As a European, it has always been perplexing to me how little the US invests in teachers and schools, given that we know how huge the benefits are down the road (educational attainment, income, pro-social behavior, life satisfaction).
Watching how large parts of the political spectrum embrace hardship as a societal teaching tool, I begin to understand that the expectation may always have been that kids ought to figure it out by themselves. It's almost as if our "invention of childhood" (as a protected phase in life) is being rolled back.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't believe kids can until they are quite old. On the contrary, I expect the emotional and psychological scars to demand a significant toll in the future.
[edit] PS: There have been quite a few very heated recent discussions where dang sternly warned against incisive political scorn. I agree, and my comment is intentionally worded carefully and as objectively as possible.
I'd argue $13K per student is quite low relative to the services expected. I mean, compare that to the price of college tuition.
Now, college is too expensive and I certainly wouldn't want to replicate that problem in K-12 schools. But... well, in some ways colleges have it easier, because the students are older and can be expected to be more independent. You can't have a 100-person lecture in a K-12 setting (not that I love classes like that at the college level either).
Fine, compare it to portion of GDP. Like healthcare, we spend a lot and get poor return if you measure objectively by things like standardized tests, unemployment, imprisonment, etc.
Yup. $13k/year works out to about $10 per pupil-hour, and even less once you include costs like the building and work done out-of-hours (grading, lesson planning). I’m pretty sure I made something like that babysitting in junior high!
The amount of work/responsibility definitely scales with the number of kids, and it's not exactly linear either: one will color quietly, two might play together--or fight, and three or more...yikes.
I mentioned the rate because it surprised me it was so close. I'd expect that it costs more to actually educate a kid, and of course, the parents provided the house (and often ice cream and HBO), whereas that rate includes everything.
By what standard is that actually "plenty"? Is that $13185 enough to properly fund all the services a child needs for a proper education? And if it's not, why not? How much do you believe we should be spending per student?
You can point at a big number and say 'that's enough' but we spend large amounts of money on all sorts of things, the number being large doesn't mean it's sufficient. There are tons of children in need of an education out there and they're frequently crammed into overcrowded schools in buildings badly needing maintenance, while teachers have to buy supplies out of pocket. Maybe the answer is that all that money is being siphoned away and we would be fine if we redistributed it correctly, but the premise that we're already investing enough seems pretty questionable to me without proof.
I mean, if you have a class of 20 students (which seems on the smaller end), that would be a "revenue" of over a quarter million per teacher, right? I feel like we should be able to do a pretty good job with that while paying a teacher a decent salary.
That class of twenty needs a building to take place, which in turn needs upkeep. It needs supplies and equipment (workbooks, computers, dodgeballs), and it needs some level of administration[0]. The teachers presumably want benefits too.
At a university, the “overhead” costs of research [1] are on the order of 50%: doing $100k worth of research require another $50k to keep the lights on, the building clean, and the library stocked. A fully-loaded salary with benefits is also about 30-50 percent higher than the take-home amount. Similar math gets you to about $100k, which would be a massive improvement but nowhere near the quarter-mil you might expect.
However, the average also hides the fact that student spending usually isn’t uniform: it’s not the case that each student costs $13k; it might be more like 9k for 19/20 students and a lot more for the one student with special needs (who might require a FTE on their own). This doesn’t scale nearly as well, but it’s important if you want to give everyone a fair shot at success.
[0] The right amount of admin is obviously debatable, but you clearly need some level of management and organization: somebody needs to make class schedules, run payroll, etc.
[1] These rates are negotiated with the federal government, and so theoretically reflect the actual costs pretty well. It’s not obvious how well they translate to a K-12 environment: researchers need more specialized services…but also are a lot less likely to draw on the walls.
I did use the word revenue in scare quotes for a reason - I don't expect that all that money could be given directly to the teacher. On the other hand, the state should be able to achieve quite high economies of scale on administration and purchasing (whether they actually do is something else), and there's no profit to make at the end of the day.
I was actually thinking 50% would make the math easy but probably be a bit unrealistic, but I arrive at about the same place as you I think. Also I'd imagine that most classes are larger than 20, but hopefully smaller than 30.
By the standard that we're systematically mismanaging the funds we are spending. The bussing system is absurdly inefficient and wholly unnecessary. Neighborhood schools used to be a thing. Some school systems offer 'gold plated' healthcare plans where they include cosmetic surgery as a benefit to a school system that needs more money spent towards actual education.
I'm not advocating doing away with the public education system, but we're being swindled. It's not the teachers' fault (obviously), but the system as a whole. Every little town has its own school system, administrative overhead, etc.
> Some school systems offer 'gold plated' healthcare plans
So? If you want good teachers--or at, some point, any teachers--you need to offer working conditions that are good enough to attract them, just like any other job.
Spending on benefits "instead of" education is a false dichotomy; in fact, I'd say that's the central thesis of the article.
The figure in the Netherlands is about €6.7k for an elementary school pupil (until age ~12, not sure how that compares to K-12 exactly).
So that's a little over half of what the US spends, and I think it's fair to say that Dutch elementary education is at least roughly comparable to US education (maybe one is a little bit better than the other, but I'd be surprised if the US one was twice as good).
I don't know about other countries, but this is one metric to give an approximation about what is "plenty", although there's the caveat that you can't compare this directly: I've heard about "school lunches" and "school nurses" in the US, and those kind of things are virtually unheard of over here.
Yeah, we spend money to operate school police departments here too. I totally believe you that the Netherlands' spending is adequate given costs and services, though.
I assume you don't have private health insurance plans in the Netherlands either? Those will raise the cost per teacher in the US.
I don’t think it’s fair to assume the money is evenly split. Public schooling must also support students who need much more support, ranging from ESL to a variety of disabilities with a variety of severity.
If you think of specialized needs students the 13k number looks ridiculous. 13k is an alarmingly low amount of support for dyslexia, or autism, or diabetes.
> If you think of specialized needs students the 13k number looks ridiculous.
You’re comparing an average per student spend to a high needs minority. Average spend should be compared to the average student who does not have dyslexia etc. A larger than average portion will be spent on kids with special needs due to special facilities, smaller class sizes, and specialist teachers etc.
But I think the $13K number includes those outliers, no? If I understand GP, they're arguing the average for 90% of students is probably significantly lower.
For comparison - we currently pay more per year to keep our 1 year old child in daycare (roughly ~15,000/yr) and for daycare we literally only expect them to keep him alive & clean. And this is considered a "cheap" daycare. Most places in our area (the much cheaper south-west side of Atlanta) still charge more than 1600/m or almost 20k/yr.
We certainly don't expect them to be significantly enriching his education experience (although the simple exposure to other kids will likely do that at this age). We also don't expect the employees to have any sort of educational/vocational training to excel at teaching, or expect them to perform any sort of off-the-clock work (ex: grading, class prep, parent-teacher meetings, etc). I expect them to be mostly high-school graduates with a background check.
So I look at that number, and while it's certainly a large number if you're making 1 teacher manage 30 kids, I don't really know that it's a number that results in viable conditions to truly "educate" children.
I strongly suspect that education is highly dependent on the family at home, and that's becoming harder to meaningful do as more and more families are forced to have both parents work full time.
>I strongly suspect that education is highly dependent on the family at home, and that's becoming harder to meaningful do as more and more families are forced to have both parents work full time.
This is a big part of it. Education doesn't stop when the school bell rings.
But I was told by HN the state is responsible for providing an education for children. If the parent is responsible instead, then I'd like to be able to opt out of paying taxes for schools and instead send my kid to a private school.
>For comparison - we currently pay more per year to keep our 1 year old child in daycare (roughly ~15,000/yr) and for daycare we literally only expect them to keep him alive & clean
You cannot compare the per child costs of taking care of a kid who cannot go to the toilet themselves or eat by themself with a kid who is much more self sufficient.
The person taking care of a baby (or 4 babies) might need to be much less qualified than an AP physics teacher in high school, but the labor (and liability) costs do not necessarily scale exactly with the minimum qualifications needed to be an AP physics teacher versus a daycare teacher.
I think comparing the costs between the 5 year olds in our daycare and the 6 year olds entering first grade is entirely fair.
Our daycare gets more expensive as the child ages - not less.
> The person taking care of a baby (or 4 babies) might need to be much less qualified than an AP physics teacher in high school, but the labor (and liability) costs do not necessarily scale exactly with the minimum qualifications needed to be an AP physics teacher versus a daycare teacher.
And this - this is exactly what I'm contesting. Why is it we're ok paying someone who should be able to teach complex and technical skills to children (high school physics) barely more than a high school grad who is only qualified to tend to infants? Worse - why do we let class sizes balloon to the point where one-on-one interactions are incredibly hard?
One requires considerably more skills, considerably more education, and frankly much more work (and I'm not talking about the one tending the infants). Yet they're expected to effectively teach class sizes of between 25 and 32 (which is the technical max for the state - but I've frequently seen this balloon as high as 45)
Yet the daycare worker is making almost the rate of an intro physics teacher (17/h vs 19/h). And the very top most earners are making only 30/h. Being a manager at a McDonalds is FAR more lucrative (avg of 98k vs the avg physics teacher in GA at 43k). That should be a giant fucking red flag.
The numbers aren't even that far off - There are ~500 McDonalds locations in GA, and ~525 public high schools. Each McDonalds location has ~3 managers (shift manager, assistant manager, store manager) And they all make more than intro physics teachers. (from 50k to ~100k)
When flipping burgers is literally more lucrative... I fail to be compelled by your argument.
>Our daycare gets more expensive as the child ages - not less.
I have shopped around daycares on east and west coast, and I have never encountered this type of pricing. Infants have always been more expensive than toddlers and pre K in at least 10 to 15 daycares I have priced.
I also do not see the purpose of comparing prices for different prices of labor for justifying the prices.
Physics teachers may very well need to be paid more to attract enough people to meet the desired teacher student ratios and quality of teacher , but it has nothing to do with how much daycare teachers are paid. It just depends on supply and demand of that particular type of labor or service, hence the futility of comparing per student costs of daycare and high schools.
> I also do not see the purpose of comparing prices for different prices of labor for justifying the prices.
Then you're unable to see that market forces are making it incredibly unattractive to be a teacher.
The comparison is to point out the following: Why bother to take loans for college, then complete the additional certifications required for teaching, only to spend more effort at a career that will pay you considerably less well than simply working as a McDonalds manager? And seriously, my mom taught for 48 years - McDonalds manager is an easy job compared to handling 32 kids a class, for 5 classes, and their ~320 some parents (seriously - the parents are usually the pain).
You could have instead spent 4 years generating income roughly equivalent of the same job, spent no money on school, and end up making far more by just going the corporate McDonald's route - not even discussing the "buy your own class decorations bullshit", or the hours lesson planning and grading, or the certification required once every three years to stay current.
This has EVERYTHING to do with how much other professions are getting paid - it's just become incredibly clear we don't value or respect teaching - so why fucking do it?
And that's my point with the daycare workers - it's objectively an easier job, with less education and certification requirements, that also lets you work with kids, and pays almost the same as intro physics teacher. Why wouldn't people choose that instead? Love of physics is bullshit - that's not enough, it has to be genuine respect and the compensation that follows. And that clearly isn't happening.
So we can argue about why that isn't happening, but "nobody wants to teach anymore" is because teaching has become a fucking terrible, shite, job. No fucking duh no one wants to teach anymore.
So 13k per kid clearly isn't getting enough money to the people we need. You can claim that's due to inefficiencies in the system, but given that we pay more for a daycare that pays roughly the same... I suspect we're just genuinely not paying enough - although at least we could have a fair discussion around how that money for each child is allocated.
For comparison - the well known private schools in our area (Paideia, Woodward, Lovett, Galloway, Westminster, etc) all charge at least 22k per student, and many go as high as 36k for high school.
And that's with an expectation that parents are more available and involved.
>Then you're unable to see that market forces are making it incredibly unattractive to be a teacher.
Note that I agree with your statement of teachers not getting sufficient pay relative to quality of life at work. I even think this is true up and down, from daycare to physics high school.
I disagree with the chain of reasoning to support this view, however. You cannot derive this conclusion by looking at the price of daycare.
My claim is that the only thing you need to claim the price is too low for a product or service, is the lack of existence of said product or service given that it is not technologically impossible or such a rare talent or otherwise subject to forces of nature that affect its supply/demand. Which teachers generally are not.
And it is not just price that is too low, it is always price relative to quality of the product/service, or in this case, wages relative to quality of life at work (like having to deal with cumbersome admin, rude children, and entitled parents).
>For comparison - the well known private schools in our area (Paideia, Woodward, Lovett, Galloway, Westminster, etc) all charge at least 22k per student, and many go as high as 36k for high school.
But what are teachers getting paid? The point of my initial response to you was that you cannot compare annual tuition for daycare or private high schools and determine which are appropriate prices. Staffing ratios, liability insurance costs, there are a myriad factors that render this line of thinking erroneous.
> The point of my initial response to you was that you cannot compare annual tuition for daycare or private high schools and determine which are appropriate prices. Staffing ratios, liability insurance costs, there are a myriad factors that render this line of thinking erroneous.
So I guess turn the question on its head - What makes you believe 13k is enough?
When the only viable comparisons we have in my area strongly hint that this is underpaying - both daycare and private schools are relatively close in terms of services provided, and they both cost more.
You've made a claim - I'm saying I don't really believe it. I've pointed to plenty of examples of why I don't believe it, but you've done nothing but attack those methods.
So, genuinely, what makes you think 13k/yr per kid is enough, what's the reasoning behind your argument?
How much is enough? People can barely afford to pay rent right now, and in most places property taxes (and thus rent) are a major source of funding of the schools. We need to make schools more efficient with their funding rather than making people homeless via raising their rent. If part of that is eliminating administrators and a football stadium to pay teachers more have at it.
>What makes you believe 13k is enough?
>You've made a claim
I have not made a claim about which cost is "enough" or appropriate. My only claim was that comparing the price for different products/services is not sufficient to conclude whether the price should be raised or lowered.
If anything, I wrote that I agree with your premise:
>Note that I agree with your statement of teachers not getting sufficient pay relative to quality of life at work.
Are current class sizes small enough? Are the teachers for the current classes sufficiently qualified? Can anything be done to increase quality of life for teachers? These are questions that would answer whether or not the cost is sufficient or not.
>For comparison - we currently pay more per year to keep our 1 year old child in daycare (roughly ~15,000/yr)
>I think comparing the costs between the 5 year olds in our daycare and the 6 year olds entering first grade is entirely fair.
Which is it, you're paying for a 1 year old or a 5 year old? What daycare do you go to that 5 year olds pay the same rate as an infant?
What would be "fair" is to not lie, and be truthful and say your original comment was comparing an infant (or 1 y/o) to school child, and not play switch-a-roo to now say we're talking about 5 year olds which in most states requires something like 1/3 the number of caregivers per child as a 1 year old.
I'm paying for a 1 year old - I have access to the full payment info as they age... Tuition is covered in the new parent hand book by year, and communicated yearly as it updates (the most recent was just this month - as they mirror the back to school dates for our county).
I really don't know what it is you think you're pulling with this bullshit:
> "What would be "fair" is to not lie".
I think it would be fair to tell you to bugger off.
Especially the teacher-pupil relationship, which has been transformed into a teacher-parent relationship where the teacher is seen as a service-worker and the parent sees him/herself as a client/customer. I've heard this first-hand from a close friend of hours who works in the education system for French expats' kids.
One of the issues in my country is „student's money“ where public schools get paid per-student. „2nd year“ if student performs very poorly vanished as a result. 3 decades ago it was pretty common for kids to repeat the curriculum. Now parents just threaten to transfer the kid to another school. Administration lets the kid move on to the next grade for the sake of €€€. At the end of the day, kid never catches up academically..
When you're actually from the US as a Millennial or Gen Z'er, it's not hard to see what happened. The previous two generations taught us nothing, but expected us to know everything they did, as though by virtue of being a living human this knowledge is just granted. Our parents never had the time to show us how to budget, care for a home, etc, so we had to learn from the Internet.
But why?
I posit that Boomers and Gen X had such an easy go of it, they assumed we would, too. Born to an economy that was thriving, they had to know relatively little themselves because there was always someone else who could do it. In short, that translates, over time, to less value placed on teaching the next generation to thrive and looking at things like school milages as "my tax dollars not benefiting me directly."
These previous generations also operate under the illusion that they somehow had it harder than we do now. This is perpetuated by the "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" attitude that most of them seem to have adopted while having to ask for help operating a smart fridge or iPhone. It's really a failure of self-awareness, if we remove all the fictional swagger they've built their lives around, and it has left us a nation that is crumbling under its own ignorance and stupidity.
Now people my age (late 30's - early 40's) are living paycheck to paycheck, trying to figure out how we can afford to fix the problem so our children can do better than us, and we are utterly failing to find a solution because we are operating in a system that was designed to cater only to the selfishness of our parents and grandparents.
Did this happen because the kids didn’t listen or because the parents were overly protective or some combination of the two? Helicopter parents denied their children the chance to fail safely and so calibrate the good and bad portions of life. By scheduling their kids time and removing all risk they prevented growth.
You never did chores for your spending money? Had to help out with minor repairs or maintenance of a domicile? Never had a part time job? I suspect not, again, as the now revealed as misguided effort to give their kids the best (“better than we had it”) was crippling. It’s not hard to do what is mentioned in the first paragraph.
Look up the shit that went down in 1968 before you repeat that previous generations had it easier. There’s no draft, although the Cold War and risk of nukes are coming back. You have computer and communication resources that exceed st:tos (damn near), uni has toys that were inconceivable in the 70’s, …. Google what opscan forms and #2 pencils were - that’s years of organizing courses and drop/add.
The only thing that really sucks now is that std’s can kill.
> When you're actually from the US as a Millennial or Gen Z'er, it's not hard to see what happened. The previous two generations taught us nothing
> Gen X had such an easy go of it
I was still in college when the dot com bust happened, followed a few years later by the Great Recession. Please tell me more how Gen X had it so much easier than Millenials. Also in a previous comment you claim to be 44. Since I turned 45 this year we’re basically the same age. We both, by most definitions, are Gen X. That being the case maybe you’re making a subtle point that your life was really easy as a result of that fact (not that the generation this and that crap means much anyway though you seem to put some stock in it hence my comment).
That would assume the educational capabilities are relatively equal. The US has large demographic segments that have historically been difficult to educate.
I wonder what the comparison would look like if limited to native born with two parent households?
For example, US spending on education includes a bunch of healthcare costs, as the employers are paying something (as a benefit) and employee salaries need to cover the rest. Somewhere with single-payer healthcare will directly allocate the money to healthcare instead.
It's not about money. Avg salaries are plenty above the OECD average. The U.S. has a strong tendency to just throw money at a problem. There are many urban school districts that have trouble getting 50% attendance rates ON THE FIRST DAY. And that's with going door to door to remind parents the day before. How can you even address it when the people don't even believe in the institution anymore?
Let parents have some real choice of different school to attend. This will allow some experimentation from the ground up to happen organically. Parents who are the most invested in their child's success can have real agency in their future. This will also give teachers more flexibility in the kind of environment they want to work in. They could even start their own homeschooling pods and take in a set number of students from the area.
Once again, the teachers union stands in the way of real progress.
Do you mean cost of living-adjusted salaries are about OECD average? And do you think above-average salaries are required for above-average returns? Just curious.
The stats on the page are from 2018, before inflation became problematic. It also does not include the pandemic-related problems that have made things worse. However, the main point about comparable funding still stands. We are not getting above average returns. The question should be where is all that money going.
> As a European, it has always been perplexing to me how little the US invests in teachers and schools, given that we know how huge the benefits are down the road (educational attainment, income, pro-social behavior, life satisfaction).
You may or may but know this, but the funding of K-12 education varies by locality and has quite a bit of variability (typically paid for by local taxes).
If you go to the upper-middle class neighborhoods in the US, and certainly in the nicer private schools, you will see a high or very high level of investment in teachers and facilities. These investments typically have good to great returns. There is also often quite a bit of structured parental involvement (which is usually a good thing).
There are a lot of interesting levels of inquiry into this phenomenon:
- Do we need high quality mass education as it is found in these higher quality upper middle class schools? As in, if you magically made these types of schools appear in low SES neighborhoods, would the outcomes/benefits be similar? If not, how would they differ?
- If you take a few low SES students and place them into these better schools, do they get the same benefits as the locals?
- To what extent do better schools and school districts get better results due to the schools, due to the inputs, and/or due to the values of the local community?
People who are looking for good K-12 education in the US can find it, but it’s not universal. Imho, this is due to the fact that the value of education in the US is not perceived similarly across communities.
The article mentions that many parents see schools as child care while the adults do “real work”, and I think that that is the dominant perspective in most communities (note, not most HN communities, not most upper middle class communities — statistically most communities are low or mid-low SES where people are living paycheck to paycheck). As such, the community is sort of getting what it wants when it gets mediocre education results. I think that many people like the idea of a having a better school or school district, but they are not able or willing to do what it takes to make that happen on an individual or community level to make that happen (e.g., through parental involvement in schools, school boards, creating a good learning environment in the home, etc.).
If you ever need a good litmus test for how this looks different across communities and across different SES levels, ask the parents if they read books with their children, and if they did/do, at what age. In most communities, they don’t at all or very little. In the communities with better schools, it’s almost always early and often. There are obviously exceptions (both positive and negative), but this heuristic is extremely telling in aggregate.
"as european"... Just like teachers/teaching situations in federal US is hard to generalize so is in confederal Europe. You should probably read about the yearly teachers strikes in many southern European countries.
Teaching is a precarious job - particularly in early career in public sector schools. And just like many comments already mentioned: There's a global social trend expecting teachers to be some kind of social workers. And older teachers in many countries public sectors are basically grandfathered into previledged conditions that Young professionals will never attain.
> As a European, it has always been perplexing to me how little the US invests in teachers and schools, given that we know how huge the benefits are down the road (educational attainment, income, pro-social behavior, life satisfaction).
1) European perspectives on a lot of American problems miss one of the biggest differences between us: you have a lot more of a homogeneous population. There's numerous differences between designing a school system for basically all Hungarian or all Norwegian kids, for example, and figuring out what the hell you can do with a school mixed with Latinos, Asians, Blacks, and Whites with all different levels of interests, drive, and ability.
2) You've made a few statements of objective fact here without backing them up. Does the US actually invest little in education? I suspect that a lot of the money is of course wasted, but they do spend a crapload of money, and I'd bet dramatically more than many other countries. As another thing, does increasing spending (as the only variable that changes) lead to dramatic differences in educational outcomes? To a point, I'm sure it helps, but at some point, I think it doesn't. As an example, a young Forest Gump might be able to pass Basic Arithmetic in his elementary school if given a private tutor who gave him their full attention and effort, but there's no universe in which Forrest Gump gets an A+ in Advanced Calculus even if he's given 1,000 of the best teachers in the world to personally tutor him 24/7.
