Same here. In fact, I have a MS in chemistry (and many, many years of experience in pharma research) and a post-baccalaureate teaching certification. In my state, you need a degree in a STEM field in order to teach a STEM subject.
That being, said, I was offered $35,000/year to teach high school chemistry…even with my background and experience.
I at least am not saying that ability in STEM is incompatible with an ability to teach. I am saying that the converse, that demonstrated ability to succeed as a BSE in math education say is not the same as ability to succeed as a BS in CS for example.
Turning to your supply/demand point, yes both sides of the equation are important. But based on admittedly anecdotal experience there is currently a more than adequate supply of individuals qualified to teach in most fields, including most STEM fields. The point being that like in every field, the market is going to set the going rate for a particular skill set and task. I am fully willing to concede that the market rate for specific disciplines may be suppressed because of contracts that prohibit merit pay. I don’t believe the solution to that particular problem, if it exists, is to raise all teacher salaries so that my son, who is studying organic chemistry at Princeton, makes a purely economic decision to teach high school science rather than working in a lab at Pfizer for example.
As to the normal path to teaching, my wife followed a path similar to what is laid out above, with a bachelor’s in her chosen field and then an MA in education. While that may be a more common path in some states, it is much harder here at least to get hired as a new teacher that way, because a teacher coming in with an MA will start at a higher salary step than one with a BSE who gets their Masters while teaching.
One major factor I can think of off the top of my head is that college Profs aren’t expected by most college admins/parents to handle classroom disciplinary issues without going to higher-level admins/authorities or be considered “unfit” for being “unable to manage a classroom” whereas that’s not the case for most college Profs…including those teaching at Community Colleges.
Unlike K-12 public school teachers, college Profs are presumed to be teaching adults ages 18+ and the onus of meeting minimal classroom behavior expectations without being reminded by teachers or other adult figures falls overwhelmingly on the college student.
Unlike a HS teacher, a college Prof who has an exceedingly loud disruptive student or worse, a violent one can eject the student from the class without nearly as much fear from recriminations from higher level admins. In fact, if the student is violent or perceived to have the potential for it at the moment or the student refuses to leave after being requested to do so for being disruptive, Profs can and do reserve the right to call in campus security to escort such student(s) out.
When I did my stint acting as a substitute instructor at a community college for an older friend, the experience was an absolute breeze compared with what I’ve seen my public middle school teachers had to put up with as a student or public school teaching friends from their accounts and my observations from sitting in on their classes while visiting them/meeting them for lunch/dinner.
It’s certainly something which gave my college Prof friends…including those teaching at the Community Colleges much more peace of mind in contrast to the public K-12 teachers I’ve had or friends who currently teach in various public school systems including NYC’s.
Another biggie, no need to deal with irate parents over grade disputes or other non-emergency matters due to college regulations/their interpretation of FERPA along with the fact there’s a far greater expectation that being adults, such matters should be dealt with directly by the students…not their parents.
I said nothing about students from top 30 schools working for Google or Microsoft in my prior posts. I find this a bit amusing as the CS major friend I cited as a case didn’t graduate from a top 30 or even a top 50 school. At the time he graduated, his college ranked somewhere between 60 and 120. And while his first job was with a respectable hardcore computer tech firm, it was nowhere near the league of a Google/Microsoft.
That is fleeting as many Washington Heights/Inwood are gentrifying rapidly.
Some really shabby 2 bedroom apts for which an older friend who is rent controlled from living in the same apt since 1963 for less than $1k is easily going for $2.5k and rising for market rate tenants.
That’s not to say one can’t find affordable apartments in Manhattan…just that it’s getting much harder to do so and the conditions of apartments found may leave much to be desired…especially for fresh college grads from upper/upper-middle class suburban backgrounds.
The whole issues with schools is complicated. For example, teachers at private schools generally IME make less than the public schools, my son went to a private school that then was 25k a year, and the teachers there didn’t make anywhere near what my district or surrounding districts paid. According to the teachers I talked to, they could do this, many of them were married women whose husbands made good money (so they could afford to do that), and they worked at a private school because they were able to teach the way they wanted to, they didn’t have all the bs the public schools have between state mandates and rigid work rules from the NJEA, plus they also had the ability to teach to smaller classes and they did so because they had all that.
As far as great teachers being only for the elite, I question that. First of all, every study shows that many of those coming out with teaching degrees are not necessarily the best and brightest, and often the best and brightest end up in districts with the best pay, good teachers in NYC often end up teaching in suburban districts in NJ or NY or Connecticut because it is that much more lucrative (and teachers are, unless they have changed that, required to live in the 5 boroughs or one of the surrounding counties, least that was true a while ago)…so part of the problems NYC public schools have is they have a lot of teachers who are not the best, and a system where it is very hard to get rid of those not measuring up. And it makes a difference, not just to the elite. The golden age of the NYC public school system, despite the hard times they represented, was in the time of the Great Depression through the end of World War II, and Malcolm Gladwell’s observation matches both of my parents experiences in that system, that they had a lot of people teaching there who otherwise might have taught at the college level, but because of the economic mess, they were teaching in the public schools. My mom went to a high school in the South Bronx, and the math department was made up of mostly people with Phd’s and Masters degrees, my dad went to a high school in the northeast bronx, and it was much the same way…and it made a difference in what the schools turned out.
