clark | April 4, 2008 6:41 PM

I'm starting to think Sailer's a bot.

Posted by Dan S. | April 4, 2008 6:43 PM

Y'all seem to think that smart teachers have a big payoff in student achievement. I've never seen any evidence that this was the case, and plenty that it wasn't. Teachers today are probably dumber than teachers 30 or 40 years ago, but student scores (NAEP)have hardly changed. By 'dumber' I mean that teachers score about a standard deviation lower than the typical college graduate: I think they used to do better, but I don't think it matters much.

Posted by gcochran | April 4, 2008 6:45 PM

I think many, many professionals would prefer to earn $80k a year, leave work at 2:40 p.m. each day, get Christmas break and Spring Break, and spend the summer sitting around doing nothing.

I'm not sure I can name any teachers that do that, but just for the sake of argument, if this is all true, and if, as Fred says above, Ed-school classes (and thus becoming a teacher) are so easy, why isn't everyone doing it? Why aren't these sales-reps who have to go cold-calling all day doing it? Why are there so many people in poorly paid "buyer" positions for various retail corps?

If teaching is such an awesome, highly-paid job where you do hardly any work, I'm trying to figure out why EVERYONE isn't trying to get into it. Because as far as I can tell, people are either avoiding the job to go into other insecure, mediocre-paying jobs? Can I ask what highly-paying, easy job YOU have that's so much better that teaching just didn't seem like a good deal for you?

Posted by Tyro | April 4, 2008 6:46 PM

Public medical examiners/cornoners get paid $135K, which makes sense, since the job absolutely requires experience. You'd think teachers would be looked upon the same way, since they shape the people who are the next medical examiners, doctors, lawyers, business people, etcetera.

And who cares if it costs more money? I'd rather have higher paid teachers than new football uniforms and the like.

And BTW...what about replacing some of those books for e-books? (Not all of them)

Posted by AKBY | April 4, 2008 6:56 PM

Tyro,

Teaching jobs in higher-paying districts with educable students are not that easy to get. There is no shortage of applicants for these jobs.

Posted by Fred | April 4, 2008 7:03 PM

"Why do people go into accounting and engineering? Because they have high starting salaries."

Well, they also don't want to deal with a bunch of leftist, pc, ed school graduates in the administratrion. Not to mention the poorly behaved kids.

But even poorly behaved kids give respect to those who are strong. I think we should start getting army veterans teaching certifications.

Posted by jacobus | April 4, 2008 7:04 PM

What they need to do is introduce more hierarchy so that not everyone at the local high school is the same thing: a high school teacher. If there were fewer positions at the top, people could compete for them and those who made it would get more prestige.

They could also introduce more rewards at the top, increasing incentives all the way down etc etc

Posted by Junius Brutus | April 4, 2008 7:11 PM

> The first is to reduce class size. There
> isn't a teacher in the land who wouldn't feel
> more honored and valued if that were done.

More teaching assistants and similar paraprofessionals to support teachers, yet. Smaller class sizes? I am not so sure about that. The 35-45/teacher classes of my childhood were undoubtedly too large (although the rooms, built in the 1920s, had desks for 50-60 which makes you wonder) but smaller than 20/class is IMHO too small. The classroom loses variety and synergy, and the kids feel overly watched and picked on, when there aren't at least 15-20.

So rather than smaller classes stay with 20-24, give _every_ teacher a TA, and have a secretary/gopher per 4 classrooms.

Cranky

Posted by Cranky Observer | April 4, 2008 7:19 PM

The really pressing need is curriculum reform.
Kids are smart enough to know that most of the current K12 curriculum is a horrendous waste of their time.

Posted by Don Williams | April 4, 2008 7:23 PM

I work with top students from elite schools that want to become teachers. They have "social justice" leanings, but they also have "self-respect," and "want to get paid" leanings. Most of them would work for less money. The problem, the thing that pushes them out of the career is that schools generally provide a disincentive for excellence. You are rewarded for sticking around FOREVER, regardless of how hard you work, how long you stay to help kids after class, or how well your students perform. First year lawyers are generally OK with putting in their 80 hour weeks because that translates into promotion and results. Good teachers are able to reach kids in need, but it requires extra investment. The young teachers that make this commitment (many go through our program as undergrads) are often discouraged by the tenured teachers that make more money and don't want to look bad. The school sure isn't going to give them a bonus for actually addressing the students' needs.


To say that top young people don't want to be teachers is just wrong - the truth is that the profession pushes out the really, really good ones. Thousands go for it anyway. Undergrads and high school students give up their summers to teach with us, and they're desperate to help.

