I don’t know who in their right mind would want to be a teacher. Bad pay, hard work, ungrateful students and parents, and limited opportunities for growth.
That wasn't really necessary? Your point is taken and some of us are indeed grateful (and I don't doubt GP is or was), but I think we're in the minority. And it seems a general thing in Western societies? There's a lot of teacher bashing in France too, and also a difficulty to find ones. The pay, the teaching conditions, the permanent bashing and ridiculing by the elites, the ruling class, and any class really...
I mean, when your secretary of education tells teachers during the first covid lockdown, most of them fighting to keep classes running, to go help pick strawberries instead. Err... When you can't even fund 5 kn95 masks (to be reused) for every teacher and you relax all covid constraints because the economy is grinding to a halt. 15 euros... Not even that. Even my company pays for 2 daily kn95 masks and I'm not exposed to kids.
Yes, it's a woefully underappreciated and underpaid job. But unlike what must of us fully-hatched adults do with our lives - I do feel that (good) teachers are in fact doing something very valuable and important, and ultimately, at least some of their students will appreciate their efforts long after the fact.
The median wage for teachers seems to be equal to the median pay for college graduates, maybe a bit higher if you account for benefits.
It's not terrific by Hacker News standards, but should be a living wage in most places especially if you marry or room with someone who can split housing costs with you.
Media entry level wage is typically pretty good. The problem is it doesn’t scale as fast as most other professions. Look at mid-career salary and it is a bit different story.
Remember educators also have to get a master’s within 5-10 years in most states.
The $ per hour and quality of life at work are terrible though. You do not get to browse the internet whenever you want, take on enormous liability dealing with children, and of course, entitled parents.
The number of synchronous commitments teachers have every day would be a disqualifier on its own for me. Teachers have a highly structured schedule of daily "meetings" (class sessions), and they are conducting every "meeting" rather than being just a participant. And they are probably doing so on their feet. That just sounds exhausting.
Massive drama but low probability; twice as many people are killed by lightning strikes every year. Beyond that, the "mass shooting" tallies often include gang fights and cartel wars, which most of us do not need to worry about.
Because it’s something you can actually react to. There’s almost no chance a tornado will hit your school but schools do tornado drills. All schools and businesses do fire drills. There was a time they did nuclear bomb drills and many buildings from the era have fallout shelters.
So yes it’s unlikely to occur. But it could and it requires very little effort to be prepared.
The main effect of these drills is to cause kids stress and anxiety, but I also wonder if it's possible that there may be some marginal benefit of increasing awareness and vigilance of warning signs among the kids and teachers.
Older American folks here may remember doing nuclear attack drills in school, where the kids were told to crouch under their desk.
Low probability, but it happens each year and several times. Just in 2021 it happened 32 times. I bet that each time a mass shooting happens in a school it affects emotionally to all teachers in the country.
As teacher is normal to deal with problematic, or even very twisted children sometimes, but the feeling in Europe is very different. I can perfectly understand somebody that leaves after experiencing such traumatic events non-stop each ten days.
It’s definitely not hard work relative to other fields. That plus 3 months off and a relatively short day and low barriers for entry make this a no brainer for many, many people.
I think it would be mentally exhausting dealing with ~30 children all day. It's not a job where you can take a quick mental break if you're feeling overwhelmed since the kids will be there regardless.
> relatively short day
Citation needed. Teachers I know spend a ridiculous amount of time prepping, marking, and going to meetings outside of class hours.
Teachers have a lot of vacation, sure. But all the teachers I had were at school from 7-4 minimum every day and worked much, much harder than I ever have as a developer. And I make 3 times as much as any of them.
I work less than half as much over the course of a year as a senior tech consultant than I ever did as a public school teacher. No question. And my salary doubled within 2 years, is set to hit triple now in year 6, and my stress is so much lower as to be negligible.
It’s a difficult job for not enough pay and an expectation to work far more than 40 hours per week, and that was before the COVID-19 pandemic. (I got out to raise my child and support my employed spouse)
I don’t understand why usa is so adverse to metal detectors at the door for public institutions like schools. I spent a few years in India having to be metal detected to enter any metro, mall, or hotel. And they have far fewer weapon and terrorism concerns than USA does. It’s annoying and you get used to it.
Small steps like these could improve the confidence of those working in schools and the many parents trusting schools to safely educate their children
Like other physical security measures (tall fences, razor wire, bars on windows, steel doors) it’s a sign that you are in a low-trust, high-crime environment.
If in fact you are, then those things are important, but most Americans don’t want to think of their local communities this way and resent developments that reify such a perception. Especially when it comes to children. We really don’t like young children being cognizant of evils and threats and other such “adult” concerns. Innocence is important.
My elementary school was like this. No doors on any stalls or the bathrooms themselves. It wasn't a safety thing, it was a 'kids are dumb' thing. Kids would hang on the doors and break them, pee on them, smear excrement on them, crush other kids body parts in them (which I guess is a bit of a safety thing...), etc. Finally they just gave up and got rid of the doors entirely.
Nobody ever seemed to care, but I sure never set foot in those bathrooms.
Many American schools do have metal detectors. The public school in the area where I grew up (known as a "good" school district) not only had metal detectors, but required everyone to use flimsy backpacks made of clear vinyl so staff could always see the contents.
My school had metal detectors. Wasn't a big deal. They were only for when you enter in the morning though. If you wanted to bring something in you could do it at any other time and leave it in your locker.
People (rightly) ask: Why would anyone be a teacher?
For some it's genuinely a calling, a vocation. The buzz you get from seeing the lights go on, from making a difference, from seeing a student blossom, is unequalled.
But external pressures are squeezing that out, and the utter neglect of the teachers and utter contempt for the profession is finally catching up.
The warning signs have been there for decades, the momentum is growing, and it may now be too late.
I think the biggest indicator of a problem is that now even those people for whom it’s a “calling” are leaving the field. Epecially those in public education
Presumably the "calling" is the aspect that has been abused in order to underpay teachers. In my experience they are underpaid across the board but particularly in public sector roles (at least in the UK).
What's interesting, and isn't something the article covers, is that demand side at the high end is nearly insatiable. Private schools in London consistently increase fees well above inflation year after year and never fail to fill places. The teachers there do okay but it's hardly stellar pay and although many of the schools discourage teachers tutoring it's commonly the way that income is boosted.
I have several teachers in my family and have been teaching for 11 years. In my life I have met at most four people for whom teaching is a calling. Teaching is a job, not a priesthood. Some people really like their job but when they retire they wave goodbye and that’s it. A very large majority of teachers view it as a job.
Who wouldn’t want a job that pays a pittance while also being so underfunded that some of that tiny salary has to be used to buy resources needed for the job? While also being continuously attacked for everything and being threatened with fines for doing your job properly
I implore you to look up starting teacher salaries in your area. Where I live, a single family homes average $550k, and teachers start at $35,200. For a career that requires a degree that is horrific, and far from 'generous'.
They should take it up with their unions. We could probably pay good teachers what they are worth if we had a market for them. But we don’t. Unions negotiate their pay and unions exist to protect the group, not individuals.
So, good teachers who want to be rewarded on merit should seek to abolish their unions and abolish public schools generally speaking. Let parents compete for the best teachers in part by using taxes to fund children and not administrations and unions.
Ok, I did. They are in the process of raising salaries (most teachers make in the range I was talking about anyway now). Now they will be starting at 50K with many making 70K.
That could dovetail with the pandemic demographic contractions where births have declined 25% during the pandemic. This is compounded by the fertile generationX is smaller than normal. And immigration has been politically reduced. This could wreck havoc on institutions that depend on youth cohorts like schools, colleges and low-skilled jobs.
Education is ripe for disruption. The US should move to a South Korean model where a few very good superstar teachers lecture thousands of students simultaneously.
Questions are overrated. Most people will never ask for social reasons, and most of the time either the teacher won't understand the question or the student won't understand the answer. You can't really learn with an audience.
It’s one thing to suggest the Socratic method may not be the best learning strategy, but it’s quite another to suggest that questions are overrated. Questions are so fundamental to increasing our knowledge in an intuitive way - just look at Stack Overflow, Quora, etc. for the success in helping people find answers (of decidedly varying quality). There is no limit to creative questions a group of people can ask but there is a limit to how much a single human thinks they know about a subject or can write in a single lecture, article, or book.
In the USA though we'd need another couple hundred "enforcers" to make sure kids stayed in their seats and didn't hit one another during lecture.
And that (in my opinion) may be part of the reason so many teachers are leaving the field. Teaching is very rewarding, playing social service aid giver and municipal cop not as much.
You can do both. Flipped classroom, where the students watch video lectures ahead of time on their own schedule, and the time in the classroom is for supplemental recitation sessions and/or getting practice with the material.
That is just bullshit buzzword. Overwhelming majority of classes involve both exercises and lecture like segments. They switch.
Plus, watching and reading stuff does not mean teacher can skip it. It still needs to be said again, either because many kids read only half of it or because they forgot it all due to not switching between active and passive learning by themselves.
