I realize this piece is more of a rant, and I won't hold it to a data accuracy standard it never pretended to have, but they pay issue is really misconstrued. Salaries in large urban districts are often well above area median, and when accounting for benefits and pension, quite impressive. In South Dakota and a number of states in the south and rural districts, yes it is another story, and it is bad. Also, teachers NEVER want to discuss pay differentials by anything but years of service. I'm sorry, but most qualified high school physics teachers have way differently valued skillsets in the labor force by alternate employers than most kindergarten teachers.
> Salaries in large urban districts are often well above area median
Is the median the correct benchmark? The median household income in NYC was $67k in 2021 [0]. Why would someone choose to be a teacher making around the median [1] when you could be a software engineer and make 3x as much?
It's not just a matter of trinkets and baubles. That difference allows you to comfortably afford a nice family sized apartment [2] in a safe area with a convenient commute.
People might want to be teachers rather than software engineers because teachers get enormous amounts of time off, have extremely high levels of job security, plus all the usual reasons that not everyone is in the very highest paying profession.
Anyone who's actually been or known a teacher knows this is false.
During the school year, in the time they're not actively teaching, teachers are
- Coaching sports
- Overseeing other student extracurricular activities
- Making/updating lesson plans
- Presiding over detention
- Tutoring students who need more 1:1 time
- Serving on school committees (especially in larger districts)
During the summer, teachers generally spend a large percentage of their time laying out the curriculum for the coming year. This is especially true for those in smaller districts, where one teacher has to teach three or four different levels of the same subject (or even multiple completely different subjects!).
I mean, I guess it's all relative. I'm a software engineer at a startup. On average I work about 50-55 hours a week. I get 3 weeks of vacation a year.
I certainly don't deny that teachers spend a lot of time working on their "time off". But that said, I've known more than a few teachers personally, and yes, they still do get enormous amounts of time off. Heck, a bunch of them will even admit it is the biggest perk of teaching (because otherwise there aren't many).
Teachers have plenty of real, valid complaints about the environment of teaching, and more importantly, it's clear with the current teacher shortage that something is really broken. Still, I don't think it wins them any supporters when teachers try to deny that most of them have vastly more time off than other professionals.
When I was teaching I worked a 7am to 6pm job, 5 days a week. That was actually in the school building, so that's 55 hours right there. The two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon, when I wasn't looking after 35 teenagers in a small, hot and unventilated classroom, were spent marking, planning lessons and writing reports. Have you ever had a job where you literally have to plan how much you drink, so that you don't have a full bladder in the middle of a double Science lesson?
Most weekends I'd dedicate around 5 or 6 hours to work, so that puts me up to about 61 hours a week. Of course we got those amazing holidays. Holidays when you were still expected to answer emails, mark work, write reports, plan assessments and lessons. One year, I remember working from September through to August, and my total time off was Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. In August the exam results come through, so I was expected to be in school to coach children on their options, and then write a 15 page report on the reasons my department had performed or under-performed.
I appreciate that this has turned into a rant, but don't ever think that your job is harder than a teacher, if you are a software engineer. It's not. I can testify to that. Teaching involves understanding your subject, understanding pedagogy, being a parent, councilor and sometimes prison warden to children who are often going through the most difficult times of their lives. You have to do all of that, while basically performing on stage for 5 hours a day, and your lunch break is spent ramming food down your throat so you can get out to the playground on time to supervise the kids out there.
An ex-colleague of mine has asked me to go back into teaching in his school. My response was "okay" can you pay me 150K, because I wouldn't do it for anything less.
I feel that this scales largely based on subject mater, experience, and past history teaching a particular course. I know a number of teachers and there are a lot of differences. Expectations vary by district, school, and parents. There have been many top down changes over time, mostly for the worse increasing workload.
When I was in HS, it was not uncommon to have lecture most days and a graded assignment once a week or even less. This is obviously a lot less work for teachers. In the best cases it can be a 7—4 job with summers completely off.
