Teaching in the US vs.

the rest of the world

This is Anna. She just graduated from college in the United States. And this is Sophia. She just
graduated from college in Finland. Ana and Sophia both want to be middle school teachers. But it
turns out, there’s good chance their experiences will be very different . So different that Anna is twice
as likely experiences will be very different. So different that Anna is twice as likely as Sophia to leave
teaching for good. That’s causing a problem. The supply of new certified teachers in the United States
is shrinking, but the number of public school students keeps growing. Massive teacher shortages.
Warnings about public school students keep growing. Massive teacher shortages. Warnings about
teacher turnover. Educators call Colorado’s teacher shortage a crisis.

So what makes Sophia stay and Anna Leave? And how can the United States keep more of its
teachers in the classroom? In the US, teachers work about nine and a quarter hours a day. That’s an
hour and a half longer than the average for teachers in other countries in the Organization for
Economic Development or OECD for short. That’s a group of mostly wealthy countries that economists
often compare to one another . Teachers in the US.work more than two and a half hourslonger that
their colleagues in South Korea, Finland, and Israel. There are some countries with similar teacher
work hours to the United States, like New Zeeland, Singapore and the UK. Teachers in Japan for
example work nearly two hours more per day than teachers in the US, but in all of these countries
teaching hours are much lower. Of the nine and a quarter hours that American teachers work every
day, they spend about five and a half those hours actually teaching. That’s more than the OECD
average and significantly more than teachers in New Zeeland, the UK, South KOREA, Japan and
Singapore.

Teachers in these countries get more time for planning, grading, and collaborating with each other.So
do all those etra teaching hours translate to better results? Students in the US score slightly above the
OECD average on the PISA exam , wich tests 15 years-old all over the world in reading , science, and
math. But they core lower than students in countries like Findland, South Korea, Japn and Singapore ,
were teaching hours are much lower. If we look inside Anna and Sofia’s classrooms in the US and
Finland we’d see Anna teaching an hour and a half more per day than Sofia. ANNA also spends ,ore
time planning lessons, grading student work , and leading extracurricular activities. But those extra
hours aren’t necessarily reflected in Anna’s paycheck. If you compare Sofia to other people in Finland
with college degree, she makes about 98 cents for every dollar that the make. That’s on par with the
pay ratio between teachers an college graduates in similar countries. But Anna and others American
middle school teachers only make about 65 cents for every dollar that their college-educated peers
make. Still, as politicians in the US never tire of pointing, out we spend more per student than almost
any country I think than nearly every other country in the developed world. But that figure varies a lot
by state. New York spends twice as much as California on each student. Mississipi spends less than
half as much as Alasca. And American schools generally spend a lot more on security and other non
instructional costs than schools in other countries.

Plus if you look at the share of its national wealth or GDP that each country spends on education, you
can see there are plenty of countries spending a bigger share than the us. There’s one other
difference between Anna and Sofia. When they’re asked whether people in their country value
teachers, two out of three Finnish teachers say yes. But just one in the American teachers agree.

There are a lot of reason why teachers like Anna leaves a classroom, but if the UA wants to keep
more them around, we might want to take a few pages from Finland’s book.