3) There's an age old debate about Nature vs. Nurture, which of course will not be settled here today. But I'd like to point out that if "Nature" is generally the most important variable in success, then beyond a certain point, there's a level of diminishing returns with education spending and simply throwing money at schools is not a wise course. Just throwing more money at a problem is, I suspect, the path we've taken up until now.
1) Do those really have that big difference? Should they? I could see a point if we were discussing first or second generation immigrants. Specially not those from highly educated parents.
Coming from Finland which did rather well with much less hours spend it might as well be systematic issue. Maybe process of the teaching itself has something wrong.
Are Finland's schools like my city? 30% of its children descendants of slaves? + 10% illegal immigrants? A good few percent homeless, parents in jail and/or hard drug addicts. 20% with both parents working 100 hours between them. Some bring guns to school. Teaching isn't all about teaching.
30% descendants of slaves? You mean their parents were slaves? I really recommend you moving out of such third world society. If they had slavery this millennia they can not be saved.
Not parents, descendants. Yes its been 150 years, but the scars still haven't healed.
> I really recommend you moving out of such third world society.
Well this is the challenge in America and why Finland's education system has it easy. The teaching in Finland doesn't have to be good to beat an average US student.
> There's numerous differences between designing a school system for basically all Hungarian or all Norwegian kids, for example, and figuring out what the hell you can do with a school mixed with Latinos, Asians, Blacks, and Whites with all different levels of interests, drive, and ability.
Why would Latinos, Asians, Blacks, and Whites all require a radically different education? It seems to me that math is math, your country's history is your country's history, biology is biology, etc.
I understand there are cultural differences between different population groups, but that's hardly unique to the US; Europe has differences and minority groups, too.
> Why would Latinos, Asians, Blacks, and Whites all require a radically different education?
We can't completely discuss the reasons for different educational outcomes between population groups in America in a civilized forum such as HN, so let's only mention that different educational outcomes between groups exist.
Since different population groups have different educational outcomes in a multicultural society, the groups that are left behind will always feel slighted and resentful and the educational system would have to be continuously redesigned to accommodate the least common denominator, IMO in a fashion resembling the famous Harrison Bergeron short story.
In basically every city with a substantial multicultural society in America in recent years, you can find articles similar to this.
Europe doesn't have to account for this kind of thing anywhere near the level that America does. Their educational systems can largely focus on what's best for education.
It is hard to teach math to someone who doesn't speak your language.
This is one of the biggest challenges in many US states. For example, 20% of students in California do not have basic proficiency with English and 40% of students do not speak it at home. This puts a huge burden on teachers and school systems.
Teaching/training is quite difficult. I've done quite a bit of training (but not true teaching -there's a difference), over the years.
My family is full of teachers. I have many friends that are teachers.
It's amazing how "solutions" never seem to actually get around to simply paying teachers more, and maybe not expecting them to be child-rearers, in lieu of parents.
paying teachers more is not going to solve the problem that most people do not appreciate teachers whether its kids or parents. It is certainly not a job for those who cannot stand being criticized the whole time.
Money will not overcome the "those who can't, teach" sentiment that runs quite strongly in the US. There is a very strong anti-intelligence (not merely anti-intellectual) sentiment in this country.
It will help, and we should certainly pay teachers more, but it isn't the whole solution.
“Those who can’t teach” is a direct result of the low pay. A software developer might semi retire and start teaching, but it’s a hobby at that point not a viable alternative.
It’s more complicated than paying more money automatically means better workers, but higher pay does let an industry be more selective.
More money will encourage more of “those who can” to switch to teaching, which will help to undermine the stereotype.
There are already many “who can” who already teach, but they’re almost exclusively the ones who also intrinsically value teaching highly. A higher pay will help bring the ones who would be good teachers but are in a situation where they need to prioritize money.
> More money will encourage more of “those who can” to switch to teaching,
No, it won't, because in the private sector you can have a growing career. If you are teaching it's very likely to be the very same job until you retire.
I know some people “who can” who cared a lot about teaching and decided to be a teacher. I also know some people in industry who were on the edge of being a teacher but decided it didn’t pay enough. More pay absolutely would draw in the people on the edge.
If there was salary parity between teachers and workers, I think that sentiment would vanish. With the current disparity, the implication is teaching is a "final resort" for people who "couldn't cut it" in their industry.
"Those who can't do, teach" is almost exclusively about money, the idea being that in almost every industry you would be paid more to do than to teach. Thus, if you are teaching it's likely because you failed to be a doer. This isn't anti-intelligence, it's actually a fairly logical stance.
It does miss that a person's desire to educate can far exceed their desire to ply the trade and they are willing to sacrifice their pay at that particular altar. But given most teachers do not seem irrationally excited about teaching or being teachers that line of thought is quite diminished.
Being a teacher (as opposed to a trainer, like me) is really difficult, and a great many people who are excellent engineers and scientists, are horrendously bad teachers.
The best teachers that I ever had, were ones that were trained as teachers, and were not necessarily content matter experts.
The worst teachers that I ever had, were content matter experts. Almost universally, they had no patience for folks that had a hard time coming up to speed, or that weren't already at a level beyond the class they were teaching.
They would ridicule you for asking "stupid" questions (that's me -I ask questions that have the whole class in stitches, but by the end of the semester, I'm coaching my classmates). They would start from a baseline that actually assumed the student had already completed and passed the class they were taking.
I would sign up for a class, because of the bona fides of the teacher, but would end up regretting my decision.
Yes it will. Because if you pay teachers more, in fact, pay them well, then more people will want to move into the field.
If teaching was like a FANNG tech job, with limited availability due to demand and salary, then it would be "discovered" to be prestigious and valuable and important.
And moreover, everyone would be free to come up with their own performance management BS because you'd actually have the glut of incoming talent that supports failures removing people from the industry (or screw it up so bad that despite the money no one bothers - also a FANNG phenomenan).
"Those who can't, teach" is the result of systematically underpaid teachers. There are two groups who go into teaching: those who like it so much they're willing to take less pay, and those who are drawn to the profession because the pay is competitive with the other jobs they're capable of.
Money is not sufficient to overcome the problem on its own, but it is necessary, and not having enough of it caused the problem.
Public schools are not a market economy. Even in the most capitalist country in the world, there will be obligatory free public schools, and they will be government-financed.
The level of demand, however, can vary. Do Americans even want good public education? Or it is an afterthought?
Market forces for schools are reflected in real estate prices. Houses in good school districts can go for 4x the cost of similar housing a few miles away if the schools are bad.
That’s right, but the schools themselves are not participating in the market feedback forces, their quality distribution is random (or worse).
This very observation is telling us that the entire system is outside the market (why, for example, people from other locations cannot choose this particular school if it is better than others?)
Money does not come from the skies, it's about what the market agrees the value actually is (when it comes to private education) or what the government decides (for public education). Public education is a problem because in many western countries it's already the largest budget and it's still a shitshow so you are going to have a hard time to convince everyone that injecting more money is going to make it better.
My wife is (ex)teacher. Parents would flat-out say that they can't respect her because of her salary. Along the lines of, if you're smart and can do stuff, why the hell are you working for such a low pay? Ergo teachers are dumb and parents (along with their kids) feel free to make fun of dumbasses who work in schools.
On top of that, paying more would help with self-respect. It's damn hard to be an authority to kids when you live paycheck-to-paycheck. Especially in teens' world where appearance matters a lot.
> Parents would flat-out say that they can't respect her because of her salary. Along the lines of, if you're smart and can do stuff, why the hell are you working for such a low pay?
Damn, that is so gut wrenching to read. It's so short sighted that society does not value teachers more highly. The next generation is the ultimate investment.
True. We needs massive propaganda campaign to highlight teachers. And, of course, show respect by paying them accordingly.
Another semi-related issue is school system used for virtue signalling first. For example „special needs“ kids integration. It sounds nice on paper, but in reality one kids holds up whole class. And then smarter kids riot because they get bored. But hey, that's teacher's fault..
IMO that will be the crucial piece for West decline. This is reverting the best bit in post-industrial-revolution welfare states. Teach the masses to fish out the brilliant mind from the whole pool. But now we're reducing the pool to those who can afford private schools. And loosing lots of talent in the rest of society. If that trend continues, soon we'll be back in nobility-peasants split with little social mobility. Which a loss not onlh for the society as a whole, but for neo-nobility as well. At first it may be cool to be richer-than-thou, but over time „richest in the room“ will turn out to be poor at global scale.
It actually makes sense to deprecate teachers if you are one of the christian fascists in the republican party. We need only look at the recent string of laws, book bannings and similar to get an idea of what religious fascism does.
Attacking the teachers have been a long term goal. School funds already are now allowed to be directed to parochial (religious) schools from the state school coffers. This starves the public school systems one by one.
No Child Left Behind guaranteed that bad schools get less money, and get worse. This all but guarantees that low income areas have terrible school systems that are more just juvenile delinquency prevention and babysitting services.
Book bans are pushed by the "right" (which they rarely, if ever, are), with obvious canards like "Harry potter is evil occult and should be burned". Naturally, with the exception of https://www.vice.com/en/article/epzv9j/texas-school-bans-the... , most of the bans are done explicitly by the christian fascists forcing their beliefs on others.
Or, instead of more money and resources, we see Texas state legislature forcing schools to hang banners of "In god we trust." https://www.texastribune.org/2022/08/18/texas-schools-in-god... . Again, it's the forcing of one myopic direction of religion on the masses. It brings the parochial school into the public piece at a time.
All of these different directions have the ultimate effect - deprecate the "godless" education to something with their variant of religion in it. And naturally, we get pablum like "Noah and dinosaurs lived together", and other completely non-science garbage taught as fact.
Globally, the root cause is definitely not „christian fascists“. For example in my country it's woke neoliberals pushing the notion of schooling freemarketisation. At the same time claiming that teachers' salary increase won't help with terrible students' performance at exams :)
I’m sorry to hear that, but to counter-anecdote: Four of my family members are teachers at various levels. They all have strong frustrations but money (either in terms of perception or paying the bills) has never been one.
Are any of them under 40 and completely self-supporting? Most of the coworkers I had when teaching who weren’t bothered by the money had an external source of financial support. It took me a long time to realize it because those who are supported by others don’t like to admit it. I referred to them as hobbyist teachers, and they were much much more likely to stay longer than 5 years compared to those who were doing it as a career.
Legitimate question, thanks. Two married to each other. One over 40. Last living in a nicer part of town than otherwise due to husband, but actually looked for non-teaching jobs and couldn’t find higher salaries so stayed.
If our goal is to shovel new people into the system as quickly as others are quitting, I suppose lawyers are a good aspirational example. But if we assume that the best teachers are ones who like their jobs and have been around for a while, we might want to try a different model.
Why not ? I would argue that most teachers provide a more valuable service than most lawyers (For my definition of value atleast). Lawyers have strict licensing requirements while teachers don't, which would be one of the major differences
In NY, teachers have to pass exams, and get certified. I could ask my friends for details, but I know they need to do it, because I hear them bitch about it.
Teachers have strict licensing requirements in literally every state.
Although the bar exam specifically is probably harder than any single component of teacher licensure, overall they are comparable, as teachers have more components.
Nah I think most people like "the idea" of being a lawyer (or a doctor). But to actually be one it's much harder, and that's when they get a reality check
Lawyers will mostly attest how divorce/family practice has nothing on actual criminal practice, and it might be even harder. Most people don't know about the long hours, the case studies, etc. They think it's the romantic view of what they see on TV
Doctors have to know how to deal with bodly fluids. Of various kinds. They have to learn how to tell a family a dear person died. They have to literally survive residency.
> Nah I think most people like "the idea" of being a lawyer (or a doctor). But to actually be one it's much harder, and that's when they get a reality check
Same with writing software. I get rather tired of running into people that obviously took it up for the money, then found they weren't particularly good at it. Being a good engineer (software, or otherwise) is hard.
In my experience, these folks tend to be quite concerned about the "culture," as opposed to the actual art of the field. They look and sound great, but don't rely on them to actually ship anything.
Delivering software is really difficult. I've been doing it for my entire adult life, so it's become pretty much habit. It's always shocking to encounter folks that aren't able to deliver software, yet have been in the field for a very long time.
It’s education as a whole that isn’t valued very highly. People just don’t want to put in the work and it’s easy to blame teachers on the front line doling out the work.
But money is at least a big factor: even those who keep up with self-motivation and co-worker’s appreciation can’t go on if money isn’t there. Paying them fairer prices is the first step in any attempt to make teachers come back.
As long as we have tenure and the seniority system we aren’t going to see significantly higher pay.
Virtually everyone else has a boss that judges his or her performance. Sometimes those judgments are wrong or unfair. Almost every institution has determined that’s still better than nothing. But somehow not schools.
> It's amazing how "solutions" never seem to actually get around to simply paying teachers more, and maybe not expecting them to be child-rearers, in lieu of parents.
In a neighboring town parents tried to set up a "hotline" where teachers would have to be available at night to intervene on google chat related social incidents. They just don't seem to get that at 3:15, the kid is your fucking problem again. Leave these poor teachers alone.
I don't actually think the money is main problem. You can keep giving them more money and it wont change anything in long run. Unless they are grossly underpaid compared to cost of living.
It is all about giving them tools to solve issues with those children that cause issues. And maybe cultural change back to state where it is most of the time kids fault. Not teachers... And lessening the work load where possible. Maybe increasing number of assistants available and resources of special education.
> I don't actually think the money is main problem.
Most of the teachers that I know, personally, mention this as the first problem to solve. I don’t think any of them believe that it’s the only problem to address, but there’s not even a tiny doubt that the great majority of teachers believe it to be something that needs to be dealt with, before tackling the rest of the pile.
But looking at this very conversation, shows that the idea of paying teachers more, is quite unpopular. The verbal and mental gymnastics that people go through, to avoid coming to the conclusion that teachers simply need to be paid more, are kind of astonishing. We have no problem at all, coming to that conclusion for many other vocations (especially the one we happen to be in).
I guess, because of my own family/friend situation, I find this stance puzzling.
I assume, then, that a good place to start, is to find out why people don’t want to pay teachers more, and address that.
Great, let's move forward with some real online learning initiatives. The current system is antiquated and no longer makes sense from a purely educational perspective. For too long the US has used the school system as a baby-sitting service while both parents (or single parents) are at work.
While I don’t necessarily disagree with many of her points, the overly dramatic and staccato style made this irritating to read. She succeeded in having me walk away from the article frustrated, not with the problem, but with her article.
s/to Teach/to be treated like shit for crap wages/g
Not exactly news, these days.
In much of America, local school districts still have quite a bit of autonomy. As thing keep getting worse, there might be a district or few, here & there, where a different approach gets an honest try.
Let’s just go with crap wages == whatever isn’t sufficient to keep enough people in the profession, such that you need to start recruiting wildly unqualified people just to fill the spot.
You almost had me at "whatever isn’t sufficient to keep enough people" but then dammit, you lost at "wildly unqualified people"
If you mean "having an education degree" or "getting a grossly irrelevant teacher's certificate" then no, those are not "qualifications." Those are just the teacher's union contract provisions.
There are some problems with the system you're objecting to, but the "veterans and random college students" qualification some places are moving to is... worse.
I think it depends upon what US State the teachers are in.
Some states, if a teacher says some phrases they could, get fined, loose their job or maybe in rare cases face jail time. This may even spread across the Teacher's life style. Not to mention in many places the pay is not worth it.
Forgot to mention, some states also require a Masters Degree even to teach very young children, the expense of getting that degree is not worth it.
This is the real issue. Most states require a master’s or credit hour equivalent to retain your teaching credentials, but the pay is bad, laughably bad in some areas. So bad that someone who has been teaching 10 years will make more doing almost anything else at an entry level position elsewhere. A lot of teachers are being recruited to do sales because they can speak well extemporaneously.
Should I get paid less and get kicked, bit, and punched all day and then be told it is my fault for not properly simulating their angel child? Or should I just get a job where I can work from home and make more money?
Can you point to an area where a teacher with 10 years of experience, working full-time, earns less than an entry-level position? Teacher contracts are mostly public and you can use $15/hr for entry level, shouldn’t be hard to find and example if it exists.
Many entry-level sales jobs, which often require no specific college degree, though typically a college degree is preferred, earn 50-70k /year. Entry level sales, specifically, can easily net over 100k a year if you are good at what you do as you work at least partially on commission.
Teachers, companies are discovering, are desirable sales reps because they are experienced at being high energy, talking extemporaneously, and may have some domain specific knowledge that is valuable, such as a chemistry teacher going into pharmaceutical sales.
Most teachers will never make 100k in their entire career. Some districts pay well in high COL areas, but this is the exception not the rule. Entry level pay for teachers is actually pretty good, but your salary does not scale as it does in most other careers. It typically takes 20+ years to get to six figures if you can at all.
People do want to teach and get paid to do it. It’s called private schools. They charge what the market will bear for their quality and location, and they pay what the market rate is for teachers of the requisite quality that let them charge the rates they need.
What confuddles people in education is the same thing that causes endless articles about housing, healthcare, inflation… it’s called “basic economics”. Just because education is heavily regulated by the government and full of people ideologically predisposed to pretending economic rules don’t apply, doesn’t mean supply and demand is false and the normal rules of gravity are suspended.
I myself have children and live in Boston, Massachusetts. The per-student funding here is $25,000 per year. Yet excluding a few meritocratic public schools that you have to test into (which they are making ever harder for my Asian children to get into as they reduce the seats allocated to tests and give away to “underprivileged” races, aka not Asians or whites) the schools are dog shit and anyone with a few bucks avoids them like the plague. So money is not the problem in Boston, it’s the horrible nature of the public school system.
There's an unspoken benefit of private schools though: kids of teachers get to attend for free or at a hugely discounted rate. When I was at one, just about every teacher left after their kids graduated. The ones who stayed either had some nice admin role, or their spouse was the main breadwinner.
That’s a societal decision we have to make. Should all children have access to good education - i.e. should we invest in public schooling? Or should it be dependent on your parents ability to pay in which case lets go all in on private.
In my opinion, the voucher system is correct - keep funding public school through tax dollars, but give the parents a voucher for the amount to spend where they wish. If every parent in Boston received a $25,000 voucher to spend at the school they wished, competition would force public schools to improve or shut down as every school vied for the vouchers.
Unlike many on the left, who despise monopolies in business and ruthlessly hunt them down, yet worship monopolies the government has (like in public education), I think public dollars should be allocated to the parents to make decisions they feel are best for their children. Saying “just move if you don’t like your public school” betrays the reality of how difficult it is to relocate for the non-tech elite who can’t just work from anywhere.
> competition would force public schools to improve or shut down as every school vied for the vouchers.
I don't know how to fairly evaluate a school's performance. I guess we could ask if the students perform better in the job market 10-20 years later, but that's not obviously not helpful or useful information on which to make a decision now.
I get why the voucher system is appealing on first glance. After all, you often can evaluate the quality of goods and services. You can, say, estimate that a shirt you find at the mall will last a few years or that it will fall apart in a month. I just don't think you can do the same for schools. I have a feeling most people will evaluate education based on their beliefs (religious, etc) and the grades their kids "earn".
You don’t seem to know how to evaluate them, yet everyone agrees Harvard is better than your local community college, and there is literally a private school half a mile from my house that charges $60,000 per year. So clearly some people know how to distinguish a bad school from a good school and allocate their money appropriately.
Most importantly, everyone knows a very bad performing school when they see one. The role of vouchers is first and foremost to reward schools that don't screw things up too badly. Quality can then be a secondary factor.
College is pretty different than grade school. It's a lot easier for adults to understand whether or not they're learning well and to see where people end up following graduation. You'd have a hard time convincing me that the way an 8 year old is taught today will lead to better results in better outcomes decades later (after those that ran the schools have retired and have thus left the market).
Further, how many Harvard-level grade schools do you think we can run as a society? Given that private school pay is substantially worse than public school pay on average, how could one say that private schools, again on average, would outperform public schools?
Problem is two things: one, Americans strongly believe that every child should have access to an education. Two, not every family can afford 25k per child. Hell many cannot afford one child at that rate.
You’ve got a point - quality schooling does exist, if schools can pay well and offer sensible class loads. However to apply that to the current public school system requires significant dollars long term, and a lot of people don’t want to pay for that - think retired people whose children are out of school, or couples who have no children.
I don’t agree with that, but I’m simply stating some different positions from people whom I’ve talked to about this topic.
Do you feel that the private system is taking all of the good educators and administrators? America isn't the only country with a private/public school ecosystem, yet other countries are able to maintain quality public schooling while it seems America struggles.
A lot of Western non-US countries honestly don’t have a lot of attractive private sector businesses. Small nations with strong public education are very unique. For example Norway only has 5 million citizens, extremely low immigration, a mono-culture and mono-ethnicity, and earns a huge amount of money from selling fossil fuels which are then funneled to public use. Yet the left in America pretends the Nordic model can apply here.
America is unique. A lot of our public services are quite expensive and quite low quality. Our system is organized around the private sector and the more we embrace the private sector the better things are.
The environment Rebekah describes seems like a modern US tech business. Everyone is expected to be where they're needed, treat each other with respect and focus on their work. Sometimes I wonder why successful businesses can create the environment schools can't and then remind myself that businesses (and private schools) can easily exclude troublemakers, malcontents and people who don't fit in for whatever reason. Also some of the things you mention (e.g. mono-culture) make it easier to create an environment suitable for learning.
It shouldn't be a priori to honor the private sector and shit on the public sector but as long as we do we shouldn't be surprised at the results. Teaching and education simply needs to be valued more than it is. We shouldn't have to beg people to do the job. Instead we should reward and honor the profession so well that we can set high standards for teachers and still have a surplus of applicants.
Perhaps if we compensated teachers more like police or firefighters and required advanced credentials as more successful countries do our schools would be better.
Or perhaps if we had the demographics of Norway our schools would be vastly better in every single category except “diversity”.
Like it or not students are not born genetically equal. Throw in poverty and lack of effective parenting and there’s no hope that endless funding will somehow fix that situation.
I think you would benefit from approaching the situation with a bit more understanding. Also forget Norway, America is a big a diverse country so that is your problem to solve. You are not competing with Norway, you are trying to solve your own problems and failing.
America is big and diverse, but it is not a special snowflake. You are choosing to provide public schooling but failing to do so well. There is a myriad of reasons why and I am sure it is different per location but the fact remains. In your ideal private focused system, are kids not provided a good education when their parent's income can't keep up with the worsening class divide? If so, do you think that will result in a positive situation for America long term?
I do appreciate your perspective by the way, thanks for engaging.
I want to take the same public dollars that are funneled directly the monopolistic, corrupt, badly run system and instead give the money directly to parents to use as a voucher. If they like their current public school, wonderful, they can give them the voucher. If they want to go someplace else, the money is there for them.
I partially agree with you, but private school teachers often get paid less than their public school counterparts. Private schools get a flood of applications from humanities PHDs who don't have the certifications required to teach in public schools, so it's very much a race to the bottom in terms of salary. Private school's biggest advantage for teachers is that the parents treat education seriously, so they are less likely to treat teachers like babysitters.
