I have had two teachers before college that have had the title Dr. in front of their name. The saddest is a man who has a PhD in chemistry and is now teaching junior high earth science. Though I always somehow suspected that this is what he wanted to do with his life. Then three years later, my high school English teacher told me that it was an embarrassment for someone with a PhD to teach in High School and that she is still paying off all her loans.
What gives? These people should be able to get real jobs. They have the highest degree of education which should get them a job better than junior high and high school.
So how is it possible to screw up your life after at least 20 years of school?
Just a WAG but we don’t live in a perfect world where every route of education leads to an appropriate pay/skill job afterwards. Some routes do better than others (computer science, versus, say, psychology) Some people are more skillful at finding work than others. Some people like teaching. Some don’t. I personally would love to teach.
The PhDs I had in high school had retired from industry and returned to teach high school-level science. They were among the better teachers I had, too, because they had less to do with pedagogy and more to do with actual information.
I’d guess that there are myriad reasons a PhD teaches at the secondary level. The teachers I had wanted to share their love for their respective fields with the people who were going to be replacing them. I’m sure there are those PhDs who dislike teaching at the college level, so they do so in high school.
One of the most cheerful teachers I had in high school was Ph.D. chemist who left a high stress industrial R&D job to teach high school physics. He was happy as a clam. He was also an amateur singer who would regale us with show tunes on the last day of class. It was kind of a hoot to see this little guy in his lab coat belting out “The Impossible Dream” from behind the lab bench.
My father has a Chemistry PhD, and then went straight into teaching - first high school, then primary school. He did the PhD because he wanted to study that subject, and he became a teacher because he enjoys teaching and enjoys working with children. No mystery, no failure, no plans-that-didn’t-work-out.
Sorry to disagree with you. I don’t know what you mean by a real job. Do you mean a college faculty position or some position in industry? It’s not necessarily a screw-up to be teaching at the secondary level with a doctorate. There are qualifications beyond academic credentials to teach at the college level. And some people don’t want to work in industry, but do want to teach. So teaching below the college level is a viable option. And of course, there could be many other reasons why someone ended up on a particular career path.
Lots of reasons for a PhD to end up teaching high school.
Many, many fields are saturated with PhDs. There are only so many tenure track positions open in universities. American industry is cutting way back on basic research. Sometimes, you have a “two-body” problem where one person gets a job in a geographic area where the other person can’t find a job. Some people who get doctorates decide they just don’t like doing research all that much.
Many universities are cutting down on their tenure track faculty, preferring to hire underpaid adjunct faculty for 1-3 year contracts. Compared to that kind of no-job-security, no prestige life style, teaching high school doesn’t seem that bad.
That’s what stopped me from even considering a PhD track, though I was fairly interested in teaching. The sheer emphasis on researching and getting papers published so you don’t end up dead-ended just struck me as so confining and stressful, sucking whatever fun there might be out of education. There are very few really good spots for purely educating teachers at a college level.
The smartest math guy in my high school class took his undergrad at University of Chicago, and his Ph.D. at U of Wisconsin at Madison, both schools with outstanding math departments. He taught at a prestigious university for six years, published lots of papers, but didn’t get tenure. He now teaches at a Catholic secondary school.
Why didn’t he get tenure? My guess is that he’s too honest and nice a guy to excel at the politics inherent in academia.
As far as why he didn’t get a better-paying job in some applied math field, I think it’s a number of things. He really loves teaching. Also, his area of concentration in mathematics wasn’t applicable to any hot technologies. He’s very religious, and I get the feeling that he’s happier in a religious school environment than he would be in some cubicle farm. I also note that he stayed in the area where his university job was, so he and his wife may prefer not to move, which would also limit his options.
Another example I am familiar with: I work for a US DoD agency. A colleague of mine with a doctorate in physics had always wanted to teach high school physics, and when he retired, that was just what he did.
Besides the love of teaching, there is the financial aspect. It is not unknown for public school teachers to be paid markedly more than college instructors.
Also there is the geographic factor. There are places where educated want to live but which don’t have many PhD type jobs. Los Alamos, NM used to be one of those. There used to be a standing joke that one had to have his doctorate to even apply for a custodial position in the public school system there.
I would be willing to bet that it still is one of the top public schools in regard to the number of PhD’s teaching in the U.S.
Finally, I would point to the diploma mills that are becoming more widespread. A guy picks up a MS or PhD from one of those, where else can he get a job? Colleges and universities check awfully closely as does the government and private industry. If a school system needs a biology teacher, immediately, they won’t check that carefully. In addition in many states they get extra points from the state for every advanced degree they hire.
In addition to the many things pointed out here, teaching isn’t exactly working in the salt mines (in a lot of places anyway). Around here, a PhD with 10-15 years of experience would make 50-60K and have all the benefits of being a teacher (great benny package, ample time off, etc).
You’re being a bit judgmental toward high school teachers aren’t you? “Not a real job”? A sign of a “screwed-up life”? Wow. If you don’t want to insult any number of people on these boards, you might want to save those comments for career paths that really DO indicate a screwed-up life (like, say, drug dealing).
Anyway, to answer your question: Some people with doctorates love teaching at the high school level. Others (rightly) believe it’s where good teachers are needed most. Others don’t want to deal with all the hoops you have to jump through to get a tenure-track job at a university, and consider high school the best compromise.
Now, perhaps your English teacher who told you her job was an “embarrassment” IS a sad case (she was certainly being unprofessional, not to mention insulting to her students), but please don’t take her attitude as the norm.
Certainly in the case of the Chem PhD, he may have discovered that he hated doing research - that’s not actually that uncommon.
A friend of mine has a PhD in Molecular, Microbial and Cellular Biology and teaches English as a second language because that’s what he likes to do. I certainly wouldn’t consider someone who’s doing a job that they enjoy, who also happens to have a boat-load of knowledge on a particular subject a failure.
Good lord, I agree with this. The OP should be a little more sensitive to the fact that some people, including some prominent members here, consider schoolteaching to be a noble calling and useful endeavor.
Student teacher checking in. I’m currently teaching seventh grade in a blue-collar neighborhood & one of my colleagues in the social studies department is a “Dr.” (I don’t know whether it’s a Ph.D., M.D., or whatever).
Teaching at the elementary, middle or high school level is a “real” job, and a rewarding one, for those who choose it because they like teaching kids. In fact, more than a couple of people on the ed track at my university are older students who recently retired from a very successful & monetarily rewarding careers outside the field of education and who now wish to teach in the K-12th grade system.
The English teacher to whom you spoke was not only remarkably unprofessional, but she also generalized when she ought not to have done so.
Another point: it’s possible to do a PhD in Education. The question would then arise if such a person didn’t persue that field.
Also, there’s plenty of teachers who have PhDs, but don’t use the title ‘Dr’ (my already-mentioned father being one of them). Because it tends to confuse kids.
It’s been my experience that people go as far as a Ph.D. in education are more likely to be interested in administration or curriculum design than in teaching.