My personal opinion for what it is worth is that schools in this country suffer from something I believe no other industrialized country suffers from, and that is education is left up to ‘local control’, and that has led to the all over the place nature of public schools in this country. Places that are relatively poor or places where low tax mania means less funding, have schools that are deficient, whereas some places that have a huge tax base fund schools that turn out kids going to the top colleges and such. Schools are paid for by property taxes in most places, which puts the burden on homeowners and puts pressure on school budgets, rather than spreading it out among all taxpayers which makes more sense. Other countries recognize it as a matter of national policy and need…worse in the US, it then becomes a patchwork of things, some places fund a lot of their schools from federal spending, others don’t, and standards are all over the place. NJ is a classic example, we aren’t a big state, but there are like 660 school districts in the state…
That’s not the case anymore. It is the case for police and sanitation workers, but not teachers.
There’s also the not-so-small factor that private school teachers don’t usually have to deal with the degree of loud disruptive or even violent behaviors to the same degree public school K-12 teachers…especially those in challenging regions/neighborhoods have to deal with.
In fact, private schools…especially those with respectable/elite academic reputations forestall this by reserving the right to refuse to accept students with records of such behaviors or if they were found to have acted in such a manner in the private school in question, reserve the right to expel the offending student with extreme prejudice.
Heck, I’ve known of some private/parochial schools which expelled students for far far less…
Public K-12 schools, however, don’t usually have nearly this “out” as they’re mandated by law to accept all students in a given district with few exceptions.
http://money.cnn.com/2016/02/24/news/economy/trash-workers-high-pay/
This CNN article is about a couple of sanitation workers who are gaming the system, collecting massive amounts of overtime by working the graveyard shift every night.
This has nothing to do with the regular salaries of sanitation workers.
Here is what the CNN article says:
And then we have:
Working conditions in most NYC public school are horrible. Very few MA’s would last 3 months. much less 8 years before seeking better pay and better conditions. Almost all the Teach for America fellows leave teaching at the end of their two-year fellowships. If conditions and pay are so great, why do they all leave? And these people only have BA’s, not MA’s.
For some reason, there are no lines of highly qualified people with Master’s degrees waiting outside the NYC Department of Education to get a teaching position in a New York public school. Hmm, I wonder why.
They must be lining up for those 120k a year jobs picking up the trash.
I thought CTR stuck to Reddit. I guess CTR has come to CC too.
Plotinus. Senior sanitation workers in NYC make over $100,000 per year. That’s what the salary is. We aren’t talking nationally. We are specifically talking about NYC. As I said, you don’t know what you’re talking about, and Google is your friend. There is no gaming of the system by those workers. There are always two or three shifts, and until a worker is very senior, he or she is assigned without choice, and when it snows, the schedule is 14 hours a day 7 days a week until it’s done. When Hurricane Sandy hit, my husband worked 14 hours a day for 51 days in a row. However it was enough to pay an entire semester of college. The “regular salaries” of sanitation workers here are a base salary plus whatever you do on a given day. that is the regular salary. Some people aren’t senior enough to “make garbage” every day, so they make less on some days. And other such things, but their schedules and salaries are set on a daily basis and “regular” has nothing to do with it. You really don’t know what you’re talking about.
You can go to the open salary website and search for Department of Sanitation and scroll down until you hit sanitation workers and you will see that I’m telling the truth and you are uninformed.
Working conditions in some public schools in NYC are terrible, and guess what? There is a line of people with master’s degrees waiting outside the DOE to get jobs. These jobs are incredibly coveted. Ask our beloved moderator, Sybbie, she knows whereof she speaks. She has helped more than a few young people get jobs here (including my daughter) because those jobs are so incredibly hard to get. Same with sanitation workers. There is a waiting list to just take the test, and more than 50,000 took the last one, because it’s hard to find six figure jobs with great benefits when you have no education.
I wonder where you live now, because you have no idea what happens here at all.
Because most of them never intended to stay permanently, and because all of them are required to get their master’s degrees.
I think every teacher of math and science in high school should have a degree in math or science.
@emilybee Sorry. I would never have defined heaps of abuse as negative letters to the editor or negative things posted on an internet message board. But if they pick other careers because of all the abuse heaped on them in letters to the editor and in online message boards, prospective teachers/government employees should consider other options carefully. They are not the only jobs/careers with such abuse heaped upon them. Though in the end, it should be no different for public employees as it is private ones: if whatever negatives of any given job/career outweigh the benefits (or its just not worth it to you), pick a different job/career or move to a different location.
In terms of your statement that its especially women who are looking at other options because of all of the abuse heaped upon them, my experience is much different. I see a lot of young women who want to have kids picking teaching because its very conducive to raising kids.
