McGraw-Hill Research: U.S. Should Raise Teacher Status

Amid a nationwide stir in which teachers' rights are up for discussion, a new report says the U.S. should raise the status of the profession.

The McGraw-Hill Research Foundation's "What the U.S. Can Learn from the World's Most Successful Education Reform Efforts" says the U.S. should take a hint from education systems in top-scoring countries. Nations such as South Korea, Singapore and Finland seek out top level college grads and offer greater pay and mentoring for teachers, the report says.

In an education speech Monday, President Obama repeated sentiments from his State of the Union address, calling for greater respect of teachers and lauding foreign education system, the New York Times reports.

"In South Korea, teachers are known as nation builders. I think it's time we treated our teachers with the same level of respect right here in the United States of America."

Obama has made education a primary focus and is pushing Congress for reform by September. He'd like to see better efforts made that support teachers, leaving much room for creativity and growth and little room for poor teaching, the Associated Press reports. Obama has stressed that education cuts are not an option.

Andreas Schleicher, one of the report authors, tells the New York Times the U.S. spends education dollars disproportionately on areas such as bus transportation and sports facilities.

"You can spend a lot of money on education, but if you don't spend it wisely, on improving the quality of instruction, you won't get higher student outcomes," Mr. Schleicher said.

Attempting to prove that attracting the best teachers and holding them accountable gives way to academic success, a charter school in New York City is offering teachers $125,000 a year.
The school's founder and principal said the teachers are "worth it" and has hand-picked the best and brightest, CBS reports

Some of the school's chosen teachers include Rhena Jasey, a Harvard grad who's been teaching for eight years and Gina Galassi, an accomplished violist who teaches music.

Comments

[Caplee3]

12:29 AM on 04/03/2011

McGraw Hill has made a good point about teacher status, however, like a true text book company does not know how to do it.

Teacher status will raise when the public sees results. However, these results must not be artificial. Teachers may no longer be forced to teach to the test or the text. To get respect, teachers must take back their profession. They must be allowed to teach in the way kids learn best which is also the way they teach best. With NCLB the artificial test became powerful and education became secondary. Failure was mathematically guaranteed as schools and students were ranked. When someone is first, someone must also be last. How does that allow us to educate all children? It doesn't!

Teachers, take back your profession.

Cap Lee
See a student poem at www.WholeChildReform.com

[Linda GR]

11:27 PM on 03/27/2011

As a Canadian I have been following the controversy around the perceived problems in American education. I would suggest that there should be more focus on teacher preparation. Because of the lack of confidence in the profession, you have organizations like Teach for America and The New Teacher Project, supposedly dedicated to making a difference. The former recruits smart college grads, gives them a few weeks of training, then sends them into hard-to-serve schools. The latter recruits people who wants to change careers and fast-tracks them to certification in a few months. Such quick routes into teaching have not been available in Ontario for 40 years. Here a university grad who wants to become a teacher must earn a second degree at a college of education. It is one full year, including many weeks of practicum. Someone who wants to change careers requires a bachelor's degree with one or two 'teachable' subjects (not just any degree) and the full year of teachers college. Entrance to teachers college requires top grades and considerable volunteer teaching experience. And there is no fast-tracking.

[El Chingaso]

01:20 AM on 03/23/2011

I say can public ed bureaucrats and raise teachers' pay. Anyone that can work with today's kids...deserves to earn $100K-plus (but we need results, too -- not just the same old product). Another helpful suggestion...is to get the U.S. government out of the education game altogether. That'd cut down on all those useless e-mails and paperwork requirements that overly-paid administrators shuttle among each other. I mean, let's be bold and try it...

[Cantinflas]

03:49 PM on 03/22/2011

Pass my next two posts to your friends who think teaching is easy, and to the ones
that know it is hard. If you happen to have Scott Walker's email address, pass it along to him, as well.

[Josie Burton]

09:29 PM on 03/31/2011

Excellent. Except to be realistic, that should be 30-35 students per class, and 20 of them English learners.

[Cantinflas]

03:48 PM on 03/22/2011

Part II:

In addition, they will complete fire drills, tornado drills, and [Code
Red] drills for shooting attacks each month.
They must attend workshops, faculty meetings, and attend curriculum
development meetings. They must also tutor students who are behind and
strive to get their 2 non-English speaking children proficient enough
to take the SOLS tests. If they are sick or having a bad day they
must not let it show.

Each day they must maintain discipline and provide an educationally
stimulating environment to motivate students at all times. If all
students do not wish to cooperate, work, or learn, the teacher will be
held responsible.

The business people will only have access to the public golf course on
the weekends, but with their new salary, they will not be able to
afford it. There will be no access to vendors who want to take them
out to lunch, and lunch will be limited to thirty minutes, which is
not counted as part of their work day. The business people will be
permitted to use a student restroom, as long as another survival
candidate can supervise their class.

If the copier is operable, they may make copies of necessary materials
before, or after, school. However, they cannot surpass their monthly
limit of copies. The business people must continually advance their
education, at their expense, and on their own time.

