@emilybeeWhy wouid anyone want to go into teaching given the disdain a large minority of people have about them and the fact that these people wouid pay them even less and take away their benefits if they could?
Well - a lot of people go into teaching because they love the vocation and the lifestyle is presents. Remember, that as a teacher you work about 2 months less than those in the private sector, so when people say teachers are paid poorly, if you translated their salary into 10 months it is quite competitive. I know a couple of woman who went to work in schools after a short career in private sector business. They worked about 10 hrs less per week, got better health benefits for a lower cost contribution, and got more than quadruple the amount of vacation. One opted to get a summer job to bring her earnings up, the other enjoyed the well deserved summer break.
Yes, and on the private school side many women seek those teaching jobs for reasons that have nothing to do with their actual salary. Many elite private schools offer free tuition to the children of teachers. In the day school I am most familiar with that is $30,000 per annum for grades K-8 and $35,000 for high school. If you have 2 or 3 children that is quite a yearly benefit. Your children come to and from school with you and are off from school when you are. It makes a lot of sense even for those that do not need to work, but might not otherwise be able to afford that steep tuition for multiple children.
Edited to add that Boarding Schools provide housing/meals on top of children’s tuition for teachers --the whole family lives on a bucolic campus that is an independent community unto itself. If I were a teacher that is the situation I would seek out.
the argument that charters get to pick and choose students is not correct in Philadelphia. In Philly, charter schools accept students by lottery. Students come from all over the City to go to a charter school. They also do not discriminate against special ed students. I will not speak for other districts.
I think you would have to define what you mean by best and brightest first. Clearly the top minds in most fields are not teaching in primary or secondary school. As I said up the thread, not sure why people think those individuals would be effective teachers of teenagers in the first place.
And I agree with you about teaching in private school. My neighbor is a math teacher and football coach at our local catholic high school. His three daughters all went to that school, and our parish grade school, gratis, to the tune of some 15k a year per kid for high school and maybe 8k a year for elementary. Not a bad little bump there. And let’s not forget that some people teach in religious schools because, well, they are religious and feel more comfortable in an environment they feel more in line with their beliefs.
I would rate the premise as more true than false. I’m sure there are a lot of smart people who choose teaching because it allows them to spend more time with their kids, and the other spouse is the primary earner. There’s also exceptions to any generalization. My high school biology teacher was incredibly smart, aced her MCAT, got admitted to med school, but then needed a job immediately, for whatever personal reasons, and became a teacher. She was exceptional, though, and I doubt many other biology teachers in the state were at her level.
What else do the “best and brightest” of those that major in education do? Sure some of them may eventually branch off and go into other fields for various reasons but I bet most spend some time teaching. Are posters contending that that are no “best and brightest” majoring in education?
No, I think the best Ed majors probably end up teaching. My point at least is that the best Chem majors probably end up in a lab rather than a high school classroom. It is not clear to me why that is a bad thing.
I am not getting the comparison of the “best and brightest” in other fields to those who decide to be educators. Every field has their own “best and brightest.”
An ambitious “go-getter” who majors in finance or applied math has the basic knowledge to teach algebra but they might not have the interpersonal skills, desire to teach or an affinity for adolescents. Why would I want them teaching my children? They are not the “best and brightest” of educators. The “best” educators are not only knowledgeable in their subject but have a strong desire to teach. Most importantly they like and can relate to students of that age group.
^
Best and brightest to me is a shorthand for saying someone has an IQ at least 2, and usually closer to 3 standard deviations above the mean. So “best and brightest” to me is independent of whatever career field someone ultimately ends up in.
^We could debate what IQ is or isn’t, but I think that would take us far afield from the OP’s assertion that the only people qualified to teach K-12 are those who graduated from a top 30 university.
It will be interesting to see if the youngest Trump son will attend Sibley Friends when they move to Washington. Here in NYC I understand that he is in 5th grade at the elite Columbia Grammar & Prep. Ivanka Trump Kushner’s children or at least the oldest child attend probably the hardest admit in NYC for nursery school apart from Dalton, the 92nd St Y… almost impossible to get in. She travels with security to do nursery drop/pick up as one of my daughter’s friends teaches an art class for adults one day a week and has been in the elevator with her.
^ @marvin100 Since this horse is about dead, I’ll make this my last post. However, I don’t think I’m misrepresenting the OP at all.
Consider these quotes:
Since lots of people do in fact go into teaching, the OP obviously believes most people majoring in education are unqualified to do their jobs. Who does the OP want to hire? People from top schools, getting job offers from GS, Google, and Microsoft.
None of that adds up to your claim (verbatim): “the OP’s assertion that the only people qualified to teach K-12 are those who graduated from a top 30 university.”
One comment about teaching and I think someone came up with something, about why people go into teaching. Some people go into it because they truly love to teach, and think they can make a difference, others unfortunately do so because it is seen as a ‘steady’ career with good benefits (of course, forgetting the periods when especially urban school districts hit budget crunches and lay teachers off) and in my view don’t have a passion for it (and I am sure there are people in the middle, too). Best and brightest becomes a complicated idea, because being a good teacher is a different skill set then someone who let’s say is good at finance or programming. I think the negative perception of teachers likely comes from those who went into it who didn’t have the passion or quite honestly, the skill set, teaching is in many ways an art form and it is those who went into it for ‘security’ that give a lot of the bad perceptions, not to mention of course the parents blaming teachers for their kids own flaws
You see something like this on the music side of things, kids who like music get pushed into music ed because with how difficult it is to be a musician, it is a ‘steady job’ and so forth, and there are a lot of frustrated musicians out there working as music teachers in the schools who shouldn’t be there…