this is Anna she just graduated from
college in the United States and this is
Sophia she also just graduated from
college in Finland Anna and Sophia both
want to be middle school teachers but it
turns out there's a good chance their
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
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
u.s. 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
oacd for short that's a group of mostly
wealthy countries that economists often
compared to one another teachers in the
u.s. work more than two and a half hours
longer than their colleagues in South
Korea Finland and Israel there are some
countries with similar teacher work
hours to the united states like New
Zealand 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 of those
hours actually teaching that's more than
the OECD average and significantly more
than teachers in New Zealand 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 extra
teaching hours translate to better
results students in the u.s. score
slightly above the OECD average on the
Pisa exam which tests 15 year-olds all
over the world in reading science and
math but they score lower than students
in countries like Finland South Korea
Japan and Singapore where teaching hours
are much lower if we look inside Ana and
Sofia's classrooms in the US and Finland
we'd see Ana teaching an hour and a half
more per day than Sofia ana also spends
more time planning lessons grading
student work and leading extracurricular
activities but those extra hours aren't
necessarily reflected in Ana's paycheck
if you compare Sofia to other people in
Finland with college degrees she makes
about 98 cents for every dollar that
they make that's on par with the pay
ratio between teachers and college
graduates in similar countries but Ana
and other American middle school
teachers only make about 65 cents for
every dollar that their college-educated
peers me still as politicians in the
u.s. never tire of pointing out we spend
more per student than almost any country
I think the 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 Mississippi spends less than
half as much as Alaska 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 u.s. there's one
other difference between Ana and so
via when they're asked whether people in
their country value teachers two out of
three Finnish teachers say yes but just
one in three American teachers agree
there are a lot of reasons why teachers
like Anna leaves a classroom but if the
US wants to keep more of them around we
might want to take a few pages from
Finland's book
you