That is another vector on the spectrum of decisions for why quality teachers choose to work at private schools. No one takes a job purely on salary - a decision like that is based on many things.
Isn’t it obvious that good teachers want to teach children with parents that want them to learn? And punish their children when they are disruptive? And the school can kick out bad kids?
The current vogue of reducing everything in education to the lowest common denominator - eliminating gifted programs, enabling disruptive kids to ruin classes, removing suspensions and expulsions - is exactly why private schools are growing. I don’t want education to optimize for the worst kids who won’t go to college and into intellectual pursuits anyway. I want to optimize education for the kids who will actually get value out of it.
“Isn’t it obvious that good teachers want to teach children with parents that want them to learn? And punish their children when they are disruptive? And the school can kick out bad kids?”
Perhaps, but that kind of school is doing a different “job” than one tasked with ensuring a base level of education for all young people.
There is a place in society for schools that will treat you like cattle and babysit you all day. There is also a place for academically challenging schools that provide a strong education. I don’t want to ban the latter in order to improve the former.
Please, put your children in terrible schools out of some sense of social justice or whatever. I myself will do what is actually good for my family. Given the school down the street from me had its Vice Principal of Gang Violence execute a student he recruited to deal drugs for him, our local high school my children would be automatically zoned into is sadly not an option despite my tax dollars paying for it. https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2015/03/05/former-bos...
I disagree. Private schools self select their student population. Most private schools do not take students with special needs or students with really difficult home lives - and those students deserve education. Once private schools have to accept every student regardless of need, will their quality remain? I doubt it.
That depends on where you live. In the Midwest, most (if not all) parochial private schools pay teachers substantially less than the public schools pay teachers. And it isn’t like the public school teachers are making enough either. But to say private school teachers get paid well is very incorrect for the large midwestern cities
That's a great thing happening. No one knows how to teach anyway anyhow. It's a lost art, a forgotten knowledge, which have given way to formatting, somewhere in the last Century. Preparing young souls for Life: _teaching_ is very different from telling people how to do things and stuff: _formatting_.
We are forced to go full circle now. Throwing out garbage, as we can't keep up. That's a good thing.
The garbage is education system, not teachers. The art is not lost. But people who want to be Teachers get forced out of the system. Too much paperwork, too strict rules, too much content, too many students... No place left for performing the art of teaching.
Some private schools (many focus on making parents happy in short term..) and tutoring is the last refuge of the art of Teaching.
I realize this piece is more of a rant, and I won't hold it to a data accuracy standard it never pretended to have, but they pay issue is really misconstrued. Salaries in large urban districts are often well above area median, and when accounting for benefits and pension, quite impressive. In South Dakota and a number of states in the south and rural districts, yes it is another story, and it is bad. Also, teachers NEVER want to discuss pay differentials by anything but years of service. I'm sorry, but most qualified high school physics teachers have way differently valued skillsets in the labor force by alternate employers than most kindergarten teachers.
However much they're paying teachers, it's clearly not enough, because not enough people are willing to do the job for that amount of money.
Assuming you had all the skills required to be an effective teacher, would YOU put up with everything they put up with for that salary? Because I sure as hell wouldn't.
(As an aside, it's different depending on where you are but in Australia, comparing teacher salary can be difficult because "they get 12 weeks of holiday a year" and "they only work 6 hours a day" but also they do 3+ hours of unpaid marking and lesson planning a day, they're expected to show up at the end of those 'holidays' prepared for whatever courses they've been assigned for the next term, etc. A close relative is a teacher and it's insane what they have to deal with.)
> However much they're paying teachers, it's clearly not enough, because not enough people are willing to do the job for that amount of money.
The problem is that the scope of the job has changed and you can't pay people enough to do it. Here are some issues, straight from teachers I was talking to last week:
* Admin who constantly wants teachers to do more with no additional resources so they can get credit for it and advance their career. They were very frustrated by this.
* Teaching evaluation based on absolute standardized scores rather than relative. So you can have a bad class, lift them a lot, but still be viewed poorly because on absolute terms, they are still weak. You might say that evens out over time, but it doesn't because some teachers are better with difficult students, so they get more than their share of these issues.
* Special needs students mainstreamed - kids with emotional issues that flip desks and yell out constantly, physical issues such as seizures if they bump their head, but parents will not let them wear protective gear because they will stand out, elementary school kids who are constantly in physical altercations with other kids.
* Kids come to school not having eaten since the day before, cloths that haven't been washed in days, etc.
* Unable to give accurate grades because parents fight back and so teachers are forced to pass kids even though they know they are just pushing a big problem on the next teacher.
* Zero support from parents and in many cases, outright hostility.
* The classroom is a minefield regarding what can be discussed and cannot be discussed. Everyone has an opinion on how it should be done, but almost none of them have ever actually taught.
That many teacher’s pensions require one to give up social security benefits makes the decision to teach more difficult, I would think, especially for those who are later in their working lives.
There are many ways to compensate teachers [1], but in general, you really shouldn't make categorical statements on matters you are completely unfamiliar with. I help manage the finances of someone who is in the position of being unable to collect any social security benefits from the relatively brief time she had a regular job which paid into social security prior to becoming a teacher, and is also unable to collect her spouse's Social Security survivor benefits (she literally receives zero dollars from Social Security, though if she had never worked a day in her life, she's be able to collect her spouse's survivor's benefits). You've made quite a few comments in this thread: how many of them are as badly informed as this?
"Windfall Elimination Prevention" and "Government Pension Offset" are things you can google if you're interested in learning a bit about this stuff.
[1] States whose teachers participate in their own pension plans instead of Social Security include California and Texas, so it's not like these are rare concerns
This is not the case for NY, and not in WI and PA as I have heard from teachers there.
In cases where they don't receive it though, they're not paying into it either. I can't comment as to whether that is a good or bad thing, because I don't know those cases. Maybe the union membership by in large doesn't want to?
> In cases where they don't receive it though, they're not paying into it either.
If the "it" you're referring to is social security, this is, to use your phrase from above, "patently untrue." It would be comforting if that were the case, but there are cases where a person who has paid into social security will not receive anything from it, and will not receive their spouse's Social Security survivor's benefits, under WEP and GPO rules. As I explained above, I know one of these people and help her manage her money.
To the original point in my grandparent post: just having to do the math on this stuff could be deterrent to someone trying to make a decision about whether teaching is a smart career move.
> Maybe the union membership by in large doesn't want to?
WEP and GPO are a matter of federal law, although "maybe the unions want this thing that is obviously hostile to their members" is certainly... a thought a person could have. As it happens the American Federation of Teachers is lobbying to eliminate WEP and GPO, and I assume there are other unions who are acting similarly:
(some potential disinformation in the second link, but the point is, this is a pretty active debate)
edit: It occurs to me that maybe you meant "maybe they do not want to pay into Social Security," which is probably true. To keep this in perspective, these teacher pensions which were considered an alternative/supplement to Social Security are a lot older than the WEP and GPO, which came along to kick those with these pensions in the nuts in the late seventies and early eighties. The teachers and their unions were already committed to the path they were on when the federal government changed the rules on them.
Not disagreeing with what you just wrote above,but do you have a source for
> If the "it" you're referring to is social security, this is, to use your phrase from above, "patently untrue."
? Because everything I am reading suggests those states whose teachers whose work years only go to pension and not SS eligibility are not having their teachers pay into SS.
That part is right! The problem comes at the end of a career when the SSA needs, under the WPA rules, to weigh what the teacher in question is going to be paid by the teacher’s pension (which by design was paid into instead of social security) against what the teacher paid into social security via payroll taxes before or after their career as a teacher, or during summer work during their career as a teacher. The SSA then reduce the social security benefits according to their formula. The reduction can be pretty extreme, all the way towards a person who paid into the social security trust not receiving any benefit from it.
I’m not fully familiar with the stated justification for these laws, or why you’d want to treat a pension as a ”windfall,” (or maybe they’re trying to keep social security benefits from being a “windfall?”) but I guess my main thought on that as a non-teaching, non-union professional is that we are all very lucky these rules were drafted a year or two before 401ks came into wide use, such that we avoided someone in congress getting the bright idea of treating our tax deferred retirement savings as a “windfall” to be factored into the SSA’s payment calculations as well.
I believe the problem of losing a spouse’s survivor’s benefits happens under the GPO rules, and that is similarly unpopular.
Most people in their 20s and 30s today aren't getting social security anyway, so maybe this is decreasing in importance?
Personally, I don't have much faith in pension systems either. The growth ponzi scheme for US stocks can only go on for so long, and many pensions have gone belly-up in the last decade or two even though the market has been incredibly good for most of that time. If we enter a recession that lasts more than 1 or 2 years, those pensions are going to end up in worrying places for anyone who isn't already cashing out.
Comparing teacher pay to the median wage isn’t an apples to apples comparison because the average teacher has between a bachelor’s degree and a master’s, a state certification with regular training and renewal requirements, and a good amount of professional experience. I was a high school teacher and when I left my salary went up by 50% on day one, passed 100% increase within 2 years, and tripled within 5 years. The median wage earner in a large city is probably paid hourly for service work.
I do agree that the single pay scale across all public school teachers is an issue. You will never get someone to teach high school math, science, or tech if salary is a significant consideration.
It's pretty close to the median worker having a bachelor's degree so that doesn't really skew the comparison
Ultimately teaching salaries are fine. The median teacher makes about the median salary. But it comes with great job security, benefits, and significantly more time off than the median job. The benefits are high enough to attract enough teachers.
The problem are parents and administration. And more recently kids missed a couple years of school due to Covid and went feral. It's gotten to be a significantly worse job. Solution is to cut the bullshit. Not pay more to incentivize people to put up with the bullshit.
> Ultimately teaching salaries are fine. The median teacher makes about the median salary. But it comes with great job security, benefits, and significantly more time off than the median job.
I know 3 public school teachers, in CA/NYC/NJ. Their 6 to 8 weeks off in the summer (if that, due to ongoing training), is nowhere near enough to offset the low pay per hour and most importantly, having to deal with garbage parents and their misbehaving kids.
They also work many extra hours at home during the school year doing grading or prepping exercises or whatever. If we have a get together, the teachers will pretty much guaranteed to be working all or some portion of the evening.
> The benefits are high enough to attract enough teachers
Only if you think 30+ kids per class is acceptable. I would want no more than 20 kids per class.
Average teacher salary in California is $84,000. Official working days total out to about 12 weeks of vacation. Realistically less than that but still much more than your typical worker.
The question of if teachers are sufficiently paid is answered by asking if current classroom sizes are sufficiently small and staffed by sufficient quality teachers. Whatever price that makes that happen is the appropriate price, regardless of what people in other jobs are earning.
>The question of if teachers are sufficiently paid is answered by asking if current classroom sizes are sufficiently small and staffed by sufficient quality teachers. Whatever price that makes that happen is the appropriate price, regardless of what people in other jobs are earning
Like I said before the solution is to cut the bullshit. Not pay more for people to tolerate it.
For the purposes of determining appropriate prices, why is it necessary to compare their price to anyone? Supply and demand determine appropriate pricing.
This is the best reply so far. In the US, things (good and bad) vary dramatically between school districts, but everyone talks about “teachers” as this monolithic group.
In the Boston area it’s absolutely possible to exceed $100,000 salary. The pay scales are public, look it up yourself. I’m willing to believe many teachers are underpaid, and that those in Boston have legitimate gripes too, but we need to be clear about which context we’re discussing.
My anecdata- friend last year just crossed $100K in about her 15th year teaching in Boston suburbs. She didn't have to do any of the "add-ons" like sports team coaching, curriculum work, tutoring, etc. to get to that number.
It's still not worth the money. Ive spent time in the classroom in a large urban district and the job was twice as hard as my current software engineering job (for me) for literally half the pay
> Salaries in large urban districts are often well above area median
Is the median the correct benchmark? The median household income in NYC was $67k in 2021 [0]. Why would someone choose to be a teacher making around the median [1] when you could be a software engineer and make 3x as much?
It's not just a matter of trinkets and baubles. That difference allows you to comfortably afford a nice family sized apartment [2] in a safe area with a convenient commute.
I’ve met some too, but I’d say that most are incapable. Or they are the same proportion of the population that is capable. I don’t think teachers are any more or less likely than a typical person.
I’d guess I’ve met and spend significant time with 100 teachers. And a handful were capable of being a professional programmer.
I’ve never heard of ”urban” being a code word for “black”. Is that a thing? I assume they mean “urban” as in “city” where you’re likely to have many other forms of opportunity vs “podunk” where you’re kinda stuck in one career because there’s nothing else around.
I think a more diverse student body, likely one with a wide range of parental income and possibly including some kids who are members or gangs or is just more likely to have a few actually violent (,mentally ill, narcissistic, borderline personality disorder, etc.) kids, with a higher student to teacher ratio, will be much more challenging than a small high-school with 400 kids that more or less fall into "middle class and above with a spattering of low income."
EDIT: found an interesting "day in the life" article by a self-labeled urban teacher.
The parent comment answers itself. They would choose it because they actually don't have the alternative choice. In fact, aside from the transient young Teach for America type affluent idealists, most (not "all") urban public school teachers are gloried babysitters making good babysitting wages. If they teach kids anything it's usually something that should be untaught asap. By and large, the long hauler, professional urban public school teachers are not the type of people who have a ton of useful skills. In fact, the social skills useful for dealing with adults usually atrophy so even being a Software Project Manager is off the table. They become prisoners as much as the students, who at least have a definite term to serve and can get out early for bad behavior. For most kids, urban public schools are a policy solution to the social problem of young, unattended kids causing havoc, not a viable educational tool. Considered in that light they work pretty well.
Yes, for obvious reasons. Classroom size and the relative economic factors of urban schools make the job less desirable than non-urban schools. Urban kids are typically rich or poor. Rich kids end up in non-public schools. Non-urban schools are more often serving the middle class, who have cultural advantages over the poor when it comes to learning outcomes. Why do you think urban parents move to suburban school districts after having kids?
You jest, but this is my suggestion to anyone who wants a career change. You can study and get a PMP or Scrum certificate and get an entry level job fairly easily. And, if successful, can be making 100k within a few years.
Of course you have to be a PM, so there’s that. I’d rather literally herd cats or manage a kindergarten class.
"I call people and ask them to do the things they said they would do, on time. Then we have meetings about it for 4-6 hours a day. Technically I'm in charge."
People might want to be teachers rather than software engineers because teachers get enormous amounts of time off, have extremely high levels of job security, plus all the usual reasons that not everyone is in the very highest paying profession.
Anyone who's actually been or known a teacher knows this is false.
During the school year, in the time they're not actively teaching, teachers are
- Coaching sports
- Overseeing other student extracurricular activities
- Making/updating lesson plans
- Presiding over detention
- Tutoring students who need more 1:1 time
- Serving on school committees (especially in larger districts)
During the summer, teachers generally spend a large percentage of their time laying out the curriculum for the coming year. This is especially true for those in smaller districts, where one teacher has to teach three or four different levels of the same subject (or even multiple completely different subjects!).
I mean, I guess it's all relative. I'm a software engineer at a startup. On average I work about 50-55 hours a week. I get 3 weeks of vacation a year.
I certainly don't deny that teachers spend a lot of time working on their "time off". But that said, I've known more than a few teachers personally, and yes, they still do get enormous amounts of time off. Heck, a bunch of them will even admit it is the biggest perk of teaching (because otherwise there aren't many).
Teachers have plenty of real, valid complaints about the environment of teaching, and more importantly, it's clear with the current teacher shortage that something is really broken. Still, I don't think it wins them any supporters when teachers try to deny that most of them have vastly more time off than other professionals.
When I was teaching I worked a 7am to 6pm job, 5 days a week. That was actually in the school building, so that's 55 hours right there. The two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon, when I wasn't looking after 35 teenagers in a small, hot and unventilated classroom, were spent marking, planning lessons and writing reports. Have you ever had a job where you literally have to plan how much you drink, so that you don't have a full bladder in the middle of a double Science lesson?
Most weekends I'd dedicate around 5 or 6 hours to work, so that puts me up to about 61 hours a week. Of course we got those amazing holidays. Holidays when you were still expected to answer emails, mark work, write reports, plan assessments and lessons. One year, I remember working from September through to August, and my total time off was Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. In August the exam results come through, so I was expected to be in school to coach children on their options, and then write a 15 page report on the reasons my department had performed or under-performed.
I appreciate that this has turned into a rant, but don't ever think that your job is harder than a teacher, if you are a software engineer. It's not. I can testify to that. Teaching involves understanding your subject, understanding pedagogy, being a parent, councilor and sometimes prison warden to children who are often going through the most difficult times of their lives. You have to do all of that, while basically performing on stage for 5 hours a day, and your lunch break is spent ramming food down your throat so you can get out to the playground on time to supervise the kids out there.
An ex-colleague of mine has asked me to go back into teaching in his school. My response was "okay" can you pay me 150K, because I wouldn't do it for anything less.
I feel that this scales largely based on subject mater, experience, and past history teaching a particular course. I know a number of teachers and there are a lot of differences. Expectations vary by district, school, and parents. There have been many top down changes over time, mostly for the worse increasing workload.
When I was in HS, it was not uncommon to have lecture most days and a graded assignment once a week or even less. This is obviously a lot less work for teachers. In the best cases it can be a 7—4 job with summers completely off.
Why? Are they really better than khan academy at doing a lesson plan? Isn’t this like a software engineer complaining they have to write their own database driver in their spare time after work?
In general, it is a good idea to personalize lesson plans based on how well people did or didn’t react to the last one, and khan academy certainly doesn’t do anything like that, nor does it work for everyone.
The entire point of khan academy is that it is individually tailored to the student and can decide what lessons need additional practice vs those that can be skipped. It sounds like you aren’t at all awqre of how khan academy works.
Are you claiming teachers can personalize a lesson plan for each individual student in a class? To a granularity finer than what Khan Academy can do?
Unless you are suggesting a teacher can clone themselves to however big their class size there is, the individualization is not a realistic prospect given that you have to teach a few dozen kids in a 30-45 minute period. And given that current funding levels are having a hard time keeping teacher retention even at these levels, significantly increasing teacher numbers to make real individualization possible is not within the realm of reality.
Also, individual teaching methods don’t work well in certain subjects; as an example, you need a few people to put on a theatrical production, perform ensemble music, or have Socratic discussions.
Teachers aren't paid to personalize lessons though, if you work overtime to do that then you can only blame yourself. Teachers are paid to hold standardized lessons and answer questions help students with problems.
You could argue it would be better if teachers were paid to personalize lectures, but they aren't. Maybe some document somewhere says they should, but in practice nothing will happen to you if you just use standardized lectures so that is what most will do and that is what the expectations of the job is built around.
Lesson plans are not standardized down to the day and order.
Sometimes, a group of students might need to speed up, slow down, or go in a wholly different direction depending on what happened with the previous lesson. There’s a lot of variation between one class of students and another, and teachers are not some kind of omniscient perfect predictor of behavior. And ultimately, you need to cover a whole curriculum.
There is a whole spectrum between teaching centrally dictated lesson plans and individually crafted tutoring, and one of the requirements of teaching is to be able to adjust lesson plans according to reality. We don’t expect software engineers to waterfall every last character in code down to the wire, but teachers are supposed to do this with unpredictable human children?
You say this because you don't know better, but its very common in schools for kids with learning or other disabilities to be in the same classes as other students - called 'mainstreaming' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainstreaming_(education)
Teachers are 100% supposed to teach the standardized kids, the kids with disabilities, and the kids who are a little faster than everyone else. It's simply not possible to do with one standardized lecture without individual attention to those with special needs.
It's not some document, its literally a major movement decades old in education.
> Why would someone choose to be a teacher making around the median [1] when you could be a software engineer and make 3x as much?
Isn’t the answer to this quite obvious? It’s harder to be a software engineer. And there’s more risk to the profession.
Programming is interesting as you can be self-taught and be great. And it doesn’t require any formal training. I started as a college dropout (from a different major nothing to do with programming) and there’s lots of boot camps.
Anyone with the inclination can do what you suggest. But I think programming is hard so many are incapable.
> Why would someone choose to be a teacher making around the median when you could be a software engineer and make 3x as much?
Is that a serious question?
Why indeed? Maybe because a union job with a state pension (yes, defined benefit pension) that starts at 62K and has an advancing pay scale based only on education level and seniority (yes - job performance unrelated to pay) and very high job security ain’t bad place to be if you can get it.
(And also I suspect that a lot of the people getting those teaching jobs simply would not be able to get 200K software development jobs.)
> most qualified high school physics teachers have way differently valued skillsets in the labor force by alternate employers than most kindergarten teachers.
Do they? I read that as implying that physics teachers could potentially get some stem jobs. But is that actually true? If you can do math, you can teach yourself enough physics to teach in high school. But that gets you nowhere near the knowledge necessary for applying non-trivial physics at work.
"If you can do math, you can teach yourself enough physics to teach in high school."
No, you can't. Even at the high school level there is jargon, historical methodology, and domain-specific nuance that isn't accessible to the self-taught. That's true for almost any subject one might think of, in fact.
To be clear, I didn't write "be an exceptional physics teacher with knowledge of history, nuance, etc." - I agree that's not a trivial thing and a very desirable one. But if you need "just a physics teacher" for a given spot, I stand by my opinion.
I mean, if you’re talking about the happy path where every student understands the material on the first pass or can work out issues on their own then maybe. But that’s not how teaching or learning works for anyone, including super geniuses.
What prevents anyone from learning all they need about any subject on their own? If someone is capable of reading, it seems to me they could teach themselves any subject using books. Of course, having a good teacher to guide them in which sources to read, etc, would greatly speed up the process of learning. However, I don’t see any reason someone cannot learn any subject on their own.
Books provide the basics required to understand the field. They don't help develop intuition, methodology, collaboration, and other skills necessary to truly understand the field or teach it to others.
Whether you could or couldn't self study to be a competent physics teacher is besides the point if you need a physics or very closely related STEM degree plus test of content competency as a condition of getting the job by the regulations if most US states. That limits the pool of applicants to people who can command better salaries elsewhere over their whole career arc for arguably a lot less stress. Thus an exceptional shortage within that specialty is more prone to happen. Lowering the standards of qualification is an option, but the author doesn't seem thrilled with that idea. So we are pretty much left with discussing a pay differential within the profession, which is a third rail topic among most teacher unions.
Starting salaries for many districts for jobs that require a masters is pathetic.
Many suburban schools pay decent, but often urban centers pay poorly.
I know one person who was offered under $30k for teaching young special Ed folks. This is someone who has a masters and extra certs on tops of that.
Your argument about physics teachers being more sought after is interesting but misses the point. As a society we want our children to have the best outcomes, providing them with the best education at early ages provides that.
To have the best education you want to pay well and attract the best candidates. Not have those teachers splitting their time with Uber so they can afford rent.