Jeff Bezos can't get his employees to do the same, apparently. That's why meetings at Amazon start with a reading period, to ensure that everyone has read the memo that's on the agenda. The "flipped classroom" is an edfad than only works in advanced courses. Even worse: process-oriented guided inquiry with students who don't want to be there.
I think the most infuriating thing about "growing up" and becoming an adult is that obvious problems you think should simply be fixed without any particular ideological emphasis end up becoming bogged down by people who know the least about a problem(and, in my view, the kind of people least likely to be experts on anything) trying to make sure the solution conforms to their uninformed world views.
You're confusing the US's requirement for religious freedom with the education model. It's not like you're forced to pick a school that teaches things you don't agree with.
For every one of these schools teaching kids religious nonsense that is clearly wrong, there is some other school using that freedom to try alternative ways of running classroom. If you don't allow this you end up with a pretty rigid system that basically everyone but educational board members hates, like the Common Core requirements that are so tight that teachers basically have to design their entire quarter around them.
If they receive public money, they may not introduce religious concepts into science courses. A chain of charters in Texas does indeed seem to be working around the ban on religious doctrine, a ban tested in court, by using tricky language e.g. "Evolution is one theory; there are competing theories." However sooner or later they'll probably be taken to court and lose. Probably nationwide, 99% of charter schools are secular and do indeed teach proper broadly accepted science and other subjects.
Yeah, there’s a real problem with people generalizing from sensational news about isolated incidents. It seems to be creating really distorted mental world models.
It's been an ongoing fight in Texas for a few decades. This is a major issue since Texas buys so many school books they tend to drive the market but this is lessening a bit.
From what I understand her coworkers at the agency were all ideologically motivated to hate her and stonewall everything she did, so it was difficult to make progress. This was her philosophy:
> states and local districts should make education policy, not the U.S. government.
It would be a breath of fresh air for a philosophy like this to be implemented but you would have to fire everyone in the department of education and start over to actually get anything done.
There's probably some truth to this-- but I think people should look at these kind of notices with some skepticism.
Consider who is quoted as an expert: someone who makes money training teachers. Seems like someone who will profit from greater funding of the general system.
A while ago, a friend of mine read articles in the newspaper about a dire shortage of math teachers. So he enrolled in a teacher training program, put in the hours and couldn't find anything anywhere. He's a personable guy. Polite and very sociable. So when he couldn't find anything anywhere, I started to believe that this is one of those self-serving fibs circulated by the unions and the teacher prep programs. There may be some truth to it, but it may be wildly inflated.
My wife is a 1st grade teacher, has been for 11 years now. She has incredible patience and genuinely enjoys helping children succeed and grow.
A few years ago, she got her first salary increase in seven fucking years after her union threatened a strike. And it was 7%. This all during one of the biggest economic run ups ever. While the district and admins had all gotten consistent wage increases every year she didn’t.
She has multiple children who literally take off their clothes, flip over tables, and try to climb the fences of the school to leave every single day. Not kidding, multiple grown adults have to intervene multiple times a week to protect these kids and their peers. And literally nothing changes, absolutely no support from admin to get these kids support they clearly need. I have zero respect for the professional abilities of school administrators, I’ve regularly interacted with them and wondered how they are employed, it’s crazy.
School administrators are by and large bureaucratic idiots that are incapable of innovating or improving schooling. The pandemic proved this perfectly. My wife was required to do 3 hours of real time education a day, to 6 year olds, including filling out a physical piece of paper for attendance at the beginning of the day, then taking a photo and sending it in.
For virtual school.
For 6 year olds.
She has to perpetually pull individual children to test their progress against state standards, while the rest of the class has to occupy themselves with activities.
6 year olds.
The amount of bullshit wrapped around public education, along with completely upside down incentive structures, will be ripping apart the very concept of school over the next ten years.
She wants to educate, but we are already working on pursuing that as a small business vs being a public educator.
> School administrators are by and large bureaucratic idiots
I think that the size and uselessness of the para-ecudational layer should not be underestimated. The ministry, committees, the commercial education ecosystem; they have been extremely successful in absorbing whatever money we have been trying to poor in. It's like a ship with two seamen and a council of 5 captains and 20 contractors to keep the messhall's leisure PC running in exchange for 80% of personell expenditures.
It's ridiculous. And if that was not enough, some people believe even more privatisation is the solution.
Privatization changes the incentive structure for administration. If the school needs to turn a profit they are less likely to hire unnecessary or incompetent staff. That is just a waste of money. Public schools get away with hiring excess staff because they get paid by the number of kids in the school regardless of performance.
Quite the contrary. Private schools spends even more on excess. Their business model is after all to make money, which they do, like any modern capitalist venture, with brand management.
> School administrators are by and large bureaucratic idiots that are incapable of innovating or improving schooling.
This can’t be overstated and, unless you have first hand experience, impossible to comprehend. We’re talking the very basic levels of competence like don’t smoke weed in your car before school because you’re the principal of a middle school level of competence.
Meanwhile, at least back in the mid-2000s when I was in school, they’re doing stuff like stationing cops at every school so they can run drug dogs through the halls and arrest + throw into juvie any kid they find with a jacket that smells like weed in their locker.
> She has multiple children who literally take off their clothes, flip over tables, and try to climb the fences of the school to leave every single day
All serious potential legal issues. Whatever happened to expulsion? No way I'd accept students like that. If your child is that out of control they're your problem to deal with.
Yeah, my wife actually intentionally hasn't gotten certified to allow her to legally physically retain children because it's such an obvious litigation minefield.
School is frequently viewed as a day care more than a house of education unfortunately.
I was a teacher and my experience was that I always felt administration as a whole was counter productive, but almost all of the administrators I could think of were really great. They were great teachers who had great relationships with students and knew how to teach well. So it stands to reason that the problem is with the system and incentives, not the individuals.
I think this is they way things are heading. Learning pods with private teachers based off a accredited college approved prep curriculums. I hope your wife does well.
So the fact that one of the most powerful unions (at least in my state, CA) has orchestrated a pay scheme in which new entrants to the field do not benefit whatsoever is not in the least bit surprising.
Teachers unions don't exist to help students, they don't exist to help those who might want to become teachers, they exist to help entrenched teachers maximize the amount of money they pull out of the state.
This is why in California entry level teachers, who are doing the same job as 65 year old teachers, are making less than half.
> maximize the amount of money they pull out of the state
the root "cause" of the problem is that the money spent on education does not produce profit (to fund the endeavour). It is reliant on a taxation scheme, which means the source of funding is adversarial to the payment of wages.
Private schools _do_ align the profit motives, but it also breaks the social good that free public education has. I dunno how one can solve this problem.
Weirdly (to me, at least) private school teachers make substantially less than public. The ones I know say it's worth it to be free of the onerous beauracracy that plagues public education.
Shame on whoever thinks the salary difference goes to the education management companies behind the charter school movement. (Looking at you, Edison Schools failing the young people of Philadelphia!)
Not only that but a career public school teacher in many places can retire with a nice pension, private school teachers don't. Even if you look at some of the best private high schools in the country the teacher salary just isn't great.
The only way it makes sense financially to teach at a private school is if you have kids you want to go there. Many schools will do reduced or even free tuition for teachers' kids. It's relatively common for private school teachers to either be early retirees from a more lucrative field or have a spouse that works.
That said, many private school teachers do it because they have more flexibility in designing a curriculum, are much less likely to encounter disruptive students, etc. Private schools also don't actually do 180 days. So it is a more enjoyable job day to day for sure.
Unfortunately one of those onerous bureaucracies involves having an actual education in how to educate, or a teaching certification. Which is how my private catholic high school had a baseball coach as a history teacher who didn't really know how to teach history.
I had a few former scientists (left the field after PhD) teach me in high school and holy shit it was amazing, leagues above anything my friends were learning in the local public school. There are pros and cons, but the point I was at in high school I found much more value in talking to those science teachers than the ones that had an education in education with science as a secondary concern. Teaching certifications have a place but I also think it is a good thing most private schools don't require them.
That's not surprising, the private teachers are not unionized. I think a lot of the hate for teachers' unions is driven by decades of propaganda - both from private institutions and both of the major political parties. Slashing teacher salaries by ~20% is the wet dream of many "education reform" advocates. Though I wonder what effect that will have on society and the quality of education, especially for those that can't afford the top tier private schools.
A big part of the hate for teachers unions is the inability to fire bad teachers.
>California has more than 1,000 school districts and 300,000 teachers, yet only 667 dismissal cases were filed with the Office of Administrative Hearings between January 2003 and March 2012, according to the Los Angeles Unified School District”s chief labor and employment counsel, Alex Molina. Only 130 of those actually got to the hearing stage, and 82 resulted in dismissals — fewer than 10 a year.
This makes sense to me (and matches the facts I've found) -- when folks talk about private industry being "more efficient" they often mean cheaper, which also often means those near the bottom rung are the worst paid relative to work and experience. It's unnecessarily explosive and results in qualified and motivated teachers leaving the industry prematurely.
- a lot less paperwork and mind bending BS.
