Blogs:

According to a study conducted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that covered 27 nations, teachers in US work the longest hours. Summer vacation in US is long and only 36 weeks are spent by the primary school teachers a year in classrooms. In spite of this, the study found US teachers spending at least 1097 hours a year on an average teaching.

Hours calculated by the OECD survey only consider the time teachers spend in classrooms. A 2008 survey shows New Zealand in second place with 985 hours, much above the 786 OECD hours.

All this shows that, as compared to major developing countries, American teachers are the hardest working and most productive. In spite of this, especially in science and reading, student achievement in our country is the lowest. Another depressing finding has come up with a Department of Education’s new report.

According to this report, since the nineties, on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the gap between white and Latino students has continued to persist with regard to reading and math even as it has increased in Hispanic students.

According to the Daily Mail, in US schools, the largest minority is the Latino students who are also the fastest growing population here. In fact, certain schools enroll more numbers of Latino students than whites. Arne Duncan, US Education Secretary responded to these findings saying that ethnicity and race should never be factors that determine the success of our students.

A strange fact you notice in these findings is that certain countries where teachers do not work too many hours produce students who are better educated. Some people attribute this to the issue of teacher salary in our country. After working for fifteen years, our teachers, who work the longest numbers of hours are fifth lowest paid.

According to a report published by the New York Times at the beginning of this year, for our country, the top suggestion should be to raise teaching profession status. This is according to a comparative educational systems study. The report said that this was not just about the salaries.

Only the best students are admitted to the university teaching programs in countries that score high. In our country, it is imperative to make the teaching education programs more rigorous and selective, said the report.

There is another issue here. As compared to the veteran elementary teacher’s average salary which was $44,172 in the year 2008, which is way higher than other OECD country teacher’s salary of #39,436, average salary drawn by our college graduates was lower by forty percent.

Taking into consideration statistics from Finland, we find that the average salary of veteran teachers was 13 percent lesser than that drawn by their college graduates. Another problem came up to the forefront. Our country spends a lot of money on education on the whole.

However, a disproportionate amount of money is spent by American schools on areas such as sports facilities and bus transportation. Clearly, these are some of the issues that govern our education paradox and must be looked into as early as possible.