Why? Are they really better than khan academy at doing a lesson plan? Isn’t this like a software engineer complaining they have to write their own database driver in their spare time after work?
In general, it is a good idea to personalize lesson plans based on how well people did or didn’t react to the last one, and khan academy certainly doesn’t do anything like that, nor does it work for everyone.
The entire point of khan academy is that it is individually tailored to the student and can decide what lessons need additional practice vs those that can be skipped. It sounds like you aren’t at all awqre of how khan academy works.
Are you claiming teachers can personalize a lesson plan for each individual student in a class? To a granularity finer than what Khan Academy can do?
Unless you are suggesting a teacher can clone themselves to however big their class size there is, the individualization is not a realistic prospect given that you have to teach a few dozen kids in a 30-45 minute period. And given that current funding levels are having a hard time keeping teacher retention even at these levels, significantly increasing teacher numbers to make real individualization possible is not within the realm of reality.
Also, individual teaching methods don’t work well in certain subjects; as an example, you need a few people to put on a theatrical production, perform ensemble music, or have Socratic discussions.
Teachers aren't paid to personalize lessons though, if you work overtime to do that then you can only blame yourself. Teachers are paid to hold standardized lessons and answer questions help students with problems.
You could argue it would be better if teachers were paid to personalize lectures, but they aren't. Maybe some document somewhere says they should, but in practice nothing will happen to you if you just use standardized lectures so that is what most will do and that is what the expectations of the job is built around.
You say this because you don't know better, but its very common in schools for kids with learning or other disabilities to be in the same classes as other students - called 'mainstreaming' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainstreaming_(education)
Teachers are 100% supposed to teach the standardized kids, the kids with disabilities, and the kids who are a little faster than everyone else. It's simply not possible to do with one standardized lecture without individual attention to those with special needs.
It's not some document, its literally a major movement decades old in education.
Lesson plans are not standardized down to the day and order.
Sometimes, a group of students might need to speed up, slow down, or go in a wholly different direction depending on what happened with the previous lesson. There’s a lot of variation between one class of students and another, and teachers are not some kind of omniscient perfect predictor of behavior. And ultimately, you need to cover a whole curriculum.
There is a whole spectrum between teaching centrally dictated lesson plans and individually crafted tutoring, and one of the requirements of teaching is to be able to adjust lesson plans according to reality. We don’t expect software engineers to waterfall every last character in code down to the wire, but teachers are supposed to do this with unpredictable human children?
> Why would someone choose to be a teacher making around the median when you could be a software engineer and make 3x as much?
Is that a serious question?
Why indeed? Maybe because a union job with a state pension (yes, defined benefit pension) that starts at 62K and has an advancing pay scale based only on education level and seniority (yes - job performance unrelated to pay) and very high job security ain’t bad place to be if you can get it.
(And also I suspect that a lot of the people getting those teaching jobs simply would not be able to get 200K software development jobs.)
You jest, but this is my suggestion to anyone who wants a career change. You can study and get a PMP or Scrum certificate and get an entry level job fairly easily. And, if successful, can be making 100k within a few years.
Of course you have to be a PM, so there’s that. I’d rather literally herd cats or manage a kindergarten class.
"I call people and ask them to do the things they said they would do, on time. Then we have meetings about it for 4-6 hours a day. Technically I'm in charge."
I’ve met some too, but I’d say that most are incapable. Or they are the same proportion of the population that is capable. I don’t think teachers are any more or less likely than a typical person.
I’d guess I’ve met and spend significant time with 100 teachers. And a handful were capable of being a professional programmer.
I think a more diverse student body, likely one with a wide range of parental income and possibly including some kids who are members or gangs or is just more likely to have a few actually violent (,mentally ill, narcissistic, borderline personality disorder, etc.) kids, with a higher student to teacher ratio, will be much more challenging than a small high-school with 400 kids that more or less fall into "middle class and above with a spattering of low income."
