All teachers should be well paid and well vetted. Teaching shouldn't be a self sacrifial social justice position, it should be an honored and well rewarded position.
All teachers should be well paid and well vetted. Teaching shouldn't be a self sacrifial social justice position, it should be an honored and well rewarded position.
Careful, you might get yourself into edtech. >-D
The average career length for teachers (not job, career) is 5 years and trending down.
The reason is not a secret: teaching is a brutal experience with sub-poverty wages. In most cases parents, students and the school administration are your adversaries. If it’s a public institution, political campaigns come crashing in annually with “us vs them” battles that make it awful no matter what side you are on.
It is not a job anyone should pursue.
We should probably also redesign schools so that they need fewer teachers. For example, above certain age it is a waste of time if the teacher has to explain the same concepts over and over again to each class -- kids could instead watch a video, and then discuss it with the teacher.
Basically, the problem is that the current educational system doesn't scale well. It requires hundreds of thousands of teachers. Then people say "also, they should all be very smart, very empathic, well paid, etc." but good luck finding hundreds of thousands of people like that.
People understand why having a personal cook is expensive, so you either cook for yourself or you buy something mass-produced in a supermarket or you do a combination of both. Yet, we insist on everyone having a personal teacher. Not completely personal, but the ratio of teachers to students is something like 1:10, which is still too many teachers.
If we go even further, the school system has a dual purpose of cheap babysitting and education, but it is taboo to talk about the former, so we pretend that all teachers do it teach. If instead we admitted the dual purpose, we could have separate professions of babysitters and teachers, both operating at schools, but we would need fewer teachers, and the babysitters would not need to have university diplomas.