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We say teachers shape the future, then pay them like baristas.

This isn’t hypocrisy.

It’s an accurate and unfortunate market signal about what we’ve let teaching become.

Great research by Matthew Kraft & Melissa Arnold Lyon tells the story¹:

• In the 1970s, 75% of Americans wanted their children to teach
• By 2021, that had dropped to below 40%, the lowest level ever

Meanwhile, we keep repeating the hollow mantra that teaching is “one of the most important professions.”

We need to make teaching prestigious again.

And the irony is we already know how to do this..

We’ll discuss that, but first….

What Makes Jobs Prestigious

Prestigious jobs, i.e., doctors, investment bankers, lawyers, management consultant, share a few key traits:

• They’re selective aka not everyone can get in
• They pay well
• They let you think for yourself rather than follow scripts
• The people who do them are visible, respected figures in society

Teaching has none of these qualities anymore.

The barriers to entry are low. 

The pay is mediocre. . 

Teachers increasingly follow rigid curricula and teach to standardized tests rather than designing their own lessons and becoming masters of motivation. 

And how often do we now see teachers treated as public intellectuals and leaders anywhere that matters? We don’t. 

But we see doctors on the biggest podcasts in the world, entrepreneurs celebrated for their accomplishments, lawyers as cable news experts. Teachers are culturally invisible in the spaces where ideas and influence actually spread.

Unionization, meant to protect teachers, actually signals to many that teaching is unskilled labor requiring collective bargaining and protection rather than individual merit. 

Student-teacher ratios have also become the perfect red herring.

We’ve conditioned parents to think teachers are fungible.

That any warm body will do if there are just fewer kids to manage.

It’s a tacit admission that we’ve given up on teacher quality entirely.

The whole system screams “service job” rather than “professional career.”

Compare this to countries like Finland, where teaching requires a master’s degree, has fierce competition for spots, and gives teachers autonomy to innovate. There, teaching is prestigious because it actually resembles other prestigious professions.

(I know many of you are thinking – “I keep hearing that we spend more and more on education.” You are right, but most of that increased funding does not find its way to teachers. See note ² at the conclusion of the essay.)

The Accidental Solution

Here’s what’s fascinating: we already have seen a model that works.

Teach for America (TFA) takes the exact same job and and makes it prestigious. TFA corps members teach for just two years, yet the program is widely respected and attracts top university graduates.

Why does TFA work when traditional teaching doesn’t?³

TFA accidentally created a prestige hack. They borrowed the playbook from consulting and investment banking:

• Elite recruitment from top schools
• Brutal selectivity with acceptance rates around 10-15%
• Intensive bootcamp-style training
• A mission framed as solving big problems, not small ones
• An alumni network that launches careers
• An exit ramp that makes joining feel like a respected tour of duty

TFA proves people will take a 50% pay cut for prestige, if the prestige is real.

The irony is obvious: we’ve figured out how to make teaching attractive to high achievers, but only if they promise to leave.

Instead of treating TFA as a brief detour on the way to a ‘real’ career, we should ask: what if we made regular teaching look like this? Not the pay cut part as that’s just martyrdom in disguise.

But the selectivity, the mission, the career capital.

The Fix

Making teaching prestigious isn’t mysterious. We know what works because TFA has shown us. 

• Start with selectivity. Make teacher training competitive and rigorous. Not everyone should be able to become a teacher, just like not everyone can become a doctor or lawyer.

• Pay absolutely matters. The low salaries of teaching have made teaching a job for martyrs or people with well-off spouses (and also contributed to the loss of male teachers). Real professions pay real salaries. We can’t build prestige on the backs of people making financial sacrifices.
• Give teachers real autonomy. Stop making them implement someone else’s lesson plans and teach to someone else’s tests. Prestigious jobs let you think for yourself. Teaching increasingly doesn’t.
• Create visible career paths within teaching itself, not just into administration. Let master teachers become celebrities in their field. Give them platforms to share ideas and influence policy.
• Most importantly, change how we talk about teaching. Stop calling teachers “heroes” and “saints” as we don’t need condescending charity language. Stop celebrating sob stories about teachers buying supplies with their own money as if poverty wages are heartwarming rather than shameful. Instead, showcase the teachers whose students go on to change the world. Start calling them what they should be: nation builders.

The Bottom Line

We don’t lack a blueprint. We lack the backbone to use it.

TFA cracked the code. 

They proved that when teaching feels elite, mission-driven, and career-advancing, top talent shows up gladly, and despite the pay cut.

But instead of scaling that model, we’ve quarantined it to a two-year tour of duty. 

Want to make teaching prestigious?

• Raise the bar to enter.
• Pay competitively
• Make autonomy the norm.
• Celebrate expertise, not sacrifice.
• Stop recruiting “heroes” and start recruiting professionals.
  

Because if we don’t, the best minds will keep going anywhere – but the classroom.

And we’ll keep paying the price.

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At the Schools of Entrepreneurings we are launching, we expect to pay teachers ~2x average teacher salaries. We fundamentally believe teacher quality along with a curriculum that allows for impact, autonomy and relevance are the top ingredients to delivering on the goals of education and avoiding the disengagement trap.

Notes:

¹ Research paper by Matthew A. Kraft & Melissa Arnold Lyon of Brown University. “The Rise and Fall of the Teaching Profession: Prestige, Interest, Preparation, and Satisfaction over the Last Half Century” 

² Yes, we are spending more per student. 

But several factors prevent these funds from directly benefiting teacher salaries as the graph below illustrates showing revenue per student (aka funding) growing dramatically while teacher salaries remain stagnant.:

So where is the money going if not to teachers?

• Pension and Benefit Obligations: Rising costs for teacher pensions and benefits consume a growing share of education budgets, limiting funds available for current salaries .
  
• Infrastructure and Operational Expenses: Funds are often directed toward building maintenance, technology upgrades, and other operational needs, which, while important, do not directly increase teacher pay.
• Administrative Costs: A significant portion of education budgets is allocated to administrative expenses, including salaries for non-teaching staff and district-level administrators. The graph below illustrates this.

³ It is worth noting that Teach for America has had recruitment challenges post Covid. Per an article in Chalkbeat, “The organization expects to place just under 2,000 teachers in schools across the country this coming fall. That’s just two-thirds of the number of first-year teachers TFA placed in schools in fall 2019, and just one-third of the number it sent into the field at its height in 2013.”