Posted by Bobby Cupp | April 4, 2008 7:24 PM

1) The perennial complaints from Congress about US Kids' performance in math and science is two-faced HYPOCRISY.

2) If Congress wants a nation of strong engineers and scientists, then Congress should stop whoring itself out to corporations and stabbing US engineers and scientists in the back.

What's the value in becoming strong in math and science if the reward is to be laid off in favor of a low-paid foreign worker from India or China.

3) If a kid is intelligent, he's smart enough to know that the US ruling elites fuck productive people like engineers, the military, and doctors.

All the Rewards, by contrast, go to parasitic, deceitful con artists -- either on Wall Street, in the legal profession, in politics or on Fox News.

Posted by Don Williams | April 4, 2008 7:30 PM

when we talk about improving education, we're talking about improving urban education. and when we're talking about improving urban education, attracting "better teachers" is not going to make much difference until many other problems -- e.g., bureaucracy, funding, non-engaging standardized curricula (focused on standardized tests) -- are solved first. and once some of those problems are addressed, we may find that the teachers we have are better than we think.

Posted by Skyhook | April 4, 2008 7:33 PM

I would like to see teaching of many specialist subjects being a co-career.

What do I mean by this? Take commerce as a high-school subject. If commerce were taught by business professionals, the classes would take on an element of reality. If economics classes were taught by professional economists who work for banks, government departments, large corporations or universities, the career paths of the profession would be apparent.

If science were taught at high school by research scientists or by if IT were taught by the IT industry all this becomes a "real education". People with experience in the subject are teaching the subject.

How to get people to do this? You offer large corporations tax breaks based on the number of staff they have spending 5-10 hours a week teaching. You make the salaries for teaching higher. You talk about the prestige of being a person who educates and trains our future generations as the bedrock of our economy.

This is something that can be piloted and rolled out in large scale.

There are two key points. First is creating partnership between business, local/state government, local universities etc and schools.
Second, is encouraging a teaching model that says having some teachers teach as part of an alternative profession.
Professional teachers will always be important. But sharing the experience of other types of professionals is also important, and completely laking in our current system.

Posted by Domino | April 4, 2008 7:40 PM

"I think we should start getting army veterans teaching certifications."

Thanks for the great idea, Jacobus. Seen any good movies lately?

I think we should get army veterans teaching certifications, too, but only as long as they are "leftist, pc" and have graduated from ed school. In fact, one could argue that one of the weaknesses of TFA, other than the idea that you can solve every problem by "throwing Ivy Leaguers at it" (thanks Mark), is that kids straight out of college aren't alwyas ready to deal with kids who may not make it there. Greater incentives to recruit and fast-track certification for qualified mid-career professionals would do a lot to create a new dynamic in the classroom. Whether that experience is in the army, a pharmaceutical lab or filing taxes for the Clintons, I think it would bring some intangibles to the classroom and enhance our kids' perspectives.

Posted by LIJ | April 4, 2008 7:49 PM

Don Williams,

Why do you seem so angry all the time? Maybe go out in the backyard and shoot some stuff this weekend. As for this:

"3) If a kid is intelligent, he's smart enough to know that the US ruling elites fuck productive people like engineers, the military, and doctors."

You're completely off-base on two out of three here. Physicians get paid very well depending on their specialty; surgeons can earn in the high-six figures or higher. As for the military, I don't think any cohort of troops in history has gotten paid as much as our troops are getting paid now. The non cash benefits aren't too shabby either. As for engineers, the real money in that field is for entrepreneurs who use their engineering degree and talent to get an equity stake in one or several start-ups. If you are looking for a low-risk, high security job, engineering ain't it. Hasn't been for decades.

"I would like to see teaching of many specialist subjects being a co-career."

You and Newt Gingrich. He has suggested paying local pharmacists to teach chemistry at high schools, for example.

Posted by Fred | April 4, 2008 7:52 PM

Sometimes, it seems that conservatives live in a different world than I do. I can't say that their world is necessarily unattractive to me, it's just a world that I haven't visited.

In the conservative world, no one wants to live in dense, walkable neighborhoods. In the world I live in, I'm struggling with the issue of whether to leave my dense, walkable neighborhood because I can't afford it anymore, owing to the massive amount of competition for apartments people are willing to pay big money for.

In the conservative world, teaching is a profession that promises high pay and little effort whose training process is easy. Meanwhile, in the world I live in, all around me I see people taking jobs as poorly paid administrative assistants or busting their butts in middle management or in sales for mediocre pay while so many people who go into teaching burn out after a few years.

