Teaching Trade-Off 2

This past week, there's been some good discussion based off of a previous thread ('Teaching Trade-Off'), and one of the contributors (Heidi - thanks again, great perspective) brought up some very good questions. One of the questions she was unsure about was the exact reasons why educators leave the field in their first three years of experience. This intrigued me as well, so I've done a bit of research and found an interesting article which was published in the February 25th, 2008 edition of Time magazine called 'How to Make Great Teachers'. The article covers several important issues related to the field of education, but in regards to Heidi's inquiry as to why teachers usually quit so early into their career, Time magazine offers some answers. Here's some excerpts from the article:

Why do teachers bail? The biggest reason is pay. U.S. public-school teachers earn an average annual salary of less than $48,000, and they start off at an average of about $32,000. That's what Karie Gladis, 29, earned as a new teacher in Miami. She barely made it 31⁄2 years before leaving and taking a job in educational publishing. "It was stressful living from paycheck to paycheck," she says. "If my car broke down or if I needed dental work, there was just no wiggle room."

But money isn't the only reason public-school teachers quit. Ben Van Dyk, 25, left a job teaching in a high-poverty Philadelphia school after just one year to take a position at a Catholic school where his earning prospects are lower but where he has more support from mentors, more control over how he teaches and fewer problems with student discipline. Novice teachers are much more likely to call it quits if they work in schools where they feel they have little input or support.

The article also agrees that the solution to many education problems in America begins with paying teachers more money. As a part of the article, the author randomly polled 100 educators from K-12 public schools who had left their job in education within their first three years and asked why. The most frequent responses were:

1. Not enough pay
2. High stress levels
3. Lack of freedom (in curriculum and teaching methods I imagine)
4. Lack of job security

The last one kind of surprised me, but the article describes many teachers who fear for their jobs because of standardized testing and other teachers who have to take special care not to put themselves in any kind of situation where a student could get them fired (an example would be a male teacher who will not speak with a female student one-on-one after class unless they take the discussion into the hallway where others are present). Also, many teachers are laid off depending on state and government funding each year, and if you're among the youngest teachers in a school, you can bet your name is on the list. Anyway, I thought the article in Time was interesting and it related to the discussion postings in my blog 'Teaching Trade-Off'. And yes, Heidi, it's appauling to think a JC Pennies sales associate makes just as much as a starting teacher does. You suggest it shows the priorities of this country, and I agree with you. The real question is: do the powers that be in this country really want people to be educated? Sadly, I would say no because educated people pose a threat to the system.