There was a study that showed the value of great kindergarten teachers and it’s over $300k a year.
Do software engineers just spontaneously come into existence? Or do they begin their education with kindergarten teachers, and progress though to the professors that teach them at college?
If a software engineer is contributing millions of dollars in value each year, they are doing it on the backs of the giants that taught and coached them to get to where they are today.
If you want to follow the value chain all the way down, why not attribute the value of that software engineer to the professors who taught those kindergarten teachers to be good teachers? Or the kindergarten teachers who taught those professors?
The truth of where the value to society comes from is somewhere between the "shoulders of giants" myth (that everything is obvious in light of what came before, and nobody really creates any value) and the "lone genius" myth (that value is created solely by bright individuals).
Some component of the value that we attribute to a person likely comes from their teachers, but it may be 0 (or negative - lots of teachers demoralize their students too). However, a significant portion comes from them.
A lot of the people who espouse the "shoulders of giants" myth use it to discredit the idea of the "lone genius" (without thinking about who the giants are). They believe that the giants represent societal knowledge, not individuals who made great contributions.
You totally missed the point though. The value you create has almost nothing to do with how much you’re paid. That’s just the most you could possibly be paid. You’re paid the amount your employer thinks it would cost to replace you.
I think markets are generally good, yes. If someone wants to do your job for cheaper and they’re just as good they should get the job. Either way, I don’t think it makes sense to talk about things like this as good or bad, they just are the way the are unless you’re talking about a complete revolution.
100% false, special Ed is a spectrum from high functioning to low functioning. Some kids need extra attention and support to find their element and become successful.
The diaper-changing-babysitting end of things is probably the most difficult job in the school. Think about it, it's one step away from working in a mental institution.
The whole USA teaching system exploits nice salt-of-the-earth types, chews them up, then spits them out. The system makes it difficult to even stay in it as a teacher, the job is littered with madness compared to many other government and private sector jobs.
Many teachers work very long hours. Ones I've dated did a minimum of 60 hours. They would work their day shift and then go home and work more, and work on weekends, and then do tutoring for extra cash.
Do you know how frustrating and exhausting teaching is? Very. They also don't get hazard pay for working in dangerous schools. One teacher I knew literally stopped teaching and became a kind of official bouncer (I don't know what it's called); when kids would get violent his job was to restrain them. The reason he switched was the kids' disrespect and his own desire to see them improve was crushing his soul.
Many teachers use their own money to buy their students' class materials.
If you're a teacher in New Jersey, you have to also live in New Jersey, a state with a ridiculously high tax rate.
The years of service thing is a fair yardstick because it's comparing apples to apples. We are not paying them based on what a different job would pay them, we pay them based on the job we want them to do.
In general, the hours spent teaching diminish over time. At the beginning of a teacher's career, they spend a lot of time outside of class building lesson plans and creating tests and homework assignments. These legitimately take a lot of time. And they aren't perfect, so the teacher often sees that they need to make big changes after those lesson plans and tests and homework assignments hit the students.
But after a few iterations, they have those tools, and at that point things settle down a lot. The material only needs to be updated infrequently. Most of that time that in the first few years was spent building those things is freed back up, and it's not replaced by anything.
I know three teachers well (Chicago area; two quite senior, the other recently retired). Hours might have once diminished over time as you suggest, but their experience as told to me contradicts this trend: curricula have been changing so quickly in response to administrative decree that every few years everything gets thrown out and rebuilt. When you add to that decreasing resources for classrooms and increasing student-to-teacher ratios, it is not surprising to me that they work more hours than anybody else I know.
The teacher in that example had 13 years of service and worked in one of the better paying public schools in New Jersey. She said she was paid pretty highly at around $60K (iirc). I do remember there was a kind of pecking order where more entry level teachers would make lesson plans, but the senior teachers still had to help the younger teachers learn how to do it, and sometimes do it themselves when nobody else could (teachers might trade between each other what extra work they needed).
The thing to compare to is the jobs the teachers could do if they weren't teachers. All of them have college degrees, many have masters degrees. The comparison point should be generic white collar office jobs, which are pretty much all easier (and especially, less annoying), higher paying, and more respected.
> Salaries in large urban districts are often well above area median, and when accounting for benefits and pension, quite impressive.
I'd disagree. Some anecdotal evidence - I'm from a HCOL suburban area with a nationally ranked public school system. Teachers here are generally considered "well-paid" by teacher salary standards. Many of the teachers in my area literally cannot afford to live here, and have to commute 30-40 minutes in.
My mom was a teacher there. She was making about $80k a year at the end of her career, with 2 masters degree and 20 years of experience teaching (so she was pretty much maxed out on her salary). Her pension is something like $20k a year (also maxed out due to her YOE). My dad was in between jobs for some time in there, and my parents, who are frugal people, struggled to make ends meet on just my moms salary, borrowing against their mortgage for the year while my dad was unemployed.
I went to Chicago public schools. Most of my teachers had graduate degrees from degree mill schools, some even had phds that they loved to talk about even though I doubt they spent more than a few days to get them. That ended up meaning they all made around 110-120, with full pension after I believe 30 years. Certainly not an amazing salary, and they all worked much harder than I ever have, but nothing to laugh at I’d say.
Very good point, that's a salary you can live very comfortably on. Seems like it just depends on the school district, but I'd say the authors main point, that salaries across the board for teachers are lower than they should be given how hard the job is and how qualified most teachers are, still holds true.
Are our public school teachers unfit to be teachers and low-quality workers because not high enough wage is offered for quality people? Or is it that the salary attracts competent people but other factors are broken?
The interesting thing to me is I see people almost universally praise our teachers, and comment on how great and caring they are. The money seems to be attracting the raw talent, so I'm leaning towards something else is much more broken in our system.
It's always been my opinion that market value aside, Kindergarden teachers probably deserve the HIGHEST pay because they lay the foundations, and without sound foundations, the building is unstable.
Apologies for extended metaphorical language, but the underlying point is really what I think: Pay the ones at the front the most. They do the groundwork.
> Demoralization is what happens when you spend years becoming an expert in a subject area, and nobody cares. They’d rather hire another MBA to make all the important decisions, while they stick us on committees writing reports for ghosts. That’s when teachers start to withdraw from their jobs, when we realize it doesn’t matter what we think, and it definitely doesn’t matter how amazing we are at what we do.
This was really well put, and applies to any profession, not just teaching. Consider software security experts, who know all the ins and outs of making systems secure. They advise, the offer guidance and best practices on very complex material.
And yet at the end of the day all that work gets thrown out by some PM’s that think it only adds complexity, or worse yet users simply don’t use the more secure features of an application.
Any MBA or Product Manager telling a security expert what's important and what's not is absolutely doing it wrong. What they teach in an MBA is simply the larger picture of a business, it's complex systems, it's architecture. Anyone that writes code should be fairly good at it because it's essentially the same thing one does as an engineer: Determine the interfaces and contracts between the teams, understand the 'organs of the body' and the processes therein, understand the inputs and the outputs and governing systems such as cash flow and income. What often happens is prioritization and risk assessment ... the needs of the customers are many and there is only so much room in the backlog. What the security expert needs to do is to make the risks clear to the manager in business terms that they can understand, which to be honest, often comes down to probable loss of money, or customers, or brand.
Honestly there’s useful and interesting stuff in an MBA course, but it has very little to do with practical management of a business at any level. Pretty useful if your job is doing financial projections of projects with relatively predictable costs and payoffs.
Imagine if we put in charge of a tech firm the dude with the best understanding of category theory.
> it only adds complexity, or worse yet users simply don’t use the more secure features of an application.
This is true, on both counts. Adding top end security does add complexity. The business should decide if it's worth it. And users generally want whatever is simpler, and will only use MFA if it's forced upon them.
I was going to quote that very paragraph, as a professor teaching three classes this semester, in addition to my 50 hour a week job as the technical director.
I see at my university the outside consultants telling us how and when to teach. But OPs first sentence here seems to ring true a lot on my campus. Your boss, HR, some organization called "student success" which is made up of MBAs that have never taught a class, some VP of whatever division, they talk down to you. Tell you, as a professor with great student feedback and high marks all over the place, that you do not understand "how to teach" and that we should have Elvsiver, Pearson, or some other bookseller tell us how to teach, or even better, that we should just outsource teaching to them.
In fairness a lot of professors are terrible teachers and don't really care about teaching at all. My own course was full of them. I'm sure they didn't like to hear it though.
My friend is a professor and admits she has no interest in teaching. She is a scientist and counts herself fortunate to have enough research funding that she is rarely expected to lecture.
It's not that they're not paid to care, it's that they're not paid to teach. At least at research universities, tenured/tenure-track faculty's job is to do produce research and get grants. Teaching is a thing that's piled on top of it that doesn't help your career and takes a whole lot of time away from your primary job function.
A lot of professors do actually care about teaching and genuinely want to help students, but the system as designed strongly disincentivizes (or actively punishes) doing more than the bare minimum. I know a professor who was recently denied tenure at a research university that likes to describe itself as very "undergraduate teaching focused" -- he had decent but not outstanding research output, but had gotten several university-wide teaching awards and was broadly considered by students one of the best lecturers in the department. Some of the comments he had received suggest that this actively hurt him for tenure, because they felt he was too focused on teaching over research.
I will admit, there are those, just like the SW dev that hates coding, the Dr. that hates patients, etc. Most in the teaching profession that do not "like to teach" are people who like to do research, but are forced to teach.
I would probably argue, as another poster noted, that the really good ones quit, or their classes are perpetually full as they are the good ones. In the CS department where I teach, we generally do not have the luxury of multiple sections after the intro courses, but in say Mathematics, you really see this point driven home. The "good" Calculus I profs class fills instantly, then everyone else is left with "that researcher person" who does not like to teach.
Of course, the obvious solution: have research professors and teaching professors. Right? Nope, colleges are run by business people. "Have people just do research??" Only the well off colleges can really do that.
They may be brilliant at mentoring grad students but worthless at teaching undergrads. It all depends on the focus of the school. Small universities are more likely to focus on undergrad teaching over research or PhD numbers.
I think there's a point though where people are so deep in it, they can't see the forest through the trees anymore.
Security, as you mentioned, is definitely a balance with what your users will actually want to do. Security experts see doomsday scenarios everywhere, but if their solution is a hassle, your customers will just go to the less secure competitor.
I’ve worked with DBAs who were absolutely experts and knew far more than us but wanted to normalize the data to the point where actually retrieving it would have been a major hassle of JOINs. There’s a balance there that experts miss.
"Experts" in my general experience often lack the big picture. They get so honed in on their little area of expertise that they can forget that people don't value what they value to the same degree.
Id argue a DBA who doesn't understand the practical value of judicious use of denormalization isn't YET an expert. knowing when to dry your data and when to optimize for a specific usage pattern is part of being an "expert."
Currently turnover is high for many jobs with great working conditions, so it shouldn't be news that people don't want a stressful job with relatively mediocre pay.
I don't have the data to back it up, but I would expect a few European countries to be the only exception, and only those that have moved on from older educational models.
>Not just mediocre pay, but nowadays unlivable pay with the current rent trends in suburban and city environments.
Not just "nowadays." I recall (I've looked around, but can't find it archived) an article from 2000 in the San Jose Mercury News about full-time public school teachers living in homeless shelters because they couldn't afford housing in San Jose.
So, no. Not new. Still a big problem, but not a new one.
But that’s San Jose - I think we’re seeing the problem spread to more reaches of the US. For example, Savannah, GA is a mostly stagnant area with only 4,000 population growth since 2017 and not much job growth. Meanwhile, the average rent for a 2 bedroom was stuck under $1100 until 2018, and after Covid the expiration of the CDC moratorium enabled a rent boom to $1500. I can guarantee you income has not risen to match that, so anyone already in an apartment is simply dedicating more of their income to paying the rent.
>But that’s San Jose - I think we’re seeing the problem spread to more reaches of the US. For example, Savannah, GA is a mostly stagnant area with only 4,000 population growth since 2017 and not much job growth. Meanwhile, the average rent for a 2 bedroom was stuck under $1100 until 2018, and after Covid the expiration of the CDC moratorium enabled a rent boom to $1500. I can guarantee you income has not risen to match that, so anyone already in an apartment is simply dedicating more of their income to paying the rent.
You won't get an argument about that from me. I wasn't trying to deride or minimize the issues you mentioned. At all.
Rather, I was pointing out that low pay for K-12 teachers isn't a new phenomenon.
I wholeheartedly agree that this is a pressing issue right now, and in lots more places than Silicon Valley.
The problem with teaching is that the role has expanded way beyond what it used to be and teachers are expected to do FAR too much in the classroom and they get minimal support from admin who are more worried about their careers than supporting teachers.
I just had this conversation last week with a couple teachers. If this matters to you, I suggest you find some older teachers who have been around long enough to actually see how the job has changed and ask them what they think.
It has become an impossible job for any amount of money.
The problem/solution is YouTube. There is prestige in being a YouTube super-teacher like 3B1B, teaching millions of people. There is no prestige in teaching kids at a local high school who don't even want to learn.
The smart people who once might have found their vocation in teaching, now prefer to set up YouTube channels.
The role of teacher is splitting into content makers and babysitters.
Believe it or not, YouTube is not good pedagogy. A YouTube video doesn't help you to fill in the gaps of your understanding by re-working a difficult concept with you. A YouTube video, nor an app, doesn't go through the steps of solving a problem with you, and watch how you do it to give you constructive criticism.
Educational content is amazing, but it's not teaching. It's a resource. It's like saying that the existence of books negates the need for teaching and that all the clever people are now writing books.
"A YouTube video, nor an app, doesn't go through the steps of solving a problem with you, and watch how you do it to give you constructive criticism."—neither will 99.9% of teachers. Most of them out of sheer incompetence, impatience, and general inadequacy to be around children, some due to the fact that there are 30+ children in the classroom and they literally don't have the time and energy for that kind of effort. I am not speaking about American schools with 25K+/year tuition fee in NYC, I am speaking about teachers in a general classroom in Punta Arenas, Chile or a general classroom in Kruševac, Serbia.
> A YouTube video doesn't help you to fill in the gaps of your understanding by re-working a difficult concept with you. A YouTube video, nor an app, doesn't go through the steps of solving a problem with you, and watch how you do it to give you constructive criticism.
Video is a replacement for teacher-centered lectures, that don't do these things either. Of course the tutoring part of education is also important.
It’s a great improvement over older videos in the classroom though, since there’s feedback from the actual viewers.
(I vaguely remember being shown some educational video in class that was over half old wireframey CGI transitions with what an old person thought technobabble looked like all over it. It was supposed to be about the environment.)
I agree with the core idea of this, but have you personally watched 3B1B? It feels to me like a largely isolated case, and I hope “remote learning” does not become the norm, but … it is really amazing.
YouTube teaching is inherently one sided. There is significantly more to teaching than that. Tailoring the lesson to the individual, being able to immediately respond to questions, knowing when someone doesn't understand. These things are super important for great teaching. YouTube and online one sided teaching courses are never going to be able to beat that.
Here in NJ we invest a lot in education. Most school districts spend 20-30k per student. Senior teachers earn over 100k. The results are good, low income students have far higher grades that most of the country. It is expensive though, both our income taxes and property taxes are famously high. Lots of people leave the state because of this.
Superb article. Perhaps covid has let people learn that they could survive without doing something they didn’t like just to get some money. There’s many ways to make or get money, and the hassle level is quite variable. But when people choose, say, an Amazon warehouse over their former position ya gotta wonder about what they gave up.
If they know stem at all, why teach? If they can handle foreign languages or wield words, why teach? If they can work with their hands, there are trades and the like dying for people…. The buzz from a success has to be balanced against all of the issues discussed here in, and now the risk of physical harm is quite high.
The very same problem exists in other countries. We have been having an outrageously similar situation in France for years already, so much that this article does a really good job at depainting the situation here in France too.
It's clear everything is falling and people are trying to jack up the wages to compensate. Yet nobody mentions how to fix the horrific management that allowed this to happen in the first place and won't solve the crisis.
My last job wanted me to replace the existing management. They tried to sell this to me by complaining about all the different bosses they had to report to, how difficult the job was and how they want to retire and stop doing the job. Combined with all the other structural issues and tribalism within the workplace, having a management team that is happy to spell out their own doom is criminally incompetent.
You can pretty up the teacher or management role with money and pride, but it's still going to fall apart if you're hellbent on overworking your staff and killing the golden goose. Everyday the terrible management continues, the more and more relatable Anakin looks. Disappointment is a weekly reality.
In Canada each province has a fairly strong teacher union. In Manitoba for example a teacher with 10 years experience will earn approximately $95K CAD (more than most software developers here). This with strong pension benefits that can be collected at 55. I know teachers that retired in their late 50s, and will continuing making 70% of their inflation adjust salaries until they die.
Relatively speaking this salary/benefits has higher expected lifetime earnings than a software developer.
One negative is that the unions are also strong enough that teachers can't be fired/replaced for performance (this is similar to Police...etc). As with any profession the worst of the bunch is very bad, and unfortunately they keep doing it until their fifties at the cost of the children.
It varies significantly by state. Five states explicitly outlaw collective bargaining by teachers and 32 states require it with various limitations on the scope of items that can be negotiated. Some states also have restrictions on striking.
Some of the worst educational outcomes in the US are in deep blue states and deep blue cities. Meanwhile, suburban communities in the US tend to vote more "red" and are also the places people go to raise families because of the better public schools.
in the USNews ranking, 8/10 of the best states Pre-K-12 are blue, while 10/10 worst are red.[1]
When you evaluate things beyond the partisan lens, poverty is a massive predictor in education outcomes which is why many deep blue cities do poorly and why many deep red states do poorly as well.
Separately, the suburbs in the US are about as purple as it gets. Suburbs also have the lowest rate of poverty compared to urban and rural. [2]
Poverty is a better analysis than political lines.
Most of the best school districts are in purple districts. The worst ones are in heavily red or heavily blue districts, largely correlating with poverty.
I'd like to introduce a sensitive subject as neutrally as possible.
For root causes, the morale environment is largely politically induced in a coordinated attack on public education that goes back to the 80's. For some examples...
Exactly. They want to replace public education with a for-profit system.
Once that transition is in place, the vouchers will become harder for certain people to get, then eventually vouchers will go away and people will be solely responsible for their children's education. This means, yet again, the poor and middle class get the shaft.
1. For as much as we spend on education, teachers seem to be grossly underpaid - to be getting robbed of their share of the budget. Where does that money go?
2. It seems that education degrees are seen as easier to achieve than others.
3. Teachers frequently complain about how they are unappreciated, yet children spend _12 years_ in their care. Why do people come up to them and say they hated school rather than “thank you”?
4. Many school problems are caused by disruptive children.
Disruptive children are caused by parents who frankly just don’t give a shit. Throwing more money into schools won’t ever fix this problem.
5. Schools are just too darn big. Thousands of kids in a big prison-shaped building and we wonder why everyone is alienated, miserable and dehumanized?
> Disruptive children are caused by parents who frankly just don’t give a shit.
This isn’t necessarily true; sometimes the parents simply don’t have the proper info or education themselves. Example: parent of a kid with ADHD who has no understanding of what ADHD is or how it presents, and thus that their kid even has it.
This goes back to the parents who aren't taking their child to doctors for health checkups for any myriad of reasons. Early and often checkups should catch these issues. In your example I wouldn't say parents don't give a shit. But as someone who had ADHD but didn't cut up in school or wasn't a class clown, I had discipline at home. Sure I would talk during class and my mind would wander. But I wasn't being so disruptive class couldn't be taught.
Almost always in the examples of why teachers don't want to teach anymore. The focus is always on pay, testing, and administration. But who wants to come to work and teach children that are so disrespectful and so disruptive that class can't be taught. My salary wouldn't be the deciding factor here.
As a parent, you can be well very well informed on the issue, and still not be able to solve it in your kid. I'd venture that this kind of futility is more prevalent than ignorance.
On the flip side of that coin, you sometimes have the parents who do know all about their child's ADHD and how to (help their child) manage it effectively, and then you get these meddling teachers or principals who genuinely believe they know better than everyone else about how "problem children" should be dealt with (all while utterly ignoring the actual problem children, like bullies for example). They hear that a child has "a diagnosis" and it's like painting a target on that child for some screwed up teachers/principals, no matter how actually well behaved that child is in practice. Sometimes those vile people even go beyond "too far" and ruin lives with their meddling.
2. Depending on the state you may not even need one
3. It's the parents, not the kids that make them feel this way. Kids typically love their teachers
4. 100%
5. Building a new school is 10-100s of millions typically. Why it costs so much is worthy of debate, but plunking down new schools these days is far more costly than in the past.
1. Automation. Teaching in its rawest form has been automated away, leaving it to be a valueless human endeavour. “Teaching” in the context of children survives because it has become a childcare service. But babysitting is not able to charge much as its cost must remain under the income potential of parents, else parents will take the responsibility themselves.
1) Has it really? I'm sure the potential exists for video lectures or whatever, but I think the teachers still ostensibly at least teach.
2) How little do you pay babysitters? At, say, $5 per kid per hour, a teacher of 20 would be doing pretty well, and that's on the low side of class sizes these days I think.
> Has it really? I'm sure the potential exists for video lectures or whatever, but I think the teachers still ostensibly at least teach.
Yes. Gone are the days that you would hire a teacher to teach you something. These days you turn to automated teaching services. The fact that the word teacher is now synonymous with the K-12 school teacher further emphasizes that the career in general has effectively disappeared. As before, "teaching" has survived as a career where childcare is the actual service offered.
> How little do you pay babysitters?
In my case it is $3 per hour for a daycare provider that cares for no more than five children at a time. If the babysitter cared for more children I would expect to pay less as I would get much less value for my dollar. The quality of care and attention declines as the number of children increases.
Large class sizes are accepted because we are going for bang for our buck over quality of care. If teachers were charging on the same order per child as other daycare providers providing higher quality care, indeed it would be good money, but there would be a shift to putting children into those better care facilities and so it wouldn't last. Why pay the same amount for lesser care?
Teaching as a career basically doesn't exist anymore outside of schools for children. It is not that teachers are using automated tools, but students are using automated teachers instead of hiring human teachers. When was the last time you hired a human teacher instead of consulting an automated teacher when you wanted/needed to learn something new?
Like I said before, we don't even recognize the existence of general teachers anymore, with the word under typical use now only referring to those who work at schools for children.
Books provide a primitive form of automated teaching, although we've expanded on the concept considerably since the advent of the book.
You have not heard of automated teaching as a thing because we invent names for automation. The automated kitchen servant isn't called an automated kitchen servant, it's called a dishwasher (among others).
Likewise, automated teachers are not called automated teachers. They are given names, depending on the teaching method at play. Automated teacher is used here as a generalization as the specific automation is immaterial.
$1 per student in a 25-student classroom for 30 hrs/week for 36 weeks is like 27k, the base salary isn't much higher than that. So that's assuming a worthless teacher with 0 added value. The added value is probably at least 3x even for a subpar teacher up to 10-20x for a top performer and the actual time variables are all probably higher than listed above.
