Would you want your child to be a teacher?
That question, posed by McGraw-Hill Research Foundation, gets to the core of many of the challenges facing education reform. Forget the research on teacher impact and the theoretical conversations surrounding the need to attract the best people into our classrooms, and think honestly about the question in real world terms: If your child decided to become a teacher, how would you feel about his future? One only needs to look to the recent budget debates to see that far too many Americans do not believe that teachers are up to par. But the only way to ensure the academic success of all of our students is to convince the American public and policymakers that teaching is a profession worthy of respect.
McGraw-Hill’s recent white paper, “What the U.S. Can Learn from the World’s Most Successful Education Reforms” by Steven L. Paine and Andreas Schleicher, suggests that raising the status of teachers is essential to raising student achievement levels and producing more internationally competitive graduates. The United States cannot hope to increase student academic success levels without first addressing the way teachers are treated and the systems for recruiting and training candidates for the profession.
Using the results from the most recent Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests to evaluate the scholastic performance of 15-year-old students in 74 education systems, the authors looked for lessons from the highest-performing PISA nations (the U.S. ranked 30th in Math, 23rd in Sciences, and 17th in Reading). They found that generally, “International comparisons show that in the countries with the highest performance, teachers are typically paid better relative to others, [standards for entry into the profession are higher?], education credentials are valued more, and a higher share of educational spending is devoted to instructional services than is the case in the United States.”