“It’s too early to say for sure,” writes USA Today’s Greg Toppo, “but a few observers believe public schools could be the beneficiaries of a brainpower shift from the trading floors of Wall Street and the hedge funds of Greenwich, Conn., to classrooms nationwide.”
New applications to Teach for America and the New York City Teaching Fellows are showing a sudden uptick in the number of would-be teachers with business and finance backgrounds. As Toppo puts it, your child’s next math teacher could be an absolute whiz.
On the other hand, there’s a potential downside, which USA Today does not mention. In hard economic times, underqualified and low-performing teachers are less likely to seek more renumerative employment elsewhere, and more likely to dig in their heels even when pressured from above. High unemployment makes a steady government paycheck a much sweeter deal than in boom times.
Having known a number of Wall Street types first hand (my DH was an investment banker for slightly under 2 years), I’m not sure most of them would make great educators, particularly given the way schools today are run. Sure, they are solid number-crunchers. But they often have outsized personal egos and little patience for red tape. Not exactly the best qualities for a would-be teacher…