No:
Most teachers have Bachelor’s or Master’s degrees in education, and most people with education degrees are teachers. Decades of research has shown that education is a less rigorous course of study than other majors: Teachers enter college with below-average SAT scores but receive much higher GPAs than other students. It may be that a degree in education simply does not reflect the same underlying skills and knowledge as a degree in, say, history or chemistry. When we compare salaries based on objective measures of cognitive ability — such as SAT, GRE, or IQ scores — the teacher salary penalty disappears.
I’d always suspected that, but I had never actually seen the statistics. Colleges of Education should be abolished, or at least not eligible for federal funding of any kind, including student loan guarantees.
“…the typical worker who moves from the private sector into teaching receives a salary increase, while the typical teacher who leaves for the private sector receives a pay cut.”
First, I know several people who went into teaching after leaving private industry, they did not get increases. Second, anyone who’s ever interviewed a teacher vs a non-teacher can tell you why they get less pay.
I interviewed several teachers with backgrounds in biology when I worked in the poultry industry. Two of them had zero questions about the job, but plenty about time off and over time pay. The other one stopped the interview and left when I told him that our schedules frequently required night, week-end and holiday work.
These were all people with between 5 and 10 years teaching high school, who were applying for entry level jobs to get out of teaching. The youngest one had a masters in biology and one in education too.
I had a kid in high school and one in grade school and the whole thing gave me the creeps.
Are teachers overpaid? The really good ones aren’t and the bad ones most definitely are. However, due to the teachers’ unions, it’s very difficult to pay teachers what they’re worth.
When my wife was getting her Elem Ed degree, she came home one day from a class called “Teaching Elementary Mathematics” absolutely disgusted. The class was covering fractions and some of her classmates — future teachers attending university — didn’t believe the professor that 1/2 = 2/4. The prof had to break out the pie charts to prove it to them.
This is who’s teaching your kids.
I went back to school as an adult for calc, and had a professor also taught the “math for elementary teachers” course. He said it confirmed his suspicions that a great deal of elementary grade teachers target that level precisely because they’re deathly afraid of math. It’s pathetic, really.
When I was an undergrad math major, I decided to take some education classes. I asked one of my classmates, a future elementary teacher, how many math classes she’d taken. She replied, “Oh, the absolute minimum. I hate math!”
I ended up teaching for a year and then rejoining the Air Force, this time as an officer. While my previous enlisted duty had made me used to poverty but I found I no longer enjoyed it. By the time the kids got to me in high school, most of them hated math, too. It doesn’t matter how much an elementary teacher smiles, when she hates math, the kids pick up on that very quickly.
Teachers get not just below average SAT scores, they have the absolutely lowest SAT scores of any profession requiring a 4 year degree. Oh, and they only work 9 months a year.
Mike,
Two points:
1) Social workers actually hvae lower SAT scores…granted, we are in the ‘who is more evil, Nazis or Communists’ territory with that sort of nitpicking, but lets be fair to the teachers…
2) Teachers don’t work 9 months a year…typically they are in the school a bit closer to 10 months out of the year. With that said however, most of them don’t work much of that time.
There are many excellent teachers who could (absent collective bargaining) command much higher salaries than they do at this time. Most, however, are sad wastes of the oxygen required to support their metabolisms.
Anecdotal evidence.
I live in a pretty decent subdivision, one of the better ones in my town. We have several police officers and school teachers who live here.