I'm almost tempted to claim that live in conservaworld is preferable, because then I'd be able to head home at 2:40 pm after picking up my 8k-10k monthly paycheck and go to my $600/month apartment or $150k house in a walkable neighborhood, but then I realize that conservaworld, if it existed, wouldn't be an ideal world for them, it would be a nightmare that they would try to destroy.

Posted by Tyro | April 4, 2008 7:57 PM

>> I would like to see teaching of many specialist subjects being a co-career.

i'm all for having specialists participate within their local schools, offering as much of their time and expertise and they are willing, but the idea that one can teach bio or physics or history or any secondary course as a part-time job is severely under-estimating the time and effort necessary to teach well. creating different engaging lessons, day after day, is very time consuming. also, why is there an assumption that just because one is an expert in a subject that one can teach it ... to kids? how many college professors have any of us had that were truly good *teachers*? i went to a decent school and i just got lectured to for four years. that's not teaching.

Posted by Skyhook | April 4, 2008 8:06 PM

There is a lot of nonsense on this thread that needs to be dispelled.

First, regarding teachers unions. This isn't a hypothetical question. We already have the experiment of unionized vs non-unionized schools in this country. Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, etc. are all right-to-work states without teachers unions. Tell me how much better the quality of public education is in union-less Mississippi compared to unionized Wisconsin. Ask teachers in Texas how empowered they feel without a union if you want a good laugh.

Second, regarding Teach for America. It is really the wrong model to begin with. The much larger and more successful model is existing alternative teacher certification programs. TFA is just an alternative route for young college grads to get into education without having any additional life experience. The more productive approach is to attract professionals with experience in other careers to try teaching. Here in Texas the majority of new teacher candidates now come from other careers via alternative teacher certification programs rather than through traditional schools of education. They are all people who already have Bachelors, Masters or PhD degrees and experience in other fields who have chosen to pursue a teaching certificate. That's the route I took into teaching. It involves going back to school for education classes and then intern teaching for a year under a provisional certificate.

Finally regarding prestige. Money is a part of it but not the whole problem. Teaching sucks for a lot of teachers because they get little or no support from communities, parents, and school administrations. Making more money might make things a bit more bearable. But unions or no unions, many teachers are in difficult situations for with they have little or no real control.

Posted by Kent from Waco | April 4, 2008 8:15 PM

Physicians get paid very well depending on their specialty; surgeons can earn in the high-six figures or higher.

That's false, from what I've heard. The story I've heard is that doctors are very poorly paid, to the point of being beggared by frivolous lawsuits that make the profession not worth going into anymore.

At least, that's what people keep saying. I mean, it wouldn't make sense if, even after malpractice insurance costs were factored in, that doctors would still be making in the high six figures, would it? Because that doesn't really seem like lawsuits would be an industry-shaking problem if it were the case. I mean, no one would keep demanding that we put a stop to malpractice suits if, even after malpractice was taken into account, everyone was still making money after victims of medical screwups got compensated, right? Right?

Posted by Tyro | April 4, 2008 8:17 PM

A huge nonmonetary cost of being a public school teacher is having to put with the mindless jargon filtered down at 8 removes from some Paris cafe in 1973 that serves as the "working philosophy" that teachers are supposed to memorize and espouse and even believe in. Non-teachers can't begin to imagine how skull-crushingly boring and self-evidently stupid is the dogma in which public school teachers are indoctrinated and must show evidence of enthusiasm for if they want to advance professionally.

Get rid of the systemic lies and you'd get better people wanting to be teachers.

Posted by Steve Sailer | April 4, 2008 8:27 PM

> That's false, from what I've heard. The story I've
> heard is that doctors are very poorly paid, to the
> point of being beggared by frivolous lawsuits
> that make the profession not worth going into
> anymore.

Good snark; I think you hit your target with that one. But it is my actual understanding that primary care physicians, particularly family practitioners and pediatricians but also most internists, are in essentially the same situation as 20-year teachers. They see specialists, administrators, and health care executives around them earning in the mid-to-high six figures, but if they want to earn any decent return on their eduction and time investment their only choice is to work 16x7.

Cranky

Posted by Cranky Observer | April 4, 2008 8:38 PM

> A huge nonmonetary cost of being a public school
> teacher is having to put with the mindless jargon
> filtered down at 8 removes from some Paris cafe in
> 1973 that serves as the "working philosophy" that
> teachers are supposed to memorize and espouse and
> even believe in. Non-teachers can't begin to
> imagine how skull-crushingly boring and
> self-evidently stupid is the dogma in which public
> school teachers are indoctrinated and must show
> evidence of enthusiasm for if they want to advance
> professionally.

