Why are teachers so undervalued in today’s world, when, in so many ways, the profession should be the most highly valued?
The Australian Federal government today released version 2.0 of the MySchools website. ABC news reports that “ the My School 2.0 revamp gives parents more information about school performance and reveals how much money each school receives from the federal and state governments, as well as from other sources, such as fees.” So what has changed? This league table approach to defining and measuring schools still focuses on content outcomes for students. Is this what parents are looking for?
Research shows that parents value social development over content delivery. A 2005 study found that, “on average, parents strongly prefer teachers that principals describe as good at promoting student satisfaction and place relatively less value on a teacher’s ability to raise standardized math or reading achievement.”
(Jacob & Lefgren, What Do Parents Value in Education? And Empirical Investigation of Parents’ Revealed, 2005)
Our own (Group 8 Education) research illustrates what parents seek from a school (sample size is 3,000 parents):
It is worth making the point that the list of values was generated by asking a large number of parents to describe the ideal school for their child/children. An analysis of their answers generated this list, with no answers being ignored. The absence of values around content and its delivery remain the ‘elephant’ in the room here.
So it seems that parents want something other than just content knowledge for their children, yet the government, the media and our society in general still see teachers as primarily content deliverers. If we consider content as a commodity, then in today’s world, its value has fallen significantly. Content has high value where the content has a long shelf-life, is hard to obtain, and where it contributes to a better future for the individual. This was the case, arguably, as late as the early 1990s. Since then, Google is the new content expert, allowing easy access to any kind of expert knowledge. Worse, as the measure of future certainty of our world decreases, so too does the relevance of today’s information. The value of content has dived in a manner far more spectacular than any stock market crash, yet to little notice of many.
If teaching, as a profession, was available to you as a service, outside of any institutional framework, just like a dentist or an accountant, what would you be prepared to pay for a content expert?
What if a teacher could offer your child the full development of resilience, creativity, collaboration, social excellence and the ability to adapt to a very uncertain future. Would this be a different value proposition to you? How would you value a school that, over content grades and university entrance measurements, developed your child to engage with themselves, others and their own future?
These outstanding teachers are, indeed, present in our systems – currently around 1 in 20 – yet their particular engagement skills and impact on students are largely ignored by the systems in which they teach.
We need schools and systems that work with the commodity of engagement over content. Make no mistake – we need both, and each contributes to the effectiveness of the other. Sadly, content remains king.
If education could create students who are fully developed socially, emotionally and cognitively, teachers would be amongst the highest paid professions.
Related articles
- To Surly, With Love: Are Teachers Overpaid? (reason.com)
- Video: Do public-school teachers make too little? (hotair.com)
