<p>I was involved in an interesting discussion yesterday and would like the opinions of the thoughtful group here. The premise is that we shouldn’t pay all teachers the same salaries based on longevity and education as most, if not all, public schools do these days. (Not talking about performance here–we left that for another discussion.) For example, teachers of more “difficult” subject matter (physics, for example) are deserving of more money than art or music. Here’s how one woman put it: “We should develop a teacher pay plan based on knowledge required to teach the subject.” I’m not sure where such a proposal puts a kindergarten teacher, for example, or a high school home economics or phys ed teacher.</p>
<p>I am not familiar with top-notch private schools. Are their teachers remunerated using a similar plan?</p>
<p>I am certified in a significant shortage area. I’d love to be paid more because of that. BUT the reality is…it’s not my school district’s fault that there are not enough grads to fill the jobs. </p>
<p>Just FYI…music teachers are a shortage area in this state. Not EVERYONE can just become a music educator. Music ed programs require an audition and interview at most colleges.</p>
<p>Such a plan would require a ton of judgment calls…Not sure we could ever agree that physics is more important than art. OP mentions subject difficulty, not "importance. Seems you are saying those subjects are more important if you are going to pay those teachers more. Who gets to decide that physics is more difficult than art or music? Seems like this plan is full of holes!</p>
<p>Barron, would you support that concept for public schools? If the college is an engineering school, they usually pay their engineering profs more than the liberal arts profs…Thought that was so industry didn’t ‘steal’ their profs!</p>
<p>Think about other careers that do that. I am a nurse, many hospitals will offer hiring bonus or pay differential for specialized nurses that are in need. Doctors salaries are often differentiated by specialty as well. Does that mean that one specialty works harder than another one? Somethimes yes, sometimes no. Healthcare may not be the best example for this, as it is one of the most dysfunctional systems around. But specialized attorneys can be paid differently as well. I am sure that there are a number of other professions that have the same type of pay differentiation. It can come down to the need for professional staff in a specific area as well as the need for that type of professional to have specialized education/training to perform a specific job. But there are no easy answers.</p>
<p>This should all be handled by market forces. If people qualified to teach e.g. physics want more money, let them go do other work. If this doesn’t lead to a situation that society likes, then the government should start offering additional compensation to attract more talent.</p>
<p>Is STEM education failing in K-12? Perhaps. If so, the easiest way to fix it is to make K-12 STEM teaching careers more attractive to people with actual STEM training… I can think of a few ways:
(1) Remove the requirement that STEM people get a special teaching certification.
(2) Increase monetary incentives for K-12 STEM teaching.</p>
<p>The same thing goes for any subject… if K-12 Arts programs are failing, and society wants to make K-12 Arts programs better, make it easier for college-educated Arts people to get a job and offer better incentives.</p>
<p>To sum up, I think that offering e.g. Physics K-12 teachers more money is a good thing, not because of any kind of “hardness” metric but because there’s probably a shortage of qualified people competing for these (unattractive) jobs. When a physics major can pull down at least $50k out of college working in engineering/IT, it’s hard to make the sacrifice to go into teaching… money isn’t everything, but it helps when you’re raising a family.</p>
<p>Neither of my kids took physics…both were very accomplished musicians. I expected those music teachers to be top notch…and they were. While some would argue that physics is more important…it was NOT for the students in this family (one is a college grad in a STEM field do it’s not like we don’t know about sciences and math).</p>
<p>Yup. I’ve hired a lot of teachers. Way, way easier to hire a great gym teacher or social studies teacher than to hire a great English teacher or science teacher. Furthermore, the out-of-class workload varies tremendously between subjects. I’ve yet to see a gym teacher spending hours a day grading and evaluating student work, and any decent English teacher has that routinely. Well-qualified science and math teachers are a lot scarcer than they were when women didn’t have great career alternatives and when we didn’t require so much math and science in high school. (Not objecting to that requirement in the least, but we’ve increased the number of required math courses by 50-100% in a number of states, and typically increased the science requirement as well. Along the way, options taught by vocational teachers (business math and consumer math) were often dropped in favor of the core Algebra/Geometry/Agebra II-Trig/Functions-PreCalculus series, all of which has substantially driven up the demand for math teachers.)</p>
<p>To me it isn’t a question about which subject are more difficult – it is a supply and demand issue, and also a workload reflection. My personal experience is that middle school music teachers are probably the very hardest hire – a smaller middle school will only have a single teacher who needs to handle vocal, band, and orchestra – a lot of preps and a lot of different skill sets, or you break it into tiny part-time positions that are even harder to fill. Elementary music is a lot simpler, and high school music is typically specialized and has frequent extra-duty compensation.</p>
<p>Talk to most high school teachers about teaching Kindergarten and watch what happens…eyes glaze over and FEAR (and disgust at snotty hands, potty accidents, etc, etc) is the gut reaction. While Kdg teachers may not be teaching physics and chemistry, they are developing literacy skills and life skills…both of which are pre-reqs for success in the “harder” subjects.</p>
<p>Just pay teachers fairly, treat them well, and send your kids to school prepared. Some of what teachers are asked to do these days justifies a reasonably high salary.</p>
<p>It’s easy - it should be supply and demand and not necessarily the difficulty of the material although the two often go hand in hand. There are a lot more teachers with creds to teach history or English but not so many who can effectively teach physics or AP computer science or AP chemistry. If it turns out that at a particular school it’s more difficult to find a qualified art teacher than a physics teacher then the art teacher should earn more. If there’s no shortage of teachers in any subject area then they should probably all be paid less since there’s more supply than demand.</p>
<p>^ Concur. Forget about hardness. If there were only one person willing to teach gym, I’d be prepared to pay him $100k a year (rather than cut physical education from K-12). Problem is, for that money, there would be plenty of highly-qualified people willing to teach gym, and you’d be a sucker not to offer less.</p>
<p>Why shouldn’t it work the same way for any teaching discipline?</p>
<p>I have long held the highest paid job in our society should be kindergarten and first grade teachers. Even more than President, CEO of a Fortune 500, etc., etc., etc. Not only do you have to teach the very base of all these kids educations, you have to do it while never losing your patience.</p>
<p>The problem with that is that there are plenty of people willing to teach K-1. Like I said, if only 10 people in America were willing to teach K-1, they’d probably make millions a year.</p>
<p>^^^Yeah, but if we had lots of people who wanted to teach K-1 than we could have the very best for every kid. And if we were paying them so much, we would have an incentive to make sure they were the very best.</p>
<p>So should inner city teachers working with severely emotionally disturbed kids get top salaries? They probably have the hardest job of all that requires true dedication and respect for all children.</p>
<p>Since learning the basics of reading and math are the cornerstones of education… should elementary school teachers be paid the most? The job of the elementary school teacher isn’t just to teach but to nurture the mind, and the child, so that a child enjoys learning…sounds like a pretty important job to me…maybe they should be paid the most.</p>