I would imagine the 10-20x value-adders aren't incentivized and are probably actively de-incentivized in the faculty senate/union dynamic unless they literally love the job that much which is debunked in the OP post.
Of what relevance are kids? We're talking about adults. When was the last time you hired a teacher instead of turning to YouTube (or whatever)? That's where teaching is effectively dead, lost to automation.
Children require care. Again, "teaching" survives when children are present because childcare is the functional service offered. There is no impetus to move to automation here as childcare is not easily automated, necessitating a warm body anyway. However, the value of a teacher is constrained by the value of childcare as there is no longer market value in teaching alone.
Like I said in the other comment, teaching outside of schools for children isn't even recognized in the word teacher anymore because the career, as a general one, effectively no longer exists. You've proven my point.
Anything to do with the general public costs a lot because of legal liability, especially when dealing with kids.
Any loss that occurs, no matter how low probability it is, get litigated and once litigated gets incorporated into expected losses by insurance companies and mitigations for it get stipulated into the insurance coverage.
Fire, handicap accessibilities, school shootings, tornado, earthquake, trip and falls, sports equipment injury, etc.
If an entity does not cover its ass head to toe on “known” risks, and lets a loss happen due to negligence, then it is on them. The response to this is lots of protocols and code requirements, and lots of additional bureaucracy to continuously check if those protocols and code requirements are being followed.
> Disruptive children are caused by parents who frankly just don’t give a shit. Throwing more money into schools won’t ever fix this problem.
I was a disruptive child and my parents were the opposite of people who didn’t give a shit. Both of them highly valued education and spent plenty of time with me. they just had to contend with a child who wasn’t well behaved at school and it was genetics more than anything they did. They spent thousands of dollars on therapists and medicines and it didn’t help that much. Luckily for me, puberty seemed to turn things around and I ended up doing well in high school and very well in college (at a good school). Now I’ve got two little trouble makers of my own and it’s pretty obvious to me where they got those genes from.
I agree that dealing with problematic kids is a pain in the ass for teachers and I do try to thank them when I see them, and I even agree that parenting is often the issue, but a lot of it is genetics and luck.
That’s valid, there are different kinds of disruptive kids.
A good friend of mine at high school was very bright, kind of a troublemaker, diagnosed with ADHD, took prescription Ritalin, was a bit of a pain in the ass with his teachers, but had parents who cared and he ended up graduating and doing fine.
I never formed good habits and I really wish my parent prioritized that (Ritalin) over growing big and tall for a minuscule chance of making it in pro sports.
I volunteer with kids, and I see parents who prioritize sports where they have to pay a lot of money for fees over more scholastic and much cheaper programs for the smaller chance of getting a sports scholarship/career than more plentiful academic scholarships.
I don't know if they think their children just aren't capable intellectually or what.
At least in my case, sports was my parent’s opportunity to socialize. It was never really about my interests or well being, they didn’t want to lose their contextual friends and contacts. It was so bad I was disallowed from doing speech and debate in high school.
There are some parents with delusions about their kids being pro athletes, but many are just providing their kid the opportunity to do something he likes, and can afford to do it.
There is a whole industry around youth sports that is designed to extract money from parents. That doesn't mean that the kids don't enjoy it though.
I’ve asked this question of some acquaintances that prioritize sports above all else. Their kids play different sports all year around and are on all these traveling teams. I’ve asked them if they seriously think their kids will be good enough to get a college scholarship or play pro sports (I’ve seen them, they won’t be). They just shrug. I have to presume this is how they were raised and so they are doing it to their own kids.
"The sieve" is insane. And it begins early. While there are plenty of people who get to play professional sports who weren't in peewee, who didn't do travel ball, etc. It does not hurt.
Because in order to even get a shot to play professionally, you have to play well in college, preferably at a notable school. In order to get a shot to play well in a notable college, you have to play well in high school. That means you have to make varsity, play on the team, be a starter. And that usually means you have to be ready to play when you get to high school. And the best way to do that is to play peewee, travel ball, etc.
You'll find out if the kid is coachable, if he can be made coachable, if he's got aptitude, etc.
I thought it was well known that disruptive kids are often unrecognised creative/smart kids who are challenging the authority/leadership of the teacher.
There has been some research on this in the UK, look into some of the work by David Price around creative test answers.
Dude, are you me? I'm the same way. Highly educated parents, very supportive. I was a major disruptive shithead all through school - in retrospect probably because I was bored. I was not any better as a teenager, but calmed down post university graduation.
Now I have a highly disruptive 2-year old that Preschool calls "behavioural issues" and wants psychologists involved. And I'm like "yes, we're willing to have those conversations", but secretly I think "He'll have the same journey as me - I will need to make sure he's sufficiently physically and intellectually stimulated for the next 20 years, and everything will turn out fine." Of course it's not fair to place that burden on others - his peers, or educators - and I will do as much as I can in extracurricular time, BUT, there's only so much my partner and I can do.
As a former teacher from the States (and maybe will go back to it one day, either internationally, or in another country permanently, depending on how life works out), I'd live to give my answers to some of this.
Note, I'm biased. My undergraduate degree was not in teaching but in physics. I did a masters programme in teaching to transition to becoming a teacher. I enjoyed teaching, but just ended up finding it boring teaching the same thing six times a day, so when an opportunity to do a new masters came along, I took it. I didn't leave because I got burnt out or hated it, I just wanted something a bit more challenging.
2) They are. The masters I did for teaching was a joke. I've seen high schoolers with better writing abilities than half my professors. And these are people with 'educational doctorates'. Also, this might be different at better universities, but at least in my state several are propped up by their online teaching masters (the state requires a masters) and they exist just to pump them out. If you don't get a 4.0 something is wrong. I've heard similar issues with the undergraduate programmes in the state.
3. Kids don't want to be at school. They want to be out doing kid things, which we are limiting more and more in school. They also don't want to necessarily sit and learn the stuff they're supposed to learn. It's a complex issue, but that's my take on it a lot.
4. Yep. This is, in my opinion, the number one issue facing American schools, and why private/charter (sometimes) do so much better. They can be picky about the students they take -- thus they only take those who are well behaved and who want to be there and have active parent involvement. Parent involvement is a huge predictor of school success. Until we fix that -- including the issues of poverty and not social safety net -- some schools won't improve. Kids need a safe place at home and at school if they're to truly learn and achieve what they can. Sadly, nobody talks about this issue, nor are any steps taken to change it or the culture around education. I'm from a rural area, there's people proud they dropped out and didn't get a degree and even more proud they didn't get a college one. It gets passed on.
5. Absolutely. It's incredibly difficult to teach 30+ kids at once, of various levels. Especially when they refuse to create differentiated classes. I had some classes that ran the gamut from kids who needed extra assistance and had learning disabilities to kids who would literally be in the running for valedictorian and had all accelerated classes in the subjects that had it. If I spend time on one subset of those kids, it immediately hurts the other. Now, this is a school-specific problem and lazy guidance counselors and a principal who just didn't give a shit about academically gifted students, but I had a cousin leave the school just this year because they don't care about academics because they're too worried about passing the weaker ones (not catching them up, but just making sure they can squeak by with the bare minimum). Not entirely the dehumanisation and alienation you mentioned, but I think it leads to it when the classes can't be catered towards them.
This is the one thing where I think more money could help -- get more teachers and get smaller class sizes. It'd also be nice I think to have a teacher go all four years with the students in high school, unless there's major issues, so the students get to truly know the teacher and feel like they can trust them. It could work in my state, except for science because each subject has its own certification as opposed to just one for 'math'.
I feel like a more trades-oriented approach with kids who don’t have the desire, motivation or aptitude for college would lead to more engagement and give those kids a better chance at success.
For my case, it was very school specific. Basically, our counselors were lazy and didn't want to deal with the scheduling headache of adding accelerated classes for science. We also had a good attached vocational school, which did wonders for a lot of kids; I had some graduate as fully certified welders and go make more money than me right out of high school. But there were still the issues in their other classes, sadly.
But, to answer the question more broadly, it's the 'equality' bit I think. I'm all for giving everyone equal opportunity, and the ability to move into accelerated pathways if you can prove you have the requisite knowledge to do so. But if you stick students with learning disabilities with accelerated students nobody is going to have a good time. It doesn't help either group and just harms them.
And, again, I say this as someone who didn't think California's math updates were all that terrible. Pushing kids to do stats as opposed to just the whole "everyone needs to aim towards calculus" attitude is a great thing and I stand behind that. But if we can differentiate classes, we can serve all groups of kids better and provide better outcomes for all. But the whole class needs to be differentiated; differentiation within a set of 30 kids is nigh impossible, especially when there's such a gap between abilities. For a personal story, the smartest kid I ever taught was in my last year teaching. He worked hard, if there was something he didn't understand he asked for more help and practice problems. The lowest kid I ever taught was in the same class. The kid was a freshman in high school and couldn't add single digit numbers without a calculator. There's no way that should ever be happening.
> But if you stick students with learning disabilities with accelerated students nobody is going to have a good time. It doesn't help either group and just harms them.
This was explicitly the operating philosophy of my middle school. It was terrible.
The concern is that they become a self-fulfilling prophecy. You get sorted into the lower grade, perhaps because of maturing more slowly in the early years, or a home environment non-conducive to study due to two working parents, or just economic disadvantages like having to live further away from the school and therefore spending time commuting that other kids are spending on study. (and in the US there's a correlation with race for the structural disadvantages because of more outright historical racism).
So students end up in a lower grade of class, don't get taught as complex versions of their subjects, and finish school with a lesser educational attainment, thereby setting the seeds for their next generation to be in the same place.
Even without seperated classes, this does happen to some level between schools.
> The concern is that they become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
An effective education is ultimately the student's responsibility. If we could somehow teach that at an early age, lot of these problems become irrelevant.
As a freshman I was placed in a geometry class in high school that included several seniors that obviously came to class high and some that spoke 0 English. I asked for more difficult problems in class, unaware that an advanced geometry class even existed at the school.
After taking a precalc class as a junior (which was after I took a precalc summer class at a local university), I was told I would be placed in AP calc AB.
I literally had to accost the teacher after class and say that was unacceptable. He said if I could convince the Calc teacher I should be in BC calc, I could take it. As luck would have it, the calc teacher was my former geometry teacher. I finished AP calc BC with an A and a 5/5 on the AP exam, but what if I hadn't been so lucky (knew the teacher) or so pissed off with my education up to that point that I had respected the precalc teacher's decision?
This was basically my experience as well. I had to fight against our idiotic guidance counselor to do so. This lady told, and is still telling (she's still there and is the one I've complained about in my other posts) to take whatever class is easiest, there's no need to push yourself, etc. She also actively discourages AP for dual credit, which is beyond useless if you actually want to study a subject in university; she also told 17 year old me that taking out 250k in debt is worth it for my dream school...Like wtf! There were three things that saved me, and pushed me more in high school
(1) My mom was a teacher there, so she knew what classes were offered better than I did, and was able to help me plan stuff early on without the counselor.
(2) The curriculum director used to teach beside my mom and got hired the same year (and they retired the same year even), and had known me my entire life. She often just went over the counselor's head to make sure my schedule lined up like I needed it to
(3) I had an uncle who worked over at the central administration for the school. He got sent lots of information about summer camps, etc, and passed them on both to my mom and the curriculum director to advocate for them.
All three of them are, sadly, retired now (though my mom keeps coming out of retirement because they can't find biology teachers) and there's not many at the school who advocate for the kids in the same way. The old principal (left at the end of the 2021 school year) was horrible too. I've heard the new one is better, and is slowly trying to re-rigourise the curriculum, but he's fighting against a lot of lazy teachers and our guidance office. It's a mess, but I truly hope he succeeds. It's almost made me want to go back to help push for that and for academically gifted kids, so they actually realise what's available.
Help me understand the proud dropout concept. I cannot wrap my mind around it.
My single mom worked three jobs to put me through private school and pay for my college. I grew up thinking that no college == bag groceries for the rest of your life.
How could anyone be proud of depriving themselves of the tools to succeed in life? It's like being proud of gouging out your own eyes and walking around blind.
Where I'm from, it's because of coal mines. They saw their parents and grandparents do reasonably well (financially; health is a-whole-nother story) in the mines without a degree or with only a basic degree and they accepted that school wasn't necessary. Now you have people telling them it is, and doing better because they had more education. It gets to the point where they see that as not trying to screw them over but as elitism, so they blame those people that the options of the past aren't there anymore, and look to try to make themselves feel better.
Though lots of America is fundamentally based in anti-intellectualism. Anti-Intellectualism in American Life was an eye-opening read and helped explain a lot of what I saw around me in the rural Bible Belt.
Same, to be completely honest. Generally, if the parents care about education and are involved the kids will do fine. This is complicated when mom wants her kids to do well but has to work two jobs and older brother watches younger sister after school, but in general it's an easily predicted trend.
Yep. I'm biracial, black and Indian. My mother is Indian. She raised me alone, with no financial support from my father.
My father is a black American who never went to college. He doesn't understand the point of education. He wanted me to a be a movie director or singer or otherwise "famous". He didn't give a crap about school and let me do whatever I wanted when I stayed with him a couple weekends a month.
My mother, an Indian immigrant, sat me down every night and made me do my homework even though she worked three jobs. She paid for twelve years of private schooling. She told me every single day that my education was the only thing I would ever have that would let me survive in this world.
Thanks to her obsession with education, I completed college and never stopped educating myself. I now work as a front-end dev and make six figures. I'm currently preparing to apply for master's programs. I live a happy and comfortable life. I have some savings in the bank. I am constantly working to educate myself. I don't have vague fantasies about becoming "famous" or winning the lottery to support myself.
Education is truly the only guarantee for people of color to achieve a comfortable life in the US. I would never have understood this without my Indian mother's cultural drive towards education.
1. Curriculum. Instructional tools and all the things that for profit publishers can convince politicians, bureaucrats, and administrators they need.
2. They are, and there is a useless but direct correlation to pay and degree attainment. Having more degrees will get you more money, but rarely has any correlation to the quality of teacher.
3. As in most industries where the customer isn't the payer compensation does not correlate to performance. The worst teachers make the same as the best, or more if they have the degrees.
4. Equality, no child left behind and related concepts dictate that the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Any efforts at exclusion are met with resistance, typically by unaffected / uninvolved parties.
5. The idea here is that consolidation of services will save money. The trend away from neighborhood schools to mega-schools / school complexes looks good from a burecratic view.
> 1. For as much as we spend on education, teachers seem to be grossly underpaid - to be getting robbed of their share of the budget. Where does that money go?
Counterpoint: teachers' pay is great, it's just backloaded in pension plans.
> 2. It seems that education degrees are seen as easier to achieve than others.
Yeah, but cost is the same and cost is what's important.
> 4. Many school problems are caused by disruptive children.
Bingo. Half the success of 4-year colleges is that it's the first time the bottom 50% of the students are filtered out.
Story time. I was an ESL teacher for 5 years in Asia and planned on coming home to the USA and getting my teacher's license in Math to teach at international schools. I am not currently a teacher, I'm a quant at a big bank.
Why didn't I end up in teaching? The licensing requirements in Minnesota are insane. Counselor's straight up told me I'd have to borrow ~$50k from the UMN for a MS in Curriculum and Instruction before I could teach.
The labor unions along with politicians have built a structure in which there is artificial scarcity of teachers. Not only is the profession filled with disrespect, but it's outrageously expensive and bureaucratic.
Lastly, the Economics of Education field is wild. Clearly there's value to basic reading/math/science education, but it's not clear at all whether teachers are schools matter than much (wealthy communities/parents matter a lot).
Edit: feel obligated to add that k12 education is financed and administrated at the local level, which means our experiences with this likely vary a lot. Mine are specific to trying to move back to the USA and become licensed in MN.
I suspect that almost all of the success of private schools can be ascribed to being able to kick students out and not requiring fifty billion dollars in degrees to teach.
To a degree. There's some sampling bias as well because the kind of parent that would choose a non-default education option probably cares more to begin with.
I taught computing for 13 years at a public charter high-school. It doesn't charge tuition (it's a public school), but does have a dress code, and a commitment to a curriculum based on E. D. Hirsch's core knowledge program in grade school and on classical, liberal arts great books in high school.
Admission is by lottery if there are more applicants than places, not by cherry-picking applicants. They hire teachers with subject-matter degrees and experience: they have some PhDs and a couple ABDs (all but dissertation). Half-jokingly they said they didn't look to hire people with teaching certificates, but wouldn't hold that against them. I had a master's degree in computer science and worked summers to get another master's.
The school was smaller (maybe 700 total students K-12; the class of 2022 graduated 26), which right there, I think, made for fewer behavior problems. There was a well-thought-out discipline policy which was enforced by the administration and backed up by the board and most parents. After all, parents had made a choice to not go to the regular district schools but enroll in this school instead.
I agree that the odds are much better for school success with smaller sizes, a focused curriculum (whether it's International Baccalaureate, Core Knowledge, STEM, arts, or whatever), highly qualified teachers, and supportive parents.
Yes, it's a big step for parents to leave the default neighborhood school, look over the various options, even staying in the same city, let alone moving to a different district. I agree with you there.
The admissions people take some time to represent the whole story or big picture to prospective parents, because the school is not for everybody. I don't think it's cherry-picking to encourage parents to find the best school for their children, even if it isn't yours.
The school accepted applications from parents who had had unsatisfactory experiences at former schools, who were willing to go through the extra steps to try to get better outcomes for their students. The school had its share of free-and-reduced-lunch students and students with individual education plans and such.
I heard parents give heartfelt thanks to everyone at the school who had helped their child overcome what other schools termed learning disabilities. Is it the opposite of cherry-picking to accept a student other schools have, in effect, given up on? I believe the small size of the school and individualized attention helped many students in similar situations.
It still sounds like cherry picking. Is there bus service from all poor neighborhoods to and from the charter school? Or is it only wealthy families that are not working multiple jobs and can afford to drive their kids to and from the school everyday that can consider sending their children there?
> I don't think it's cherry-picking to encourage parents to find the best school for their children, even if it isn't yours.
Why? Because "cherry-picking" is bad and the best things for children are good?
It's, of course, exactly cherry-picking to find the children with the most interested and motivated parents, then filter them down to the ones that you like best. Fuck the kids with bad or no parents.
If I'm a parent who is typically interested and motivated, am I committing a sin against social justice if I am interested and motivated in my children's education and work to provide opportunities for them to learn?
You're not sinning, you're just reacting to incentives.
This isn't a moral condemnation of you, it's just the fact-based explanation for why schools that you have to apply to produce better academic outcomes than default public schooling. If those public schools could just drop the cohort of students whose parents couldn't be arsed to apply to a special school, their quality would also go up.
Pointing out that a bias exists is not always a call to eliminate that bias. The fact that merely requiring an application rather than being the default option improves average outcomes isn't a problem that needs to be solved. It's just something that should be kept in mind when comparing schools.
At some point, some school is going to have to take the kids who don’t bother applying, since we can’t put 100% of schools behind an application and preserve its benefits, and we should not be surprised that such schools do worse, if the ones who do apply happen to be better.
Open lottery admission isn't the same as universal retention. Some charters and even magnets later "counsel out" admitted kids who act up, perform poorly on tests, or need expensive extra services, saying the school isn't the right fit for them. Traditional district public schools don't have this option and usually wind up taking back the kids who wash out of the choice schools.
I have certainly heard this from some teachers in non-charter schools, and I've seen one student asked not to return to the charter school where I teach part-time.
what about a child/family's socioeconomic situation? would that not be a factor? seems like a rich kid is already setup for success regardless of public school or private school. most of the rich kids from my public school are doing fine.
> Counterpoint: teachers' pay is great, it's just backloaded in pension plans.
This is no longer true in most places, and was never a good enough reason to justify paying starting teachers poverty wages.
New York State, which I think most will agree is a state with a strong teachers' union and all that goes with it, has been phasing out defined-benefit pension plans over the past few decades. My mother-in-law, who retired about 10 years ago, was among the last wave to get the "Tier I" full-salary pensions; if you become a teacher in NYS now, you get a much less generous package (I don't know offhand whether it's still defined-benefit, just less, or if they've switched to defined-contribution plans now).
> Counterpoint: teachers' pay is great, it's just backloaded in pension plans.
Counter-points to that:
You still have to pay the bills before retirement.
And this even assumes they get a good pensions, because a lot of states don't bother funding their public employee pensions properly (using current-year tax income for splashy announcements instead, kicking the liability down the road for the next politician):
Teachers in the US get decent salaries and good pensions. It may be different from from state to state, but in California you can work for 25 years and retire without ever having to work again by the age of 50.
You'll have to learn to live on a low salary for the first 5-10 years of your career. But pensions are paid based on your terminal salary, not your average salary. For elementary school teachers in my district the terminal salary was in excess of $100k as of 2017.
> without ever having to work again by the age of 50.
While that may be true, it's important to note that the pension is only salary (and usually only 80% of your terminal salary) and not benefits.
So you'd spend a significant part of that money on getting health insurance.
Most teachers who have earned full pensions wait to retire until 67 anyway so they can get Medicare (and not Social Security, because they don't qualify for it since they have their pension unless they worked another job as well).
Unless you're married and your partner continues to work and covers benefits for you.
My aunt did exactly above, and felt it was a moral duty to let new younger teachers have the spot (nevermind it meant that she was going to draw a pension from the system for more years than she'd actually worked).
Plenty of other teachers feel the same way, though obviously not all.
Sure, if you're married and have a second income, then that second income is basically subsidizing education. My wife was a teacher and retired when our kid was born, because we could. Some time in her 50s she'll be able to draw her pension.
But basically the only reason we can afford to live in the Silicon Valley is because I'm an engineer with a decent salary. A lot of her paycheck went right back into her classroom, and with the hours she worked, she was basically make $3/hr, despite getting some of the highest teacher pay in the country.
And all of her coworkers were in the same boat -- almost every one of them, even the senior teachers, were married to engineers. The few that weren't either had family money or at least had parents who bought them a condo or house. Or a good friend. We let one of her young teacher friends live with us for a couple years until she managed to save up enough for a down payment on a small condo, and then got married and got a second job.
It is basically impossible to be a teacher in Silicon Valley without a highly paid spouse or multiple side hustles.
> But basically the only reason we can afford to live in the Silicon Valley is because I'm an engineer with a decent salary
The existence of California -- and San Francisco, in particular -- makes discussions like this one difficult, because yes, sure, San Francisco is too weird to exist and is therefore basically irrelevant in national policy discussions.
I live in Rhode Island. East Coast. An hour from Boston. Expensive real estate, high-COL (top 10 or 15, depending on which numbers you trust), etc, etc -- and yet, we are just absolutely nothing at all like California, which is its own very weird outlier that has nothing to do with the experiences of the almost 300 million Americans who aren't Californians.
