It's not like Australia is a starving banana republic that's short on cash. Do you really value the education of your nation's kids so little?
AFAIK in the Nordics like Finland, teachers are paid quite well since the kids are the nation's future workforce so it's worthy investment.
Many people enjoy doing jobs with meaning, many people enjoy working with kids, and many people enjoy teaching things.
Teaching is like nursing, many people find meaning in it and want to do it, and the skills required aren't too difficult to get. Just as many people likely want to be doctors or university professors, but less can do it, so pay goes up, comparatively.
Or on the other hand, many people can do jobs like working in an oil rig but not many want to. Once you look at jobs like this you understand most of what dictates salaries.
Find something hard to do, that not many people want to do, and you'll always be fine.
If tomorrow all teachers quit because the pay wouldn't be worth it anymore to counterbalance their love of teaching and the feeling of accomplishment of molding the next generation, pay would go up because kids still need to be taught.
It also depends on the minimum competence people will tolerate. There's plenty of competent people who would consider teaching if the compensation was worthwhile. It all depends on how much a country and its voting population care about education and how much more in taxes are they willing to pay to support that.
Since there is a teacher shortage (i.e. people are not being replaced), this would appear to not be the case.
So you get paid the minimum required to replace you OR the maximum the employer is willing to pay before saying "we'll just go without this role being filled", whichever is lower.
[0] = https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-...
I agree money is only one form of compensation. Some jobs focus on status or honor. But I don't see that in the areas you mentioned.
- nurses do make a lot of money and it's accessible without an incredible academic aptitude - EMT is almost always a stepping stone job for young people - a lot of women and moms want to be librarians partly due to flexibility
> a lot of women and moms want to be librarians partly due to flexibility
Source? It's not a particularly flexible job, and in my program none of my peers ever mentioned that being why they were here. The concept of vocational awe also comes out of academic librarianship which is a whole other ball game to public librarianship. But maybe my network + program is an outlier so if you have reading on that I'd welcome it!
> EMT is almost always a stepping stone job for young people
And? They're still doing valuable, dangerous work and are literally in charge of keeping people alive. They're also paid barely enough to live on, which is batshit crazy if you consider that chronically stressed people (like those who are living poor) make worse decisions and EMTs are required to make very important decisions on the fly. The only reason it's maintainable is that they have new young people to dazzle.
> But doesn't explain why people get into these professions.
Speaking for librarianship, most people who get into it do so for a few reasons that I've seen(some of them are stupid):
* They like reading and want to be around books and just like libraries. This is a very bad reason to become a librarian and go to graduate school.
* They want to be an academic but can't hack it in/don't want to try to become a professor. Your odds of landing a library position are much better than getting a decent teaching/research job in much of the humanities. So lots of people with grad degrees in things like English and History who realized that they need a career. (This is also a bad reason.)
* They really, really like organizing things. Or are really into niche areas like preservation that can pretty much only be explored professionally in this particular sector. Particularly for people in those interest areas who either have no interest in coding or who went into the profession before there were viable tech career paths to indulge those interests.
* They have several years of library work experience and want to move up the ladder because often you can't get even a basic full time job without the grad degree. This is a version of sunk-cost fallacy (as is the 'wants to be an academic' reason); if you've worked in one field/area for a long time it's hard to consider leaving to do something else.
I agree with your post and I'm not clear what our disagreement is. My point is that people are choosing these jobs because they are ok with the tradeoffs. They are being compensated, even if it's not with money. You describe benefits of being a librarian.
For example:
> They're still doing valuable, dangerous work and are literally in charge of keeping people alive
Yes and somehow people still sign up, so it looks like the wages + intangible benefits package is working.
> my program none of my peers ever mentioned that being why they were here
These kinds of life tradeoffs are rarely articulated. In fact I would argue that the savior/sacrificial narrative you describe is likely a polite screen to hide motivations like "I'm afraid of jobs where I can lose my spot if I perform poorly".
That assumes that the gains in productivity are passed unto the parents in the form of increased income, do you have any data that shows this to be the case?
But some of the parents gotta be either shareholders or cashed out houseowners?
I just moved from a city where teacher pay has gotten on par with engineers. The only thing needed was outlawing hiring unqualified teachers. Suddenly there was money for teacher salaries.
It didn't solve the housing question for other sectors though ...
The idea of collecting more taxes to benefit $underserved_group is like an obese person eating more to increase muscle growth.
If industries were personas arguing at a table, Instagram demands pay and threatens to turn off Instagram immediately. Teachers damand pay and can only threaten to destroy society in 50 years. Psychologically, Instagram's threat is a lot more usable, because teachers don't want to pull the trigger on ending society.
In other words, Instagram has a more direct and immediate way of demonstrating value than teachers do.
Australia has exceptional 'productivity' from extracting geological resources, providing exceptional and taxable profits, and requiring few human resources. Low productivity in other areas (e.g., service industries, tech) is more caused by low investment in education than vice versa. Other industries won't find a home in Australia without a capable talent pool, and you can't have that without a well-funded education system.
This doesn't explain why Australia hasn't significantly invested in education in the last few decades.
(2) They are all basically paid the same (i.e. if you want to pay some teachers more, you have to pay all (in the state) more)
So any time there is a proposal to increase pay for teachers, you have to budget a lot of money. It's rare for there to be such an option each budget year.
Around 10-12k worth of education dollars are spent per year per student at a public school in the US. This money does not educate the children, or even go mostly the teachers' salaries.
The nations that figured out how to get the cash to the people who matter in education are the ones doing it right. Most western countries spend a lot of cash on education; they just spend it in horrifically bad ways.
What’s worse, IMHO, the teacher unions will then run campaigns for overrides to add additional funding misleading voters into feel good ideas about funding education. When you oppose such an override because the district is a poor steward of public funds you look like you hate the kids or some other BS. I have four kids at our neighborhood school and my wife used to teach in the district (and still subs occasionally). I have a vested interest in ensuring high quality teachers are paid appropriately.
But as mentioned, there are so many who have just accepted that it’s a low paying job and martyred themselves for the good of the community. We’re taking advantage of the people responsible for the future of our communities. And by we, I mean sociopathic school boards and district administrations. They’ll spend money on unnecessary technologies at the drop of a hat but teacher pay increases often require a strike.
I’ve met more than a few teachers who’ve left to join educational supply companies, school administrations, or even unrelated businesses and not known one who went back into the classroom. One of their first comments when describing their transition is how much better the compensation is.