Raising Teacher Prestige
No profession is more important than the teaching profession. On a daily basis for 10 months out of the year parents send their young ones to professionals in hopes that they nurture, protect and educate their children for the future. This is no small task! Yet, the teaching profession is still one of the least valued and one of the most underpaid profession compared to other prestigious and high valued professions such as, doctors, lawyers and financial analysts. My intention here is not to argue for more teacher pay but to propose a solution for increasing the prestige of the profession.
My theory is that teachers do not get the pay and the love they deserve because the general public does not actually know what they do. An Exceptional teacher can see growth of 1.5 to 2.0 years from their students in one school year. An ineffective teacher can set a student back 1 to 2 years. That's right, if your child has an ineffective teacher in their class for a year, that student can actually digress while with that teacher! If the public knew more about what makes a teacher Exceptional then parents would make better decisions about where to send their students to school, principals would hire better teachers and their would be more incentive for paying teachers more.
I am excited to be working on a project that does just that! The questions I am asking are; what are the things that make a teacher Exceptional? How do we account for the effects that demographics have on teachers effectiveness when rating teachers across the country in different settings? What should be just compensation and reward for great teaching? Finally, how do we present these answers to an upcoming generation of graduates so that they are motivated to enter this profession and feel valued and respected while doing this work?
These are not easy questions to answer but their are answers out there and I invite anyone who is willing to work on this with me to join me and contact me. I would love to have thought partners who are willing to work and start something that changes the teaching profession for the better moving forward! I look forward to hearing from you all soon!