- flexibility is higher. Hey, we're going to teach outside on stumps during the pandemic -> no problem. This is with most things. That said private schools tended to stay open with modifications (so if you didn't want that public school would be better to be at to check out during pandemic).
- Teacher has a lot of authority in their class.
- Teachers / teacher aids etc that don't work out, pretty simple process not to bring them back for the following year - so peer group tends to enjoy working with each other.
- You don't have to wade through the massive teacher certification processes necessarily.
- Admin often has your back on discipline issues.
Some downsides too.
- You can be let go easily if school feels its not working out (practically, if you have things covered its hard enough to find teachers they will work to keep you).
- Pay is lower.
- Expectations can be higher at good schools ie, you might need a masters etc.
- Quality of programs varies WILDLY!
Private schools (non charter, non voucher) have more engaged parents and by being selective and flexible may have a lower number of children with special needs, behavioral disorders, and/or more flexibility in providing services for them.
We are seeing the outcomes at universities. We are getting football teams and really fancy gyms but not better education. On the contrary, if you fail students who shouldn't really be there you get in trouble with the administration. The naive free market solution does not work.
The government doesn’t actually do this. Your eligibility for such loans is means-tested and you’re only obtaining them at a discounted rate. And they cannot be discharged during bankruptcy in most cases.
It’s like saying home mortgages are free money because they’re also partially backed by the fed.
It's pretty much universally accepted at this point that the flood of government student loan money has both distorted the higher education market, and created a trap for millions of people who have gotten an ineffective education with that "free" money.
Your analogy to mortgages is right on, but you've drawn the wrong conclusions. Fed-backed mortgages absolutely functioned as free money. Because the risk of unqualified borrowers was assumed by the government and by opaque, byzantine, and corrupt securitization schemes, banks were incentivized to hand over money to people who weren't able to pay it back.
This was, in every sense that matters, "free money". And it led directly to a financial crisis that many millions of people have never fully recovered from.
>We are getting football teams and really fancy gyms but not better education.
This is an often flouted myth. Football pays for itself and then some. There's more money in education, per capita, inflation adjusted, then there ever has been ever.
It's not a money problem, and it's not a sports problem.
This is how the American higher education system works.
The problem with this approach for public schools in the US is that there are multiple taxing authorities involved in determining how much $$$ gets attached to a student, and most of it comes from local property taxes.
> Teachers unions don't exist to help students, they don't exist to help those who might want to become teachers, they exist to help entrenched teachers maximize the amount of money they pull out of the state.
This isn't true at all. I know of teacher unions (that my family members belong to) that have refused deals because they weren't fair to their younger members. My local teacher's union refused a deal that wouldn't have applied to substitute teachers. Just because California has an entrenched entitled boomer problem doesn't mean all unions are bad. You're using one of the worst examples in the country to generalize unions with.
I lived in California for 10 years (I moved to Chicago last July). The entrenched power is just ridiculous- old politicians never retire, it's all political machines everywhere, and while there are a lot of amazing activists they're fighting huge uphill battles. At the same time costs in lots of areas have risen a huge amount, and Prop 13 incentivizes people being landlords and forces higher prices on newly purchased property to make up for subsidized taxes on those landlords.
Yeah, it’s great paying 10x the tax of our neighbors with similar house values because they moved here 30 years ago. The argument is always “people shouldn’t be forced out of their homes because of rising prices!” but we shop at the same grocery stores, eat at the same restaurants, pay the same power and gas bills…
What we end up with is neighborhoods with literal multi-millionaires in >1m properties living next to squalor, and people living in such a situation can’t afford to move anywhere else within 50 miles. They stay and try to scrape by until they can’t take it anymore and move somewhere cheaper, or pass away and the property is promptly torn down, rebuilt, and sold by the family for a ~1m profit. The reality of someone who can barely afford that even massively-reduced tax bill living in a million-dollar house that they can’t sell without moving out of state isn’t pretty, but these are the situations that Prop13 advocates are supposedly protecting (when really they just want to keep their own much lower tax bill forever in a vacuum detached from reality).
A lot of the really bad Prop13 offenders are businesses though. I don’t have much sympathy for landlords, but I have even less for Disney paying 1/100th of their property tax because of prop 13: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/dis...
Unfortunately, boomers and existing home owners will keep voting against ANYTHING that reduces Prop13’s benefit to businesses because they all think it’s a slippery slope and that they’ll come for residential next.
Most states have some variety of "homeowners" or "homestead" tax policy that gives deductions for people who live in their own home. I don't mind that, as long as it is fair. In California it isn't fair, and it isn't limited to a the home someone lives in.
> The entrenched power is just ridiculous- old politicians never retire, it's all political machines everywhere, and while there are a lot of amazing activists they're fighting huge uphill battles.
You've probably figured this out by now, but that sentence describes Illinois as well as it does California.
This enrollment decline is across the board in education. While not high paying, education was at least once considered a safe and reliable profession in a respected field. It is really none of those things anymore.
The job has gotten harder and more involved and the pay has gotten, relative to cost of living, much worse. In many districts teachers do not know if and when their next raise will come. It could be next year or in 10 years.
If as a society we value education we need to fund it.
Every time this topic comes up on HN I see a lot of comments along the lines of "Don't try to fix the problem; just move kids to private schools", an incredibly privileged, net harmful point of view... very sad to see.
The reality is that teachers in America make horrific wages for a job that requires a degree, are treated like garbage, held to impossible standards, constantly subject to budget cuts, and then we wonder why America, the wealthiest country in the world, ranks 14th in education. It's not a mystery. Teachers deserve better.
Some teachers deserve better, to be sure. The reality is that educational spending in the U.S. is quite high by developed-country standards. But the system still fails to reward the best teachers, and many teachers are quite simply not properly qualified for what they're supposed to teach. "Education" degrees are practically meaningless.
I agree that a mistake that has been made has been to force teachers to get graduate degrees and largely incentivize that they earn their master's degree in education. It would be more valuable if they received a master's or doctoral degree in literally anything else.
The problem is that measuring the efficacy of a teacher is a dubious task. What would probably work the best is to incentivize teachers to get advanced degrees outside of the field of education by providing a substantial pay increase upon completion. Right now it is actually harder to get a degree in a field outside of education because in many districts you would need explicit permission from a supervisor to be reimbursed for a non-education degree versus an education degree that requires no permissions for reimbursement.
An advanced degree does not make a great teacher, but it does provide some solid foundational knowledge.
Is this true the world over or just the USA? I have a friend that complained his high paying FAAMG job didn't get him any respect when applying for a home loan at a Japanese bank but his wife's college professor job got lots (both of them are foreigners).
Probably not globally, every country will be different, though I suspect a similar thing is playing out across numerous western countries. My knowledge is of the American educational system.
One of my best friends has been a teacher for ~20 years or so. They said the parents and the kids treat you insanely terribly. Society also barely respects what you do and treats you like glorified baby sitting. The only cool part is the 3 months off a year my friend used to use to go live in Italy or something and explore/learn about the world. Most jobs don't provide you with that time.
It's a shame teachers are held in such low esteem in U.S. society. In Asia, the teaching profession is prestigious (if not highly paid) and the students pay teachers a lot more respect. When I lived in Taiwan, I witnessed it: from kindergarten through university, students stand and bow when the teacher enters the classroom, and the same when he or she leaves. Of course there were terrible teachers there, as well, but at least they probably enjoy higher job satisfaction than our teachers (both good and bad).
Asian countries haven’t had decades of social programs advocated for by “activists” that have encouraged people to abandon the family structure and devalue personal responsibility. So we have a large part of society that is completely dysfunctional and reliant on the state to raise their child. Many people consider these people heroes even.
Education is an area where I believe private competition against the public sector can have huge gains. If the local school board cannot implement simple evidence-based education reform, then they've failed to provide the community's children their most fundamental need.
Maybe a startup to facilitate the founding of private schools is in order?
i left teaching in 2 years, and I wanted to leave it pretty much as soon as i started...took me 2 years to get out...what a mess... my day was full of personal conflict...not something I ever enjoyed...but I did grow as a person, but it was certainly not a pleasant process...
the main problems? Inability to punish students, lack of respect...back in my day, if we disrespected the teacher, we got licks in front of the classroom...
also, kids don't read that much anymore, making it hard to teach them
one other problem is that the classes are not separated as to ability anymore...now in each classroom you are going to have one or more kids who have mental issues and who will wind up in prison, maybe for most of their adult lives...think about that--you have to ride herd on kids who are future lifer convicts...you can tell that these people will be in prison from an early age...they are really messed up...from birth, most likely...these kids are angry at the world because they do not fit in...and they take it out on the teacher...a lovely situation...the teachers warn each other about these kids...you can spot them fairly easily...naively, society believes you can get them on your side...you think we don't try? It does not work, long term...these kids fail at everything and cannot succeed at anything...
Imagine you are the kid which will end in prison. Wouldn't you feel betrayed from society if society can already see that you will end in prison and is doing nothing against it?
You can we haven't accepted the right answer though: more money for education.
Smaller classes, more support, proper trained psychologist
I think it’s become tragically obvious that a whole lot of children are born to parents who should’ve never had children and have no business being parents. These children end up dumped on educators with zero support at home, and so little social system support we could also say it’s zero.