Did heck just freeze over? This comment by Sailer is 98% correct. Except that for the last 10 years the jargon to which teachers must conform has been dictated by the American Enterprise Institute and various Scaife- and Norquist-funded Radical Right organizations.

Cranky

Posted by Cranky Observer | April 4, 2008 8:41 PM

These pay numbers like $80k are wildly out of touch with reality:

http://www.payscale.com/research/US/All_K-12_Teachers/Salary

Posted by Josh Yelon | April 4, 2008 8:43 PM

"A huge nonmonetary cost of being a public school teacher is having to put with the mindless jargon filtered down at 8 removes from some Paris cafe in 1973" - SS

As opposed to the exciting and relevant wisdom that serves as the "working philosophy" of the business world. Now, who moved my cheese?

Anyway,

"But we also need systems and curricula that can work when implemented by what amounts to a mass labor force of teachers."

Yes, yes, deskilling, scripted curricula, etc. - the slightly upscale version of fastfood cash registers with little pictures on the buttons. Teaching and prestige indeed - one definite way to make teaching even lower-prestige. (My wife, who teaches kindergarten in the ninth circle of hell, always points out that one of the big morale-sappers (besides seeing the little children one is nurturing ground up and spit out) is the great lack of professional respect and acceptance.) Of course, it's not like (say) Matt's, Ezra's or Megan's parents would ever have stood for their children being educated by such "professionals," nor, if any or all of them have kids, will they accept that in turn.

Now, there are situations where such an deskilled outcome might indeed be better than worst-case dysfunctionality, it's true. But of course, that means that we as a country quite intentionally chose to go one step above utter crap, and no further, for those children without the good judgement to be born to the right parents in the right socioeconomic strata. I seem to remember Matt writing quite perceptively about these kind of decisions.

Posted by Dan S. | April 4, 2008 8:49 PM

1) Here in Pennsylvania , we are LOSING doctors because of a fucked up ,expensive state malpractice fund that soaks a doctor for over $180,000 per year. That's due to the lobbying power of our cock-sucking tort lawyers.

2) A doctor spends 4 years in a demanding pre-med college major, 3 years in an expensive medical schools, and years of low-paid jobs as an intern and resident, working 100 hour weeks, before he can enter practice.

A doctor provides ENORMOUS value to his community -- by comparison, tort lawyers provide nothing. They cure NO ONE. Yet they enjoy great wealth while doctors -- who should be free to concentrate on patients --are trying to stave off mental depression over the fucking they're getting in our political system.

3) See http://www.hcmsdoctors.org/Politics/Pennsylvania%20Updates/Pennsylvania%20Disappearing%20Doctors%20March%202004.htm and

http://www.thetimes-tribune.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=19368860&BRD=2185&PAG=461&dept_id=415898&rfi=6

Posted by Don Williams | April 4, 2008 8:56 PM

...by comparison, tort lawyers provide nothing. They cure NO ONE. Yet they enjoy great wealth while doctors...

Lawyers add value in a culture where disputes are escalated to a court of law. Within this system, there are folks who parasitically game the system. Whether the gamers are overwhelming the system is a good question.

If people didn't have tort lawyers to go to, there'd be no way to resolve the slipped grape... or being sold poisonous, adulterated crap, other than the 3rd world way: physical retaliation or supporting fringe movements.

Posted by cmholm | April 4, 2008 9:19 PM

Sorry --forgot to note that my 8:56pm post above was in response to Fred's bullshit claim that physicians are well-paid.

Fred then went on to say:
"As for engineers, the real money in that field is for entrepreneurs who use their engineering degree and talent to get an equity stake in one or several start-ups."

In response, I will note that this country's cities were saved from nuclear annihilation during the Cold War by the strong efforts of our engineers.

Many of whom worked long hours in the 1980s only to be tossed out on the streets in the massive layoffs of the 1990s. Mainly because they focused on saving the country instead of following Fred's advice to be an entrepreneur and "get an equity stake in one of several start-ups".

40% of the US ARmy's personnel were also tossed out on the street by Newt Gingrich's Republican Congress.