EDIT: found an interesting "day in the life" article by a self-labeled urban teacher.
The parent comment answers itself. They would choose it because they actually don't have the alternative choice. In fact, aside from the transient young Teach for America type affluent idealists, most (not "all") urban public school teachers are gloried babysitters making good babysitting wages. If they teach kids anything it's usually something that should be untaught asap. By and large, the long hauler, professional urban public school teachers are not the type of people who have a ton of useful skills. In fact, the social skills useful for dealing with adults usually atrophy so even being a Software Project Manager is off the table. They become prisoners as much as the students, who at least have a definite term to serve and can get out early for bad behavior. For most kids, urban public schools are a policy solution to the social problem of young, unattended kids causing havoc, not a viable educational tool. Considered in that light they work pretty well.
Yes, for obvious reasons. Classroom size and the relative economic factors of urban schools make the job less desirable than non-urban schools. Urban kids are typically rich or poor. Rich kids end up in non-public schools. Non-urban schools are more often serving the middle class, who have cultural advantages over the poor when it comes to learning outcomes. Why do you think urban parents move to suburban school districts after having kids?
I’ve never heard of ”urban” being a code word for “black”. Is that a thing? I assume they mean “urban” as in “city” where you’re likely to have many other forms of opportunity vs “podunk” where you’re kinda stuck in one career because there’s nothing else around.
> Why would someone choose to be a teacher making around the median [1] when you could be a software engineer and make 3x as much?
Isn’t the answer to this quite obvious? It’s harder to be a software engineer. And there’s more risk to the profession.
Programming is interesting as you can be self-taught and be great. And it doesn’t require any formal training. I started as a college dropout (from a different major nothing to do with programming) and there’s lots of boot camps.
Anyone with the inclination can do what you suggest. But I think programming is hard so many are incapable.
Many teachers work very long hours. Ones I've dated did a minimum of 60 hours. They would work their day shift and then go home and work more, and work on weekends, and then do tutoring for extra cash.
Do you know how frustrating and exhausting teaching is? Very. They also don't get hazard pay for working in dangerous schools. One teacher I knew literally stopped teaching and became a kind of official bouncer (I don't know what it's called); when kids would get violent his job was to restrain them. The reason he switched was the kids' disrespect and his own desire to see them improve was crushing his soul.
Many teachers use their own money to buy their students' class materials.
If you're a teacher in New Jersey, you have to also live in New Jersey, a state with a ridiculously high tax rate.
The years of service thing is a fair yardstick because it's comparing apples to apples. We are not paying them based on what a different job would pay them, we pay them based on the job we want them to do.
In general, the hours spent teaching diminish over time. At the beginning of a teacher's career, they spend a lot of time outside of class building lesson plans and creating tests and homework assignments. These legitimately take a lot of time. And they aren't perfect, so the teacher often sees that they need to make big changes after those lesson plans and tests and homework assignments hit the students.
But after a few iterations, they have those tools, and at that point things settle down a lot. The material only needs to be updated infrequently. Most of that time that in the first few years was spent building those things is freed back up, and it's not replaced by anything.
I know three teachers well (Chicago area; two quite senior, the other recently retired). Hours might have once diminished over time as you suggest, but their experience as told to me contradicts this trend: curricula have been changing so quickly in response to administrative decree that every few years everything gets thrown out and rebuilt. When you add to that decreasing resources for classrooms and increasing student-to-teacher ratios, it is not surprising to me that they work more hours than anybody else I know.
The teacher in that example had 13 years of service and worked in one of the better paying public schools in New Jersey. She said she was paid pretty highly at around $60K (iirc). I do remember there was a kind of pecking order where more entry level teachers would make lesson plans, but the senior teachers still had to help the younger teachers learn how to do it, and sometimes do it themselves when nobody else could (teachers might trade between each other what extra work they needed).