The winner of this Season of Survivor will be allowed to return to their regular job.

[Cantinflas]

03:47 PM on 03/22/2011

Part I:

Have you heard about the next planned "Survivor" show?
Three businessmen and three businesswomen will be dropped in an public
school classroom for 1 school year. Each business person will be
provided with a copy of his/her school district's curriculum, and a
class of 20-25 students.

Each class will have a minimum of five learning-disabled children,
three with A.D.H.D., one gifted child, and two who speak limited
English. Three students will be labeled with severe behavior problems.

Each business person must complete lesson plans at least 3 days in
advance, with annotations for curriculum objectives and modify,
organize, or create their materials accordingly. They will be required
to teach students, handle misconduct, implement technology, document
attendance, write referrals, correct homework, make bulletin boards,
compute grades, complete report cards, document benchmarks,
communicate with parents, and arrange parent conferences. They must
also stand in their doorway between class changes to monitor the
hallways.

[becut]

11:32 AM on 03/22/2011

Why does America need a more educated populace? There are no jobs! Corporations can get highly educated immigrants from other countries to work for less. Education reform is about educating less people, not more: corporate owned media attacking underpaid / overwhelmed teachers in empoverished communites; busting unions, using temporary teachers, getting rid of higher paid teachers, privitizing schools with public funds (Charter Schools do a worse job than public schools); testing kids to death, etc.

There are no jobs! Where are these high tech jobs? With computers the high tech jobs can be wired online in another country, India or China, which we see when we call about airline tickets, credit cards, etc., we are talking to people in other countries. Hundrends of thousands jobs have left the country, never to return............why pay American workers $20. an hour, when you can pay someone in another country $3...........and don't even have to pay to educate them. Not educating American children (especially the poor) is a Win Win for the corporations..............they don't need them anymore.

This mess (education reform) is a cruel joke designed to educate very fewer children, not more.

[Badgolfer1974]

10:23 AM on 03/22/2011

What I've said all along - it's the profession, not the teachers that need the reform:

http://TheEducatedSociety.com/putting-the-focus-on-the-profession-not-the-teachers/

[sydneymoon]

11:23 AM on 03/20/2011

Report: Thank you Captain Obvious

[Tom Iarossi]

02:49 AM on 03/20/2011

The whole issue of education reform is too complex for simplistic answers. There are all the societal dynamics that kids bring to school, like poverty, hunger, disengaged parents, gangs, drugs, violence, and teen pregnancy. You have a few teachers with tenure who should have been fired before they reached that point and a system that makes it almost impossible to get rid of them.

Then you have school boards who spend their time trying to push religion into the public schools with issues like creationism instead of science and prayer or the ten commandments in class. People who want to revise history to suit their narrow political views, as happened in Texas and Tennessee. People who think kids won't have sex if you don't talk about it.

All of that is topped off with pay scales for teachers that are insultingly low and a right-wing bloviating machine that constantly disparages teachers, an attitude that is reflected in too many people. This is a technicolor world, folks - black and white answers waste our time.

[farmilyman]

02:37 AM on 03/19/2011

The attack on teachers across the nation was planned by the GOP so that they could set up for profit schools and teach things like creationism and revisionist history.

[Nikolai Curtis]

10:53 AM on 03/21/2011

Oh you mean the history of how the white man founded America, did nothing wrong to Native Americans, and how every law we have is due to the noble actions of law-abiding citizens. We never massacred any native peoples, the brigands and neer do wells had nothing to do with constitutional change, and the geniuses of the world weren't actually a little off center? Read a little bit of Howard Zinn and you'll learn some of the real history of America.

[SupportPublicEd]

01:55 AM on 03/18/2011

Wow, we need a report from a publishing company to figure out that the teaching profession in America is undervalued, undersupported and underfunded?

The pseudo-reformers love to throw around studies, but what about the research that shows merit pay does not improve student learning. What about the numbers that show states with unions score higher on standardized tests than those without?

The reforms passing and pending in Idaho and Florida and Wisconsin and across the nation are not proven strategies for improving learning and they are certainly not strategies for valuing, supporting, and developing expert teachers.

And don't forget... discussion of these international tests creates a large assumption - that doing well on the test is the ultimate goal. I personally have never seen these tests, and I am pretty certain that in 14 years of teaching, my students have never seen them either.

The goal of the OECD that administers PISA is economic and social well-being. These are econ people, not education people. Funny, because the reforms being pushed through right now seem more like economic reforms than education reforms...

http://supportpubliceducation.blogspot.com/2011/01/why-test-scores-are-failing-us.html

[dmessy]

01:01 AM on 03/18/2011

Pay is almost always tied to the availability of skills. We don't expect a lot of skills from teachers and therefore they are treated like commodities. That's why merit system, setting the bar high, and expecting teachers and students to be successful are important. Sadly, most of the teachers I see, while they might have in the past been enthusastic do not really bring any true motivation to the job. The get into a routine and no longer "care" whether they are achieveing the goal of not just having students with good grades, but bring a passion of life-long learning. Most can't wait to leave the school building. And instead of teaching they just assign a lot of homework and expect parents to deal with it. I'm all for raising the bar, and raising salaires if the commitment is there.