And when those men went to find alternative employment in the computer industry --because that's were the jobs were -- they found that the whores of the Republican Congress had given Silicon Valley CEOs 700,000 H1B visas (to bring in foreign workers for 6 years) for the years 1999-2002. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H1B_visa#Congressional_Yearly_Numerical_Cap

But Fred thinks everything is just peachy.

Posted by Don Williams | April 4, 2008 9:20 PM

Re: This post by Matt is typical of the rightwing fellow traveler- with a hat tip towards increasing teacher prestige, he goes on to say we should reduce the entry requirements for the profession.

Matt did not say reduce the requirements-- he said reform them. Today's education classes are probably the biggest waste of time to be found in the college curricula. You can't teach someone how to teach by lecturing them in a classroom. Teaching has to be a hands-on learning experence. Teachers should excel in their area of expertise, but should learn teaching itself (and whether or not they have an aptitude for it) by apprecticeship, an expansion of our student teaching program. Except for very specialized matters (e.g., teaching the disabled) we should junk the whole "school of education" nonsense.

Posted by JonF | April 4, 2008 9:33 PM

I'll bet if they did like the Aztecs with the real class troublemaker every year a lot more people would teach.

(Oh yes Linus. We have a few of those here.)

Chh.

Posted by Linus | April 4, 2008 10:15 PM

Please listen to serial catowner.....

One of the few people here who appears to have any teaching experience. Most of the commentors should go to the mirror right now and get a good look at a major part of the problem.

Smaller class size, fewer administrators, cut the Federal Dept of Education, and get the university professors out of local school districts (and out of the educational money stream).

Posted by squack | April 4, 2008 10:20 PM

Yes, JonF is exactly correct.

All the stupid Ed School classes and the Ed Schools themselves are a gigantic burden on the system and entry-barrier to smart, sensible people. The sort of mindless junk they teach is very difficult for someone with brains and principles to stomach, and has also produced totally disastrous "educational innovations" in the schools.

Teaching probably does made most sense as an apprenticeship-type profession, and if it were sensibly structured, the current salary levels (for about 185 days of work) would be more than enough.

All those former Ed School professors could then be "redeployed" to clean inner city public school bathrooms.

Posted by RKU | April 4, 2008 10:36 PM

Like many on this thread, I used to make fun of education majors in college. I went to law school, practiced law at a big law firm,made good money, and was miserable. I now teach high school. (Karma's a bitch. It is a highly rewarding yet frustrating profession. The low starting salary is a killer. Most teachers leave the profession before 5 years. Many of those burn out, but many simply can't afford to raise a family on a teachers salary. Most teachers are married to someone who is the primary breadwinner or they can't make it.
Yes there are some bad teachers, but what business does not have bad employees? Do you read Dilbert, watch The Office. Look around at your company, is everyone competent, dedicated and hard working? Private enterprise is not perfect (see for ex. Enron, Bear Stearns, Mortgage Companies etc. etc.) Yes the summers off are nice, but I would rather have smaller classes (the difference between 25 and 35 is huge), a bigger starting salary(the rigid pay for teaching experience only sucks), less state testing, fewer administrators and politicians off my ass.
A little genuine prestige (without the "damn I feel sorry for you" pats on the back would be nice.

Posted by exlitigator | April 4, 2008 10:54 PM

"... But good teachers matter! ..."

Says who? The evidence I have seen says that how kids do in school depends mostly on whether they are rich and smart. To the extent that schools matter at all the differences are mostly explained by peer effects (whether your classmates are rich and smart). The effects of things like teacher pay are lost in the noise.

Or what gcochran said.

Posted by James B. Shearer | April 5, 2008 12:05 AM

I've seen no evidence that being rich, in itself, makes much difference. I would guess that the children of math grad students score higher than those of CEOs.

I don't really know of any evidence for strong peer effects either. Educational outputs have only a weak relationship with formal educational inputs: it's like pushing a rope.

The strategies everyone believes in don't have much effect. Other strategies might, though. Considering the temper of the times, I've surprised no one has mentioned torture as a sure-fire score-raising technique.

Posted by gcochran | April 5, 2008 12:21 AM

"The $40k to $80 numbers are about what teachers earn in my district. In big cities the numbers can go even higher. Teaching contracts here are for 37 weeks, or 185 days a year, which does not include sick days.
I think many, many professionals would prefer to earn $80k a year, leave work at 2:40 p.m. each day, get Christmas break and Spring Break, and spend the summer sitting around doing nothing. Oh, and with zero chance to get laid off when the economy turns sour."