Starting salaries for many districts for jobs that require a masters is pathetic.
Many suburban schools pay decent, but often urban centers pay poorly.
I know one person who was offered under $30k for teaching young special Ed folks. This is someone who has a masters and extra certs on tops of that.
Your argument about physics teachers being more sought after is interesting but misses the point. As a society we want our children to have the best outcomes, providing them with the best education at early ages provides that.
To have the best education you want to pay well and attract the best candidates. Not have those teachers splitting their time with Uber so they can afford rent.
There was a study that showed the value of great kindergarten teachers and it’s over $300k a year.
100% false, special Ed is a spectrum from high functioning to low functioning. Some kids need extra attention and support to find their element and become successful.
The diaper-changing-babysitting end of things is probably the most difficult job in the school. Think about it, it's one step away from working in a mental institution.
The whole USA teaching system exploits nice salt-of-the-earth types, chews them up, then spits them out. The system makes it difficult to even stay in it as a teacher, the job is littered with madness compared to many other government and private sector jobs.
Do software engineers just spontaneously come into existence? Or do they begin their education with kindergarten teachers, and progress though to the professors that teach them at college?
If a software engineer is contributing millions of dollars in value each year, they are doing it on the backs of the giants that taught and coached them to get to where they are today.
If you want to follow the value chain all the way down, why not attribute the value of that software engineer to the professors who taught those kindergarten teachers to be good teachers? Or the kindergarten teachers who taught those professors?
The truth of where the value to society comes from is somewhere between the "shoulders of giants" myth (that everything is obvious in light of what came before, and nobody really creates any value) and the "lone genius" myth (that value is created solely by bright individuals).
Some component of the value that we attribute to a person likely comes from their teachers, but it may be 0 (or negative - lots of teachers demoralize their students too). However, a significant portion comes from them.
A lot of the people who espouse the "shoulders of giants" myth use it to discredit the idea of the "lone genius" (without thinking about who the giants are). They believe that the giants represent societal knowledge, not individuals who made great contributions.
You totally missed the point though. The value you create has almost nothing to do with how much you’re paid. That’s just the most you could possibly be paid. You’re paid the amount your employer thinks it would cost to replace you.
I think markets are generally good, yes. If someone wants to do your job for cheaper and they’re just as good they should get the job. Either way, I don’t think it makes sense to talk about things like this as good or bad, they just are the way the are unless you’re talking about a complete revolution.
Comparing teacher pay to the median wage isn’t an apples to apples comparison because the average teacher has between a bachelor’s degree and a master’s, a state certification with regular training and renewal requirements, and a good amount of professional experience. I was a high school teacher and when I left my salary went up by 50% on day one, passed 100% increase within 2 years, and tripled within 5 years. The median wage earner in a large city is probably paid hourly for service work.
I do agree that the single pay scale across all public school teachers is an issue. You will never get someone to teach high school math, science, or tech if salary is a significant consideration.
It's pretty close to the median worker having a bachelor's degree so that doesn't really skew the comparison
Ultimately teaching salaries are fine. The median teacher makes about the median salary. But it comes with great job security, benefits, and significantly more time off than the median job. The benefits are high enough to attract enough teachers.
The problem are parents and administration. And more recently kids missed a couple years of school due to Covid and went feral. It's gotten to be a significantly worse job. Solution is to cut the bullshit. Not pay more to incentivize people to put up with the bullshit.
> Ultimately teaching salaries are fine. The median teacher makes about the median salary. But it comes with great job security, benefits, and significantly more time off than the median job.
I know 3 public school teachers, in CA/NYC/NJ. Their 6 to 8 weeks off in the summer (if that, due to ongoing training), is nowhere near enough to offset the low pay per hour and most importantly, having to deal with garbage parents and their misbehaving kids.
They also work many extra hours at home during the school year doing grading or prepping exercises or whatever. If we have a get together, the teachers will pretty much guaranteed to be working all or some portion of the evening.
