At first, this article caught my attention because I thought it would be interesting to see how much less teachers are getting paid compared to other professions. However, once I started to read the article I became much more interested in the first chunk of it. It discusses the increasing demand for teachers. Having always received negative responses when sharing what I planned to do with my career, I figured maybe it was a fairly competitive field and that could perhaps be a factor to the negative realm surrounding the profession. I was surprised to learn that there is an increasing demand for teachers.
First of all, less students are entering this profession. I knew this, so I probably should have known that there was a higher demand. Secondly, career opportunities for women have expanded causing education to be less of a "go-to" career. On the other end of things, teachers are retiring. Without a similar sized pool of replacements, it becomes an uneven ratio. Also, many people are leaving the profession for non-retirement reasons. Studies have shown that the rates of people who leave the profession early have been steadily increasing for decades.
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| http://neatoday.org/2015/06/12/how-teachers-stay-creative-in-the-high-stakes-testing-era/ |
So, although the financial aspect of the article was interesting, I got more out of this side. It made me realize that we all have to take the good with the bad. I like the odds of being able to get a relatively good job. Another interesting thing was that there was a sixteen percent decrease in the number of college students interested in pursuing a career in education. This is due to the reasons stated earlier and the large amount of teacher layoffs during the recession. People became scared of pursuing a teaching career. Still, one of the biggest issues facing the education field is the quality of teachers. There is not a diverse pool of teachers although the student population becomes increasingly diverse. Class size is becoming bigger, and high demands through standardized testing puts immense pressure on the teachers. Obviously some of the reasons people didn't want to go into the profession in the first place has a large impact.
To come full circle, I agree with the article in the aspect that in order to recruit more high quality teachers, a healthier salary is necessary. Money talks, and especially in our world today. We will always need good teachers, but since I am entering the education field I am glad that now we need them more than ever.
It is really interesting reading about research like this because it seems everyone knows the importance of education and teachers, yet like you said the amount of students pursuing these careers have been declining. I was surprised at the difference between men and women wages and would be interested to see other data on this. I agree with you completely that money does talk when students are choosing a career and it will be interesting to see how this changes in the next couple of years.
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