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by syntaxing 884 days ago
The school district I went to had a policy that the teachers are required to have a related masters degree in the subject they’re teaching. It was a great school district since the teachers were all formerly non teachers at one point. My social studies teacher was a lawyer before, physics teacher actually published some papers as a physicists. The downside is the property tax ballooned out of control but I got a great education.
2 comments
dchichkov 884 days ago
A state or a small country can afford maybe a few schools like that. You need state sponsorship, endowment money or a district where property values ballooned out of control. And with a lot of money at stake, it's very likely that school administration compensation will be ballooning instead.

Connecting schools with a university system could be a more viable option. Make it easy to teach in a nearby school, pay reasonably for tuition and a university can be a source of PhD students and postdocs that could get some easy pocket money as guest lecturers. I think, it's also refreshing for PhD students and postdocs to give classes to younger kids.

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zdragnar 884 days ago
Entire states are like this, and it doesn't work out that way at scale. Teachers get degrees to teach, and are buried under a mountain of debt while not being paid for it. On top of that, they need to take "continuing education" credits, which ostensibly is a way to stay on top of teaching trends but is really a racket for the teaching-adjacent industry.

I don't think my state required the masters degree, but pay scales definitely were weighed in favor of it. It certainly didn't make for better teachers.

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peterfirefly 884 days ago
Entire countries do this. Seems to work fine for them.
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Ekaros 884 days ago
Finland has generalist with special degrees doing Elementary school. After that the teachers have degree in subject or adjacent subject. Plus pedagogy. On other hand education is state paid so there isn't huge loans to pay off.

It did not do badly in past. But less resources and more non-natives have taken a toll on results.

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peterfirefly 884 days ago
Mostly the "non-natives", as you so politely call them... and we are not really talking about Germans and Swedes...
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