> The benefits are high enough to attract enough teachers
Only if you think 30+ kids per class is acceptable. I would want no more than 20 kids per class.
Average teacher salary in California is $84,000. Official working days total out to about 12 weeks of vacation. Realistically less than that but still much more than your typical worker.
The question of if teachers are sufficiently paid is answered by asking if current classroom sizes are sufficiently small and staffed by sufficient quality teachers. Whatever price that makes that happen is the appropriate price, regardless of what people in other jobs are earning.
>The question of if teachers are sufficiently paid is answered by asking if current classroom sizes are sufficiently small and staffed by sufficient quality teachers. Whatever price that makes that happen is the appropriate price, regardless of what people in other jobs are earning
Like I said before the solution is to cut the bullshit. Not pay more for people to tolerate it.
For the purposes of determining appropriate prices, why is it necessary to compare their price to anyone? Supply and demand determine appropriate pricing.
The thing to compare to is the jobs the teachers could do if they weren't teachers. All of them have college degrees, many have masters degrees. The comparison point should be generic white collar office jobs, which are pretty much all easier (and especially, less annoying), higher paying, and more respected.
However much they're paying teachers, it's clearly not enough, because not enough people are willing to do the job for that amount of money.
Assuming you had all the skills required to be an effective teacher, would YOU put up with everything they put up with for that salary? Because I sure as hell wouldn't.
(As an aside, it's different depending on where you are but in Australia, comparing teacher salary can be difficult because "they get 12 weeks of holiday a year" and "they only work 6 hours a day" but also they do 3+ hours of unpaid marking and lesson planning a day, they're expected to show up at the end of those 'holidays' prepared for whatever courses they've been assigned for the next term, etc. A close relative is a teacher and it's insane what they have to deal with.)
> However much they're paying teachers, it's clearly not enough, because not enough people are willing to do the job for that amount of money.
The problem is that the scope of the job has changed and you can't pay people enough to do it. Here are some issues, straight from teachers I was talking to last week:
* Admin who constantly wants teachers to do more with no additional resources so they can get credit for it and advance their career. They were very frustrated by this.
* Teaching evaluation based on absolute standardized scores rather than relative. So you can have a bad class, lift them a lot, but still be viewed poorly because on absolute terms, they are still weak. You might say that evens out over time, but it doesn't because some teachers are better with difficult students, so they get more than their share of these issues.
* Special needs students mainstreamed - kids with emotional issues that flip desks and yell out constantly, physical issues such as seizures if they bump their head, but parents will not let them wear protective gear because they will stand out, elementary school kids who are constantly in physical altercations with other kids.
* Kids come to school not having eaten since the day before, cloths that haven't been washed in days, etc.
* Unable to give accurate grades because parents fight back and so teachers are forced to pass kids even though they know they are just pushing a big problem on the next teacher.
* Zero support from parents and in many cases, outright hostility.
* The classroom is a minefield regarding what can be discussed and cannot be discussed. Everyone has an opinion on how it should be done, but almost none of them have ever actually taught.
It's still not worth the money. Ive spent time in the classroom in a large urban district and the job was twice as hard as my current software engineering job (for me) for literally half the pay
> Salaries in large urban districts are often well above area median, and when accounting for benefits and pension, quite impressive.
I'd disagree. Some anecdotal evidence - I'm from a HCOL suburban area with a nationally ranked public school system. Teachers here are generally considered "well-paid" by teacher salary standards. Many of the teachers in my area literally cannot afford to live here, and have to commute 30-40 minutes in.
My mom was a teacher there. She was making about $80k a year at the end of her career, with 2 masters degree and 20 years of experience teaching (so she was pretty much maxed out on her salary). Her pension is something like $20k a year (also maxed out due to her YOE). My dad was in between jobs for some time in there, and my parents, who are frugal people, struggled to make ends meet on just my moms salary, borrowing against their mortgage for the year while my dad was unemployed.
