It’s rare that I can combine research on higher ed and secondary schools in the same article. Today, I did.
Why Aren’t More Ph.D.s Teaching in Public Schools? They’re highly qualified, and they need jobs. And yet fewer than one percent of all teachers have doctorates.
Read more at the Atlantic.
Apt. 11d 
Quite a few teachers at fancy schools (Exeter, Collegiate, Chapin) have Ph.D.’s. As Laura’s article indicates, most public school systems demand, or at least favor, education degrees rather than degrees in substantive fields.
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Yes, a number of my older children’s teachers have Ph.D.s in their academic fields. Teachers who want to enter administration tend to get M.A.s; they don’t do it at night. I can think of several who took a year off of teaching to work on their Master’s degree. I think their schools pay for the degrees.
Some of the boarding school Ph.D.s are boarding school alumni themselves.
For public schools, I’ve always heard they are not interested in new teachers with advanced degrees due to salary schedules.
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It is hard to get certified to teach in the public schools. Most people have to go to a Master’s Program that will help them get a transitional B certification. Teaching high school also requires a different skill set: it requires classroom management to a degree that is not required in college. Here in Brooklyn, students in mainstream public high schools are very badly behaved. It is normal for students to talk incessantly, to play on their cell phones, and for parents to back them up if they receive low grades, or it said cell phones are confiscated. There are not many options for discipline and it really only takes 3 or 4 out of control students to derail a class. The managerial culture is punitive and somewhat humiliating and teachers are forced to use methods that are the worst hybrid of ed school babble and whatever the ed reformers pet issue is at the moment. Oh, plus, you are responsible for students’ passage rate on the regents and other standardized tests, even if they miss class for 80 days out of the year. It takes a really charismatic person with a knack for playing politics with the administration and a high tolerance for nonsense to make it more that 2-3 years. Seeing people that I am close to go through this has led me to warn everyone that I meet who is considering it not to work for the DOE. It is really a waste because a lot of unemployed Ph Ds are good teachers; it is just that being a good teacher is not the most important part about being a successful high school teacher.
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I couldn’t get past the comment that said that a 30 year old Ph.D couldn’t get along with the 22 year old BS grad. Hello? I started teaching at 42. I get along fine with my 20-something colleagues.
I would agree though that the barrier to teaching for Ph.D.’s is actually certification. I would have considered public school if I could have done a semester of coursework and then jumped to student teaching Both the cost and the time seemed crazy to me after I a) had almost 20 years of teaching experience and b) much of my research involved educational theory.
I think my pay, because of my Ph.D., is comparable to what a B.A. or B.S. with certification and a few years of experience make at a public school. Certainly, the work load is better, and the students are better. Unfortunately, there aren’t that many private schools, especially in low populated areas. There are a ton around here, but that’s because there are lots of people with money and there are public schools that suck.
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I would have also considered public school teaching if the pathway had been easier–the pay and benefits are significantly better than I have now, but the job is definitely harder. I took the job in better conditions that could hire me with a non-education MA, though I may regret it when it comes time to retire.
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