You're right. Outlier is a poor word choice. I just mean to say that increasingly we need separate discussions for the 10% of people who live in CA and the 90% who don't, because the experiences are really quite different.
I think you're right in that discussions need to be different for different parts of the country, but I think the split is urban and not-urban. A lot of California is urban, but so is a lot of New York, Massachusetts, Washington, Oregon, Illinois, etc etc. as far as where the population lives. And all have similar problems when it comes to education.
When it comes to education pensions, CA is not an outlier. The precise terms vary, but I think most public educators have access to similar pension programs.
> San Francisco is too weird to exist and is therefore basically irrelevant in national policy discussions.
Not SF, but more people live in LA County than in the ten least popular states. If only we could ignore them and their 20 senators as completely irrelevant when it came to national policy discussions...
I don't actually want to ignore San Francisco's problems. [0] I would just say that its existence makes national conversations more difficult.
[0] I would tell California that they need to permit about 10x as much housing if they want any more federal help. The U.S. Government should not take on the role of dealing with the consequences of such an obvious self-own. "Our teachers can't find places to live and also it's illegal to build apartments on practically every single lot in the state -- what should we do?" is a question that answers itself.
If you want to be in the Union, then one thing you have to do is allow internal migration, and by that I mean actually allow it, which means you have to allow newcomers to build housing. If you're not allowing newcomers to build housing, then you are not actually in any real sense fulfilling your obligations to the rest of the country.
> You still have to pay the bills before retirement.
That's a valid point, but choices need to be made. Go to the teachers union and ask if they'd be willing to drop future pensions (and cap current ones to the benefits payed in so far) in exchange for a higher salary (based on the amount saved by not longer having pensions). My guess would be that they wouldn't even be willing to discuss it.
You're talking as if "choices need to be made" doesn't extend to the question of whether or not they get enough tax dollars total, regardless of split between income and pensions.
But actually, you're the only commenter I've so far seen in the thread who claims that their pensions are enough to make up for their salaries. Personally I think both salaries and pensions for (most) teachers should increase, in most countries including the US, and I have no problem with teachers' unions not being willing to have a discuss boxed into your opinion that they already get as much as they deserve.
> you're the only commenter I've so far seen in the thread who claims that their pensions are enough to make up for their salaries
That is not true, given that I was replying to you, and you were replying to the person that said _this_.
> Counterpoint: teachers' pay is great, it's just backloaded in pension plans.
That being said, in some places the teachers make good money when you include their pension; in other places they do not. It's not consistent across the country.
> You're talking as if "choices need to be made" doesn't extend to the question of whether or not they get enough tax dollars total
That was not my intent. My intent was to indicate...
If you think that teachers make enough when you include their pension, you can't complain that their pension causes a hardship early in their career; because the choice of a pension is likely not something they'd be willing to give up". If you think the pension causes a hardship earlier in the career and that that needs to be changed, then either 1) You do _not_ believe teachers make enough including their pensions, OR 2) You think pensions should be done away with (which I doubt will be supported by the teachers/union).
> That is not true, given that I was replying to you, and you were replying to the person that said _this_.
a) Oops! Not sure why I thought that diognesofsinope's comment and your comment were written by the same person, my bad.
b) You've either made the same mistake I did or you've excellently satirised my mistake, as you were replying not to me but to somebody else :P
So fair enough, sorry I thought your comment that I replied to was the owner of the original belief that salaries + pensions = enough currently, and then expanding on that belief.
If the general population were numerate enough, and there was enough transparency, there were would be riots in the streets over the NPV of retirement packages for public sector employees, these people are getting packages that are worth $2m,$5m,$10m at retirement (which could be 50ish!)
So...you're suggesting people should riot so they can get that, too, right? Not so they can tear other people down to only get the same pittance they do?
The public sector employees getting generous retirement packages are not the enemy. They are not the reason the rest of us are getting pissed on and told it's raining. That's the very wealthy and the politicians they've bought.
“Why didn't I end up in teaching? The licensing requirements in Minnesota are insane. Counselor's straight up told me I'd have to borrow ~$50k from the UMN for a MS in Curriculum and Instruction before I could teach.”
I received my teaching license in Wisconsin and transferred to Minnesota by doing little more than passing the licensure exam. I did not have an MS at that time or when I started teaching in the Minneapolis suburbs.
I don't have a BS in Education (BA in Philosophy), which means you have to go through their M. Ed. program with licensure. You must take Educational Theory/Pedagogy core courses along with required courses in your field -- I had saved money and already taken the calc sequence, linear algebra and differential equations.
Grad school at the UMN is ~$10k a semester (https://onestop.umn.edu/finances/costs/tuition). Would have been ~30 years old, $40k in debt as a beginning teacher in MN. Amazingly, none of that includes actual experience teaching lol.
The teachers union has been waging a war against future teachers to benefit current teachers for 30 years and this is what that looks like after 30 years.
Similar to housing and zoning, education is a government racket.
> The philosophy of mathematics is the branch of philosophy that studies the assumptions, foundations, and implications of mathematics. It aims to understand the nature and methods of mathematics, and find out the place of mathematics in people's lives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_mathematics
Considering that the primary complaint 10th grade math students have about math is often "How is this relevant to me and my life?", wouldn't studying the philosophy of mathematics help a teacher in addressing this concern?
> Counterpoint: teachers' pay is great, it's just backloaded in pension plans.
Yet another counter counterpoint - there are still companies and government jobs with defined pension plans that pay far more than teachers. Even without those, there are still many, many jobs requiring a comparative amount of education, far fewer hours worked, and pay more even once you subtract maximizing 401k contributions yearly (let alone considering the added costs of buying school supplies).
Half the reason to be a teacher is because half the job is having fun. Most curricula is set in stone and requirements are nationally standardized (US and Asia). You more or less get summers off (there are conferences and summer school) and there are almost no jobs where you can take ~1.5 months off every year. Teaching is also one of the few steady jobs in rural America.
I feel like most people haven't been in an actual ~5th grade classroom in a long time -- literally half of it is playing games/trying to have fun.
And Youtube, good god has the educational content on Youtube evolved in the last decade.
5th grade education for my children has one 45-minute “play” recess (which doesn’t involve direct teacher instruction) and one 1-hour Physical Education class lead by a gym teacher.
The rest of their day 8:30 AM - 3:30 PM is composed of maths, language, science, history, and technology education all done on paper or at purpose-designated computers. Next year they will receive their own devices.
The playing with blocks and Lincoln logs ended in kindergarten, with the introduction of spelling test and arithmetic quizzes in first grade, so I’m not sure if I’d characterize the work my childrens’ teachers do as “literally half of it is playing games/trying to have fun” or that “[h]alf the reason to be a teacher is because half the job is having fun.”
Seems like it is hard work, with both practical instruction directed toward 20-30 children with varying levels of discipline, interest, and abilities, and management of just as many if not more parents with similarly varying levels of discipline, interest, and abilities.
This is a public school in one of the largest state systems in the country (United States) so perhaps your experience is informed by something more niche.
Being around kids all day isn’t fun. It’s stressful. Part of the job is appearing to be calm and approachable to the children and it absolutely wears out most people.
It’s just like thinking enjoying having a pet means you’d love working with dozens of dogs all day. If you’re lucky to have well behaved dogs, it’s okay. But you’re most likely going to have some barking all day, one’s going to vomit, some are going to fight, and any time anything happens the owners completely blame you and will threaten you in every way they can imagine.
Professional sports. If you work in professional sports there is a baked in 1 to 2 month vacation for all players, coaching staff, and assorted player personnel.
Teaching is work. I have the feeling you haven't been in a 5th grade classroom in a long time. Or any grade. People get into teaching because they want to help others. Especially if they get into special education.
You know, having known and being related to multiple teachers, I've not heard any of them express it as -fun-. Meaningful, important, challenging, yes, but not 'fun'. The two college professors I know have expressed it a such, but that's it. Of the teachers I had, I could see some of the advanced placement ('gifted') teachers viewing it as fun, because we were generally well behaved and smaller class sizes, but even there a common through line was taking advantage of the class' temperament and offloading the curriculum back onto us (i.e., "pick a topic in (X) to teach to everyone").
There is a tradeoff in lesson planning; there are resources around the proscribed curriculum (i.e., teach to the book), but that is decidedly not fun or interesting and the kids -will- misbehave more; the alternative for most classes (the advanced placement as mentioned above notwithstanding) is to prep something more interesting, but that requires using more time outside the classroom for 'work'.
Outside of the workday, which runs from 7-3:30 or so (and sometimes both before and after, if there are faculty meetings and things, or if they recruit from the teaching pool to help with kid drop off/pick up), there is grading, so it is not uncommon for a teacher's workday to run close to 12 hours.
You do, as you say, get summers off, but again, nearly all the teachers I know use that time to look for summer jobs, because the pay is so poor. Sometimes it's summer school or just independent tutoring, sometimes it's service industry work; nothing quite like running into your students from the prior year while handing their mom their McDonald's from the drive through. The only teacher I know who didn't (recently retired) do that had inherited their house, so had no rent/house payment to make, and -could- live, frugally, on a teachers' salary.
> Counterpoint: teachers' pay is great, it's just backloaded in pension plans.
25% of teachers in Minnesota leave the profession within three years [1] so they see no pension. This sort of weed out is common in a lot of professions and it's probably for the best, but weed out careers often combine high starting pay to attract a large pool of candidates. Public sector jobs exchange low pay for a pension and stability. Teaching doesn't offer the latter.
I expect attrition is priced into the pension at some level, or worse, it needs these contributions to function at all. This is perhaps best for the profession, but it is systematic theft from another point of view.
Even if you don’t contribute to the pension with cash, capital is still allocated on your behalf into the fund that could have been paid to you directly.
>capital is still allocated on your behalf into the fund that could have been paid to you directly.
For taxpayer funded pensions, it is more like future taxpayers’ capital is allocated on your behalf.
Meaning, the actuary will calculate the government needs to set aside $2 today, the government leaders will say change that to $1 so the taxes are low today, and will end up actually contributing $0.50 because some of the funds were needed to make up for yesterday’s shortfall.
> Counterpoint: teachers' pay is great, it's just backloaded in pension plans.
Nonsense. Even the most basic look at the numbers shows you this is absolutely false.
Let's take a rich liberal state first. MA. Average teacher salary: $60k. Average pension $43k. Teachers contribute 9.78% of their salary in order to get this pension! The state contributes 18.17% This is not all that different from a 401k.
You're confusing teachers with police officers, where the average pension is twice as high.
> Why didn't I end up in teaching? The licensing requirements in Minnesota are insane. Counselor's straight up told me I'd have to borrow ~$50k from the UMN for a MS in Curriculum and Instruction before I could teach.
Pensions are typically not paid based on average teacher salary, but paid based on terminal teacher salary. Defined benefit pensions are quite different from a 401k.
In our district, once you qualify for a pension you get 2% of your terminal salary per year you work. If you work for 40 years, you will be paid 80% of your last year's salary.
Teachers pay into the system, quite substantially, at rates that are similar to what you would pay for a 401k. And their average pensions are quite low.
The average teacher's pay in the US is essentially the median pay for all college graduates. Many engineering disciplines pay only $10k/year more, without the benefits.
>Counterpoint: teachers' pay is great, it's just backloaded in pension plans.
Pensions are cheap. I have a much better pension plan than the teachers in my state and the long term cost is about 16% of payroll - 8% from my employer and 8% from me. Hardly unreasonable cost, and yet I'll be able to comfortably retire around 55 and never worry about money again. That's not insignificant but it's not what is causing public schools to be underfunded.
"...men continued to make up most of the high-school teaching force until the late 1970s"
Humans are still largely primal and male presence tends to instill respect and behavior changes in younger people; I suspect the absence of it has not helped the current situation in many schools.
> 3. Teachers frequently complain about how they are unappreciated, yet children spend _12 years_ in their care. Why do people come up to them and say they hated school rather than “thank you”?
Well many students hated school, it is what it is. If you get beat up on a daily basis or are bored out of your mind (because let's face it, most of the material IS boring) I don't see why you should feel obligated to thank your teachers. It's not their fault but they also don't really deserve a thank you.
Yes most teacher do what they can but it doesn't change the fact so many students are generally unhappy in school.
I agree that there are reasons someone would hate school, but it doesn't make sense for it to be a cultural norm to say that to teachers. No one ever says "wow you murder people for Uncle Sam for money?" to someone who was in the military, they say "thank you for your service". I think that's what the author was getting at. It's not just low pay; teaching is thankless, even looked down upon.
It's a chicken and egg kinda problem. People who on average don't have lots of motivation or other options go to teaching. They then get burned out by the chaotic classes, low pay and thanklass routine. In turn they on average do a mediocre job (or less) of educating and teaching, which causes the students to pay even less attention and show less respect...which causes the teachers to get more burned out...anyway I think you see where I'm getting at.
Bet the victims of the US military aren’t saying thank you for your service. It doesn’t even matter if the person isn’t directly responsible, they still dedicated their time and energy to the system. That’s the difference. It’s thankless because it’s awful. It’s the exception rather than the rule to have a teacher that made a real difference, and the most common difference teachers make is protecting kids from harm they wouldn’t be experiencing if not for school.
Exceptional teachers help kids survive, not thrive.
> 2. It seems that education degrees are seen as easier to achieve than others.
Here is the problem. Teachers in America compare themselves to professionals, but their test scores are below the average for college educated people generally: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2017/.... Now 40% of college graduates don’t even get a job that requires a college degree. Disproportionately, those are people with lower aptitude scores. Teachers as a group are right on the borderline above those folks.
Teacher salaries are not low compared to jobs typically held by people with similar test scores—especially when you account for degree-required jobs that pay a premium for mathematical aptitude (accounting, engineering), or dealing with blood and body parts (nursing).
Is there any evidence to show that these people make good teachers?
You don't need to be a genious to teach. You need to have good social skills with kids, care about doing a good job, and a mastery of the subject matter (which not very demanding for even average-intelligence adults, at least until the latter part of high school).
So instead of putting in the work and weighing out the different qualities of an effective educator, you pick out the most arbitrary of criteria out there and want to make that the gold standard for evaluating teachers.
I'm not a betting man, but I'd feel comfortable wagering that you are a STEM grad with solid SAT scores.
I am, and I'd make an awful teacher. Engineers are generally horrible teachers, I think because they've become so immersed in their subject that everything that is entirely alien to the learner seems obvious to them. I'm so impatient. I just want people to repeat after me, do the thing exactly like I said, and to show no initiative.
They don’t want higher standards that are essentially arbitrary and capricious and imposed by boards, committees and other groups composed of individuals who have little or no expertise in teaching.
Teaching pays nothing compared to CS, finance, basically most things you need a degree for. Those brilliant individuals who would like to teach have to decide if their passion is worth making less money than some warehouses are paying around here. Those who don't have the grades or abilities to reach for the higher-paid fields have less of a dilemma. We're actively selecting against the candidates who have more lucrative options. This is where the issue comes in where people start saying they should do it for the joy of teaching. That's easy to say when you're drawing a comfortable salary. Being tight on money sucks and passion doesn't pay the bills.
I work in tech and would likely teach if it paid the same. My plan has always been to front load my retirement savings early in my career through tech so that I can take a lower paying teaching job when I'm older.
I’m in the exact same boat. One thing I enjoy doing is guest lecturing at local colleges in CS classes, around topics I have professional expertise in. If that sounds like something you’d like to do as well, I’d recommend getting involved in your local ACM chapter, as most college CS programs have an ACM tie-in.
It depends on where you're teaching; teaching is a terrible deal in rural school districts and in some states, but teaching in urban and especially wealthy suburban school districts is a pretty fantastic deal: it's a white collar salary (every single teacher at the public high school my kids went to makes over $100k) with a defined-benefit pension plan, ironclad job security, and more vacation days than any other profession.
It's not at all the case that teaching isn't competitive with other degree-requiring white-collar professions; depending on where you are in the CS/IT food chain, it's quite competitive with tech.
Defined-benefit pensions have become so alien to private market jobs that it's easy to overlook how valuable they are, or to forget that a lot of people are very happy to work towards a strong retirement.
My school district is in a middle sized city with a dominant land grant university. A starting teacher makes $40k. Requires both a BA and a teaching credential. Hours are long, and teachers spend a decent amount of money for out of pocket supplies, especially at some of the schools that despite level funding seem to get the short end of the stick.
IT in my area pays anyone with a pulse and basic computer skills $40k. A rookie developer from our land grant university can easily start at $60K with no experience. And that same developer can earn $100k with two years of good experience. Show me a 3rd year teacher pulling in $100k in my school district. No such unicorn exists.
The city doesn't have a DB pension, just a 403k.
Granted, the newbie teacher gets 1.5 months off in the summer, compared to 2 weeks PTO for the developer.
After 10 years, even assuming the teacher gets a Masters, the pay differential is huge.
I don't deny that there are teachers getting shafted all over the US; I'd just want people to know that the deal in many (most? all?) major urban school districts is surprisingly strong.
One suburban school district that you know of. I'm sure there are others. I'm not sure how you're extrapolating to many or all major urban school districts.
I've looked at a bunch of them (I have this argument somewhat frequently). But, sure: let's find some examples. What's a major metro where you think teachers probably get a raw deal? This is easy data to pull up.
I know OPS in Omaha doesn't pay crap. Last year's pay schedule started at $43k with a bachelor's, 47k with a master's, and 51k with a doctorate. Maxes at $71,400 with a doctorate. 2022-23 starts at $44k with a bachelor's and maxes at 75k with a doctorate.
I'm not at all surprised if teachers in Nebraska get a shittier deal than teachers in California or Illinois, but if you click around the financials for the DC West school district, teachers in suburban Omaha are routinely making 85k+. These teachers do not have doctorates. Note that the base salary of a teacher is just the floor on their compensation; they make substantial additional money from extracurriculars and in-school mentoring work.
Valley is not suburban Omaha. They're in the same county, but Valley is distinctly a separate city and not a suburb. Even with how far West Omaha has expanded, there's no one in the area that's going to call it a suburb without laughing a little. Is that the best you could find?
How about you look at the number of teachers employed by OPS vs DC West? They have one elementary school, one middle school, and one high school in that district vs OPS serving an area encompassing hundreds of thousands of residents.
You were excited about 100k/year in California? Please tell me that's not the Bay area where that still leaves them unable to purchase a home anywhere near the area.
You also understand extracurriculars are a lot of extra time and work for a bit of extra pay, right? One of the biggest complaints I've heard is that teachers are being forced into running extracurriculars because they already work way too many hours for the pay and for any kind of work/life balance.
I found DC West by looking at a list of Omaha suburbs, finding Waterloo, and looking up its school district. It's significantly closer to Omaha than Naperville is to Chicago, so yeah, I'm sticking with that being a suburb. If it wasn't a suburb, if it was its own city, that would make my argument stronger, not weaker.
I don't know what "excited" means. By national standards, I've been extraordinarily lucky; a $100k/yr comp package wouldn't excite me right now. But I can compare what teachers make to what other white collar professionals make, and I understand how to account for the rest of the compensation package --- a defined-benefit pension in many major districts (actually, a defined-benefit pension would light me up right now) and an enormous allotment of vacation days.
Speaking only to my local school district, which breaks comp out, extracurriculars are not a "bit" of extra money; it's as much as a 20% pay boost. My real point though is simply that the base salary is where most teacher comp packages start, and there's other things that go into it.
I'm not saying "teacher" is the best deal in the whole economy, but in major metro school districts, it's not a bad deal.
And, just to be ultra clear: obviously there are a lot of school districts, especially rural districts, where this isn't the case at all.
Alright, you pick the data you want to pay attention to and ignore the fact that the majority of teachers in the Omaha Metro are on the first pay scale I showed you. And go ahead and tell me that you know the lay of the land of an area you've never stepped foot in. Nice talking to you.
That's not what that link says. In fact the source explicitly states that they are not looking at SAT scores by major, they are just looking at average SAT scores for a given college and weighting those scores by the percentage of education majors at that college. That led to their conclusion that: "Graduates with education majors are disproportionately found at schools where students have lower SAT scores." That doesn't mean the graduates with education majors themselves have lower scores unless you make some unsupported assumptions about distribution of SAT scores at any given college.
But even if education major SAT scores are lower on average, it it seems like backwards thinking when talking about pay. The point isn't that all current individual teachers deserve to be paid more; it's that teaching as a profession should pay more to attract talented people who otherwise pursue more lucrative fields, just like any other profession. If you paid doctors and engineers low wages, you'd probably fail to attract some top talent as well. But that doesn't then become a justification for those low wages since the low wages caused the issue in the first place.
> That led to their conclusion that: "Graduates with education majors are disproportionately found at schools where students have lower SAT scores." That doesn't mean the graduates with education majors themselves have lower scores unless you make some unsupported assumptions about distribution of SAT scores at any given college.
It assumes that education majors have similar SAT scores to other majors in a given school. That’s an assumption, sure, but I think a pretty reasonable one.
I'm sure that (1) anyone can come up with counter-anecdotes, and (2) there are different kinds of intelligence, and most of us couldn't begin to cope with a class full of kids.
That said: practically every college student knows that the Education majors are the dumbest people on campus.
I don't put much weight in the judgements college-age people make of others. They're still in the mindset of the high school status game they just left.
>At some point along the way I stopped trying to rank people by intelligence.
I agree. Some of the nicest, kindest and best people I've ever met aren't very bright, and some of the nastiest, stab-you-in-the-back jerks are quite intelligent.
That's not to say the converse isn't true for many folks, but "intelligence" isn't a proxy for the quality of a human, IMHO.
There's very little that I know of on an SAT that would demonstrate the skills to teach a 10 year-old math. Somebody who teaches a 10 year-old math doesn't even have to be very good at math.
So the problem I have with this argument is that it implies that virtually all of the essential skills (as I see it) that are required to be a good teacher shouldn't be compensated. Instead, teachers should be compensated for the skills that make them a good engineer or historian.
On 4:
I disagree that more resources cannot help with this problem.
Some disruptive children have undiagnosed learning disabilities. Having more money for screening and special education can help get them the support they need.
Class sizes are also going to matter. Many disruptive children are just seeking attention. With smaller classes teachers can spend more time with each student, which will help with behavior management.
I don’t know what the right level of investment here is, but from speaking with friends who are teachers it sure seems like classes are too big and special Ed is stretched incredibly thin.
We know what percentage of children typically need these extra services. If we funded school special education based on how many they should statistically have. And incentivised them to find that many, then they would. If they miss some early amd are full that will be counterbalances by the number of parents who insist on "normal" education despite evidence that isn't what is best. Letting educators give feedback about the effects of medication levelsbwould also help I think.
The main problem with teachers is that the price for them is not controlled by quality. A teacher who performs better than other teachers (e.g. a 10x teacher) will not be worth more in the current system. And with the quality/price relation missing, there is nothing a teacher can do about the price, and consequently their wages will be as low as possible.
Even at the high level, teacher salaries aren’t very high compared to industry.
