If there was a study done that gave every profession in America an overall score based on combined difficulty, barriers to entry, importance, scarcity and how underappreciated it is, there is no doubt in my mind that being a K-12 public school teacher would beat out all others by a wide margin.
Think about it. You have to go to college, oftentimes to grad school, then student teach and likely substitute before you get to teach full time. All of that is expensive, and you’re doing it for, at best, a meager salary that most of the time seems barely worth it considering how much time and money you put into your own education. Unless your rich parents or your lottery winnings are paying for all of it, you will likely emerge from grad school submerged in a steaming pile of debt, barely making enough to make ends meet. So you can forget about making decent loan payments.
After all that, an effective teacher must simultaneously teach, inspire, encourage, reprimand, discipline, plan, organize, correct, grade, and deal with unruly parents among many other things on a daily basis. All of this is secondary to the fact that American children, particularly high-schoolers, are some of the least motivated and angsty human beings the world has ever known. In most places around the country, teacher pay is in no way tied to performance. It’s a miracle there are any qualified people that want to be teachers at all.
Our public schools are currently in crisis, and the lack of motivated and qualified teachers is a very real problem. You think the economy sucks now? What’s going to happen in ten or twenty years when those unmotivated high schoolers enter the workforce having gone through our mostly awful public school system, this time with even fewer good teachers to get them to care?
I obviously don’t believe that the burden of motivating teenagers to succeed should fall solely on teachers, but they undoubtedly have a huge impact. Gustavus is not the most exclusive college, but everybody here is capable, somewhat intelligent and motivated. Otherwise they wouldn’t be here. We have all had that teacher who has gone above and beyond what was expected of them. The teacher who made you want to come to class, instilled some of their passion in you and made you want to know more. How do we get more of those people?
Pundits like Fareed Zakaria and Bill Gates have suggested that increasing teacher incentives to make more good people want to become teachers is the best way to fix an education system that has become a relic. At one point in U.S. history, roughly seven out of ten high school students worked on their farm or in a factory their whole lives regardless of whether they graduated high school or not. Only three of ten went to college, and one of those three would go on to graduate schools or other further education.
The solution to our education problem has to start with better teacher pay and benefits, but it can’t stop there. This is a complex and important problem that has as much to do with our culture as it does with administrative and teacher failure, and I don’t pretend to have the answers.
What I do know, however, is that those who devote their lives to the betterment of others deserve our respect. I applaud and admire those of you who are going to become teachers, and I encourage the rest to think about what your professors have gone through the next time you decide to skip class or BS an assignment.