This isn’t nature versus nurture per se (although I believe the data does show some ability and intelligence is genetic/inherent), but that it takes a lot for a human child to succeed unless they’re at the higher end of the bell curve (and even then it’s no guarantee).
The United States already has below average class sizes, and spends 37% more per student than the average.
There is some evidence that large class sizes produce better results, and it would seem that whatever the US spends its education money on isn't working, because our students test much lower than our investment would predict.
I was a bad kid growing up. I ended up at a pilot program consisting of about 14 kids, mostly more screwed up than me, and about 3 psychiatrists and 5 support counselors. It did basically nothing for the kids. The thing that helped me the most was my parents moving away and putting me in normal school in a different state and peer pressure helping me be normal.
Mostly outside of education. The US spends a lot on education and gets poor results for the investment because it also spends on lot on institutionalizing racism and reinforcing socioeconomic insecurity in the working class, which creates a lot for the education system to work against.
Sounds like the system dodged a bullet, but would be improved if it could have ejected you in less than 2 years. Bemoaning the lack of beatings and then making an analogy between your pupils and livestock? Nice.
I didn't think they were bemoaning a lack of beatings. It sounded like they were talking about how they don't have tools to discipline students. Stuff like some schools doing away with detention, etc. Then they put in their experience of corporal punishment growing up.
Going to public schools in KY, I look back at how we were grouped by horse families (e.g. thoroughbreds were gifted, clydesdales the laborers) based on academic achievement. Teachers could easily and openly identify which type of student by asking which family they belonged to, and students being entirely unaware of the joke unless they were aware of different types of horses and their applications.
Zero punishment is quite new. We are seeing the results of the first generation raised in such an environment.
We were well down this path when I graduated in '99, and went full steam ahead during my kid's primary school career. You either escaped to a (private or suburban) school not full of juvenile delinquents who had parents that still cared, or you simply gave up on having your child have an actual education.
The inner city school I had to attend in 1998 was more or less a daycare even back then, and the anecdotes I hear today have only gone further in that direction.
Young people are better behaved now then at periods you talk about. Drugs abuse goes down. Young people commit less violent crime. They drink less alcohol. They even get pregnant less often.
Young people now literally behave better wherever you look. The generation that grew in 90ties just was not better behaved.
> The generation that grew in 90ties just was not better behaved.
I'm not talking about better behaved. I'm talking about better behaved in school, or you got expelled very quickly. That left others who were there to learn (or at least not to be disruptive) move forward in peace. I have no opinion on if kids were better behaved outside the classroom - likely not, having grown up during that time.
A single kid can ruin an entire semester for 40 kids in the classroom. I've personally watched it happen, and there was nothing the teacher could do. Averages don't matter in this situation - only outliers do.
I'd go back to a "rougher" generation that learns to behave when appropriate (and those that don't learn, get removed) any day of the week over what we currently have in the average urban public school system.
Edit: Heck, I got suspended from a couple classes in high school due to attendance issues. Rightfully so since I was holding back other students on group projects and the like. Today that would be utterly unheard of in that same school system.
Except that, it does not seem to be the case. There is absolutely nothing to suggest kids were better behaved in schools. The rougher generation did not behaved better where appropriate. Even issues I mentioned were about them misbehaving when not appropriate.
You just idealize own generation, that is all. Which is odd, because at the time superpredators panic was going on and people fretted.
> You just idealize own generation, that is all. Which is odd, because at the time superpredators panic was going on and people fretted.
I still believe we're talking about entirely different things. One of my schools was incredibly rough. If you talked back to a teacher you'd get instantly suspended, and on the third one bounced to alternative schooling. I was one of those kids.
That no longer happens, and was starting to slip when I was due to graduate. These days I've witnessed students literally hurling desks at teachers and smashing windows only to be back in the classroom on Monday.
Yes, I totally agree violence was more in your face in the 90s. The utter disrespect towards teachers and those trying to learn with zero consequences for your actions was simply not there yet, at least in my small section of the world. Perhaps on the coasts and other major cities this was already the norm.
There simply is no mechanism to separate the small percentage of troublemakers from the general student population any longer, much less providing challenges for the high achievers. This drags down standards and morale on a massive fashion, and the results simply speak for themselves.
The "best" school I went to during my illustrious schooling career was an inner city private school where almost all the kids were on 90%+ needs-based scholarships. Selection bias where only the parents who cared enough to jump through the loopholes made that place bearable - so teachers that actually taught stuck around. The difference in attitudes and hope was utterly night and day. Almost entirely because the bottom 10% or so wasn't dragging everyone else down to their behavioural level.
If students can't be held back why do we even test them? Ofc, it is helpful to show them their knowledge, but I think that is quite early... Or to discover where to try to improve process, but I think fear of being held back and losing the group could be reasonable tool to get at least part of the students to learn.
Afaik, it did not worked like that. Repeating grades did not lead to better success, which was one reason for ending it. The age difference between failed kid and younger kids in next class did not made anything easier either.
And kids at the very bottom have better and more support available now. It is not perfect, it often sux and is not available to everybody. I definitely don't mean to say it is somehow super great. But the kids at the bottom with cognitively issues or impulsive control issues have better chance to learn more then used to be normal.
When I was growing up you were bumped up still (to stay with age group), but you took basic courses until you were back up to speed, then you were moved to standard, then advanced, then AP. I sucked at AP, but standard / advanced were good. The AP kids must have studied so hard - I bombed those classes when I tried them.
But that also was seen as discriminatory I think because it wasn't that easy to move out of basic etc once you were there so I think they stopped this as well - I think system was called tracking.
Reminds me of this story[1] of Baltimore students repeatedly advanced despite passing essentially no classes.
>According to transcripts, France's son passed only three classes in his four years of high school, earning a 0.13 grade point average. What's worse is that her son's GPA puts him near the top half of this class. He was also late or absent to school 359 days.
In SF they've been having kids get A's despite no attendance. And the attendance figures were being fudged as well. Reason was they've had so many subs they don't know who is in class / just give everyone an A.
This is the real issue. Zero repercussions. It also affects the quality of teachers. What stops some teachers from sleepwalking their way through the year if they know their students will move forward regardless of how poorly they’ve been taught.
Belt spanking is spanking. Paddle spanking is spanking.
It was literally never true that the word would refer to beating a kid by open hand only. The books that teach parents to spank also give advice to use instruments and call it spanking.
Old books that contain spanking use the word beating as synonyms. It started to be used as different word when people started to take issue with it more often.
I agree with you that paddles or switches can be used for "spanking", and that "spanking" is a form of "beating", but still the words are different. "Spanking" strongly implies that it is done to cause pain without serious or permanent injury. "Beating" has no such limitation.
I agree that it is not the right way to discipline a child, but I can recognize this distinction in meaning.
I find this interesting, actually, as a form of argument. The annihilation of semantic categories. It's like argument via Sapir-Whorf.
>This is beyond bad faith. Would you rather get a beating from your mother or a spanking from a drug lord?
This is in bad faith, a drug lord won't give you a spanking unless it's sexual in nature. I assume you know the difference between a sexual spanking and a beating in the street. Perhaps not. A parent can give a beating, but that is different from a spanking.
I think trying to equivocate a spanking with a beating is intellectually dishonest. If you can't tell the difference in both intent and intensity, I have no idea where you are coming from. You might be against spankings but to argue the words spanking and beating are synonyms is simply wrong, and quite honestly, juvenile in the level of reasoning. As the OP said, words matter.
That's very dramatic. Maybe if people would stop being so comfortable with meaningless hyperbole such as yours, we'd re-learn how to communicate better.
As a matter of language and connotations, you're right.
I assume people are so appalled by the concept of physical punishment (which, let's be clear, I don't do and barely experienced either), that they don't want to acknowledge... how English works.
"Spanking" implies an open palm or maybe a belt or thin switch, on the rump. It hurts; it may leave a bruise; it may be barbaric -- but it doesn't involve serious injury (say, to internal organs). The point is to inflict pain without serious injury.
"Beating" carries no such connotations of limited harm. It can be done with fists or blunt objects; it can target the face or internal organs like the kidneys; it can be severe enough to lead to death.
This difference in meaning is as much about connotation as denotation, but the connotational differences are very large. You might say that, logically, a spanking is a kind of limited beating, but not all beatings are spankings.
Not sure why I'm sharing these stories, but...they are amusing.
My father, 84 years old, remembers his elementary school teacher kicking him full-force on his flank (for fooling around with his buddies). Probably not the best approach, but he remembers it to this day.
He also remembers students being forced to kneel on hardened kernels of corn as punishment.
And I was repeatedly told when I was in elementary school, "If you were stupid enough to go home and complain to your parents that your teacher beat you, you just got beaten twice as hard."
They’re not amusing, they’re horrible. The fact that these stories are re-told just goes to show how traumatising they were as experiences for those involved.
Not all painful memories or memories of pain have to be catastrophised into "trauma". Some can be simply instructive ("hot surface hurts") without needing to go into provoking an irrational response.
did you read and understand the article?...i got out because I COULD get out...lots of teachers cannot get out or are pushed out before they can find an exit option. You think you understand, but you do not...
