Both doctors and teachers serve a vital role in our society, but the outcomes of this belief are vastly different for each profession. Salient looks at the disparity in education, regulation, salary, and societal expectations.
Let’s face it: teachers’ training is often negligible. The standard training for a teacher in New Zealand is a Bachelor’s degree, and a one-year Graduate Diploma on top of that. The New Zealand Graduate School of Education, for example, requires a BA minimum for entry, and provides a ‘nominal’ study length of 12 months, with around two-thirds of that time spent teaching in a classroom.
So, little Jimmy graduates in 2014 and begins his first teaching job in 2015, provisionally registered as a teacher until 2018. Jimmy is qualified to teach any subject he received 12 points for at University. So, Jimmy’s BA/BSci major is likely to be the subject he can teach at high school level, while he would still teach every subject at primary school. Teachers are re-registered every three years, with any other monitoring conducted by the school, usually on an annual basis.
Were Jimmy aiming to become a doctor, beginning study in 2011, his study would end six years later in 2016, and he’d spend 2017 working under full supervision before he became a registered doctor. For doctors, roughly 50 per cent of each is spent shadowing qualified professionals in hospitals and clinics. Once he becomes a fully qualified doctor, Jimmy would be allowed to work as a general practitioner (GP). It would take him a further four or five years of on-the-job training to specialise in a field such as oncology, plastic surgery, pediatrics. If Jimmy has a clear idea of where he wants to go in medicine, he will probably be qualified to work in that area in 2022—11 years after beginning his study. Doctors are also required to hold an Annual Practice Certificate, which is only granted if the doctor continues training and updating their skills.
Both doctors and teachers are considered to hold a vital role in society. So how is it that one is given more weight than the other?
Studies show that a teacher’s attitude directly and heavily affects their student’s performance in all subjects. Louise, a teacher of Year 3 (seven-year-old) students, notes that “you have to have so many resources on hand, and so many activities on a daily basis, [that] there’s no chance to change it up. I teach the same things in the same order every year. You’d think new students would keep it interesting [but] the same personalities [do the] same things every year.”
Inversely, doctors have a minor educational capacity: they are expected to fix bodies that are generally the product of mistreatment and ill-education, and are invariably not held to be responsible for results they did not directly provide. A study in America showed that 25 per cent of obese people were never told by their GP—the doctor they pay to help them maintain a good standard of health—that they were overweight.
Closer to home, in September 2007, a well-known Wellington orthopedic surgeon performed a double hip transplant which did not provide ideal results, and the patient contracted a superbug. The patient sued; the surgeon dropped his personal fees; and, although the superbug infected the patient at Wakefield Hospital, as it was not as a result of the surgery, the patient was left to foot a hefty post-operation bill and ongoing medical problems. That’s right: neither the hospital, nor the surgeon were held liable for the post-operative environment, and the continuing hip problems of the patient were largely put down to the patient wanting both hips operated on at once.
While an extreme case, it illustrates the split in perception of liability in the public’s eyes. The expert surgeon acted on the wishes of the patient, knowing the likely result, but did not accept responsibility for his own surgery. What, then, is a doctor responsible for? If they remove every trace of a cancerous mole but the cancer has already spread, is it their fault?
Paradoxically, a teacher is responsible for holistic results. Teachers are measured on how they interact in the classroom, because their manner directly affects student’s willingness to learn, happiness in the classroom, and future success in learning. Teachers are measured on a student’s direct results—that is, how well their students grasp the subject they have been taught. Directly and annually, another teacher from the same school sits in on classes and analyses a teacher’s personality, so school politics play a part in the reported skill of a teacher.
Possibly the most emotionally torturous judgement, however, comes from the beady eyes of 30 children’s parents. Notes Louise, as a private school teacher, “Just once I would like to go to the supermarket without being pinned down by a parent in an aisle asking why so-and-so didn’t get 10 out of 10 for spelling. It’s always my fault!”
And, should any results be called into question, the Ministry of Education teaching guidelines require that lessons help with diverse aspects of life in New Zealand, including culture, Te Reo, technological advances, future learning and equality—in every class. Yes, even in 6th form maths.
