Yesterday I came across an analysis of the best places to teach in America. It was put together by an organization called Wallet Hub. From what I can tell they are primarily a website for small businesses looking to save money, but it appears that they’ve been doing quite a bit of comparative analysis of America when it comes to education in the last few years, comparing states by education quality, school systems and highest education level.

This particular study compared states on a number of measures to come up with a ranking of the most (and least) teacher friendly states in America from a job perspective. To do this, they looked at salary (current and average change), job opportunity now and in the future, number of schools, student/teacher ratio, school safety, school quality, work hours, commute and, interestingly, best and worst states for working moms.

Here’s the map they put together, with dark being good and light being bad:

Tennessee comes in at…41. The site does not release the data for their study (i.e. individual rankings) so we can’t pinpoint exactly why Tennessee came in this low, but we can confidently infer a few things from outside knowledge about Tennessee Education.

So why the low ranking? A large weighting priority was given to teacher salary, school quality and spending on public education. Tennessee ranks in the bottom half in all of these categories. In school spending per capita, we rank 49th according to their data. Within teacher salary, I imagine that we also got dinged for our low growth in teacher salaries over the last few years (see the governor’s decision to forgo a teacher salary increase this year as evidence).

This is disturbing to me not so much because of the outlet that published it (wallet hub?) but because we (Tennessee) fail to stand up to the scrutiny of legitimate and publicly available data. And the data that they used suggests that we’re doing a poor job of making teaching an attractive option from a career standpoint here in Tennessee. Schools are underfunded proportional to most other states, teacher salaries aren’t growing at a rate comparative to elsewhere and public school quality is lower than in many other states. These aren’t crazy fringe numbers – these are perfectly legitimate data that can be found anywhere on the internet.

In the long run, if Wallet Hub is doing this type of number crunching, how long until other more public organizations start doing similar analysis? What’s going to happen when the word starts getting around?

This should serve as a wakeup call for us. We’ve do so much to reform education here in Tennessee in the past decade and and a half, but aside from the State Board of Education’s efforts this past year to reform the way we compensate teachers, my perception is that we’ve done very little to make Tennessee a more attractive destination for teachers, at least as long as I’ve been here (since 2011). We’ve focused on students, schools, evaluations, testing, pretty much everything in the ed reform book, but left out improving the quality of teachers jobs. And it shows, as job satisfaction continues to drop across the nation and, presumably, here in Tennessee as well.

In failing to focus evaluation efforts on improving the quality of teachers jobs doing so we’ve forgotten a simple fact – education is, at the end of the day, about the people you put in front of students. We can focus on improving the quality of those people, but their happiness and satisfaction also matters. Testing, evaluation and school choice can only get us so far. If we don’t make teaching in Tennessee an attractive job, these reforms will never achieve their true potential. Our schools are only as good as the people we put in them, and right now the data says that we’re loosing ground in the competition for the best people. And regardless of the source, that’s something we should worry about.

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