I did read the article. It didn’t say anything about teachers inability to punish disrespectful students.
Rather, it said things like this:
> One of the things that students benefit from (diverse educators) is this idea of seeing themselves not only leading classrooms, but also in the curriculum
Do you see the difference? They want to engage students by empowering them. In contrast, you wanted to demand respect through fear of punishment. It’s not hard to imagine why your days were plagued with interpersonal conflict.
My wife also left elementary school teaching shortly after the pandemic. She had a child throw a sizable textbook at her, only missing her head by an inch or so. Felt the air as it wizzed by. She sent the kid to the vice-principal for their grade level. Thirty minutes later the kid was right back in her class, and once again causing disruptions.
They lack any ability or willpower to meaningfully hold students accountable. My wife felt physically unsafe with this student in her room, yet apparently nothing could be done.
When I was growing up in Texas, most teachers had a wooden paddle, often prominently displayed. To be spanked by a paddle was called "getting licks". Female teachers would sometimes delegate the paddling to a coach or other male teacher. Most all this that I recall occurred in Junior High (what they now call middle school. Grades 7-9). By high school, "licks" were quite rare, as most students had learned how to behave better by then.
To people today this all sounds barbaric. However, there were far fewer "broken people" coming out of that system than is produced today. That generation was not filled with sociopaths and 'challenged" people -- quite the opposite. It's the system today that produces those. Lack of ability to administer punishment is part of why teachers get so little respect.
The past 2 years was very revealing as to how our modern public schools are failing today. It's embarrassing, and I understand and support the moves many parents are making to private or home schooling.
But the teacher-student violence only normalizes violence in the minds of the victims. Consider that as the practice receded in the US so did the violent crime. I claim it's no coincidence. Yeah, I know, leaded gasoline etc. Whatever. That's my story and I'm sticking to it - violence begets violence.
People will argue this until they’re blue in the face, but pulling a deadly weapon out escalates the situation, when de-escalation would likely lead to a less physically harmful outcome.
What do you see as the alternative to punishment when trying to maintain an environment that students can learn in?
I was generally a good and respectful student, and I was punished on the occasions I misbehaved or was disruptive. I think that punishment was necessary and helpful.
I thought they were talking about in general and threw in a personal experience of themselves having corporal punishment. Some schools have done away with detention.
As a child I was punished three times without cause, including once when I was a straightforward victim and had several witnesses; and twice by a teacher who disliked me only because a troublesome family member had been her former student. One of those times I was "convicted" on the word of my bully for something I had not done and my bully regularly did. They tried to get me to admit to things in each case, but even though I denied it throughout, I was still punished.
As a father, I remember the only time my kid got in trouble at school. I received a strongly worded letter from my child's school that my child had been disrespectful to a teacher and that he was going to receive detention. It was like pulling teeth to get them to tell me what my child had actually done that was disrespectful. When asked (in email) they just kept repeating that he was disrespectful and they talked a lot about the teacher's feelings but never told me what my specifically kid had done or said. I wrote them back a last time suggesting I meet with the principal and the teacher in person to discuss the issue. They never replied to me, but I found out through my kid that they dropped the detention. I'd have pressed further, but we were already moving our kid to another school because of other shenanigans and overall low education quality.
I asked my kid for his version of events. He said that he took a test about the field trip they had been on, and he had left the last question "What did you learn?" blank. The teacher suggested he answer the question. My kid said leaving it blank was his answer and the teacher left to check on the other kids. If this bothered the teacher, it wasn't even addressed at the time.
Now, I had a good talk with my kid about the situation and I agree that he shouldn't have left that question blank. (I also sympathized with him because the field trip was the same each year and not exactly information rich. It was overall I think a good learning moment for him.) But this was what hurt the teacher's feelings and she found disrespectful? If the kid refuses to answer the question let his score reflect it. If you're not okay with blank questions, make that a detention-worthy offense. But to bring me your hurt feelings and how my kid was disrespectful... and then to not even be willing to tell me about it? I thought maybe my kid had a tone or was otherwise rude in his delivery of his decision; but if so, they wouldn't tell me about it. And I've talked to my kid about this incident since, and even as an adult he has no idea why the teacher had the reaction she seemed to have had.
Anyway, the point of this is that discipline in schools is mostly unfair, arbitrary, and not clearly effective. In the general case there are no trials, no weighing of the evidence, or anything to protect the student from unfair treatment or abuse.
I don't know what the solution is; parents suck and let their kids get away with murder. But many current parents also experienced such 'guidance' and have no desire to see their kids experience it as well.
"One of those times I was "convicted" on the word of my bully for something I had not done and my bully regularly did. They tried to get me to admit to things in each case, but even though I denied it throughout, I was still punished."
"Anyway, the point of this is that discipline in schools is mostly unfair, arbitrary, and not clearly effective. In the general case there are no trials, no weighing of the evidence, or anything to protect the student from unfair treatment or abuse."
To be fair, the criminal "justice" system works the same way - abuses of power, arbitrary punishments, recidivism, etc. And, you can have a trial if you feel like starting a law suit, but I don't know how much justice one finds there either. Up to 10% of the incarcerated are wrongfully convicted. I think we should be working to fix both systems, but given this it's perhaps better to learn that this is how the system works when the stakes are detention vs prison.
> back in my day, if we disrespected the teacher, we got licks in front of the classroom
The evidence that physical violence as punishment against children is counterproductive and harmful to their development is pretty overwhelming (and the evidence that it is harmful for those who merely witness and are under pervasive threat of it rather than actually punished with it is also strong.)
Promoting abuse of children just because you were raised in an environment where abuse was normalized (and one where that might have been excusable as nonculpable ignorance because the evidence of harm was not as compelling as it has since become) does little but demonstrate what the phrase “cycle of abuse” means.
Far from overwhelming. I thought so too, but that's largely from the correlation between poor quality households and use of severe physical abuse, as well as bucketing all corporal punishment from spanking to bashing them with closed fists.
Studies that separated measured corporal punishment from outright abuse found drastically different results.
Public schools are a nightmare. My wife is long time middle and high school teacher but decided to quit after this year. It’s not the kids, it’s the administration and how utterly incompetent they are. We’ll see what’s next for her but I hope my wife gets a chance to work with functioning adults at least once in her life.
It's it the admin or the politics. At least in some areas there is such pressure around graduation rates, attendance (for the money) and such sensitivity around disparate impact (ie, poor/minority students with higher than average detentions etc) that you end up with basically no failing allowed, attendance is everything including students who are massively outside of classroom ability to manage in a large class, and limited discipline
Both my parents were teachers. My mother was a teacher in public schools. When we would talk about this very thing, she said whenever they would fail students, it would glut up the system and it would start to cease to function. It's a tough problem. When I was young, they had alternate schools for bad kids. At least two levels. The bad kid school, then if you got kicked out of that, the really bad kid school. If you got kicked out of that, you didn't go to school anymore. I don't know why we stopped doing that. The public school system was bad then and it's bad now, so it might not matter.
It's complicated. At least in SF race is a major item - there is a real push to avoid disparate impact. Things like D's and F's they have shown disparately impact certain groups. Race is a major topic at least in SF school district.
"A gay dad volunteers for one of eight open slots on a parent committee that advises the school board. All of the 10 current members are straight moms. Three are white. Three are Latina. Two are Black. One is Tongan. They all want the dad to join them.
The seven school board members talk for two hours about whether the dad brings enough diversity. Yes, he’d be the only man. And the only LGBTQ representative.
...
The gay dad never utters a single word. The board members do not ask the dad a single question before declining to approve him for the committee."
They have trouble recruiting for these spots. He was white. His credentials, interest, commitment, skills he might bring to the position were not relevant.
My dad always told me that during the 40s and 50s children would be paddled for being disrespectful. Students wore uniforms. Parents would be angry at their children if a teacher or administrator scheduled a meeting. The parents would be mad at the kids. it is clear that times have changed dramatically so I think it’s insane to expect the model of the old times to work. If you want a good result for your child then enroll them in a program that is suited for these times. I suspect private school is the only good option.
There's middle ground, I think, but we don't live in a time of balance, and we have completely swung the other way in terms of raising children. Ironically, we may be doing more psychological damage to them in the long run than we did when we paddled them or put soap in their mouths or make them chew spruce gum (not that I condone any of that).
The key difference is that it's a conscious choice on the part of the parents to invest in the child's education. But there are other factors. For example, most private education at the gradeschool level requires heavy parent involvement and even volunteerism. Private schools are generally much smaller. The school also has the ability to kick out troublemakers or those who obviously don't want to be there. Not to say there aren't problems in the private schools - there are. But you don't have to deal with people who are just there because the state law says they must attend school.
Selection and Ejection. If you can say that a child is a bad fit for your school because they’re not academically gifted so you won’t accept them you’re ahead of the game. Even more true if you can kick out violent or disruptive students, which public schools can’t for much short of assault resulting in prison time.
