Does it pay to become a teacher?

In light of much discussion of the now-ended Chicago Teachers’ Strike I draw your attention to a short article published by the New York Times reporting on this year’s Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development report on the state of education around the world (http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/does-it-pay-to-become-a-teacher/ ).  It makes a subtle and nuanced point about teachers’ income in the US.  And just because one large city strike is over doesn’t mean that more conflict isn’t on its way in coming years.

In my words, here’s the point… Teachers may in fact make a decent middle-class living.  We often have job security (though you would never know it California), great vacation time, good benefits (at least as good as most nowadays), and an amazing retirement program.  But in order to increase our income, particularly in public schools, we must invest in more and more degrees – costing thousands.  To keep up with the cost of living we spend more.  Meanwhile our similarly educated peers in other professions make far more money.  And I would suggest that we work as many hours as they do in a year.  True, we have lots of time off….but notice the hours we put in during the year.  As I write this I am finishing a day that will top out at 14 hours.  I don’t often work those hours any more, to be honest.  But for my first 10 or twelve years I averages 50 hours per week stretched out over 52 weeks.  That means I had many70 hour weeks while making 67% (according to the OECD) of what my similarly educated peers were making in their positions in other careers.  Granted, we knew we weren’t going to get rich doing this job.  But as many public school teachers are facing cuts in budgets, freezes in salary, increased student loads, increased demands on our time, re-training for new expectations and metrics, and increasing demonization and scrutiny by the media, pundits and politicians, all non-educators – well, I hope you can see why many teachers are a little annoyed.  

If you want to create jobs, improve the economy, decrease corruption and crime, improve your communities, and restore the United States to its place as beacon to the world, invest in education, invest in teachers.      

This American School

  Is there anything better than a quiet Sunday afternoon listening to Ira Glass and This American Life?  Not that I ever get to indulge this pleasure, but I know it must be a wonderful thing to do.  Not long ago they featured an hour-long segment I managed to listen to twice while grading papers at school.  Honestly, this piece is worth listening to many times.  Listen to it in parts and consider its implications for schools, testing, No Child Left Behind, and our entire conception of education and schooling.  Listen here… http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/474/back-to-school

Essentially, this is a long discussion about what really matters in one’s education.  We are in the midst of a trend in American education that stresses test scores as a measure of cognitive skills.  We are valueing book smarts above all else.  But I will bet that when you stop and think about it we can all find examples of many students, colleagues and friends with excellent  measured cognitive skills who lacked the sense to come in from the rain.  And we know others who struggled with book skills in a traditional school setting who became entrepreneurs, teachers, business leaders and so on. 

  

A growing body of research is pointing to non-cognitive skills as the key to success.  These skills or traits include tenacity, resilience, and impulse control.  As educators we must consider how we teach these skills and to what degree we simply expect kids to have these from their homes or by virtue of their personalities.  Can any of us honestly say that someone’s IQ or SAT score had a great impact or served as a greater predictor of their eventual success than personality traits.  Where do tenacity, resilience, and impulse control come from? How and from whom do we learn these skills or traits?  Can we teach them in the classroom?  In this era of accountability, business models and an insistence on measurable results, can we measure tenacity, resilience, and impulse control?  

If the research indicates that these traits are most important predictors of success we must figure out how to teach them.  We must figure out how to measure them.  We must put the focus back on what really matters.