Teru Clavel is the author of World Class: One Mother's Journey Halfway Around the Globe in Search of the Best Education for Her Children.From the transcript of her interview with Fareed Zakaria:
ZAKARIA: You also talk about the respect the teachers had in these societies. Now, that's something the government, I suppose, can't really do. Teachers could be paid more, which I think is one of the tragedies in America. We think we pay teachers well. We don't. We pay them badly.--Marshal Zeringue
CLAVEL: Yes.
ZAKARIA: What could one do about that? Because there really is this difference, I think.
CLAVEL: So the reverence for teachers is really something that really smacks you kind of in the face when you're in Shanghai and in Japan. And on average, again, in Japan, for example, there are 200,000 applicants for 38,000 spots to become teachers. And it's as difficult to pass the bar, if not, more difficult in Japan to become a teacher. So the credentialing, the licensing is really, really difficult.
And what you also see is the teachers will do anything to help this next generation of students. So I tell many stories in the book where it will be 7:00 P.M. at night, and whenever the house phone rang, we knew it was a teacher who was teaching from -- who was actually, I would just say, calling from the teacher collaboration room that all the teachers went to, because so much of their time isn't spent necessarily in the classroom but it's working together collaborating through professional development and lesson planning.
And in the United States, teachers spend 27 hours a week on average in the classroom, whereas the average for OECD nations is...[read on]