The failure of public schooling would mean a reversal of much of the public safety and poverty gains we made over the past 50-70 years. So here’s hoping it turns around.
Two things I would have liked to see added to this article:
1) regarding state differences in pay, how does that compare to cost of living? California pays more than Florida, sure but its cost of living is higher also (https://www.insure.com/cost-of-living-by-state.html). Looking at how cost-of-living-adjusted pay varies between states would be more informative. California probably still pays more, but how much more? It's like comparing housing costs now and 20 years ago without adjusting for inflation.
2) how many of these teachers are leaving the profession entirely, vs. going into private or religious schools or tutoring? Knowing that would help tease out how much of the issue is due to how the public schools are administered, vs. how much they are afraid of contracting covid-19, vs. whatever else.
3) how does the labor shortage in teaching compare to the labor shortage generally? The article gives the impression that it's worse, and I could believe it, but I'd like to see some comparisons.
What the article had was a lot of quotes, and not much in the way of facts or good analysis. Which is probably because the reporter in question had 1 hour to write it, perhaps from their bedroom or their parents' basement, before they had to move on to the next article. Disclaimer: I have no facts to back up that last sentence.
If anything, the facts they presented seem to go against their case. A salary of $65k is not low. Compared to the median US income, it is quite good. Especially depending on the local cost of living, as you point out.
The inability to discipline children I think has greatly contributed to the power and balance for teachers in the classroom. It means bullying, and misbehavior can just fester.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 354 ms ] threadI am extremely grateful for the talents of several of my public school teachers (and until they were downsized) counselors.
That wasn't really necessary? Your point is taken and some of us are indeed grateful (and I don't doubt GP is or was), but I think we're in the minority. And it seems a general thing in Western societies? There's a lot of teacher bashing in France too, and also a difficulty to find ones. The pay, the teaching conditions, the permanent bashing and ridiculing by the elites, the ruling class, and any class really...
I mean, when your secretary of education tells teachers during the first covid lockdown, most of them fighting to keep classes running, to go help pick strawberries instead. Err... When you can't even fund 5 kn95 masks (to be reused) for every teacher and you relax all covid constraints because the economy is grinding to a halt. 15 euros... Not even that. Even my company pays for 2 daily kn95 masks and I'm not exposed to kids.
Perhaps not. I guess what I'm trying to say is:
Yes, it's a woefully underappreciated and underpaid job. But unlike what must of us fully-hatched adults do with our lives - I do feel that (good) teachers are in fact doing something very valuable and important, and ultimately, at least some of their students will appreciate their efforts long after the fact.
What OP is saying is that most people don't appreciate teachers, and aren't greatful for them, not that THEY (OP) don't appreciate teachers.
Had I only listened to my teachers more, when it still mattered.
It's not terrific by Hacker News standards, but should be a living wage in most places especially if you marry or room with someone who can split housing costs with you.
Remember educators also have to get a master’s within 5-10 years in most states.
So yes it’s unlikely to occur. But it could and it requires very little effort to be prepared.
Older American folks here may remember doing nuclear attack drills in school, where the kids were told to crouch under their desk.
As teacher is normal to deal with problematic, or even very twisted children sometimes, but the feeling in Europe is very different. I can perfectly understand somebody that leaves after experiencing such traumatic events non-stop each ten days.
> relatively short day
Citation needed. Teachers I know spend a ridiculous amount of time prepping, marking, and going to meetings outside of class hours.
Teachers can't even bring their dog to work! How can anyone deal with that.
Small steps like these could improve the confidence of those working in schools and the many parents trusting schools to safely educate their children
If in fact you are, then those things are important, but most Americans don’t want to think of their local communities this way and resent developments that reify such a perception. Especially when it comes to children. We really don’t like young children being cognizant of evils and threats and other such “adult” concerns. Innocence is important.
My wife’s school had:
* metal detectors
* police
* drug dogs
* 12 foot fencing
* no doors on toilets
* active shooter drills
* no on-site medical staff
* restrictions on access to medication, including inhalers
That is what public schools in America are. They are prisons, and the on-site police treat the children as criminals.
My wife went through school never using the bathrooms
Nobody ever seemed to care, but I sure never set foot in those bathrooms.
For some it's genuinely a calling, a vocation. The buzz you get from seeing the lights go on, from making a difference, from seeing a student blossom, is unequalled.
But external pressures are squeezing that out, and the utter neglect of the teachers and utter contempt for the profession is finally catching up.
The warning signs have been there for decades, the momentum is growing, and it may now be too late.
What's interesting, and isn't something the article covers, is that demand side at the high end is nearly insatiable. Private schools in London consistently increase fees well above inflation year after year and never fail to fill places. The teachers there do okay but it's hardly stellar pay and although many of the schools discourage teachers tutoring it's commonly the way that income is boosted.
Many people who teach would have trouble at other jobs from what I've observed.
I don't think it's about the money.
So, good teachers who want to be rewarded on merit should seek to abolish their unions and abolish public schools generally speaking. Let parents compete for the best teachers in part by using taxes to fund children and not administrations and unions.
https://www.governor.state.nm.us/2021/12/01/governor-plans-t...
Oh, and we are ranked 50'th in the nation in education. Down again, I think we managed to bump up to 49'th place last year.
This is more then a fair salary for the area, with the pension, and time off, and the (nearly complete lack of) results being obtained.
Education is ripe for disruption. The US should move to a South Korean model where a few very good superstar teachers lecture thousands of students simultaneously.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrDfCy5Q9wI
I think there’s ways to address the need to ask questions here. Forums and discussion pods for instance.
And that (in my opinion) may be part of the reason so many teachers are leaving the field. Teaching is very rewarding, playing social service aid giver and municipal cop not as much.
Plus, watching and reading stuff does not mean teacher can skip it. It still needs to be said again, either because many kids read only half of it or because they forgot it all due to not switching between active and passive learning by themselves.
https://ncse.ngo/creationism-texas-charter-schools
They should accurately teach subjects such as science.
For every one of these schools teaching kids religious nonsense that is clearly wrong, there is some other school using that freedom to try alternative ways of running classroom. If you don't allow this you end up with a pretty rigid system that basically everyone but educational board members hates, like the Common Core requirements that are so tight that teachers basically have to design their entire quarter around them.
https://relevantmagazine.com/current/texas-board-education-d...
This is one example. There are lots more.
Oh the irony
~ George W. Bush, during a campaign speech in South Carolina (2000)
That particular question had probably not been asked much before, but it's been asked more frequently ever since.
> states and local districts should make education policy, not the U.S. government.
It would be a breath of fresh air for a philosophy like this to be implemented but you would have to fire everyone in the department of education and start over to actually get anything done.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushism
Consider who is quoted as an expert: someone who makes money training teachers. Seems like someone who will profit from greater funding of the general system.
A while ago, a friend of mine read articles in the newspaper about a dire shortage of math teachers. So he enrolled in a teacher training program, put in the hours and couldn't find anything anywhere. He's a personable guy. Polite and very sociable. So when he couldn't find anything anywhere, I started to believe that this is one of those self-serving fibs circulated by the unions and the teacher prep programs. There may be some truth to it, but it may be wildly inflated.
A few years ago, she got her first salary increase in seven fucking years after her union threatened a strike. And it was 7%. This all during one of the biggest economic run ups ever. While the district and admins had all gotten consistent wage increases every year she didn’t.
She has multiple children who literally take off their clothes, flip over tables, and try to climb the fences of the school to leave every single day. Not kidding, multiple grown adults have to intervene multiple times a week to protect these kids and their peers. And literally nothing changes, absolutely no support from admin to get these kids support they clearly need. I have zero respect for the professional abilities of school administrators, I’ve regularly interacted with them and wondered how they are employed, it’s crazy.
School administrators are by and large bureaucratic idiots that are incapable of innovating or improving schooling. The pandemic proved this perfectly. My wife was required to do 3 hours of real time education a day, to 6 year olds, including filling out a physical piece of paper for attendance at the beginning of the day, then taking a photo and sending it in.
For virtual school.
For 6 year olds.
She has to perpetually pull individual children to test their progress against state standards, while the rest of the class has to occupy themselves with activities.
6 year olds.
The amount of bullshit wrapped around public education, along with completely upside down incentive structures, will be ripping apart the very concept of school over the next ten years.
She wants to educate, but we are already working on pursuing that as a small business vs being a public educator.
It’s a sad state of affairs.
I think that the size and uselessness of the para-ecudational layer should not be underestimated. The ministry, committees, the commercial education ecosystem; they have been extremely successful in absorbing whatever money we have been trying to poor in. It's like a ship with two seamen and a council of 5 captains and 20 contractors to keep the messhall's leisure PC running in exchange for 80% of personell expenditures.
It's ridiculous. And if that was not enough, some people believe even more privatisation is the solution.
This can’t be overstated and, unless you have first hand experience, impossible to comprehend. We’re talking the very basic levels of competence like don’t smoke weed in your car before school because you’re the principal of a middle school level of competence.
/wife is a long time teacher quitting this year
All serious potential legal issues. Whatever happened to expulsion? No way I'd accept students like that. If your child is that out of control they're your problem to deal with.
