Posted on 03/15/2011 9:30:00 PM PDT by TheConservativeCitizen
I’m gonna be upfront here. Don’t read this if you are faint of heart or can’t handle true things. There are gonna be things called facts strewn about and they may hurt.
I’m just sayin’.
I remember awhile back tellin’ my wife that I thought she was one of the reasons that our education system isn’t doing as well as we would like.
She looked at me and asked “Why?”
I said, “Because you are a woman.”
I had to walk home, but I have my reasons.
You see, in the “old days” women really were discriminated against in the workplace. Many occupations and jobs simply weren’t available to women.
But one was. Teaching.
And so it was that our best young women who wanted to enter the job market, as it were, entered it as a teacher. And they were great.
But then a funny thing happened on the way to work…women achieved more and more gender equality until…whammo! The whole of the working world was open to them. And guess what happened?
" Until a few decades ago, employment discrimination perversely strengthened our teaching force. Brilliant women became elementary school teachers, because better jobs weren’t open to them. It was profoundly unfair, but the discrimination did benefit America’s children.
These days, brilliant women become surgeons and investment bankers – …"
And the world was right! Women were able to compete for, and win, some of the best jobs in America. We had achieved our goal, equality at last! Except for one small detail:
"… 47 percent of America’s kindergarten through 12th-grade teachers come from the bottom one-third of their college classes (as measured by SAT scores)."
Blink. Blink.
47% come from the bottom 1/3. Jeepers!
As women were more and more able to compete in the market place for excellent jobs, they left teaching. And with men, and now women, working to land that “dream job”, the role of filling the job of teacher fell to the …. well, it fell to the lowest performers.
Now, to be sure, this is a general statement. Certainly top students enter the teaching profession. I, personally, have many friends and family that are fantastically smart and have become teachers.
God bless ‘em.
But the fact is that we’re losing our best and brightest to other professions. And no matter what happens in Wisconsin or Ohio or Illinois or wherever, we need our best. And our brightest. To want to become teachers.
We need the government out of Education (among the many other things they need to be out of)
Very true.
Maybe they don't want to become teachers precisely because they are the best and the brightest.
What does the author suggest to make the best and the brightest want to become teachers?
My mom, a teacher for several years, would agree with this. Her take on it, however, was that not only were the teachers women, but the administrators were women. She claimed that administration policies changed when the men took over and all sorts of problems were introduced: new (unproven)curriculums, lack of discipline, inability to properly relate to parents, too much reliance on standardized test scores, .....
Men and women become surgeons and bankers etc because those jobs allow them to make as much money as their talents allow!
As soon as education is removed from the grip of the government and the unions, then the most qualified people, men and women, will want to enter it as a profession. If you have a passion to do something and the pay is dependent on your ability to do your job well, then you will want to be the very best that you can be!
So, if you don’t want to be a teacher? You know, some of those men with high paying positions could give them up and become teachers as well.
I’d rather have a teacher who wants to teach than someone who’s there because they can’t do the job they really want to do.
Well, sorta. First, you would have to prove that nurses today are a lot dumber, as nursing was open to women en masse long before even teaching was.
I have always believed that teachers should be paid as much or more as any doctor. Because a doc only focuses on issues as they arise. A teacher is molding a life in a society that parental figures with time and gumption on their hands are few and far between.
“I have always believed that teachers should be paid as much or more as any doctor.”
Not me, and I have given up oodles to teach my kids.
It is way harder to be a doctor.
The incredibly strenuous education to get an MD is extremely tough. None but the brightest, most disciplined and most mentally and emotionally stable can manage.
There has to be a big reward for the incredibly hard education you need to get before you can begin to start to earn - at the belated age of 28 or so.
A person with a decent high school diploma should be capable of teaching at least through junior high. I know I am.
It is not about the value, per se, but the fact that only a few of our healthiest, best educated, most stable people who sacrifice a great deal and delay income for a long time can become an MD.
If there is not a big paycheck at the end of that long hard road, not many will do it.
Whereas many are willing to teach for far less income.
The law of supply and demand works well.
I have to disagree with the author. Look at the success of homeschooling mothers. They don’t all have teaching degrees or even a college education.
Had the same set of thoughts 10+ years ago.
Most people don’t realize it - because for older people - we graft the capabilities of our old teachers on the newer ranks.
For the younger people - they have never known anything different.
The best and the brightest now homeschool their kids.
Socialist indoctrination day care centers are not for the family that knows it can teach their own.
You need to think about your comment - it actually agrees with the author.
Why do you suppose we have homeschoolers now?
Anyway - their success has little to do with the teachers and everything to do with direct parent:child involvement. (We homeschool.)
I will venture to guess you are <35?
40+ years ago - a completely different intellectual/cultural class were teachers. They commanded respect - even from smart kids. In the current world - a smart person feels uncomfortable in a school.
It is as if you took all of the engineers at Boeing and replaced them with draftsmen. Nothing jusdgemental - but - reality.
It is just an unintended consequence of massive societal change - the leftist “forgot” to take into account the effect changing the entire teaching profession would have.
The discrimination was wrong - but those old teachers were smart.
I agree that we’ve dumbed down education in this society and that affects the pool of teachers. But the student demographics have changed, too. A large number of children are products of divorce, single-parent families, abuse and neglect situations. Many have parents who not English-language proficient. So I wouldn’t totally compare modern teachers to old school teachers without taking into consideration that they are dealing with problems less prevalent 40 years ago.
What is this wisdom you speak of Persevero?
I would call that a ‘check-mate’
I heard this theory years ago...and it makes as much sense now as it did then.
But we don’t need to go back to that age. If the schools decided to make kids behaved, and the teachers’ unions stopped controlling who can teach (and protecting those who couldn’t), I would expect that there would be TONS of applicants from our army of retired people, who don’t have enough money to jetset around the world (or, for certain, who soon won’t have enough money to jetset around the world...once our dollar collapses).
“I have always believed that teachers should be paid as much or more as any doctor. Because a doc only focuses on issues as they arise. A teacher is molding a life in a society that parental figures with time and gumption on their hands are few and far between.”
Personally, the free market setting wages for teachers would be ok with me...but maybe that’s because I’m on this site.
All gender issues aside, I've long said that one of the most obvious signs that we don't put a high value on good teachers in this country is that you hardly ever see immigrants from places like Japan, Korea or India pursue careers in education here. This is a pretty remarkable thing, when you consider just how important education is in these cultures.
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