{"id":139894,"date":"2013-05-24T13:00:26","date_gmt":"2013-05-24T17:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/?p=139894"},"modified":"2013-05-23T11:18:17","modified_gmt":"2013-05-23T15:18:17","slug":"defining-the-real-value-of-our-teachers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/cultural-correspondent\/05\/24\/defining-the-real-value-of-our-teachers\/","title":{"rendered":"Defining The Real “Value” Of Our Teachers"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Teacher<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a typical day at work. You begin to teach the day\u2019s lessons that you prepared the night before when all of a sudden, your surroundings are reduced to a pile of squat cinder blocks. Or when, say, a cowardly man enters the building and spews a fatal stream of bullets at anyone and everyone who dares stand in his way. You continue to do your job, which is–and always has been–to tirelessly nurture, primarily academically but in these circumstances emotionally and physically, your students. The president sees it differently, though, and even awards several Presidential Citizens Medals to some of your peers for what he–and many other politicians and taxpayers around the country–considers true heroism. And yet, that praise has an expiration date. Within the course of a few weeks, the nobility of your profession diminishes, and the number of politicians waxing poetic on your bravery and the insurmountable challenges that inevitably come with your work grows slim. In the eyes of some of the more unsavory legislators, you are back to being \u201cmore than greedy<\/a>\u201d. You are, in case you haven\u2019t guessed by now, a public school teacher in the United States. You are also tired of the lip service.<\/p>\n

Following a devastating tornado that tore through the plains of central Oklahoma on Monday, elementary school teacher Suzanne Haley<\/a> found herself in a hospital with a metal desk leg piercing through her own flesh. Tammy Glasgow had a cinder block fall onto her neck while she ushered her students into the bathroom for protection. Naturally, the praise for these two women was as effusive as it was expansive. And yet, neither viewed their acts as anything especially significant. \u201cIt\u2019s nothing anybody wouldn\u2019t do,\u201d said Haley.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In spite of those teachers\u2019 humility, you might think that the kind words of local and federal legislators should still carry some weight. Or that the community chorus trilling of teachers\u2019 heroism and their invaluable role in protecting and preparing our nations\u2019 children should be followed by an equally meaningful and lengthy refrain. <\/p>\n

That\u2019s unfortunately not the case; that is, unless you consider increased teachers\u2019 union busting, the advent of slithery Scott Walker-esque types into arenas of serious political thought and cut after cut in public education funding to be a particularly mellifluous melody in your ode to the heroism and value of our nation\u2019s public teachers. <\/p>\n

\"Tornado<\/p>\n

After every tragedy that affects or takes place in a school, we hear the same cheers for teachers. And it\u2019s great–and deserved; the problem is that without taking meaningful action to buttress such flowery praise, the words ring hollow. Disingenuous, even. We say we value our teachers, and we entrust–and burden–them with the challenge of producing a generation of competent, competitive and curious individuals capable of successfully navigating the tricky terrains of a globalized economy. Yet what, when we put these platitudes under the microscope, does said \u201cvalue\u201d boil down to?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In a recent publication by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development<\/a>, researchers were curious as to how nations with the highest performing students were able to achieve those admirable results. One variable analyzed across the board was how each country paid–and therefore incentivized a highly professional teaching force–their teachers with 15 or more years of experience. Of the 27 countries examined, the United States landed just in front of Slovenia and Hungary at the 22nd spot. In this analysis, researchers concluded that teachers in the United States earned less than 60% of the average pay for full-time, college educated workers. In most others, however, teachers on average received from 80 to 100% the average pay of an identically-educated and similarly-employed work force. <\/p>\n

Expounding upon that, major market researching firm McKinsey & Co released a study last year<\/a> that analyzed how top-performing countries went about cultivating their teaching workforce and found that, incredibly, all of the teachers in these countries (Finland, South Korea and Singapore) graduated in the top third of their class. In the United States, however, a little over 20% of new teachers come from the top third of their graduating class, and that number sinks to a mere 14% for poverty-stricken schools.<\/p>\n

No, these countries don\u2019t dole out exorbitant sums of money to teachers in hopes of luring in top-achieving graduates, as large salaries aren\u2019t necessarily indicative of subsequent productivity (re: Wall Street CEOs). But what they do<\/em> do is make an effective, professional and high-achieving teaching force a national priority. And how do they do that? Through competition. In these countries, the road to becoming a teacher is highly selective and rigorous (yet affordable) and thus the position is seen as quite esteemed. According to McKinsey researchers and US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, one way to stoke that same kind of competitive flood of high quality teaching forces in the United States–and hopefully achieve similar results in the caliber of students is to attach more competitive wages to teaching contracts. How much? To Duncan, starting teacher salaries should be around $60,000 with maximum earnings topping out at $150,000 a year (at present, the average teacher salary is around $40,000 a year with limited growth).<\/p>\n

As the Oklahoma tornado and Sandy Hook massacre have demonstrated, when it comes to matters of life and death, we as a nation are unabashedly thankful for the heroic–or if you\u2019re Suzanne Haley, average–acts of our teachers. It is how we treat them from day to day, though, that matters most. On a single day, they can save handfuls of lives. But if we truly value them and the minds that they produce, they can do so much more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s a typical day at work. You begin to teach the day\u2019s lessons that you prepared the night before when all of a sudden, your surroundings are reduced to a pile of squat cinder blocks. Or when, say, a cowardly man enters the building and spews a fatal stream of bullets at anyone and everyone […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":549,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[259],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\nDefining The Real "Value" Of Our Teachers - Prose Before Hos<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In the wake of Sandy Hook and the Oklahoma tornados, we call our public school teachers heroes. 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