Released: 5/20/2009
Author(s): Greg Forster, Ph.D., Christian D´Andrea, M.P.P.
Many people claim to speak on behalf of America’s teachers, but we rarely get the opportunity to find out what teachers actually have to say about their work – especially when people are debating government control of schooling.
This study presents data from a major national survey of teachers conducted by the U.S. Department of Education; the Schools & Staffing Survey. We break down these observational data for public and private school teachers, in order to compare what teachers have to say about their work in each of the two school sectors.
These are eye-opening data for the teaching profession. They show that public school teachers are currently working in a school system that doesn’t provide the best environment for teaching. Teachers are victims of the dysfunctional government school system right alongside their students. Much of the reason government schools produce mediocre results for their students is because the teachers in those schools are hindered from doing their jobs as well as they could and as well as they want to. By listening to teachers in public and private schools, we discover numerous ways in which their working conditions differ—differences that certainly help explain the gap in educational outcomes between public and private schools. Exposing schools to competition, as is the case in the private school sector, is good for learning partly because it’s good for teaching.