I went to Chicago public schools. Most of my teachers had graduate degrees from degree mill schools, some even had phds that they loved to talk about even though I doubt they spent more than a few days to get them. That ended up meaning they all made around 110-120, with full pension after I believe 30 years. Certainly not an amazing salary, and they all worked much harder than I ever have, but nothing to laugh at I’d say.
Very good point, that's a salary you can live very comfortably on. Seems like it just depends on the school district, but I'd say the authors main point, that salaries across the board for teachers are lower than they should be given how hard the job is and how qualified most teachers are, still holds true.
Are our public school teachers unfit to be teachers and low-quality workers because not high enough wage is offered for quality people? Or is it that the salary attracts competent people but other factors are broken?
The interesting thing to me is I see people almost universally praise our teachers, and comment on how great and caring they are. The money seems to be attracting the raw talent, so I'm leaning towards something else is much more broken in our system.
That many teacher’s pensions require one to give up social security benefits makes the decision to teach more difficult, I would think, especially for those who are later in their working lives.
Most people in their 20s and 30s today aren't getting social security anyway, so maybe this is decreasing in importance?
Personally, I don't have much faith in pension systems either. The growth ponzi scheme for US stocks can only go on for so long, and many pensions have gone belly-up in the last decade or two even though the market has been incredibly good for most of that time. If we enter a recession that lasts more than 1 or 2 years, those pensions are going to end up in worrying places for anyone who isn't already cashing out.
There are many ways to compensate teachers [1], but in general, you really shouldn't make categorical statements on matters you are completely unfamiliar with. I help manage the finances of someone who is in the position of being unable to collect any social security benefits from the relatively brief time she had a regular job which paid into social security prior to becoming a teacher, and is also unable to collect her spouse's Social Security survivor benefits (she literally receives zero dollars from Social Security, though if she had never worked a day in her life, she's be able to collect her spouse's survivor's benefits). You've made quite a few comments in this thread: how many of them are as badly informed as this?
"Windfall Elimination Prevention" and "Government Pension Offset" are things you can google if you're interested in learning a bit about this stuff.
[1] States whose teachers participate in their own pension plans instead of Social Security include California and Texas, so it's not like these are rare concerns
This is not the case for NY, and not in WI and PA as I have heard from teachers there.
In cases where they don't receive it though, they're not paying into it either. I can't comment as to whether that is a good or bad thing, because I don't know those cases. Maybe the union membership by in large doesn't want to?
> In cases where they don't receive it though, they're not paying into it either.
If the "it" you're referring to is social security, this is, to use your phrase from above, "patently untrue." It would be comforting if that were the case, but there are cases where a person who has paid into social security will not receive anything from it, and will not receive their spouse's Social Security survivor's benefits, under WEP and GPO rules. As I explained above, I know one of these people and help her manage her money.
To the original point in my grandparent post: just having to do the math on this stuff could be deterrent to someone trying to make a decision about whether teaching is a smart career move.
> Maybe the union membership by in large doesn't want to?
WEP and GPO are a matter of federal law, although "maybe the unions want this thing that is obviously hostile to their members" is certainly... a thought a person could have. As it happens the American Federation of Teachers is lobbying to eliminate WEP and GPO, and I assume there are other unions who are acting similarly:
(some potential disinformation in the second link, but the point is, this is a pretty active debate)
edit: It occurs to me that maybe you meant "maybe they do not want to pay into Social Security," which is probably true. To keep this in perspective, these teacher pensions which were considered an alternative/supplement to Social Security are a lot older than the WEP and GPO, which came along to kick those with these pensions in the nuts in the late seventies and early eighties. The teachers and their unions were already committed to the path they were on when the federal government changed the rules on them.
Not disagreeing with what you just wrote above,but do you have a source for
> If the "it" you're referring to is social security, this is, to use your phrase from above, "patently untrue."