Apart from the fact you can be laid off when the economy turns sour (ask teachers in CA right now), I can't fucking stand this "leave at 2:40" BS. Have you talked to a teacher? If you want to do any sort of decent job, you're there until 5:30 and you're up grading until 11. You work at least 70 hour weeks. And this isn't a job where you can spend half the day screwing around playing solitaire and updating your Facebook profile. You're on your feet, dealing with often pain-in-the-ass human beings. It's grueling and it's often times not at all fun.

If it were really as cushy as some people describe it to be, you wouldn't have such a large number of people leaving after a few years of teaching.

________
Other reaction:

Schools of Education are a joke. In fact, insofar as you have prospective teachers taking education classes rather than serious college classes, they're harmful. But they're cash cows, and public universities need the money. A few education profs could be kept around to teach some education methods courses. Beyond that, get rid of them.

Posted by MattD | April 5, 2008 12:58 AM

It's fairly obvious that many people who criticize teachers for having such cushy positions have no idea what it is like to actually be a teacher. I'm a first year teacher, so my workload is admittedly greater than most, but I get to school at 7 am and rarely can leave before 4, and even then I take work home with me over the weekend and sometimes during the week.

I work in a district where teacher pay and benefits are better than most, but we still lose approximately 50% of new teachers within 5 years, largely due to the long hours that teachers have to put in. Teaching doesn't end when the students leave, there is still grading, lesson prep, meetings, and parent phone calls that take time to do. Many teachers also take on additional roles as coaches or club advisers, which may or may not come with additional compensation.

While there are wealthy suburban areas where the pay scale is significantly higher, generally the only teachers who make anything close to $80,000 a year are veteran teachers with 20+ years of experience who generally have post-graduate degrees. Teacher pay in urban areas and right to work states tends to be abysmal. Many teachers in the South, Great Plains and West start near or under $30,000 a year.

Teacher do get summers off, but as has been mentioned, need to use at least some of that time to maintain their educations. Teachers have ongoing education requirements to keep their certifications in many states, not to mention additional professional development that is required for their specific content areas. I have to take a week long course over the summer on teaching AP Physics, for example, and in the future will need to maintain my AP credential as well as my teacher certification.

Posted by Ryan | April 5, 2008 2:11 AM

Higher pay for teachers elsewhere appears to be a function of their longer school years. Europe tends towards a 220 day school year, Japan and Asian Tigers - around 230. When teacher's salaries are divided by pay per day worked, the US and Canada actually come out on top in late 1990s studies. Also, since most countries that outperform the US have larger class sizes, the cost of a teacher per hour of pupil instruction is quite lower.
The NEA prefers to - like Duhhh! - avoid tying higher teacher pay to a 40/50 day longer school year and larger class sizes.

Prestige is not a function of pay as much as it is a mark of authority, and, as observable by others - skills. In other countries, individual teachers, not their administrators or unions, have the authority over the teaching situation, and directly over the students. And in other countries, discipline is tight and enforced by systems that will not only send offenders to very unpleasant "attitude adjustment" camps on weekends or summer holiday, but will track the worst offenders to the future shit jobs of the society. In some places, students are made to observe acts of homage to the teacher...and actively participate in school cleaning, tutoring younger kids, preparing food...

Class size can be sustained larger because discipline is enforced, and student tutors of high performance teach the poorer performers through rough spots rather than duties as floor cleaners, lunchroom monitors....

It can be quite a shock going from American public school where class size was 15-25 to a prestigious university and find yourself in a class of 93 tought by a grad student with TA's available to answer questions and additional help in learning and preparing assignments. It is so different because the whole philosophy changes - students are assumed MOTIVATED to succeed in university, military schools - and economics factor in to the educational structure. Quite different than "No CHild Left Behind" and the self-esteem pretenses at "everyone is similarly motivated and above average" - as soon as you leave public school, you see a whole new mindset.
Large class sizes, students responsible for their own success or failure, weeding out losers and people seeking a position beyond their capacities, delivering a quality graduate for the least cost to the institution...

Be it nursing school or AF jet fighter MNTC school, you do not want class size set below 20 and hire the most expensive instructors you can - so the dumbest, least motivated have the best chance of passing and becoming mediocre nurses or replacing flight-critical parts on F-18s. You want instead class sizes of 40-50 and weeding out the bad ones, with the cheapest instructors you can get that will still get the job done and who don't need advanced degrees to teach well. Lose 25% and you still have 50% more nurses and mechanics of better quality, and taught 30%-70% cheaper than a "super teacher" costs. (The 70% is the AF differential with a seasoned Staff SGT with a HS education teaching kids how to handle million-dollar repairs)

Something to consider: Despite more money per pupil than motivated, poorer funded white kids get in Maine or N Dakota, or Asians in Hawaii - not only do students in Detroit, Baltimore, and DC have graduates with far poorer educational attainment - the white and Asian graduation rates in the "Lower teacher asalary, larger class sizes" have 95% graduation rates compared to the 1/3rd who graduate in Baltimore and DC, the 1/4th who graduate in Detroit. The problems of the underclass are legion, some like genes may not be fixable - but it's pretty clear that money thrown at the problem for lower class sizes and higher teacher pay has failed in test schools and Districts.

