I saw a poll of teachers a while ago (which I currently can’t find again…) which stated the top issues causing them to want to leave were, in order:
It absolutely doesn’t have to be, at least in Florida. You can have a four year degree in literally anything.
Is there any place that actually offers a 4-year undergraduate degree in “Education?” Most everywhere I’ve seen that’s grad work. Your BA can be in anything.
I don’t know where you read this, but it’s a highly biased take on the situation. I know dozens of teachers, including my former colleagues (many of whom are conservatives) and some of my (conservative) relatives. The truth is, even the conservative teachers I know are getting accused of “grooming” children and instilling liberal biases. I don’t know a single teacher who feels forced to teach “woke” (Nice dog whistle there) curriculum.
If you figure out where you saw this, please provide a cite. Thanks.
I’ll agree with this, but tweak it from my own experience. I was a teacher for 10 years, but departed for another career more than 15 years ago. To me, it was never about the money. It wasn’t even really about “respect”, exactly. I came to feel more and more micromanaged, with my discretion for actual teaching eroded over time. Nobody intended to disrespect me as a teacher, they just took away my ability to do the job.
One of the problems is how schools utilize research and data. Numerous times I saw a push for changes to curriculum and teaching technique based on new research that was aggressively pursued for a while, and then dropped for various reasons. Whereas individual teachers who were good at what they did were sometimes prevented from doing it their way.
I think it’s important to realize that teaching isn’t a “science”. It can and should be informed by science, research and data. But in the end it’s adult humans interacting with little humans, which is closer to an art (for the people who are good at it). In my mind this makes teaching a “craft”, and it’s hard to scale that up.
So I believe there should be a form of “best practices” that teachers should get trained on, but largely leave the details up to them. Whereas the current system prefers to take away that sort of discretion and try to make it uniform. That’s a failing strategy, in my opinion.
I was one of the people trying to do it well, and doing it differently from certain traditional models that were no longer useful. For a while I felt supported doing that, but over time my freedom to act was curtailed.
I found myself saying to a principal one day, “I have ten years experience, a master’s degree and I’m published in my field. At what point are you going to trust me to use some of my own judgement?” There was no good answer to that question, and I soon exited for another career.
It’s sad, the way I see it - they convinced a pretty good teacher that it would be better to go do something else. I didn’t expect complete autonomy, or for administration to cater to my every whim. But if I’d been given more discretion to be the professional I was, I might still be there.
Edit: I have no doubt everything is much worse these days. Even then, shortly after I quit, I would run into former colleagues who each told me I got out “just in time”.
Elementary education, sure, but not a general “teaching” undergrad degree I’ve ever heard of. Lots of colleges out there, though, so who knows.
Many local governments would sooner buy teachers a glock than buy them crayons.
“At least around here” is key. Teacher pay varies widely across the country. Here in NC, teachers are paid far, far less than what folks with similar four-year degrees earn, and in my town, the cost of living is so much higher than the rest of the state that it’s untenable.
If the job is fulfilling in every other way, many folks are often willing to put up with terrible pay. But the worse the conditions become, the more important it is to pay commensurately.
Some do - but it’s not exactly general “teaching”. There are 4 year degrees in early childhood education and elementary/childhood education , which focus on the grades before junior high/middle/intermediate school. This may be a NYS thing for those planning to teach grade 7 or above , but I’ve also seen degrees described as a "BS (or BA) in Subject (math, chemistry, biology, social studies, etc) with a concentration in adolescent education " and others described with something similar to “B.A. degree in adolescence education: biology teacher”
In a NYS school of education that I’m familiar with, undergraduates who want to become secondary education teachers (grades 7–12) get double majors: One in a specific subject, like English, Math, etc., and one in secondary education, with many of the education courses also specific to teaching that subject. They do student teaching as part of their education program, and get initial teaching certification as they graduate. Usually they’ll do masters work while teaching to progress in the profession.
Yep. Plus it plays well with the Starship Troopers crowd. For those who don’t get the reference, that’s shorthand for the “We should strip people I disagree with of their citizenship and voting rights” crowd.
I’m not sure how widespread or current this is, but one of my high school teachers told me the public schools in our district actually paid teachers much more than the private schools in the area did. The private schools had smaller class sizes, and other advantages, but from the perspective of this particular teacher, public school jobs were more desirable. I’m not saying the salaries are adequate; I just thought it was interesting. I would vote for just about any ballot measure to raise teacher salaries and/or give them whatever else they need.
If I may hijack my own thread a bit, this problem is entirely about K-12, right? There seems to be no shortage of professors in college at all.
Satire??*
*just going by outcomes.
I believe colleges have quite the opposite problem (not that it’s a problem for the colleges per se, but rather for the would-be professors): too difficult to get a fulltime/tenure-track position, with many colleges cutting costs by employing a wide range of adjuncts for pennies on the dollar (okay, maybe nickels on the dollar. Still…).
ETA: See, for example:
I am not knowledgeable on this subject, but my impression was that substitute pay rates are not good. In the past, all the substitute teachers I’ve known did it in the hopes of landing a full time job in the district. Paying their dues, as it were.
Being unable to fill open teacher positions but getting enough subs to cover them doesn’t make sense to me. What am I missing?
I’ve never understood the idea that only people who go through a special course of study are qualified to be teachers.
Yes, there are techniques to teaching that not everybody intuitively knows. And yes, I’m aware that not everybody has the disposition to be a teacher. But to my mind, the #1 qualification, standing head and shoulders above all other qualifications, is this–
knowledge of the subject being taught.
I worry if it means Florida (and possibly other states) are effectively following the same path–perhaps knowingly and willingly, perhaps not–of colleges: turning from temporary positions as a stop gap or stepping stone to making them near-permanent gap-pluggers, but without the same protections or benefits as their full-time counterparts. Another example of unconstrained market forces promoting a “race to the bottom,” if not in terms of quality of services, then at the very least in compensation of the service providers (although I suspect the quality of service will suffer as well, it’s just that maybe the people presiding over this race to the bottom don’t care so much).
A later line I didn’t quote mentions trying to convince the subs to go full time. So I don’t think that’s it. Like, you don’t have to convince post docs to work a tenure track position. There are hundreds of applications for each opening!
Oh goodness no.
I have a friend who ran a nationally-recognized comic shop, and he once told me, “Instead of hiring comics nerds and teaching them people skills, I hire friendly people and teach them about comics, because that’s much easier.”
Similarly with teaching. At the college level, and even at the upper high school level, the content being taught can be pretty specialized, and you need a specialist there. But a specialist without communication skills will be a useless teacher, at least as useless as a good communicator who doesn’t know the subject. I speak from experience.
That doesn’t mean that content knowledge is unimportant. But most of my labor as a teacher is figuring out how to teach: how to take complex ideas and break them down into digestible components, how to anticipate and address misunderstandings, how to analogize, how to engage, how to evaluate. The work of taking the knowledge in my head and ensuring it implants and grows in the heads of twenty kids is really complicated.
Do you have a similar feeling about nonfiction authors–i.e., that it’s far more important for them to understand their subject than to know how to write?