I don’t blame them but fuck this is scary.
Wage is exactly why I did not consider teaching. Grad salary for secondary ed in Chemistry or Mathematics in WA is 78k. That means you’ve completed enough chem or math units to complete a degree, and then done teaching on top. The grad salary on the mines is far higher, and with that much math you could go into the actuarial field and make 200k in a couple of years.
Why would I study an extra 1 or 2 years to be paid less?
(To be fair, I did none of the above. But it is why I didn’t go into teaching)
Teacher of 20+ years checking in. Schools only continue in their current state because of the hard work and good will of education workers. It’s not an endless resource though. If governments keep ignoring problems in schools, they will collapse as people can’t afford to work there anymore because of the financial or mental health costs.
Stressful training and work environment, long hours, and the pay isn’t that great either. This really is the government’s problem to solve - and it’s probably not going to be solved just by paying people once to complete their degree, it will have to be throughout their career by providing more pay and more support. Which of course means the public will eventually end up footing at least some of the bill - but the alternative, where education is compromised, will end up costing even more.
We are already seeing the result of this. This is the result of this.
I don’t want to disrespect teachers, but the really skilful teachers, with innate people-management skills ended up in the private sector, in high paying people-management roles.
This resulted in only the truly passionate teachers staying on the industry. These passionate teachers were easy pray for manipulative, trouble-making students, which forced more and more teachers out of the industry.
This has been a negative-feedback loop over the last 40 years. The only way to resolve the this is to (strategically) pump money into pulling people out of the private sector and back into teaching.
I am sure that there are thousands of people in middle management roles who would love to take on a teaching (or educational management) role with KPIs based on benefit to society, rather than benefit to the pay packet of the next manager up the org chart, as long as they had a decent wage.