Posted by chris ford | April 5, 2008 2:27 AM

According to the national science foundation, there are at least 5 million in our "science and engineering" workforce.

http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind08/c3/c3s1.htm#c3s12

I think the biggest barrier to "prestige" is not pay, but rather the fact that you can be a shitty teacher and not get fired. The entry requirements aren't as high as they are for doctors, so there probably aren't that many really shitty doctors. Shitty lawyers don't make very much money. Shitty engineers and accountants get fired. Shitty teachers can get through the credentialing system, do what they have to do for 5-10 years, then basically have tenure after that.

Posted by A | April 5, 2008 4:26 AM

Matt,

The problem that you are dancing around is that there is no middle class in American anymore.

It's not that the numbers are bigger, it's the amount of money that the average American family has to support those teaching it's children is significantly less.

If we have 3.2 million public teachers who don't get paid enough to serv 49 million kids, while we have 451,000 private teachers getting paid well to serve 6 million kids, what's the underlying difference? It's the amount of money availabe to the households of those 49 million for education, vs the 6 million who clearly opt to pay more.

If we figure the national average for households with kids in school is somewhere between 1 and 2, then there are somewhere between 7.5 and 15.3 households supporting each teacher's salary. If the average family pays 10% of yearly income toward education, via property tax or some other method we have somewhere between 2700 to 6500 dollars coming in per family per teacher. This is the first problem, as the part of the public that is putting kids in school is much closer to the 2700 end of the scale than the 6500 end, while those at the 6500 end are often older/retired people on a fixed income who no longer have kids in the system. And let's not even talk about where the 30% of the nation's income resources that are in the hands of the top 1% are not going.

Slice that figure by overhead for buildings, adminstration, materials, transportation and the drive to "privitize" these items, aka hook up the budget to school board/township personal feeding troughs you have the second biggest problem. It is this wreckless spending and endemic local corruption that doesn't actually contribute to the education of the child, or the benefit of the teacher. These abuses are in fact why there are teachers unions. And it is the ugly elephant of public education that no one wants to talk about, since the public school system is often a cherry rewarded to loyal followers of the local political machine of either party. You want to fix this problem you have to be a real politician. This is "stand and deliver" stuff for adults, and there's no quick or glamorous way around this reality.

If you change the political policies at the top that are feeding the 1% the meals that should be pushing families with children closer to the 6500 dollar end of the scale, you would have more than enough to pay teachers as well as engineers. And the reward for good teachers is a stronger workforce, and more domestic innovation. We of course cheat in America by externalizing education costs for our work force to other countries, bringing in the best foreign talent to elite grad and undergrad school to compensate for our lack of investment domestically.

The real question now, is why should the foreigners want to come here anymore now that much of the world's real innovation is now happening in Shanghai and Bombay? India and China are on the verge of becoming self sustaining. It's why Obama is so appealing to some on the right, after all he's the international face of the American Investor. Why invest at home when there's 2-4 decades of growth around the world and you can get a slice for just ponying up your dollars - oh I meant Euros. The populations are large enough that none of the traditional worker rights/environmental rights barriers will ever come into play, the labor pool in Asia is essentially bottomless.

So yeah if you've given up on America, having been through private school, and then elite Ivy League institutions much like yourself and Barack Obama. What can you do? But put some certification lipstick on that pig? Right Matt? And recognize as was the theme from The Wire this season that "we all have to do more with less".

Unions are a reaction to the over reach of corporate power. You can't have a progressive political movement without healthy unions. Is there some type of collective labor organization that is better? Perhaps, but I don't see anyone at the Atlantic bothering to look into this to any degree.

So let's fluff this bad boy and shuffle some papers. On to the hot markets of Asia, boys! To hell with Baltimore, Pittsburg, and Cleveland.

Posted by patience | April 5, 2008 7:08 AM

he problem that you are dancing around is that there is no middle class in American

it's the amount of money that the average American family has to support those teaching it's children is significantly less.

