<p>
</p>
<p>Amen. My reaction to people “having” to take work home, stay up late to do it on their own time, check and respond to emails on the weekend, etc. is … welcome to the professional world. That’s the norm.</p>
<p>^Now that many are laid off, it is expected that you are doing more than originally was expected from you. Nothing additional is paid. Yesterday my day was 11 hours. What ddi I think about these 11 hours? THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU and many more for having a job. Nothing to complain about. And I would work for half a pay also, have done it up and down several times over my 9 places of employment. You do what you have to do. If you cannot relocate, there are not many choices. Our place is one of the worst, many of us are still driving to Detroit for work (out of all places), we always had it worse and still do.</p>
<p>^^ I think that there are different types of “professionals”, including some professionals that ARE paid overtime. One assumes that firefighters and police officers are professionals as they clearly are skilled and have specialized training. Yet, the beat cop is essentially paid by the shift, with overtime for anything that goes beyond the shift. Lawyers and other like professionals are another type of professional model who are not compensated per shift.</p>
<p>I think that the model for professional that the public schoolteachers historically have followed in the US is more of a firefighter/police officer model. A teacher is paid for his time with the children. It is interesting though that schoolteachers have always had a weak overtime model.</p>
<p>For one college degrees are not required to become a cop or a firefighter in most cities. Teachers have worked off the clock forever. FBI and other higher level police forces are required to have a degree and don’t get overtime either.</p>
<p>^Nursing? Here’s another profession that works on the shift model and a college education is required. Where I live, cops must have a college education. I find it interesting that the common expectation in the US is that public schoolteachers will work for free beyond their shift and that these other professions do not have this expectation. I do agree with you that this has historically been the case in the US.</p>
<p>I am just now coming to this conversation, but I almost choked on my food when I read the original post. When my son first told me he wanted to be a HS math teacher my first thought was, “for this I went to a fancy college and law school and beat myself over the head to raise you to be brilliant?” In my day, and I mean no disrespect, teachers were what you became if you couldn’t scrape yourself out of the working class by being a doctor, lawyer or engineer.</p>
<p>But I swallowed my reaction and listened to his reasons. He hated his government major and was willing to work his butt off to get a double major in math. But he didn’t see himself as a mathematician, getting a PhD, he wasn’t interested in pure research, and much as he loved higher math he knew he wasn’t an A math student who could ace competitive math jobs right away. And he was also a real people person, and couyldn’t see himself doing a purely quantatative job.</p>
<p>He had been considering law school, but he wasn’t 100% sure, and he didn’t want to incur the debt unless he was 100% sure. his other interest was government or public policy from a quantatative perspective, but he didn’t have any fancy interships to help him get a job.</p>
<p>But the more he took higher level math, the more he loved calculus, and the more he realized he loved teaching others how to appreciate calculus (and other kinds of math). Higher math made him appreciate algebra and calculus. He persuaded me his interest in teaching was real. He did a year of tutoring at a HS and loved it, and could do the meta thinking about teaching. (It was really cool to see!)</p>
<p>And he is now in a one year certifcation/teaching program that really impresses me (really good mentored teaching internship in a great school in a great school district).</p>
<p>And he has a plan… if he loves teaching he has some ideas for upping his potential salary (tutoring as mentioned for instance), and eventually using summers for writing and travel if he can. He wants more time with his family than we ever gave him.</p>
<p>And if he doesn’t love teaching… then he can do the policy thing. and he’ll actually have real world experience in some sort of policy context – education, youth, families, communities, metropolitan areas, and not just be a fresh faced college grad.</p>
<p>So he won’t win a Nobel Prize or run the cardiac surgery unit at a teaching hospital (at least the chances are small). But I never expected him to. I got him to college, he got himself through college and what he does on the other side is his business not mine…</p>
<p>And gosh, can you tell how awfully proud and pleased I am after I got over my nincompoopness?</p>
<p>The whole debate about teachers compensation is because it is government job. Once government is removed from this picture, there is no debate, compensation is decided on a job market. Govenrment should have never got involved in it, it does not have resources and k -12 is in shambles, it does not prepare kids to enter job market and much less so college. Colleges are involved in remedial activities, which also make college education more expensive. K - 12 does not measure up internationally at all.</p>
<p>Right, let’s turn over K-12 education to private enterprise. I’m sure they’ll do a fine job of it, just like they’re doing with for-profit colleges.</p>
<p>Government should not get involved in K-12 education because our K-12 does not measure up internationally at all? And what about all those K-12 education systems that DO measure up internationally? How many of them have a private component as significant as ours? (Hint: none.)</p>
<p>^^^Silversas, love your post. Well said! You should be very proud of your son.</p>
<p>Silverseas, this describes my daughter exactly! Thanks so much for your post!</p>
<p>Better students=better teachers.</p>
