http://www.nefe.org/NEFENews/PressRoom/PressRelease/UWMADISONRELEASESSTUDYONTEACHERSCAPABILITY/tabid/835/Default.aspx

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/07/AR2010050705270.html

First, teachers are broke because they buy things for their classrooms that schools won’t purchase and for their students because their parents won’t come through. It is sad and disgusting to think of the number of times when I was teaching to see the dirty (can’t they put clothes in a laundromat washer) clothes kids were wearing as well as the number of times they didn’t have toothbrushes or other basic hygiene items at home. You would be surprised at how many teachers (especially high school teachers) will put basic hygiene products in shower rooms for students to use, pay for meals on field trips because the parents couldn’t/wouldn’t (wouldn’t want to give up the 6-pack of beer money to do something for their kid) send $5 for a stop at McDonalds or some other eating establishment or at least send a sack lunch. High school teachers are also known to buy athletic shoes for kids, pay for dues for kids so they can join an organization (research shows participation in extra-curricular activities is good). And, they are typically paid less for working their 2,000 hours per year than anyone else. It amazes me to hear people complaining about those teachers getting all that time off in the summer and over breaks. Teachers are paid for the days they work and most teachers log well over 2,000 hours per year. Figure that out, please. If you work 40hours a week for 50 weeks a year (we won’t count your PAID vacation), you are working 2,000 hours per year. Teachers just work those 2,000 hours in fewer days than most people. We pay nurses for 40 hours of work when they work 3 12-hour days–maybe we should pay teachers by the hour (especially for grading, attending conferences, etc.). If everyone in every profession donated the amount of money to their employers that teachers donate to school districts, the big banks would have enough to send their top executives on lots of “retreats.”

There are trained teachers in the schools to teach a lot of basic fundamental skills that so many parents can’t seem to do because they are the “me” generation and if it doesn’t tickle their fancy, they wouldn’t begin to do something that wasn’t for them. Hower, our great powers that be think that EVERYONE has to go to a 4-year college and that academics are the only subjects to teach in high school. From a personal finance viewpoint (and by the way, to teach it, a teacher must not only teach the facts, they have to modify screwed up behavior the kids have learned AT HOME), it would be better to teach kids how to change the oil in their cars, do basic plumbing, and basic repairs around the home, cook from scratch, grow their own gardens and can the food. But that would mean that we would have to go back to teaching industrial arts, home ec, vo ag in the high schools and that would just be terrible for NCLB.

Considering that most of our high school administrators are old PE and social studies teachers who have no clue about anything, is it any wonder that they would want their “good old boys” to teach those classes. By the way, math educators don’t typically take courses in business/personal finance either and according to surveys I have conducted don’t feel comfortable teaching math, but most state legislators (who have no clue about collegiate curriculums of study) think that both social studies and math teachers are qualified.

MoneyEnergy said it best in that it is not a simple debate. There are a lot of variables, and something that needs to be look at over an extended amount of time and monitored very closely should it be implemented.