[SupportPublicEd]

10:40 AM on 03/18/2011

Do you really think the Wall Street traders and ceo's who brought down the world's economies received million dollar bonuses because they were skilled? They were greedy and dishonest and lucky.

When someone can prove to me that the merit-pay or so called business model that apparently every other profession uses is actually productive and actually makes business run better, more equitably, and sustainably, then I will start to listen.

Until then, it is a false premise.

[dmessy]

07:04 PM on 03/18/2011

no I don't think that many people who make millions are that skilled. yes -- i do think that many of the manipulate the system. but we're not talking about people getting merit pay like that. I'm talking about the people who maybe get and extra 10-20,000 a year. For a lot of people like me that's a lot of money. I don't know why you would judge the extreme and suggest that is true for everyone. Merit pay works, and it works very well. It can be abused in the abstract -- but for most of us in the private sector -- it's part of what motivates us to go the extra mile.

[flowerofhighrank]

01:14 PM on 03/18/2011

As a teacher, I'd like to apologize for the teacher in your past who criticized you for not doing your homework. I think judging all of us on this one, long-past experience is kind of harsh...
My colleagues and I are great teachers teaching the best kids their parents could send us. I'd love to have you come in and teach for a day in my room- I bet ANY one of your local teachers would love to see that!- and, if you have a college degree we could probably make it happen.
Oh, and if you HAVE a college degree...you should probably call your toughest teacher and thank him or her. Yes, even after all these years, it'd be appreciated. Maybe send him or her some fruit or a gift card.

I'll wait right here while you go and do that.

Still waiting....

Still, uh- just call the school's operator! They can find the teacher. Got it? Good. I'll just wait right, uh, here.

Wow. Still haven't done it?

Maybe....maybe the problem isn't the teachers.

[dmessy]

07:10 PM on 03/18/2011

I love teachers in general and I"m not suggesting all teachers are like that. But the good ones appear to be the exception. If I take out the teachers who have less than 5 years of experience (and because of their youth tend to be more "motivated") the enthusiasm drops. As for teaching in schools, I used to teach in 2-years colleges but my schedule doesn't permit that. I do, however, teach a class on "reading the classics" to 2-4th graders when I can. I also help fund a program on Robotics for the school. The point is that I know very well what it takes for kids to learn. You need to push them to reach their potential and push repetition and love of learning. it's not easy I grant you -- but a lot of jobs are not easy. And like most students -- I had my mentors. I had a father who believed in a "classical" education and through his efforts many kids including myself want on to win many achievement awards.

[Christopher Bowen]

04:51 PM on 03/17/2011

Over and over, research suggests that having a top teacher in the room can make a huge difference. The more we bash teachers, the more we cut their benefits and wages, the fewer top college grads will go into the profession. If we are going to compete and compare our education system with other nations, we don't get to gerrymander the data. Good wages and benefits attract good employees. That needs to be part of the solution.

Chris Bowen
http://teacher2teacher.lacoe.edu/a-fresh-dreamer.aspx

[carstohelpkids]

03:34 PM on 03/17/2011

It's funny that it took America this long to realize that teachers are not given the credit they deserve. I rather see teachers getting paid good wages (35-50,000) instead of union employees getting paid $30 an hour to basically stand around for hours. It is sickening. This makes so much sense. Teachers are the ones that help children learn the basics on life. Shouldn't they be respected as much as a doctor?

[Tom Iarossi]

02:29 AM on 03/20/2011

$35-$50k is not good wages considering the high academic price to become a teacher. 100% of teachers have Bachelor's degrees vs 38% of the population (which includes teachers). 41% have Master's degrees vs 7% of the population. I have a Master's in Education and having just retired from the military, I'm in a teacher prep program. It will be 3-1/2 years before I have clear credential. By then I will have almost 11 years of college.

You want quality teachers? Start them at $50k and give them the opportunity to make $100k plus yearly, and I don't mean with performance bonuses. Then you can be more selective in who you hire and expect more from them. And we need to stop the manure coming from both sides, like the resistance to getting rid of bad teachers on one hand and the push to add untruths ("intelligent design" and historical revision) on the other.

[carstohelpkids]

01:41 PM on 03/21/2011

Well, where I live, most teachers get paid $25,000! So $35,000 was quite an increase. Yes, I believe teachers should be paid $45,000+. It still will not help all the parents out there that do not care! Many parents place careers first. So some children are setup for failure regardless of what teachers do.

[broui]

10:47 AM on 03/22/2011

I went $60,000 in debt to become a teacher with a MA in Ed so I could learn to be a good teacher.

$35-50k is not going to pay that off any time soon. (As it happens I'm up to just shy of $60k now)Just sayin'.