<p>[TFA</a> Selection Criteria Linked to Student Gains - Teacher Beat - Education Week](<a href=“TFA Selection Criteria Linked to Student Gains”>TFA Selection Criteria Linked to Student Gains)</p>
<p>This is really not new news, except around the details. Research has long shown that (1) the overwhelmingly most important factor in student achievement is teacher quality, and (2) the overwhelmingly best predictor of teacher quality is intellectual ability, i.e., smarts. That’s why we will never “solve” our K-12 education problem as long as we staff our schools with people from the bottom of the college graduate barrel and why we should encourage and support students like the OP in this long-since-wandered thread who are considering a teaching career.</p>
<p>Actually, the study seems pretty much to contradict the proposition that “the overwhelmingly best predictor of teacher quality is intellectual ability”. At least according to the blog, for math teachers in grades 3-8 the factors that correlated with improved student outcomes were achievement (GPA, maybe like smarts), leadership, and persistence. For English teachers, GPA and persistence seem not to have made a difference, but leadership and belief in TFA’s mission did. And teachers who showed the most respect for low-income communities were able to maintain better discipline in grades 3-5, but not necessarily 6-8. That’s a pretty poor case for intellectual ability as the be-all and end-all of teacher recruitment metrics.</p>
<p>A propos of some of the other positions being taken here, the study also cautions that schools can only be as selective as the pool of candidates willing to teach, and better selection metrics only matter if there is a sufficient pool of people with the good qualities who are willing to take the job. Also, TFA invests thousands of dollars per teacher in selection, support and training. In other words – and this should be news to no one – getting better teachers is going to cost a lot more money than people are spending now. It’s nice when smart people want to do this altruistically. But teaching is not going to attract a high number of high-achievement/high-skills candidates, and then retain them for long enough for them to get good at teaching, unless the economic rewards are such that parents like the OP’s parents don’t have a cow when their child broaches the idea.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>JHS, do you mind clarifying your last sentence? Does your hint suggest that none of the international systems “we” measure up to do have a private component as significant as ours? </p>
<p>It might be an issue of semantics. As far as the involvement of government in K-12, a system could not exist without governmental controls. On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence that shows that the goverment itself is one of the worst operators and providers of services. Our approach to education and government control of education seemed to have been directly borrowed from Henry Ford. Anyone is free to choose a type of education paid by the government as long as it is at a public school! </p>
<p>Other governments thought it was better to segregate the role of the government from the actual delivery of the education services. The governments that were intelligent enough to build this citizen protection in their constitution have reaped the benefits of a system of school choice and freedom. Since such countries just emerged from oppressive governments and dictatorships, their new legislators predicted (correctly) that the freedom of education would be ferociously attacked by monopolistic ideologists, and that the best way to ensure the freedom they envisioned was to make it part of the constitution. A move that turned into an absolute necessity, and ensured the survival of the best providers of education, namely a private sector that can operate on an equal financial footing. </p>
<p>We did not get that lucky!</p>
<p>“Right, let’s turn over K-12 education to private enterprise. I’m sure they’ll do a fine job of it, just like they’re doing with for-profit colleges.”</p>
<p>-Exactly the point!!!</p>
<p>I doubt the public aspect of teaching is what the OP’s parents object to. I doubt they would be much happier if he said he was going to teach in a private high school (where the pay is often less than in the public sector).</p>
<p>^^ I do not even think this has to do as much with the teaching profession as with a decision to abandon plans to convert a math aptitude into something more “valuable.”</p>
<p>More valuable as in becoming a quant jock on Wall Street and building more arcane models to steal from widows and orphans. Doesn’t a STEM major have to provide the slickest path to quick riches and associated prestige?</p>
<p>xiggi: Which of these countries has private entities educating a meaningful percentage of their students post-kindergarten?</p>
<p>1 Korea<br>
2 Finland<br>
3 Canada<br>
4 New Zealand
5 Ireland
6 Australia<br>
7 Poland1<br>
8 Sweden<br>
9 Netherlands<br>
10 Belgium<br>
11 Switzerland<br>
12 Japan<br>
13 United Kingdom<br>
14 Germany<br>
15 Denmark<br>
16 OECD average<br>
17 Austria<br>
18 France<br>
19 Iceland<br>
20 Norway</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I won’t go to each country, but since you said … none, I will give you an easy one, namely Belgium. </p>
<p>In Belgium, education is a common good, and there are few distinctions between schools that are run directly by the government and the schools we’d call private in the United States. In Belgium, there are only a handful of non-regulated schools, but there are plenty of private schools. All regulated schools are subsidized and considered public schools. Education provided by the Catholic church accounts for the largest number of schools and pupils. </p>
<p>JHS, since your list is probably borrowed from the PISA studies. may I suggest you look up the details of Belgium, and if time permits, check the systems of education in Flanders and its french-speaking counterpart in Wallonia. It provides a fascinating insight in the performance of the different systems, and one that is blurred when looking at the aggregate results of Belgium.</p>