Couple that with high licensing requirements and bad working conditions, neither of which are secret, and of course the best and brightest do not consider it a real option.
Quality is hard to prove. Everyone thinks they're "quality."
The fact is most people are average. We freak ourselves out about these very few super teachers or super devs but most are not these people and they still need jobs and perform valid functions.
"Disruptive children" are arguably dusruptive because the system is soul sucking and one size fits all. Its just not going to work for everyone. Forest schools all the way
Not every kid should be going to high school. They and/or their families are not capable of supporting them through it. We need public vocational and alternative high schools.
A good time for 'think of the children' rather than their parents. Maybe combined with better access to free contraception so that every child is a desired child. If the environment isn't good for the child change that child's environment (family). Yes, those systems probably also need more love.
At this point, I think people who can say 1. with a straight face are either intellectually dishonest or just repeat things others say.
The majority of teachers make a median US wage fairly early into their career and plenty make a multiple of it later on, on top of great benefits. Their job is no more challenging than nearly all other professions. “But they have to”… yes, everyone else has shit they have to deal with. The fact that the Waltons, crypto lottery winners, etc. exist is a separate problem that doesn’t mean teachers are underpaid.
Education majors are easier.The sky is blue. If we even remotely believe in a meritocracy (liberals often really don’t when you dig into their beliefs, granted) starting teachers should not make as much as a starting EE major. Nobody in their right mind would or should pursue an engineering career if teaching paid equivalently.
1) healthcare.
2) education degrees are a problem. They make becoming a teacher financially very risky. They also don’t seem to actually improve teacher quality
6. Teachers are often completely out of touch with technology.
Math teachers could be using Jupyter notebooks and decent plots. Instead they are using their poor drawing skills.
Everyone should do what 3b1b is doing.
They could be using cool physics simulations, but instead everything are lame poorly drawn arrows.
Technology that exists for education often has developer art level UX and bad usability.
7. Art used in school material is cringy as fuck. What artists think kids like and what kids actually like has nothing to do with each other.
8. There could be a github or reddit of class material that teachers could use, saving teachers' time and improving the learning experience.
9. People in the department of education are fucking bozos and should all be fired. Their job is to neglect education so that politicians can keep using better education as vote bait.
> 2. It seems that education degrees are seen as easier to achieve than others.
They absolutely are. I taught math as a university lecturer while I was finishing my PhD. I taught one Algebra course and one Geometry course to education majors. These were both literally just high school math courses and the people I taught were mostly not able to do the work. Yes, literally high school math and over half flunked the courses outright. That is just pathetic. I was told to pass 85% of the class, so most got curved right into a classroom anyway, against my wishes. This is what teaches your kids. I can also anecdotally report that they were clearly the dumbest people I ever ran into teaching. Bad English, can't think in a straight line, and ready to argue at the first sign that you might enforce standards and fail their pitiful "work". They were perfect for a bureaucratic job that rewards idiots.
1. Administrators. We have insane administrative bloat, especially in higher ed. In some institutions there is nearly a 1:1 count of administrators to faculty.
Ironically, given the social politics implied by the author, a significant amount of administration bloat is specifically tied to DEI.
2. Well, they are. A teaching certification used to only require two years of higher learning compared to typical 4 for other things. That said, most teachers are actually more highly educated than the average person because schools use educational attainment as direct basis for pay. My mother has a Master’s and is shy only a few hours and a dissertation from being a Ph.D. This was relatively common, especially for special ed teachers or those who focus on a specific subject like Math or English.
3. Partly because school in the US is boring and designed to grind out individuality in favor of making good industrial cogs. We no longer have an economy that rewards industrial cogs so students resent their school experience in adulthood as they discover how illy prepared they are for the world. That and parents/social fabric encourages and allows anti-social behavior and viewpoints.
4. Yes, and parents not giving a shit isn’t even a cause, it’s a symptom of larger and more intractable social and cultural problems in parts of America. Fixing this is nearly impossible because those most motivated to fix it are even more heavily motivated to ignore significant amounts of critical data about the causal factors.
5. Yes. Scaling is hard, and we’ve roughly tripled the population since we built the institutionalization of education in the US. It’s obvious a breakpoint exists somewhere and we failed to pivot.
The U.S. spent $90.5 billion for "Elementary, Secondary, and Vocational Education" in 2021* (a subset of "Education, Training, Employment, and Social Services"), which is 1.3% of $6.82 trillion in total 2021 government expenditures. Compare to $696.5B for Medicare, $754.8B for National Defense, etc.
If anything, this illustrates how relatively unimportant a base level of education is in the U.S.
That looks like ~28% of the state budget, and per-student spending appears to very high (the 4th highest in the U.S.). Washington is spending 1.5X per student as compared to California, and is apparently not seeing commensurate improvements. I wonder if there are folks working on debugging the apparent inefficiencies of state education systems.
It's often not even state budget in the US. In the case of my town, while I believe some money comes from the state in the form of grants etc., about 60% of my town's property taxes go to funding the elementary school and a split (with two other towns) of the regional high school district.
“Total expenditures for public elementary and secondary schools in the United States were $800 billion in 2018–19 (in constant 2020–21 dollars). This amounts to $15,621 per public school pupil enrolled in the fall of that year.”
The US government spends significantly more on education than the military, ~$800B on K-12 education alone. On a per student basis, the US spends more than almost any other country in the world. If US education is poor, it isn't for lack of government spending.
Per the US Department of Education[0], the US spends 34% more per student than the OECD average. At the post-secondary level, the US spends double the OECD average.
Yeah except 1) discretionary spending (including defense is like 25% of total spending (with defense ~1/2 of that), so the 90b is a meaningful part of discretionary spending. 2) as others have pointed out, the vast majority of (80%-90%+?) is funded by state and local government.
As explained below your numbers are off by an order of magnitude. But I’m shocked to see such a basic misconception about how our government works on HN of all places.
Education is the opposite of a money pit, education is an investment. Even if it is managed poorly,you are better off than the country with a people that can't read.
Administration seems to be entirely manually based and has lots of positions that should be consolidated or automated.
For example, each school in my county has at least one person dedicated to managing iPads and tech equipment. This isn’t the networking and server support or even desktop support, that’s done centrally. This is just a human who hands them out, collects them, and processes warranty claims. The person knows nothing about the equipment and is basically just an asset manager.
That’s one of many examples of people who don’t perform much value add and take resources from higher priorities. Why not hire a dedicated librarian who also manages devices but can help with organizing information, research, etc.
In many schools, the librarian is also the ad hoc asset manager. But that's yet another symptom of the problem the article talks about. Managing tech equiment takes a lot of time, and foisting that problem onto the librarian means they either do a shittier job being a librarian (recommending books to kids, etc.) or they work longer hours for no additional pay.
You might argue that managing inventory should be automated but... that's just not how systems involving lots of random people work. The reason it's a full-time job to keep track of iPads and laptops is because the people using those things are kids and distracted parents. Stuff gets lost, power adapters get yanked and broken, etc. A parent stuffs an iPad in a random bin in the teacher's classroom. They think they "returned" it, but no one knows it's in there. Someone has to do actual communication and legwork to sort all that out. It's a real job.
My point wasn’t that asset management was easy. It does take time.
My point is that hiring an iPad manager as a 100% human is a bad idea. I suggested hiring an additional librarian, not adding extra work to the existing librarian.
Librarians aren't just people who like books. They have specialized skills, and usually have a master's degree. Librarians in many school districts have a teaching credential in addition to a Masters. The idea of hiring a person as specialized as a librarian to manage iPads shows an extraordinary misunderstanding of librarians.
My kids have gone through about 9 schools. None of the librarians had masters degrees.
The librarians in my city manage computers in the library and manage short term loaners of tablets and laptops.
I work with librarians who have masters and phd and I don’t work in education. It’s an interesting job.
I think I have enough of an understanding that it’s fair that a librarian could manage the iPad distribution for a school. It’s busy two times of the year and other times they could do more productive tasks.
The current iPad wrangler is there all year and does nothing beyond hand out and collect iPads and coordinate the repairs (<5%/year).
I don't get why kids have such things. Other than typing there really isn't anything kids need to learn that is better done with a computer until high school. (Even then everything could be done with paper, but word processors are useful for writing)
There’s value to technology in the classroom beyond “it’s better than [x]”
A difference in learning format that can be beneficial to some. It is helpful just to introduce children to technology as well. And for some it may spark interests that paper does not.
Re #1) I was a school board member and did exhaustive analysis of our budget. For primary education through high school, admin is NOT the root cause.
If you take any school budget, and strip away everything that is not an actual classroom teacher, you will find that ~1/3 or less goes to "frontline" teaching costs.
Another 1/3 goes to special ed and all that is attendant with that. I mean, my district BOUGHT a car and hired a FULLTIME driver for one student who had to be taken to special programs. You have 1:1 class aids for many kids. Special ed is < 10% of kids, and even then the huge costs add up for the 1%. This is a massively subscale operation where every school is legally obligated to deliver services.
Then you have the last 1/3 which is everything else. Food, facilities, sports, admin, transportation, etc. Admin is actually a leaner slice than most unless you are getting into really small schools where you have a principal on top of the teachers and that adds significant salary. In bigger schools this fades away with scale.
Wife often gets kids who need to be in special Ed. Takes a few weeks or more.
Basically most of her time is spent dealing with the one kid. Or the aftermath. Not fun calling parents telling them that Susan is bleeding from a thrown chair. Of John was assaulted in the bathroom.
Lots of time spent chasing kid when he runs away.
Never mind her own wounds.
These are kindergartners.
This year She’s currently has 2 full time aids for basically 2 kids. She only got the aids because she threatened to quit on the spot.
That and the special ed kids get a high allotment of cash vs regular student. In effect, the normal kid is robbed by the special ed kid who gets disproportional budget per capita.
A lot of time and talk gets spent about equity between poor and rich kids, or white and black kids, but you rarely see talk of normalizing the spending differential between special and gen pop.
Somehow, in the US government it's only "benefits" that are considered. "Cost" never is.
As I said elsewhere, I defy anyone to claim that Finland doesn't care about kids' special needs. They have the best education in the world. What percent do they spend on it?
Why don't you find out and share with us rather than just asking questions and having others do the work for you. If Finland is really significant to this debate then share some data.
I can find their total spending & their general policies on special ed (which I did share), but not that. On the other hand, we do have some Finnish people on HN, so maybe they know.
> If Finland is really significant to this debate
If? They have what's generally considered the best education in the world.
There's a finite amount of tax money available, so disproportionately allotment to a few special children effectively robs the other children of resources.
This data is REALLY hard to get. For me to do it, I had to go line by line through the budget.
For example, all the classroom aids are typically assigned as teaching costs. But the reality is that they are assigned to individual students with IEPs (individual education plans), ergo, they should be categorized as special ed.
Same thing in pulling out transportation. Or tuition to other districts. Admin dealing with special ed grants and recordkeeping. It goes on and on...
Education and social services are one of the areas where we really shouldn't be leaning that hard on ROI. The return is a well taken care of populace. Yes, it may cost, but we pay that cost because we're not assholes.
Are you saying "whatever it costs, it doesn't matter"? Because I can't agree with that. Nor is it good public policy to just be "not assholes."
The absolute dollar amount does matter, and it has nothing to do with being assholes or not. There are different ways to meet children's needs and spending an infinite amount of money is just not sustainable.
Those are still returns, just not monetary ones. You can get plenty of buy in that educational outcomes are good in themselves, but schools fail at that basic metric.
On the other hand, as a way to provide social services to underprivileged children they are pretty decent. But that's not what they're advertised as (school isn't known as an acronym for Social Care and Health Out Of a Location), and people end up pissed.
I would argue that ROI is extremely important in education. It's just that the "return" on our investment is not purely financial. Producing students who will be competent to effectively participate in and wisely run the society of tomorrow is a large part of the return that we seek. So, to that extent it may be that high special needs costs are worth it if they demonstrably help students become self-sufficient instead of dependent wards of the state. I can't say for sure that they are worth it, I'm saying that the mere fact that they're expensive doesn't mean they aren't cost-effective in the greater sense.
Yes, disabilities are expensive to accommodate. That’s why we have laws like the ADA. Because when given the option to disregard the disabled, many will choose do so.
This in turn leads to building a society in which the disabled are discarded as an inconvenience to society, rather than as people with equal rights to public accommodation.
"expensive" but everything has a limit. Even losing a limb or an eye has a dollar cost associated with it, if you look in the right tables. Pretending that there is no limit, or that the choice is a binary "no limit" vs. "don't give a shit" is just not responsible.
If I give Johnny, Jimmy, and Karen an equal investment of $20 and 20 hours of labor each for their education, I haven't "discarded" Karen, even if she needs more money and more time to get the same equality of outcome. In the same vein, I don't at all want to "discard" special ed children, I just want any public funds provided to the other children to be a nearly equal monetary investment.
>That’s why we have laws like the ADA
The period after passing of the ADA was associated with sharp drops in employment inclusion of the disabled [0]. The ADA may have actually been one of the biggest drivers of the discarding of the disabled. Not only that, the ADA encouraged racketeering against business owners for disingenuous accommodation complaints (someone off the street runs up, asked to use your bathroom, you allow the public to use it just this once and bam ADA complaint as they were secretly working for a lawyer checking for the "right" kind of grab bar) where businesses sometimes end up closing accommodations to the public. Personally I am heavily against the ADA as I believe eliminating these "protections" helps protect the disabled's inclusion within society.
An equal monetary investment for disabled children would mean they don’t have a teacher. You might be able to teach 50 non-disabled children with 2 teachers that costs $100K each to employ.
An equal $4000/student/year is not enough to hire anyone for a special needs student, who 1) won’t be able to benefit from the economy of scale in a normal classroom and 2) has needs that require a larger portion of a person’s time to attend to.
You need many multiple times the investment to accommodate kids with special needs because they have special needs.
If the school can't or won't educate the student with his/her equal allotment, then the school needs to return the monetary allotment to the parents for parental discretion on how to educate the child. If the state fails to provide the service with the allotment available, you don't just start taking from the other kids' pie.
>An equal $4000/student/year
You're off by almost 4x the average if you live in the US. For reference, for the $~16k spent per year, I was able to (privately) hire someone to take care of my infant over 40 hours a week (and all 12 months), an infant that needed around the clock care and couldn't be counted on to go unwatched for even a few seconds and who constantly irritated others with utterly mind-shattering screaming colic.
I like this, because it would probably be better both for society and for the kids.
Let's say the state spends $15K per student with no disabilities. The state says to the parent, "OK, we'll give you $25K to take care of your kid."
The parents grumble, but they find a school that caters to those kids and will take that voucher. Would it be much worse than they're getting now? I doubt it. If it is, the state can subsidize that school, and probably still end up spending less than they are now.
Now it's a question of money, as it should be for a state-wide program. Would the state say "we'll give you $150K to take care of your kid?" Probably not. Really extreme cases that need that much money could be handled by other public & private organizations, but the state gains a measure of reasonableness for the school budget.
The $4000/student/year wasn’t a real figure, nor was it a reference to total costs per student (obviously schools have more than payroll costs)… it is the result of the two hypothetical numbers I gave when divided. Use whatever numbers you want, caring for special needs groups always costs way more per student than for others.
I disagree with the rest. Universal schooling is an important part of a health society. It is up to the government to provide adequate funding for its obligations. Systematically discriminating to ease budget constraints is not an ethical solution.
You see systematic discrimination as spending roughly the same amount on each child. I see systematic discrimination as spending disproportionately much more public money on some children at the cost of others. We both find systematic discrimination of public education funds as unethical, but draw different conclusions on who is being discriminated against. I don't see our difference of opinion as an ethical deficiency in either of our persons.
You say that like we’re overspending on spending ed. I don’t understand that position. Of course they require more resources than the average student - they’re special cases, literally! To take that away would be devastating for society’s most vulnerable, as most parents aren’t equipped with the skills or resources to be able to do any different with their children. Some cases are extreme. Should we just let them either fail regular classes many years over or become extremely disruptive? How is that good for anyone?
It’s easy to say X is expensive or Y takes up Z part of the budget. We saw a lot of that with the whole defund the police movement. But no one asks what should X cost? Maybe it’s already at the required level, or even less, despite it being such a large percentage of the budget?
Speculation: Maybe they aren't funded from a distinct resource pool and are instead assumed to be a percentage of the whole that is too small to care about. However over the years the number or cost of providing service has gone up to the point where the current expectations are an undue burden on the rest of the group. If that is the case then the funding should be split off at the source into it's own portion and receive clearer representation in funding deciding bodies.
It's said without (much) judgement. In the abstract, it seems exactly right to spend on it.
But the reality is it a) very expensive and b) very disruptive. As some siblings mention, you will often have a class with 3-4 adults, only one of which is a teacher. And then several students who (through no fault of their own) can barely hold it together. For the 90% of kids in class, this is not helpful. And distributing it amongst many classes vs a more centralized special ed delivery system compounds the cost.
We have aggressively used the school system as a distribution point of social services. Again, this seems logical. But this takes focus away from what the main intent is for the school system.
There are pros and cons to this approach. I don't exactly know the answer, but instead of blaming administrators or teachers, we should be looking at what else we are asking schools to do besides educate. I know personally that the principals and superintendents spent less than 20% of their time thinking about how to make education better for the 90%.
I do think that the special ed model is completely broken. I think public schools overspend on special ed, and a lot of that funding is about getting special ed kids into the same classrooms as other kids and reducing the disruptions that they cause.
Instead, all students would be better served (and served more efficiently) if schools would admit that people learn at different rates, and segregated the children based on that. The disruptive special ed kids, who are often years behind, should have very small classes with other kids of the same level and lots of attention from teachers. Conversely, the kids who are good at math or reading should be put in accelerated classes.
Unfortunately, this kind of separation makes parents unhappy: they want their kids to all be in the "super special" classes despite the fact that on average, their kids are average. Parents are the ones who vote for school board, so school boards are unlikely to do anything that makes parents unhappy.
I think you are assuming special ed kids are academically slower and I have to push back on that. Special Ed encompasses students of all types. Some are mentally handicap, some have physical disabilities. One of my friends was wheelchair bound and had to leave class 5 minutes before the bell in order not to get stuck in the hallway. Others have respiratory issues that require classrooms with special equipment, special buses, etc. And then you have the deaf and blind students, hardly slower than anyone else, but they still require additional help that has nothing to do with being disruptive. Most of them weren't disruptive, just students trying to get a solid education like everyone else, and as guaranteed by the Supreme Court.
My understanding is that special ed money is distributed according to a power law: most kids classified as "special ed" actually need very little help (and very little money), and don't disrupt things for other students. I had a friend in my middle school Latin classes who was blind, and while he needed special written materials and some private tutoring, he didn't need any other help. The same is true of people with dyslexia, people who are wheelchair-bound, etc. They need some accommodations, but they are not where most of the money is spent.
Conversely, the kids who do need tons of resources are usually kids with severe mental or developmental disabilities. These kids usually have a 1:1 aide telling them what to do and trying to help them either understand the lesson or work through a totally different lesson (which also must be a humiliating experience - I would never want that for my child). I have seen both of these cases in public schools. These kids would certainly be better served by having a teacher who can pay attention to their needs instead of a teacher who can't and an aide who tries to keep up.
I think your response reveals how accustomed you have become to the luxury of having plentiful resources. You ask how it is good for anyone to not spend substantially more on students with special needs, but in many of the poorer countries of the world this attitude would be baffling. In many cases these students will never be able to contribute enough to society to recover what was invested in them. Hard choices have to be made that cause sadness, but unfortunately that's the way it is. If your country becomes less anomalously wealthy in the future, you may also have to make such decisions.
The article was about the US. My response is about the US. I believe in a more just American society that takes care of the most vulnerable, not just those that contribute the most.
I taught in Oakland, CA thirty years ago as a substitute, so I saw a variety of schools.
I saw the corrupt administrators in certain schools effectively diverting funds for things like special education by hiring their friends for the well-paid jobs like special ed and resource specialist and then calling a substitute (me) to actually do the job.
And that isn't saying this always happens (I imagine the smaller suburban schools with people involved would have less of this). But the existence of these special programs present a great opportunity for graft and so there's incentive to avoid making special education at all efficient.
I read a book a while back whose main argument was that we spend so much on the bottom 1% (special ed), why aren't we spending an equal amount on the top 1%? Why don't the smartest kids get one on one instruction and special resources that no one else gets?
To be fair the author was fairly balanced and presented the arguments against, such as that they tend to come from wealthier families that can provide that support, that they will be fine on their own without it whereas the bottom 1% need the support, and so on.
But it was an interesting thought experiment none the less. What would our society look like if we spent as much on the top 1% of students as the bottom? Or do we already via college education?
Some of it may be crab mentality. No matter how much you spend on some (but not all) special ed kids, there's no worry they will academically surpass the majority of students. So there's no fear from parents that the spending will mean their own kid gets dragged further down the pecking order.
Spending for gifted children means putting other kids even higher up the pecking order than their own average kid. Who wants to spend a bunch of money to watch their kid get left further behind the front of the pack?
> That and parents/social fabric encourages and allows anti-social behavior and viewpoints.
This is under-appreciated. I don’t know about other 1990s kids, but a lot of my teachers growing up pushed a “question authority” attitude. Like, painting the Tinker anti-Vietnam War protestors in a positive light, etc. “Follow social norms without questioning them” definitely wasn’t a thing we were taught. Is it really surprising then that you ended up with a generation who thinks Joe Rogen is a smart guy they should listen to?
Same experience here going to school in the 90s, but I have the exact opposite take. I was taught to question authority and think this was one of the few really important lessons I received from school. I think that's why I was instinctively able to see through all the flag waving conformism after 9-11 and the current MAGA death cult. The lack of critical thinking I see from so many of my peers didn't arise from being taught to question authority, it's because many of these people are just dumb as hell and didn't learn jack shit at all.
The "MAGA death cult" is literally the product of questioning authority. It's a situation where the establishment has lost control, leaving a vacuum of authority filled by TV personalities, conspiracy theorists, and complete randos.
I disagree. From what I can see, it looks like they just replaced the old boss with the new boss. They still follow Trump just as slavishly as they used to follow the old elite, they even show their fealty by playing russian roulette with covid, and losing at a predictable rate, hence the "death" part of the cult. I see no evidence the anti-authoritarian nature of the movement is real at all, they just have a new boot to lick.
Special Ed is as stupid as doing open heart surgeries on 85 year olds to give them 3 extra years. They’re an enormous burden on the system and are ruining everything for almost all of us. Why do severely mentally handicapped kids even need to be educated. Just provide them with an amount of money to live their lives and make their time here as happy as possible. There is going to be a reckoning.
I suspect you haven't met too many people in these programs.
I had a student in one of my university programs who was handicapped and could barely see 3ft in front of him. Guy had to ride in a motorized chair, get guided around campus, and use a super-zoom lens and a laptop screen that made everything 10x-50x its size to be able to read the whiteboard/presentations. I'm sure none of that stuff was cheap.
