Baltimore City special ed teacher here. You’re right about teachers not getting paid enough, needing second jobs and having to pay out of pocket for supplies in the States. The sad reality is that the profession isn’t as valued in America as it is in many other countries.

But the Facebook posts you see of parents complaining about their kids’ teachers certainly doesn’t happen where I teach. Teaching inner city kids unfortunately means I don’t get a lot of parental involvement when I call home to give either positive or negative feedback for how a kid is doing in my class or their behavior. America certainly has a range of schools, and a diversity of how education is valued and also how much teachers make across the country.

The sad reality is that it’s poor and heavily minority districts like mine that have the highest need but don’t get that kind of support that many wealthy suburban schools do. Perhaps the issue in the American education system is as much inequality as it is a lack of proficiency — because I guarantee you that, yes, a lot of schools with more privilege are just fine.

Thats the challenge of having a heterogenous population in terms of language, race, and class in the U.S. that many East Asian countries like Japan and Korea don’t face that leads to added layers and complexities across the country. I wish people understood that when they compared teaching and education in America to that of Korea or Japan.