Collateral Damage

My personal experience is that our current crop of public teachers are awful. I would be willing to support a base $100,000 salary for public school teachers with the hope that we can entice those (primarily) professional women who once populated  the teacher ranks when they were limited in other job opportunities.

 

The high IQ women have gravitated to engineering, computer science, law, medicine, corporate management – whereas they once were limited to teaching, nursing and secretarial work. That has left the teaching profession with moderate IQ in our classroom.

 

(And, yes, I am speaking generally – there are many excellent teachers. But we have hundreds of thousands of teachers, and their median IQ has been visibly reduced because of the other opportunities now available to them.)

 

All of us are victims of our personal experience. This analysis is the result of MY personal experience. Obviously, others may have had a different experience – but many of today’s public school teachers in North San Diego County sat in my classroom during their undergraduate and graduate years.

 

I was not impressed with them as students. We need to do something to lure back the best and fire the rest. And, yes, we will have to overpay the rest, until we can get the best – and that bothers me but not nearly so much as continuing down this road.

 

I am not looking to blame anyone. We are the victims of a cultural shift that needed to happen but teaching and nursing in particular were collateral damage.

 

Although I did not address them, the nursing profession is also hurting as highly qualified women entered other newly available professions open to them.

 

I have some personal experience with nursing homes. Highly qualified nurses of very high IQ are in great demand but they are few and far between.  They are limited to ER and ICU departments, or the eye, plastic surgery etc. specialties who can afford to hire the best.

 

(My nurse in ICU said she was being paid $1,000 a SHIFT! She was worth it!)

 

But nursing homes, even the best, pay poorly and the nurses I had for my friend were caring, dedicated people but they were tired. Many were single moms, speaking less than perfect English, and working in two centers to make ends meet. They were TIRED!

 

The cultural shift that set women free was long overdue but it will take many decades to mend the damaging results.

 

No one’s fault except for not seeing and solving the problem. No one has.