Slice that figure by overhead for buildings, adminstration, materials, transportation and the drive to "privitize" these items

And it is the ugly elephant of public education

Is that ugly elephant in the room, or is it a stepchild?

It is this wreckless spending and endemic local corruption that doesn't actually contribute to the education of the child

To hell with Baltimore, Pittsburg, and Cleveland.

I think you've made the case for better teacher pay and prestige right there!

Posted by Tyro | April 5, 2008 8:48 AM

Re: I get to school at 7 am and rarely can leave before 4, and even then I take work home with me over the weekend and sometimes during the week.

I'm not someone who bitches that teacher have it easy, but I don't see your schedule as especially strenuous. I've had jobs where I worked a similar schedule, and also occasionally remoted in from home or came in a half day on Saturdays.

Re: The problem that you are dancing around is that there is no middle class in American anymore.

The middle class by definition are the people in the middle-- crudely, either the 3rd income quintile, or more broadly, the middle three quintiles. There are plenty of people in those categories. The only way there would be no middle class is if everyone made the same or if we were all dead.
What is true however is that we are much more income and class segregated than we used to be. Many communities used to have a considerable mix of people by income level (though segregated of course by race). Nowadays too many communities have one and only one income class, and this leads to stark differences in the funding for their schools.

Re: we have 451,000 private teachers getting paid well to serve 6 million kids

On the whole private school teachers are paid less than public school teachers.

Re: The real question now, is why should the foreigners want to come here anymore now that much of the world's real innovation is now happening in Shanghai and Bombay?

Very little innovation is happening in China or India. These are derivative economies, copying foreign models and technologies and doing them cheaper (and often not as well) due to lower labor costs.

Re: The populations are large enough that none of the traditional worker rights/environmental rights barriers will ever come into play

Doubtful. In China the situation is complicated by a rigid and authoritarian government that suppresses dissent, and to some extent can even hide it from the outside world. In India however you have a burgeoning middle class that demands and receives improvements in its standard of living. The costs of outsourcing to India are steadily rising due to the escalating salaries of India's professional workers. And no, the labor well is not bottomless, because there is a limited supply (very limited) of workers with the necessary education and skills.

Posted by JonF | April 5, 2008 10:11 AM

> The middle class by definition are the people in
> the middle-- crudely, either the 3rd income
> quintile, or more broadly, the middle three
> quintiles. There are plenty of people in those
> categories. The only way there would be no middle
> class is if everyone made the same or if we were
> all dead.

Not since the 1880s, no. We use "middle class" as an expression of the observation by Bismark's team, later put into practice in the US by Roosevelt and Hopkins, that a society where the income-population distribution looks like

90-2
9-50
1-48

will in an industrialized environment be torn apart and destroyed by red revolution. Both of those administrations took actions designed to make the distribution look more like

60-5
30-75
10-20

and it is (or was) those 75 percent in the middle taking home 30% of society's wealth who we consider the "middle class".

Of course, Norquist and his gang have done their best to move us back to the first, Gilded Age wealth distribution and we are now suffering the consequences in education among other areas.

Cranky

Posted by Cranky Observer | April 5, 2008 10:59 AM

Re: I'm not someone who bitches that teacher have it easy, but I don't see your schedule as especially strenuous. I've had jobs where I worked a similar schedule, and also occasionally remoted in from home or came in a half day on Saturdays.

I didn't say that it was. Doctors and lawyers, especially young ones, work far worse hours than teachers, and probably a lot of people in finance, sales and other industries do as well. Some people however have this idea that teachers get to leave school as soon as the kids do, and that simply isn't true. There is a lot more to the job than just being in class when the kids are.

Posted by Ryan | April 5, 2008 11:09 AM

> Doctors and lawyers, especially young ones,
> work far worse hours than teachers,

Part of that is the need to pay off larger student loans, but doctors and esp lawyers are also shooting for top positions that would, if attained, pay them $250,000 - $5,000,000/year (and possibly even more for a really successful lawyer). Most of them won't ever get there, and will end up working in storefront clinics in their 50s and 60s, but that is the carrot that is dangled. The absolute maximum K-12 teacher salary I have ever heard of is $125,000/year, and that is in the richest district in the US for a teacher with 20 years experience and at least an MA. Average 20-year salaries are closer to $45,000.

The scots presbyterian idea that working 100 hours/week is a good thing in and of itself is not shared by everyone even in our own society.

Cranky

Posted by Cranky Observer | April 5, 2008 11:31 AM