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 US, 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 OECD

for short. That's a group of mostly wealthy countries that economists often

compare to one another. Teachers in the US. 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 US 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 Anna and Sofia's classrooms in the US and Finland,

we'd see Anna teaching an hour and a half

more per day than Sofia. Anna also spends more time planning lessons, grading

student work, and leading extracurricular activities. But those extra hours aren't

necessarily reflected in Anna'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 Anna and other American middle school

teachers only make about 65 cents for every dollar that their college-educated

peers make. Still, as politicians in the US never tire of pointing, out we spend

more per student than almost any country I think than 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 US. There's one other difference between Anna and Sofia.

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.

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