I started my first year of teaching (13 years ago) making $24,000. His first job paid $56,000. How can we entice our best and brightest to inspire future generations when we must rely on those who will give up a comfortable lifestyle because they love what they do?
I'm not convinced that we can. Add to this problem the fact that pay increases are 100% tied to seniority and 0% tied to meritorious work, and the problem gets worse.
When I went to college, a lot of the people choosing education as a major did so because they couldn't really do anything else.
This is also a sad fact of our teacher training system. I've looked closely at the curricula that prospective teachers have to follow, and what I've seen isn't terribly demanding. The over-emphasis on fluffy topics and the under-emphasis on subject mastery are major problems and almost certainly discourage very bright people.
If we upped the math/science salaries, perhaps teaching those subjects would gain more prestige and we'd attract more people like my highly gifted brother - quality math/science people who would actually CHOOSE teaching as a career rather than be lured away from it by the promise of higher pay and greater respect.
Maybe, but I think the problem is much larger than the salaries. If the degree requirements were more stringent, people in the field would have more respect. When I was in high school (80s; two schools) the math teachers all had degrees in mathematics, and many had graduate degrees in the subject. For them, calculus was trivial. We
definitely respected those people.
Educators as a group will get more respect when the bar in the field gets raised. I've spent way too much time at education conferences and elsewhere listening to people complain that we need to develop strategies for teaching math to the teachers so that they can pass it on to their students. I've heard too many people in the field argue that approaches like "no right answer" and group-learning in mathematics education are sound practices. And don't even get me started on multiple choice tests, whole-language reading, lockstep curricula, and giftedness-is-elitism.
Bottom line: respect is earned. Although many individual teachers earn it in spades, the field as a whole is dominated by some dubious ideas that need to be reformed. True, things are really, really bad under NCLB, but they were already really bad before it came along.
Just my 2c!!
Val