You are also completely misrepresenting what I have said and are mounting a personal attack. Are you also working for CTR?
This is not about me, but you may be interested to know that I graduated summa cum laude from Princeton and was originally in the honors math major track, so I have pretty solid STEM qualifications. I would not break a sweat teaching an AP BC Calculus course.
However, I am a university professor, not a high school teacher. I am looking for a change in government policy for the good of our children and our society. This change would not impact my personal income at all.
@cobrat:
What you say is correct if you are talking in certain areas (in NJ it would be economically depressed areas like Camden, Newark, Patterson and Passaic), teachers would leave those jobs to teach in a private schools because of discipline problems in the schools. However, that doesn’t apply to many or most of the suburban districts, where teachers don’t face the kind of problems they would in an area like Newark, so teachers choosing to teach in a private school in those areas are doing so for other reasons other than orderly classrooms, and a lot of that from their own mouths was the freedom to teach the way they thought was best for the students (no standardized tests, no standardized curricula with rigid lesson plans submitted through the union, etc), it is a different world.It is sad, because many of these people are first rate teachers, and could benefit a lot of kids, but to be honest I think that the rules and mandates and other bs in the public schools would hamper them, no matter how good.
Plotinus, does this count as “lining up?”
I was referencing my firsthand experience as a public junior high student in what was and is rated as one of the better public junior high schools in NYC and what I’ve heard from neighbors from my old NYC neighborhood and friends who had attended/currently teach in urban/rural public schools…including the most challenging schools in the NYC public school system.
And suburban public schools aren’t immune to the other problem I mentioned with being a K-12 public school teacher…having to deal with parents, higher admins, and educrats trying to micromanage and blame the teachers for issues/woes regardless of whether the issues were self-inflicted by the student in question or the issues/woes well-beyond the scope of any teacher/school system to solve.
In fact, from what I’ve seen of the suburban school districts relatives attended or friends currently teach at, those issues could be worse due to parental entitlement issues arising from their upper/upper-middle class and/or supposedly “superior” educational status*.
@cobrat Seems to me that will vary greatly by district/state. Some suburban districts may well be as you describe. Others much less so.
Some private schools have issues as well. As a kid, I can remember parents who sent their kids to private schools saying to their kids “I spent a lot of money to send you here so you better not screw it up.” Now I see a lot of parents sending their kids to private schools who say the same thing to school administrators instead. Not really an issue if you have a long waiting list to get in. But for a lot of private schools across the country, waiting lists are non-existent (attendance for some is dropping).
I know several private school teachers who moved to public schools. None who did the reverse.
All anecdotal no doubt so I can’t paint with broad brush strokes.
"Sorry. I would never have defined heaps of abuse as negative letters to the editor or negative things posted on an internet message board. But if they pick other careers because of all the abuse heaped on them in letters to the editor and in online message boards, prospective teachers/government employees should consider other options carefully. They are not the only jobs/careers with such abuse heaped upon them. Though in the end, it should be no different for public employees as it is private ones: if whatever negatives of any given job/career outweigh the benefits (or its just not worth it to you), pick a different job/career or move to a different location.
In terms of your statement that its especially women who are looking at other options because of all of the abuse heaped upon them, my experience is much different. I see a lot of young women who want to have kids picking teaching because its very conducive to raising kids."
@saillakeerie, the difference is that teachers and other public servants are paid with taxpayers dollars so people are much more likely to show their disdain towards them.
The discussion was about why the best and brightest eschew jobs in teaching (and the public sector.)
This thread just keeps getting better. Apparently to be middle class, you need a 1 million+ apartment in Manhattan, private school that runs 30-40k/per year/per kid and pays 60k/per year/per kid for college. Perhaps, you share the same definition of “middle class” as this guy(start at 1:50):.
An attitude which is completely at odds with many other societies. While teachers in those societies don’t always earn a higher/as high of a salary in all cases, one reason why teaching is much more desirable there as a profession and why there’s enough of a demand that one needs to be a topflight student to become a teacher/be eligible for teacher training is much higher social status/respect accorded by others…including those in other professions requiring university educations such as engineers/programmers, medical doctors, lawyers, business execs, etc.
In fact, in some periods, teachers/academics actually had more respect than some of those professions.
A reason why some branches of my extended family were actually aghast when an uncle opted to leave his social science PhD program at an elite university after 2 years due to toxic infighting between two factions of senior Profs in his department to attend a Top 6 law school in the '70s.
@cobrat:
I was referring mainly to the out of control kind of thing that you can see in troubled school districts and the like. The overbearing parents, the educratic control, etc are reasons why a teacher would go to a private school, in fact I mentioned that as the main reason many choose to teach in private schools, despite pay not being as good as the public schools in many cases.
Private schools are not immune from problems, of course, there are plenty of private schools that get the scions of the well off who are, to use a kind word, ‘somewhat troubled’, and issues like drug use are not exactly unknown. Sometimes kids from well off school districts end up in private schools because they have been asked to leave the local (good) public schools…