Before I came to the U.S., I thought teachers here are satisfied with their work, gaining high salary and respect. However, in the action research class in Columbia center, I found that at least four of ten classmates who had been teachers but then left their schools. One of them even felt hopeless about education. It’s totally different from what I imagined before, as well as from the Chinese situation.
In China, being a teacher is an honorable and stable job. We call teachers “iron rice bowl” because they are guaranteed, like government officials, and you will not be fired unless you break the law or you want to leave. Besides, although teachers’ salary is not as much as bankers or doctors, their welfare is the best in China: they can have paid leave for two months; they will be organized to travel for free; they will have a bonus for festivals such as Teachers’ Day, Labor Day, and the Spring festival. Therefore, ten years ago, many college graduates want to become a teacher.
Things are kind of different now. For the younger generations, being a teacher is stable but so boring, and they want to earn more money. These changes result in more female graduates being teachers because they can use holidays to take care of their family. Also, teachers’ salary and welfare depend on what level school of your stay. For well-performing schools, seldom teachers quit their jobs, but for those low-performing schools, some teachers would like to leave the stable system and do other jobs. Take a district in Hangzhou city as an example, in 2015, 36 teachers leave their positions while in 2016, 60 teachers leave (Xinhua Newspaper, 2016). Teachers who leave public schools go to private educational institutions and become tutors to pursue higher payment. For example, when I was in high school, I had a one-to-four math tutor, whose wage is about 50 dollar. That is much more than a public school teacher!
Both the U.S. and China have teacher retention problem, but the reasons are of great difference. For U.S. teachers, principals leadership is the primary concern, while for Chinese teachers, salary is the impulse, which makes me surprised when I learned that increasing payment is not the prior recommendation to solve teacher retention here.
Reference
Xinhua Newspaper. (July 24th, 2017). How High of Teacher Retention is Reasonable? Retrieved from http://www.xinhuanet.com/2017-07/24/c_1121367357.htm
1 comment:
Sandy,
I am intrigued by your perspective as a Chinese teacher here in America. It is fascinating to learn of the similarities and differences between the American and Chinese public educational systems. I have heard that teachers are held in high regard in most parts of the world, and that American is the exception in terms of teacher dissatisfaction. It is such challenging and rewarding profession, but I find that American teachers face challenges that are unique to America. I wonder how schools in China differ based on region? We were talking last class about how the boarding school you went to was in a small town away from the city. I'd be curious to know how schools and working conditions compare in the city and other places in China. Teaching in the states is so dependent on region, so I'm wondering if it is similar in China.
In addition, you mentioned teacher pay. I think pay is definitely factored into why students here are not pursuing education in large numbers. Our salaries keep decreasing when inflation is taken into account, to the point that we are 8% poorer than we were in 2008. Wages are stagnant as cost of living goes up. (see http://time.com/5441639/south-carolina-teachers-poorer-2008/).
Work-life balance is another factor for people deciding to stay of leave the teaching profession. Some enjoy and value the holidays, while others say the workload during the year is increasingly heavier with little or no support. In low-performing schools, the work-load is often heavier, as it is in charter schools. America and China have the problem of staffing low-performing schools in common it seems. It will be interesting to compare where both countries go with education in the coming decades. As we've talked about before, the reforms are never-ending.
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