School is frequently viewed as a day care more than a house of education unfortunately.
Teachers unions don't exist to help students, they don't exist to help those who might want to become teachers, they exist to help entrenched teachers maximize the amount of money they pull out of the state.
This is why in California entry level teachers, who are doing the same job as 65 year old teachers, are making less than half.
the root "cause" of the problem is that the money spent on education does not produce profit (to fund the endeavour). It is reliant on a taxation scheme, which means the source of funding is adversarial to the payment of wages.
Private schools _do_ align the profit motives, but it also breaks the social good that free public education has. I dunno how one can solve this problem.
The only way it makes sense financially to teach at a private school is if you have kids you want to go there. Many schools will do reduced or even free tuition for teachers' kids. It's relatively common for private school teachers to either be early retirees from a more lucrative field or have a spouse that works.
That said, many private school teachers do it because they have more flexibility in designing a curriculum, are much less likely to encounter disruptive students, etc. Private schools also don't actually do 180 days. So it is a more enjoyable job day to day for sure.
>California has more than 1,000 school districts and 300,000 teachers, yet only 667 dismissal cases were filed with the Office of Administrative Hearings between January 2003 and March 2012, according to the Los Angeles Unified School District”s chief labor and employment counsel, Alex Molina. Only 130 of those actually got to the hearing stage, and 82 resulted in dismissals — fewer than 10 a year.
https://www.willitsnews.com/2013/01/26/firing-a-tenured-teac...
Private schools
- a lot less paperwork and mind bending BS. - flexibility is higher. Hey, we're going to teach outside on stumps during the pandemic -> no problem. This is with most things. That said private schools tended to stay open with modifications (so if you didn't want that public school would be better to be at to check out during pandemic). - Teacher has a lot of authority in their class. - Teachers / teacher aids etc that don't work out, pretty simple process not to bring them back for the following year - so peer group tends to enjoy working with each other. - You don't have to wade through the massive teacher certification processes necessarily. - Admin often has your back on discipline issues.
Some downsides too. - You can be let go easily if school feels its not working out (practically, if you have things covered its hard enough to find teachers they will work to keep you). - Pay is lower. - Expectations can be higher at good schools ie, you might need a masters etc. - Quality of programs varies WILDLY!
It’s like saying home mortgages are free money because they’re also partially backed by the fed.
Your analogy to mortgages is right on, but you've drawn the wrong conclusions. Fed-backed mortgages absolutely functioned as free money. Because the risk of unqualified borrowers was assumed by the government and by opaque, byzantine, and corrupt securitization schemes, banks were incentivized to hand over money to people who weren't able to pay it back.
This was, in every sense that matters, "free money". And it led directly to a financial crisis that many millions of people have never fully recovered from.
This is an often flouted myth. Football pays for itself and then some. There's more money in education, per capita, inflation adjusted, then there ever has been ever.
It's not a money problem, and it's not a sports problem.
The problem with this approach for public schools in the US is that there are multiple taxing authorities involved in determining how much $$$ gets attached to a student, and most of it comes from local property taxes.
The biggest factors that contribute to student academic outcomes are household income and parental education levels.
Private schools as having a superior educational experience is really about being from wealthier households than it does about better teachers.
This isn't true at all. I know of teacher unions (that my family members belong to) that have refused deals because they weren't fair to their younger members. My local teacher's union refused a deal that wouldn't have applied to substitute teachers. Just because California has an entrenched entitled boomer problem doesn't mean all unions are bad. You're using one of the worst examples in the country to generalize unions with.
It's all very frustrating.
What we end up with is neighborhoods with literal multi-millionaires in >1m properties living next to squalor, and people living in such a situation can’t afford to move anywhere else within 50 miles. They stay and try to scrape by until they can’t take it anymore and move somewhere cheaper, or pass away and the property is promptly torn down, rebuilt, and sold by the family for a ~1m profit. The reality of someone who can barely afford that even massively-reduced tax bill living in a million-dollar house that they can’t sell without moving out of state isn’t pretty, but these are the situations that Prop13 advocates are supposedly protecting (when really they just want to keep their own much lower tax bill forever in a vacuum detached from reality).
A lot of the really bad Prop13 offenders are businesses though. I don’t have much sympathy for landlords, but I have even less for Disney paying 1/100th of their property tax because of prop 13: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/dis...
https://aagla.org/2021/12/the-california-chamber-of-commerce...
Unfortunately, boomers and existing home owners will keep voting against ANYTHING that reduces Prop13’s benefit to businesses because they all think it’s a slippery slope and that they’ll come for residential next.
You've probably figured this out by now, but that sentence describes Illinois as well as it does California.
The job has gotten harder and more involved and the pay has gotten, relative to cost of living, much worse. In many districts teachers do not know if and when their next raise will come. It could be next year or in 10 years.
If as a society we value education we need to fund it.
The reality is that teachers in America make horrific wages for a job that requires a degree, are treated like garbage, held to impossible standards, constantly subject to budget cuts, and then we wonder why America, the wealthiest country in the world, ranks 14th in education. It's not a mystery. Teachers deserve better.
Some teachers deserve better, to be sure. The reality is that educational spending in the U.S. is quite high by developed-country standards. But the system still fails to reward the best teachers, and many teachers are quite simply not properly qualified for what they're supposed to teach. "Education" degrees are practically meaningless.
The problem is that measuring the efficacy of a teacher is a dubious task. What would probably work the best is to incentivize teachers to get advanced degrees outside of the field of education by providing a substantial pay increase upon completion. Right now it is actually harder to get a degree in a field outside of education because in many districts you would need explicit permission from a supervisor to be reimbursed for a non-education degree versus an education degree that requires no permissions for reimbursement.
An advanced degree does not make a great teacher, but it does provide some solid foundational knowledge.
Maybe a startup to facilitate the founding of private schools is in order?
Imagine you are the kid which will end in prison. Wouldn't you feel betrayed from society if society can already see that you will end in prison and is doing nothing against it?
You can we haven't accepted the right answer though: more money for education.
Smaller classes, more support, proper trained psychologist
This isn’t nature versus nurture per se (although I believe the data does show some ability and intelligence is genetic/inherent), but that it takes a lot for a human child to succeed unless they’re at the higher end of the bell curve (and even then it’s no guarantee).
There is some evidence that large class sizes produce better results, and it would seem that whatever the US spends its education money on isn't working, because our students test much lower than our investment would predict.
[0] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd
Mostly outside of education. The US spends a lot on education and gets poor results for the investment because it also spends on lot on institutionalizing racism and reinforcing socioeconomic insecurity in the working class, which creates a lot for the education system to work against.
We were well down this path when I graduated in '99, and went full steam ahead during my kid's primary school career. You either escaped to a (private or suburban) school not full of juvenile delinquents who had parents that still cared, or you simply gave up on having your child have an actual education.
The inner city school I had to attend in 1998 was more or less a daycare even back then, and the anecdotes I hear today have only gone further in that direction.
Young people now literally behave better wherever you look. The generation that grew in 90ties just was not better behaved.
I'm not talking about better behaved. I'm talking about better behaved in school, or you got expelled very quickly. That left others who were there to learn (or at least not to be disruptive) move forward in peace. I have no opinion on if kids were better behaved outside the classroom - likely not, having grown up during that time.
A single kid can ruin an entire semester for 40 kids in the classroom. I've personally watched it happen, and there was nothing the teacher could do. Averages don't matter in this situation - only outliers do.
I'd go back to a "rougher" generation that learns to behave when appropriate (and those that don't learn, get removed) any day of the week over what we currently have in the average urban public school system.
Edit: Heck, I got suspended from a couple classes in high school due to attendance issues. Rightfully so since I was holding back other students on group projects and the like. Today that would be utterly unheard of in that same school system.
You just idealize own generation, that is all. Which is odd, because at the time superpredators panic was going on and people fretted.
I still believe we're talking about entirely different things. One of my schools was incredibly rough. If you talked back to a teacher you'd get instantly suspended, and on the third one bounced to alternative schooling. I was one of those kids.
That no longer happens, and was starting to slip when I was due to graduate. These days I've witnessed students literally hurling desks at teachers and smashing windows only to be back in the classroom on Monday.
Yes, I totally agree violence was more in your face in the 90s. The utter disrespect towards teachers and those trying to learn with zero consequences for your actions was simply not there yet, at least in my small section of the world. Perhaps on the coasts and other major cities this was already the norm.
There simply is no mechanism to separate the small percentage of troublemakers from the general student population any longer, much less providing challenges for the high achievers. This drags down standards and morale on a massive fashion, and the results simply speak for themselves.
The "best" school I went to during my illustrious schooling career was an inner city private school where almost all the kids were on 90%+ needs-based scholarships. Selection bias where only the parents who cared enough to jump through the loopholes made that place bearable - so teachers that actually taught stuck around. The difference in attitudes and hope was utterly night and day. Almost entirely because the bottom 10% or so wasn't dragging everyone else down to their behavioural level.
This does make things harder and disrupts learning for others.
