The problem with teaching and teachers is that there is no good reason to be one unless you have an overactive sense of altruism, or you have a generic degree and nothing better to do with it.
I am of the opinion that if you need a reason to be a good teacher, then you really shouldn't be a teacher in the first place. See also, if you're one of those doctors who claims he'll leave the united states if he gets paid less under socialized medicine.
This is dumb. You can see how dumb it is if you substitute "teacher" with any other job. We do not require janitors to be idealistic about their calling for cleanliness, and yet buildings all over the country are clean. We need proper standardized metrics and incentives for education.
Incentives help, but I just feel like there are some jobs where you should
want to do what you're doing. You should teach because you love to teach and you want to make a difference. There are other jobs out there that pay as much if you don't want to teach. There is a substantial portion of people out there who just get into this profession because they didn't feel like going anywhere else with their lives, and that's the biggest problem with education of them all.
The average household today makes 90% of the real wages in made in the 70s, and the average CEO makes about 260 times what an average worker in his company makes, compared to 24 back in the day.
Teachers' pay is not excessive; it is a throwback, protected by a ferocious union while everybody else was getting fucked. That it looks excessive now says more about everybody else than it says about teachers.
I am not necessarily defending secondary education, but my problems with it have nothing to do with the compensation scale for teachers; rather, I think it focuses on the wrong subjects. Civics & (home) econ >>>>>>>>>> calculus for its own sake
I agree with all points - I don't think that teachers are getting overpaid, I just find the 'teachers don't get paid enough' argument to be fucking laughable, because they average a pretty substantially high income for a job that is, to be perfectly honest, really fucking easy. Teachers aren't surgeons, and shouldn't be paid like surgeons.
Some practical classes as required learning would really be a start. I had a math teacher complain - at length - in high school that kids today can't do math without a calculator, and this was the reason we weren't allowed to use calculators in his class or on tests. The whole idea that we should not use a calculator when doing math - in an age where calculators are literally given away for free at the bank - is just the height of absurdity. If anything, we should have a required class on calculator use before we have a required class on math!
Why isn't Spanish required learning in every high school in the united states? I understand the far right xenophobia, but jesus christ knowing any spanish at all is really useful. In corporate america, being bilingual is a big plus on your resume, and Spanish is by far the most practical second language to learn in most of the united states, probably followed by Mandarin Chinese.