>>Dave Eggers: It's startling. The economic
cost of losing so many teachers and so many
of the very best teachers, it's about $5 billion
a year is how they estimate the cost of this
incredible turnover. And if you look at comparative
school systems, like the three school systems
in the world that test the best, South Korea,
Singapore, and Finland, they treat their teachers
entirely differently. One, they pay for their
training. Two, they give them incredible support,
lots of autonomy. And the pay is, you know,
in most cases, 250% or so more than ours.
So there, for most college graduates in these
countries, it's the most esteemed profession.
Everyone's fighting for a chancing to a teacher,
because it's considered this, you know, incredibly
valuable and crucial and central profession
that has incredible prestige. We don't have
that here.
So their turnover rate is -- the highest among
those three countries is 3% a year turnover
rate. So if you think about all the institutional
knowledge that stays in the classroom, all
that stability that stays in the delicate
ecology of a school, all of these things,
and so we wonder why we can't gain ground
in our school system and why we keep falling
behind. It starts with paying well, compensating,
retaining the best teachers, and keeping them
in the classroom.
And so -- and, you know, the Bill and Melinda
Gates Foundation has spent almost half a billion
dollars on research. And after all of these
years of doing studies in all these different
ways, Gates came out and said the most important
thing is the teacher. Technology is good,
all these things, infrastructure. But really
we need to find, reward, and keep the best
teacher. It seems like a no-brainer, but nationwide,
there aren't really any overarching policies
to solve this attrition rate.
And so, you know, I'm in favor of a stimulus
package for teaching. Like, if we can spend
billions bailing out banks and things like
that, we do need at this point, which is a
really crisis -- we're at a crisis right now,
especially with budget cuts being what they
are, the schools state by state need a stimulus.