? Because everything I am reading suggests those states whose teachers whose work years only go to pension and not SS eligibility are not having their teachers pay into SS.
That part is right! The problem comes at the end of a career when the SSA needs, under the WPA rules, to weigh what the teacher in question is going to be paid by the teacher’s pension (which by design was paid into instead of social security) against what the teacher paid into social security via payroll taxes before or after their career as a teacher, or during summer work during their career as a teacher. The SSA then reduce the social security benefits according to their formula. The reduction can be pretty extreme, all the way towards a person who paid into the social security trust not receiving any benefit from it.
I’m not fully familiar with the stated justification for these laws, or why you’d want to treat a pension as a ”windfall,” (or maybe they’re trying to keep social security benefits from being a “windfall?”) but I guess my main thought on that as a non-teaching, non-union professional is that we are all very lucky these rules were drafted a year or two before 401ks came into wide use, such that we avoided someone in congress getting the bright idea of treating our tax deferred retirement savings as a “windfall” to be factored into the SSA’s payment calculations as well.
I believe the problem of losing a spouse’s survivor’s benefits happens under the GPO rules, and that is similarly unpopular.
This is the best reply so far. In the US, things (good and bad) vary dramatically between school districts, but everyone talks about “teachers” as this monolithic group.
In the Boston area it’s absolutely possible to exceed $100,000 salary. The pay scales are public, look it up yourself. I’m willing to believe many teachers are underpaid, and that those in Boston have legitimate gripes too, but we need to be clear about which context we’re discussing.
My anecdata- friend last year just crossed $100K in about her 15th year teaching in Boston suburbs. She didn't have to do any of the "add-ons" like sports team coaching, curriculum work, tutoring, etc. to get to that number.
It's always been my opinion that market value aside, Kindergarden teachers probably deserve the HIGHEST pay because they lay the foundations, and without sound foundations, the building is unstable.
Apologies for extended metaphorical language, but the underlying point is really what I think: Pay the ones at the front the most. They do the groundwork.
> most qualified high school physics teachers have way differently valued skillsets in the labor force by alternate employers than most kindergarten teachers.
Do they? I read that as implying that physics teachers could potentially get some stem jobs. But is that actually true? If you can do math, you can teach yourself enough physics to teach in high school. But that gets you nowhere near the knowledge necessary for applying non-trivial physics at work.
"If you can do math, you can teach yourself enough physics to teach in high school."
No, you can't. Even at the high school level there is jargon, historical methodology, and domain-specific nuance that isn't accessible to the self-taught. That's true for almost any subject one might think of, in fact.
What prevents anyone from learning all they need about any subject on their own? If someone is capable of reading, it seems to me they could teach themselves any subject using books. Of course, having a good teacher to guide them in which sources to read, etc, would greatly speed up the process of learning. However, I don’t see any reason someone cannot learn any subject on their own.
Books provide the basics required to understand the field. They don't help develop intuition, methodology, collaboration, and other skills necessary to truly understand the field or teach it to others.
To be clear, I didn't write "be an exceptional physics teacher with knowledge of history, nuance, etc." - I agree that's not a trivial thing and a very desirable one. But if you need "just a physics teacher" for a given spot, I stand by my opinion.
I mean, if you’re talking about the happy path where every student understands the material on the first pass or can work out issues on their own then maybe. But that’s not how teaching or learning works for anyone, including super geniuses.
Whether you could or couldn't self study to be a competent physics teacher is besides the point if you need a physics or very closely related STEM degree plus test of content competency as a condition of getting the job by the regulations if most US states. That limits the pool of applicants to people who can command better salaries elsewhere over their whole career arc for arguably a lot less stress. Thus an exceptional shortage within that specialty is more prone to happen. Lowering the standards of qualification is an option, but the author doesn't seem thrilled with that idea. So we are pretty much left with discussing a pay differential within the profession, which is a third rail topic among most teacher unions.