And kids at the very bottom have better and more support available now. It is not perfect, it often sux and is not available to everybody. I definitely don't mean to say it is somehow super great. But the kids at the bottom with cognitively issues or impulsive control issues have better chance to learn more then used to be normal.
If the kids failed either way, it's cheaper to make them fail in 12 years than 13 or 14.
But that also was seen as discriminatory I think because it wasn't that easy to move out of basic etc once you were there so I think they stopped this as well - I think system was called tracking.
>According to transcripts, France's son passed only three classes in his four years of high school, earning a 0.13 grade point average. What's worse is that her son's GPA puts him near the top half of this class. He was also late or absent to school 359 days.
https://www.willitsnews.com/2013/01/26/firing-a-tenured-teac...
The only difference is rituál around it.
It was literally never true that the word would refer to beating a kid by open hand only. The books that teach parents to spank also give advice to use instruments and call it spanking.
Old books that contain spanking use the word beating as synonyms. It started to be used as different word when people started to take issue with it more often.
I agree that it is not the right way to discipline a child, but I can recognize this distinction in meaning.
I find this interesting, actually, as a form of argument. The annihilation of semantic categories. It's like argument via Sapir-Whorf.
This is in bad faith, a drug lord won't give you a spanking unless it's sexual in nature. I assume you know the difference between a sexual spanking and a beating in the street. Perhaps not. A parent can give a beating, but that is different from a spanking.
I think trying to equivocate a spanking with a beating is intellectually dishonest. If you can't tell the difference in both intent and intensity, I have no idea where you are coming from. You might be against spankings but to argue the words spanking and beating are synonyms is simply wrong, and quite honestly, juvenile in the level of reasoning. As the OP said, words matter.
I assume people are so appalled by the concept of physical punishment (which, let's be clear, I don't do and barely experienced either), that they don't want to acknowledge... how English works.
"Spanking" implies an open palm or maybe a belt or thin switch, on the rump. It hurts; it may leave a bruise; it may be barbaric -- but it doesn't involve serious injury (say, to internal organs). The point is to inflict pain without serious injury.
"Beating" carries no such connotations of limited harm. It can be done with fists or blunt objects; it can target the face or internal organs like the kidneys; it can be severe enough to lead to death.
This difference in meaning is as much about connotation as denotation, but the connotational differences are very large. You might say that, logically, a spanking is a kind of limited beating, but not all beatings are spankings.
So, as a matter of language, you're right.
My father, 84 years old, remembers his elementary school teacher kicking him full-force on his flank (for fooling around with his buddies). Probably not the best approach, but he remembers it to this day.
He also remembers students being forced to kneel on hardened kernels of corn as punishment.
And I was repeatedly told when I was in elementary school, "If you were stupid enough to go home and complain to your parents that your teacher beat you, you just got beaten twice as hard."
kids these days...
How were we to know they'd go home to their fat psychopathic wives to be beaten within and inch of their lives?
It sounds like you leaving the profession was best for everyone involved.
Rather, it said things like this:
> One of the things that students benefit from (diverse educators) is this idea of seeing themselves not only leading classrooms, but also in the curriculum
Do you see the difference? They want to engage students by empowering them. In contrast, you wanted to demand respect through fear of punishment. It’s not hard to imagine why your days were plagued with interpersonal conflict.
They lack any ability or willpower to meaningfully hold students accountable. My wife felt physically unsafe with this student in her room, yet apparently nothing could be done.
To people today this all sounds barbaric. However, there were far fewer "broken people" coming out of that system than is produced today. That generation was not filled with sociopaths and 'challenged" people -- quite the opposite. It's the system today that produces those. Lack of ability to administer punishment is part of why teachers get so little respect.
The past 2 years was very revealing as to how our modern public schools are failing today. It's embarrassing, and I understand and support the moves many parents are making to private or home schooling.
People will argue this until they’re blue in the face, but pulling a deadly weapon out escalates the situation, when de-escalation would likely lead to a less physically harmful outcome.
Is this some kind of joke? If you want to lead with _that_, I hope you never are put in a position of power over any kid ever again.
I was generally a good and respectful student, and I was punished on the occasions I misbehaved or was disruptive. I think that punishment was necessary and helpful.
As a father, I remember the only time my kid got in trouble at school. I received a strongly worded letter from my child's school that my child had been disrespectful to a teacher and that he was going to receive detention. It was like pulling teeth to get them to tell me what my child had actually done that was disrespectful. When asked (in email) they just kept repeating that he was disrespectful and they talked a lot about the teacher's feelings but never told me what my specifically kid had done or said. I wrote them back a last time suggesting I meet with the principal and the teacher in person to discuss the issue. They never replied to me, but I found out through my kid that they dropped the detention. I'd have pressed further, but we were already moving our kid to another school because of other shenanigans and overall low education quality.
I asked my kid for his version of events. He said that he took a test about the field trip they had been on, and he had left the last question "What did you learn?" blank. The teacher suggested he answer the question. My kid said leaving it blank was his answer and the teacher left to check on the other kids. If this bothered the teacher, it wasn't even addressed at the time.
Now, I had a good talk with my kid about the situation and I agree that he shouldn't have left that question blank. (I also sympathized with him because the field trip was the same each year and not exactly information rich. It was overall I think a good learning moment for him.) But this was what hurt the teacher's feelings and she found disrespectful? If the kid refuses to answer the question let his score reflect it. If you're not okay with blank questions, make that a detention-worthy offense. But to bring me your hurt feelings and how my kid was disrespectful... and then to not even be willing to tell me about it? I thought maybe my kid had a tone or was otherwise rude in his delivery of his decision; but if so, they wouldn't tell me about it. And I've talked to my kid about this incident since, and even as an adult he has no idea why the teacher had the reaction she seemed to have had.
Anyway, the point of this is that discipline in schools is mostly unfair, arbitrary, and not clearly effective. In the general case there are no trials, no weighing of the evidence, or anything to protect the student from unfair treatment or abuse.
I don't know what the solution is; parents suck and let their kids get away with murder. But many current parents also experienced such 'guidance' and have no desire to see their kids experience it as well.
"Anyway, the point of this is that discipline in schools is mostly unfair, arbitrary, and not clearly effective. In the general case there are no trials, no weighing of the evidence, or anything to protect the student from unfair treatment or abuse."
To be fair, the criminal "justice" system works the same way - abuses of power, arbitrary punishments, recidivism, etc. And, you can have a trial if you feel like starting a law suit, but I don't know how much justice one finds there either. Up to 10% of the incarcerated are wrongfully convicted. I think we should be working to fix both systems, but given this it's perhaps better to learn that this is how the system works when the stakes are detention vs prison.
The evidence that physical violence as punishment against children is counterproductive and harmful to their development is pretty overwhelming (and the evidence that it is harmful for those who merely witness and are under pervasive threat of it rather than actually punished with it is also strong.)
Promoting abuse of children just because you were raised in an environment where abuse was normalized (and one where that might have been excusable as nonculpable ignorance because the evidence of harm was not as compelling as it has since become) does little but demonstrate what the phrase “cycle of abuse” means.
Studies that separated measured corporal punishment from outright abuse found drastically different results.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7992110/
I had this debate with a friend a year ago, and when we dug into the literature, it was certainly rather mixed.
Both my parents were teachers. My mother was a teacher in public schools. When we would talk about this very thing, she said whenever they would fail students, it would glut up the system and it would start to cease to function. It's a tough problem. When I was young, they had alternate schools for bad kids. At least two levels. The bad kid school, then if you got kicked out of that, the really bad kid school. If you got kicked out of that, you didn't go to school anymore. I don't know why we stopped doing that. The public school system was bad then and it's bad now, so it might not matter.
"A gay dad volunteers for one of eight open slots on a parent committee that advises the school board. All of the 10 current members are straight moms. Three are white. Three are Latina. Two are Black. One is Tongan. They all want the dad to join them.
The seven school board members talk for two hours about whether the dad brings enough diversity. Yes, he’d be the only man. And the only LGBTQ representative. ... The gay dad never utters a single word. The board members do not ask the dad a single question before declining to approve him for the committee."
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/Sa...
They have trouble recruiting for these spots. He was white. His credentials, interest, commitment, skills he might bring to the position were not relevant.
1) regarding state differences in pay, how does that compare to cost of living? California pays more than Florida, sure but its cost of living is higher also (https://www.insure.com/cost-of-living-by-state.html). Looking at how cost-of-living-adjusted pay varies between states would be more informative. California probably still pays more, but how much more? It's like comparing housing costs now and 20 years ago without adjusting for inflation.
2) how many of these teachers are leaving the profession entirely, vs. going into private or religious schools or tutoring? Knowing that would help tease out how much of the issue is due to how the public schools are administered, vs. how much they are afraid of contracting covid-19, vs. whatever else.
3) how does the labor shortage in teaching compare to the labor shortage generally? The article gives the impression that it's worse, and I could believe it, but I'd like to see some comparisons.
What the article had was a lot of quotes, and not much in the way of facts or good analysis. Which is probably because the reporter in question had 1 hour to write it, perhaps from their bedroom or their parents' basement, before they had to move on to the next article. Disclaimer: I have no facts to back up that last sentence.