Color me skeptical that it's a specialized profession. It does not appear to me that decades of education majors have done any better than those who didn't possess such a degree, or that there are any special skills involved beyond knowing the subject and good interpersonal skills. When I think back to my best teachers, none of them had any special skills. They were just passionate. It doesn't help that when you delve into it, all this 'specialized knowledge' about how to learn turns out to be junk science: cf. 'learning styles' or 'three cueing', which destroyed the ability of millions of kids to actually read. [1]
Let's try a model where yes, we pay teachers more - much more. But instead of hiring "teachers", we hire experts who are passionate about their subject and want others to learn about it. Let's do this from middle school onward.
In elementary school, we can focus on getting kids to read and do basic arithmetic, and otherwise let it basically be daycare. A lot of underperformance at that age goes away if you simply give the kid more time to mature - for some mad reason at least in my school district, kindergarteners are expected to already know their letters and numbers and be able to read a few words.
> none of them had any special skills
Great teachers make it look easy. What you don't see is the preparation and the previous iterations of their ideas. It's like acting - good actors make it look like an easy profession. But try "acting naturally" in front of a camera sometime. For most people, even walking becomes awkward.
Or programming. Behind most great programmers is a trail of terrible code that they have written over the years.
>They were just passionate. It doesn't help that when you delve into it, all this 'specialized knowledge' about how to learn turns out to be junk science: cf. 'learning styles' or 'three cueing', which destroyed the ability of millions of kids to actually read.
There are quite a few people who can read, even at a high level. But how do you teach it, and teach it in a scalable way? It's not as easy as you think.
Also, what field doesn't have fashion and missteps? Doesn't HN regularly complain about how various programming paradigms and languages were terrible ideas? What makes you think that anyone can do something complex by going from zero to the best implementation in one iteration?
There is no good source on "this kind of thing"!
This is a type of "Wicked Problem"[1] and also a political darling of every political group.
And since every social scientist is just a person, with political, personal, and moral beliefs, any papers that they are willing to release typically reflect that. Further, any "peers" that review those papers will have similar beliefs because they know which places they would like that info published.
If you have pretty progressive beliefs, you will "know" that more money, in combination with identity awareness and additional help to those that match historically oppressed identities, is the answer.
If you have pretty conservative beliefs, you will "know" that it is the environment, "brainwashed" and "lazy" teachers and students (but not your kids, of course!) that are the blame. Vouchers and private schools (letting the market work) are the answer.
And there are people with beliefs everywhere on that spectrum. And not matter your beliefs, you can find research to back it up.
Education is just something that will forever be argued about and there is no clear-cut solution, even though nearly everyone thinks that there is, if only everyone else could just understand their point of view!.
> The wage gap between teachers and non-teachers disappears when both groups are matched on an objective measure of cognitive ability rather than on years of education.
That “objective measure” is based on human capital model of wages, and it seems to me pretty biased to apply to such a specialized profession.
Being wonderful at making a group of 6 years old engaged in your teaching and making them progress seems pretty hard to directly transfer to any other non teaching job.
I feel it’s like asking a pro sax player to transfer skills in another domain and ponder they lose a lot of market value.
Which is also part of the other quote you bring in. If I were to move to a teaching position, I’d look damn hard to be better paid or I wouldn’t move. And it’s not like an Amazon factory worker could just move into teaching tomorrow when he can’t take it anymore. So the pool going into teaching is extremely self selected and also biased.