This same concept of hauora—one’s entire wellbeing—is also spilling over into medicine. While doctors are obviously expected to respect other aspects of their patient’s lives, cases where patients sue doctors for not helping them maintain an adequate level of health are on the rise. A case study was presented where an overweight diabetic smoker died of sudden cardiac arrest. The jury found for the plaintiff because the doctor wrote in the chart that he intended to refer the patient to a cardiologist, but then failed to do so—never mind that the doctor also told the patient repeatedly, over the course of four years, to stop smoking and to lose weight. The judgment was for $3.5 million (Prof. John Banzaf III, George Washington University).
Unfortunately, at the same time, attemptng to advise or educate patients on anything beyond their specific training is likely to land doctors with a formal complaint. The requirement still stands, without exception, that doctors know at least the ‘basics’ of physiology before specialising. All doctors—even heart surgeons—should be able to tell you the names of the bones in your knee, for example, and how your nervous system works. They are only expected to refer patients to a specialist if symptoms are beyond a basic quick fix.
It’s interesting, then, that the only requirement for teachers, beyond their chosen subject, is basic numeracy and literacy. A teacher is required by law to cater to every aspect of a student’s learning, including Treaty of Waitangi components, although they are only given a crash course in everything except the subject they teach. They are expected to respect cultural boundaries, although they are never taught where those boundaries may be. For example, in Early Childhood Education, many preschools cope with cultural requirements with overarching rules, such as banning all pork products, so teachers do not have to learn the ins and outs of Muslim/Jewish dietary restrictions (note: both are much more detailed than ‘do not eat pork’). It seems that doctors are required to learn much more than they practice, but teachers teach more than they are required to learn.
Teachers’ ability in the classroom does affect their reputation, and may affect their future employment if they change jobs, but firing a teacher is notoriously hard in New Zealand. Further, with staffing shortages, teaching is seen as an easy profession to get into for employment. So, while teachers are monitored relatively heavily by a range of people, these results affect their perception and perhaps future employment, but not their actual jobs. Perhaps this is why doctors are kept on a short leash in terms of accountability and regulation. Their patient numbers reduce immediately and possibly irreparably when they make mistakes with patient care, and many are consultants, who are paid by the number of patients they see per day.
Teachers’ salaries and wages are set by the government (with the exception of the private sector, although private schools’ salaries are comparable), and their pay increases with their time in the profession. Estimates of the length of teaching careers vary widely worldwide, but teaching graduates can be put into three camps: roughly 30 per cent of teaching graduates do not become primary or secondary teachers, while the remainder either leave teaching after five years, or 20+ (i.e., most leave early or continue until retirement). Evidence suggests that after around five years, a teacher has tired of their low pay rate remaining stable as their living expenses (for example, mortgages to pay off) increase.
Almost 60% of all teachers start on about $45,000 a year, with the maximum base salary going up to $68,980, which around 3% of teachers reach in the first five years of their career. In fact, only 8% of teachers in public schools have a base salary above $45,653 (while additional responsibilities generally bring more pay). Overtime is unpaid, with teachers clocking in an average 10 hours overtime a week, with some working up to 36 hours extra a week. On average, one-fifth of teachers working hours are unpaid but required to complete the job.
Most doctors, on the other hand, continue in the profession until at least retirement age, so assuming one begins training straight after high school at 18, they have 40 years of a salary beginning at a minimum of $60,000 and topping out at $230,000 (all before overtime, of course, which can increase income by $30k annually). The average salary of a doctor in New Zealand is between $128,000-$195,000. Once a doctor is registered (unregistered doctors receieve a wage as low as $30,000) a doctor’s average wage is around double that of the highest paid teachers, and triple that of the average teacher.
One may justify a large amount of this difference to training. We really are paying our doctors for the countless hours of study that brought them to the five minutes they take to glance and say, “that’s eczema,” while the policy on teachers wages is unrelated to their actual quality level of work.
Sometimes it feels as if all we hear from the teaching sector is how underpaid and under-appreciated teachers feel. Sometimes we forget that almost any other industry has a pay scale that increases meaningfully over one’s career, and offers reimbursement for going above and beyond the role. While the life of a doctor isn’t as sexy and exciting as House would have us believe, and it does involve years of hard work, any adequate comparison of the two professions must still end with two considerations. Firstly, how did you treat your teachers when you were at school? And secondly, how do you treat your doctor?