How many people have PhD's?

Would encouraging people with PhDs to teach k12 improve early education?

• Higher education has too few tenure track jobs available in the United States. Supposedly, there are too few highly qualified teachers who are teaching in the k-12 system, particularly in content areas, such as physics and earth science. I realize that training for a profession in higher education is very different from training to teach high school, but it seems to me that this could potentially present an opportunity to improve junior high school and high school education; rather than going through the cycle of being paid minimum wage to adjunct at a college, one could get a job teaching high school at the highest step salary with regards to education. I'm not sure if this idea makes sense but I'd love to hear from educational policy people and people who have completed a PhD - could states develop policies to incentivize the phd community to teach k-12? - would having such highly qualified experts improve educational standards? - what would be the main obstacles to making this idea a reality? - is it worth exploring from an educational policy perspective?

• Answer:

  Maybe. There's a skill required in teaching that PhD.s don't necessarily possess.