Teaching Trade-Off 3

As the discussion continues over whether teachers are underpaid or not in America, I thought I would dig a little deeper and investigate what teachers make in foreign countries to provide this issue with some more depth. According to economist.com, these are the countries that pay their teachers more on average than the United States (if the US is considered 0%):

Turkey (+154%)
South Korea (+134%)
Germany (+60%)
Japan (+56%)
Switzerland (+49%)
Scotland (+48%)
Spain (+36%)
England (+32%)
Austrailia (+30%)
Italy (+11%)
France (+3%)

Sweden pays their teachers about the same as the United States, and there are only two countries (Iceland -15% & Norway -16%) where teachers are paid less than here on American soil. If we want to look into it further, and according to a study done at Drake University in 2006, the countries that have a better high school graduation (or equivalent) rate than the United States are (consider the US had a 78% high school graduation rate in 2006):

Turkey (97%)
South Korea (95%)
Germany (95%)
Japan (95%)
Switzerland (91%)
Scotland(90%)
Spain (89%)
England (88%)
Austrailia (88%)
Italy (82%)
Iceland (79%)

The similarities are eerie between the two lists. France is the only country that pays their teachers more but has a lower graduation rate (although this should not come as too big of a surprise seeing as France only pays their teachers 3% more than we pay our own; and to be fair, France's graduation rate is only slightly below ours). So basically, if you're to set up an X / Y axis graph where one variable represents teacher wage, and the other variable represents graduation rate, you could make the argument that they correlate with one another and the higher the wage, the better the graduation rate. If you just look at the numbers, on average, 8 out of every 10 American high school students will graduate, where nearly a perfect 10 out of 10 will graduate in Turkey. This may not seem like a big difference, but when you apply it to a large population, it can have a devastating effect. Another factor to be taken into account is that Turkey has a much smaller population than the United States (as do many of the countries on the above lists), but the population size really shouldn't matter that much. There is still enough people in each demographic to gain accurate and comparable results. One factor that cannot be quantified or represented by numbers or graphs which may play a significant role in the outcome of these numbers are the cultural factors. Every society and culture has different attitudes towards how they raise their children and in what ways they choose to live their lives. I would argue this point in favor of the data above. It is clear in the societies that value education more (the countries that pay their teachers more) that their people are finding success and knowledge on a more consistent basis (higher graduation rates). Hopefully this sheds some light on the issue of teacher pay and how we view education in America.