But that guy was awesome, fun, and super clever. His lowest score was an A-, and he had a great character.
I'm sure he had to work ten times harder than I ever did just to get into that position, but I never heard him complain.
Personally, I think keeping a mind as great as his in some sort of hedonic trance instead of letting him learn and contribute would have been a great loss, and possibly quite cruel.
He probably hasn't, but we have to look at total numbers, not anecdotes.
What do countries with education systems that are superior to the US in almost every metric do with these kids? We need to look at the best way to handle it, not just how much we care in the abstract.
>Guy had to ride in a motorized chair, get guided around campus, and use a super-zoom lens and a laptop screen that made everything 10x-50x its size to be able to read the whiteboard/presentations. I'm sure none of that stuff was cheap.
Did the University pay for that? Or did that student / his family carry pretty much all those costs, except maybe the campus being built to ADA requirements? If a parent wants to spend 10x on their kid verse the 'average' kid I have no problem with that at all.
Yeah but is it worth the hundreds of thousands or possibly millions that the tax payers had to pay for that to be possible for him? My answer is a firm no. It’s not cruel, you have to draw the line somewhere. I could say it’s cruel I can’t live wherever I want and spend my days as I please but we can all agree it isn’t.
I'd also be against disproportionately spending on "gifted" children. I also doubt "gifted" are much of a drain. I was in all the honors classes and basically spent my entire day reading whatever I liked, ignoring my teachers and basically demanding no time from anyone. Teachers finally learned to leave me completely alone except to grade the test because I always passed with flying colors and had zero interest in interacting with anyone but the lunch lady. I'm not asking for extra spending at all for "gifted" children, only that spending amongst all children be normalized to be nearly the same.
Meanwhile I saw nearly daily the math teacher spend 20 minutes trying to console the girl in the previous period who would beat the chair I was going to sit in senseless.
Personally I would have been much happier in 'gen pop' anyways and then there would have been even easier bullshit tests while I spent my public school time reading college CS and chemistry books.
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>You were in "gen pop". Honors classes are just that, honors classes. Gifted classes are another thing altogether.
My school was a country school, we didn't have anything beyond 'honors' classes. If you want to call yourself gifted and the people in my country school's honor class not, that's fine, I don't think we were particularly gifted. In my experience the student:teacher ratio were significantly tighter in these classes. I realize some people only consider 'gifted' as the very most challenging class in a large school system (not including 'honors' even if that is the highest available in the school) whereas others may call the gifted classes anything more challenging than the 'normal' core (I call gen-pop) curriculum.
>If you agree with the guy I responded to, in that you wouldn't mind removing the mentally challenged from the school system entirely, boy, that's not a good look for you.
I would think someone so eager to call themselves 'gifted' and the people they are speaking with 'not' would understand this is what's called a straw-man. I'm only asking for the gen-pop kids to be given roughly equal financial per-capita investment as special-ed.
>ifted classes are like 5 to 10 students.
Lower ratios to the extent you spend significantly disproportionately more than the average student are exactly the kind of special treatment I'm against when using public funds. If you want a private school for that where the student or their family pays for it, have at it.
You were in "gen pop". Honors classes are just that, honors classes. Gifted classes are another thing altogether.
If you agree with the guy I responded to, in that you wouldn't mind removing the mentally challenged from the school system entirely, boy, that's not a good look for you.
Because the difference between the average student to those with severe learning disabilities is the same as the difference between truly gifted students and even the honors students. And here's how you can tell the difference. Honors classes are always a full class. I've not been in a single honors class that wasn't the average class size. Gifted classes are like 5 to 10 students. I personally knew every other gifted student in my high school. Grades 9 - 12, knew them all. There were not that many, roughly 30 any given year. Across all four grades.
Special Ed spending is not just severely handicapped kids. Some of them have minor issues that require assistance or an IEP. My daughter for example had a stutter that required the help of a speech pathologist. After a year of help, she no longer stuttered, and graduated with an A average. Yet you see this type of thing as an enormous burden, where I see it as no different than a teacher tutoring a student struggling with a subject.
Yes, I realize there are varying degrees and in many if not most cases it makes sense. There are a very small number of cases that are an unbearable burden on the entire system and if not checked it will bring the whole house down for everyone. There has to be some sort of actuarial science involved with this sort of thing when it comes to government spending on accommodating the handicapped and in terminal hospice care.
I agree with some of your points but I'd take exception to: "Partly because school in the US is boring and designed to grind out individuality in favor of making good industrial cogs."
If by industrial cog, you mean someone who's suited for work in manufacturing, the US certainly isn't producing those at even the level it's reduced manufacturing base needs. It's hard to say what the exact aim of the US education system is though it does produce some amount of people sort-of competent for the jobs that are out. It's one of X many bureaucracy/industries that both produce stuff, that once produced stuff quite efficiently but become more and more characterized by an interlocked combination of administrators/pseudo-entrepreneurs who use their connections and framework of capital investment to soak a large portion of the funds going into the industry. I mean, aside from education, you have health care, the police/judicial/prison complex, the construction industry (note recent mention of $4 billion planning in the creation of high speed rail) and etc. You could say the special product of the US education system is people appropriate to be either petty bureaucrat such as social workers or people appropriate to be client of the petty bureaucrats. But of course, the education still does, to some extent, teach people ordinary skills for more ordinary jobs but in fashion abusive to both teachers and children and profitably to those in the rackets.
School funding has accounted for a majority of the outsized tax levy in the suburb of Chicago I live in, for decades, predating the movement towards formalized DEI (in fact, we're only recently beginning to hire dedicated DEI people). DEI is not the reason schools are so expensive.
(That's not to say DEI is necessarily benign or useful; the jury is still out for me.)
> 2. Well, they are. A teaching certification used to only require two years of higher learning compared to typical 4 for other things. That said, most teachers are actually more highly educated than the average person because schools use educational attainment as direct basis for pay.
Incorrect: it depends on the state, the subject, and the grade level. For secondary education of a core subject, in Michigan, for example, I had to take all of the classes for a normal 4-year degree in the subject, plus taking the equivalent of two years of education classes. Taking 18-20 credit hours per semester, it took me five years to graduate. So the requirements can actually be much more difficult than a normal degree.
When I taught Title I, there was an additional requirement that you had to be "highly qualified". That typically meant a 4-year degree out equivalent experience, no matter the subject or grade level.
Many teachers have a master's not due to pay, as you claim, but because states essentially mandate it. In Michigan you're required to get continuing education credits. I believe the requirement drops off once you have a master's. So it doesn't make a lot of sense not to get one.
Is this true? It seems like teachers in the US [0] make the 7th highest in the world on average. Of course the US is big and has lots of diversity so there may be pockets that aren’t paid more. But I think they are paid more than other countries.
I think the issue isn’t pay as they are paid more than the US median and mean for annual salary (since they aren’t paid for their two summer months off). And they have more vacation days than any other profession with their 40-60 days of leave.
It’s an important profession, but it’s pretty well paid and stable.
Could you support #1, it’s my understanding that teachers are actually quite well compensated when you adjust for pension/LT benefits and three months of vacation. Points 2-5 seem spot on.
> 1. For as much as we spend on education, teachers seem to be grossly underpaid - to be getting robbed of their share of the budget. Where does that money go?
There are over 8 million people employed in primary and secondary education, which is about 5% of the workforce. Public spending on primary and secondary education is 3.2% of GDP and private spending is 0.3%. By the latest numbers, that's about $800 billion/year. If we assume that 2/3 of the costs are personnel and 1/3 are facilities and other expenses, that leaves just $65k for the wages and benefits of the average employee.
> 4. Many school problems are caused by disruptive children.
> Disruptive children are caused by parents who frankly just don’t give a shit. Throwing more money into schools won’t ever fix this problem.
Some. Most children I believe require an approach that the education system cannot adequately provide (for numerous reasons). Children are relatively malleable and in the right environment will thrive.
The bend is an while for every kid there is an educational environment that will work for them, there isn’t an educational environment that will work for every kid.
> 5. Schools are just too darn big. Thousands of kids in a big prison-shaped building and we wonder why everyone is alienated, miserable and dehumanized?
Personal anecdotal: I started programming on my own freshmen year of High School and I wrote and self published a book sophomore year. When I showed my computer programs and a physical copy of my self-published book to my teachers, they basically gave me a pat on the back. I did not receive 1 point of extra credit. I was told to take my seat and learn about Microsoft Word (by my computer teacher) and to write a 3 page story like everybody else (by my English teacher). As I’m sitting in my desk, I’m thinking “Why waste my time with Word, clearly I’m beyond it? Why am I writing a 3 page paper, I already wrote a book!”
What I concluded from this experience was that the education system is not designed for self starters. It’s designed for the lowest common denominator. I don’t dislike my teachers, rather I dislike the education system for being inflexible. I can only hope technology will allow students in the future to customize their educations to a degree beyond what I was offered. Another commenter mentioned schools being about churning out cogs. I don't disagree.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 405 ms ] threadWatching how large parts of the political spectrum embrace hardship as a societal teaching tool, I begin to understand that the expectation may always have been that kids ought to figure it out by themselves. It's almost as if our "invention of childhood" (as a protected phase in life) is being rolled back.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't believe kids can until they are quite old. On the contrary, I expect the emotional and psychological scars to demand a significant toll in the future.
[edit] PS: There have been quite a few very heated recent discussions where dang sternly warned against incisive political scorn. I agree, and my comment is intentionally worded carefully and as objectively as possible.
We invest plenty. We just don't get a great return on our investment.
Now, college is too expensive and I certainly wouldn't want to replicate that problem in K-12 schools. But... well, in some ways colleges have it easier, because the students are older and can be expected to be more independent. You can't have a 100-person lecture in a K-12 setting (not that I love classes like that at the college level either).
The amount of work/responsibility definitely scales with the number of kids, and it's not exactly linear either: one will color quietly, two might play together--or fight, and three or more...yikes.
I mentioned the rate because it surprised me it was so close. I'd expect that it costs more to actually educate a kid, and of course, the parents provided the house (and often ice cream and HBO), whereas that rate includes everything.
I don’t think that exists. So comparing babysitting for a few rich kids to teaching full time makes no sense.
https://www.washington.edu/opb/tuition-fees/current-tuition-...
My understanding is that you have non-residents subsidize things such as scholarship programs — but that in-state is fairly close to costs.
State money appears to be a relatively small fraction of their incomes — and is smaller than the increase in their financial position.
https://finance.uw.edu/uwar/annualreport2021.pdf
For in-state, the state is paying approx $27k and the student pays approx $13k, versus in k-12 the state is only paying $13k and that's all they get.
You can point at a big number and say 'that's enough' but we spend large amounts of money on all sorts of things, the number being large doesn't mean it's sufficient. There are tons of children in need of an education out there and they're frequently crammed into overcrowded schools in buildings badly needing maintenance, while teachers have to buy supplies out of pocket. Maybe the answer is that all that money is being siphoned away and we would be fine if we redistributed it correctly, but the premise that we're already investing enough seems pretty questionable to me without proof.
That class of twenty needs a building to take place, which in turn needs upkeep. It needs supplies and equipment (workbooks, computers, dodgeballs), and it needs some level of administration[0]. The teachers presumably want benefits too.
At a university, the “overhead” costs of research [1] are on the order of 50%: doing $100k worth of research require another $50k to keep the lights on, the building clean, and the library stocked. A fully-loaded salary with benefits is also about 30-50 percent higher than the take-home amount. Similar math gets you to about $100k, which would be a massive improvement but nowhere near the quarter-mil you might expect.
However, the average also hides the fact that student spending usually isn’t uniform: it’s not the case that each student costs $13k; it might be more like 9k for 19/20 students and a lot more for the one student with special needs (who might require a FTE on their own). This doesn’t scale nearly as well, but it’s important if you want to give everyone a fair shot at success.
[0] The right amount of admin is obviously debatable, but you clearly need some level of management and organization: somebody needs to make class schedules, run payroll, etc.
[1] These rates are negotiated with the federal government, and so theoretically reflect the actual costs pretty well. It’s not obvious how well they translate to a K-12 environment: researchers need more specialized services…but also are a lot less likely to draw on the walls.
I was actually thinking 50% would make the math easy but probably be a bit unrealistic, but I arrive at about the same place as you I think. Also I'd imagine that most classes are larger than 20, but hopefully smaller than 30.
I'm not advocating doing away with the public education system, but we're being swindled. It's not the teachers' fault (obviously), but the system as a whole. Every little town has its own school system, administrative overhead, etc.
So? If you want good teachers--or at, some point, any teachers--you need to offer working conditions that are good enough to attract them, just like any other job.
Spending on benefits "instead of" education is a false dichotomy; in fact, I'd say that's the central thesis of the article.
So that's a little over half of what the US spends, and I think it's fair to say that Dutch elementary education is at least roughly comparable to US education (maybe one is a little bit better than the other, but I'd be surprised if the US one was twice as good).
I don't know about other countries, but this is one metric to give an approximation about what is "plenty", although there's the caveat that you can't compare this directly: I've heard about "school lunches" and "school nurses" in the US, and those kind of things are virtually unheard of over here.
I assume you don't have private health insurance plans in the Netherlands either? Those will raise the cost per teacher in the US.
If you think of specialized needs students the 13k number looks ridiculous. 13k is an alarmingly low amount of support for dyslexia, or autism, or diabetes.
You’re comparing an average per student spend to a high needs minority. Average spend should be compared to the average student who does not have dyslexia etc. A larger than average portion will be spent on kids with special needs due to special facilities, smaller class sizes, and specialist teachers etc.
For comparison - we currently pay more per year to keep our 1 year old child in daycare (roughly ~15,000/yr) and for daycare we literally only expect them to keep him alive & clean. And this is considered a "cheap" daycare. Most places in our area (the much cheaper south-west side of Atlanta) still charge more than 1600/m or almost 20k/yr.
We certainly don't expect them to be significantly enriching his education experience (although the simple exposure to other kids will likely do that at this age). We also don't expect the employees to have any sort of educational/vocational training to excel at teaching, or expect them to perform any sort of off-the-clock work (ex: grading, class prep, parent-teacher meetings, etc). I expect them to be mostly high-school graduates with a background check.
So I look at that number, and while it's certainly a large number if you're making 1 teacher manage 30 kids, I don't really know that it's a number that results in viable conditions to truly "educate" children.
I strongly suspect that education is highly dependent on the family at home, and that's becoming harder to meaningful do as more and more families are forced to have both parents work full time.
This is a big part of it. Education doesn't stop when the school bell rings.
You cannot compare the per child costs of taking care of a kid who cannot go to the toilet themselves or eat by themself with a kid who is much more self sufficient.
The person taking care of a baby (or 4 babies) might need to be much less qualified than an AP physics teacher in high school, but the labor (and liability) costs do not necessarily scale exactly with the minimum qualifications needed to be an AP physics teacher versus a daycare teacher.
Our daycare gets more expensive as the child ages - not less.
> The person taking care of a baby (or 4 babies) might need to be much less qualified than an AP physics teacher in high school, but the labor (and liability) costs do not necessarily scale exactly with the minimum qualifications needed to be an AP physics teacher versus a daycare teacher.
And this - this is exactly what I'm contesting. Why is it we're ok paying someone who should be able to teach complex and technical skills to children (high school physics) barely more than a high school grad who is only qualified to tend to infants? Worse - why do we let class sizes balloon to the point where one-on-one interactions are incredibly hard?
One requires considerably more skills, considerably more education, and frankly much more work (and I'm not talking about the one tending the infants). Yet they're expected to effectively teach class sizes of between 25 and 32 (which is the technical max for the state - but I've frequently seen this balloon as high as 45)
Yet the daycare worker is making almost the rate of an intro physics teacher (17/h vs 19/h). And the very top most earners are making only 30/h. Being a manager at a McDonalds is FAR more lucrative (avg of 98k vs the avg physics teacher in GA at 43k). That should be a giant fucking red flag.
The numbers aren't even that far off - There are ~500 McDonalds locations in GA, and ~525 public high schools. Each McDonalds location has ~3 managers (shift manager, assistant manager, store manager) And they all make more than intro physics teachers. (from 50k to ~100k)
When flipping burgers is literally more lucrative... I fail to be compelled by your argument.
I have shopped around daycares on east and west coast, and I have never encountered this type of pricing. Infants have always been more expensive than toddlers and pre K in at least 10 to 15 daycares I have priced.
I also do not see the purpose of comparing prices for different prices of labor for justifying the prices.
Physics teachers may very well need to be paid more to attract enough people to meet the desired teacher student ratios and quality of teacher , but it has nothing to do with how much daycare teachers are paid. It just depends on supply and demand of that particular type of labor or service, hence the futility of comparing per student costs of daycare and high schools.
Then you're unable to see that market forces are making it incredibly unattractive to be a teacher.
The comparison is to point out the following: Why bother to take loans for college, then complete the additional certifications required for teaching, only to spend more effort at a career that will pay you considerably less well than simply working as a McDonalds manager? And seriously, my mom taught for 48 years - McDonalds manager is an easy job compared to handling 32 kids a class, for 5 classes, and their ~320 some parents (seriously - the parents are usually the pain).
You could have instead spent 4 years generating income roughly equivalent of the same job, spent no money on school, and end up making far more by just going the corporate McDonald's route - not even discussing the "buy your own class decorations bullshit", or the hours lesson planning and grading, or the certification required once every three years to stay current.
This has EVERYTHING to do with how much other professions are getting paid - it's just become incredibly clear we don't value or respect teaching - so why fucking do it?
And that's my point with the daycare workers - it's objectively an easier job, with less education and certification requirements, that also lets you work with kids, and pays almost the same as intro physics teacher. Why wouldn't people choose that instead? Love of physics is bullshit - that's not enough, it has to be genuine respect and the compensation that follows. And that clearly isn't happening.
So we can argue about why that isn't happening, but "nobody wants to teach anymore" is because teaching has become a fucking terrible, shite, job. No fucking duh no one wants to teach anymore.
So 13k per kid clearly isn't getting enough money to the people we need. You can claim that's due to inefficiencies in the system, but given that we pay more for a daycare that pays roughly the same... I suspect we're just genuinely not paying enough - although at least we could have a fair discussion around how that money for each child is allocated.
For comparison - the well known private schools in our area (Paideia, Woodward, Lovett, Galloway, Westminster, etc) all charge at least 22k per student, and many go as high as 36k for high school.
And that's with an expectation that parents are more available and involved.
Note that I agree with your statement of teachers not getting sufficient pay relative to quality of life at work. I even think this is true up and down, from daycare to physics high school.
I disagree with the chain of reasoning to support this view, however. You cannot derive this conclusion by looking at the price of daycare.
My claim is that the only thing you need to claim the price is too low for a product or service, is the lack of existence of said product or service given that it is not technologically impossible or such a rare talent or otherwise subject to forces of nature that affect its supply/demand. Which teachers generally are not.
And it is not just price that is too low, it is always price relative to quality of the product/service, or in this case, wages relative to quality of life at work (like having to deal with cumbersome admin, rude children, and entitled parents).
>For comparison - the well known private schools in our area (Paideia, Woodward, Lovett, Galloway, Westminster, etc) all charge at least 22k per student, and many go as high as 36k for high school.
But what are teachers getting paid? The point of my initial response to you was that you cannot compare annual tuition for daycare or private high schools and determine which are appropriate prices. Staffing ratios, liability insurance costs, there are a myriad factors that render this line of thinking erroneous.
So I guess turn the question on its head - What makes you believe 13k is enough?
When the only viable comparisons we have in my area strongly hint that this is underpaying - both daycare and private schools are relatively close in terms of services provided, and they both cost more.
You've made a claim - I'm saying I don't really believe it. I've pointed to plenty of examples of why I don't believe it, but you've done nothing but attack those methods.
So, genuinely, what makes you think 13k/yr per kid is enough, what's the reasoning behind your argument?
I have not made a claim about which cost is "enough" or appropriate. My only claim was that comparing the price for different products/services is not sufficient to conclude whether the price should be raised or lowered.
If anything, I wrote that I agree with your premise:
>Note that I agree with your statement of teachers not getting sufficient pay relative to quality of life at work.
Are current class sizes small enough? Are the teachers for the current classes sufficiently qualified? Can anything be done to increase quality of life for teachers? These are questions that would answer whether or not the cost is sufficient or not.
>I think comparing the costs between the 5 year olds in our daycare and the 6 year olds entering first grade is entirely fair.
Which is it, you're paying for a 1 year old or a 5 year old? What daycare do you go to that 5 year olds pay the same rate as an infant?
What would be "fair" is to not lie, and be truthful and say your original comment was comparing an infant (or 1 y/o) to school child, and not play switch-a-roo to now say we're talking about 5 year olds which in most states requires something like 1/3 the number of caregivers per child as a 1 year old.
I really don't know what it is you think you're pulling with this bullshit: > "What would be "fair" is to not lie".
I think it would be fair to tell you to bugger off.
Something isn’t adding up. What are all the overheads?
But why?
I posit that Boomers and Gen X had such an easy go of it, they assumed we would, too. Born to an economy that was thriving, they had to know relatively little themselves because there was always someone else who could do it. In short, that translates, over time, to less value placed on teaching the next generation to thrive and looking at things like school milages as "my tax dollars not benefiting me directly."
These previous generations also operate under the illusion that they somehow had it harder than we do now. This is perpetuated by the "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" attitude that most of them seem to have adopted while having to ask for help operating a smart fridge or iPhone. It's really a failure of self-awareness, if we remove all the fictional swagger they've built their lives around, and it has left us a nation that is crumbling under its own ignorance and stupidity.
Now people my age (late 30's - early 40's) are living paycheck to paycheck, trying to figure out how we can afford to fix the problem so our children can do better than us, and we are utterly failing to find a solution because we are operating in a system that was designed to cater only to the selfishness of our parents and grandparents.
You never did chores for your spending money? Had to help out with minor repairs or maintenance of a domicile? Never had a part time job? I suspect not, again, as the now revealed as misguided effort to give their kids the best (“better than we had it”) was crippling. It’s not hard to do what is mentioned in the first paragraph.
Look up the shit that went down in 1968 before you repeat that previous generations had it easier. There’s no draft, although the Cold War and risk of nukes are coming back. You have computer and communication resources that exceed st:tos (damn near), uni has toys that were inconceivable in the 70’s, …. Google what opscan forms and #2 pencils were - that’s years of organizing courses and drop/add.
The only thing that really sucks now is that std’s can kill.
Please, economy and real estate prices has been boom and bust for Gen X too, 3-4 serious recessions, pensions lost before 401k were a thing, etc.
Maybe look at who you vote for and blame them, not normal people 10-20 years older than you.
> Gen X had such an easy go of it
I was still in college when the dot com bust happened, followed a few years later by the Great Recession. Please tell me more how Gen X had it so much easier than Millenials. Also in a previous comment you claim to be 44. Since I turned 45 this year we’re basically the same age. We both, by most definitions, are Gen X. That being the case maybe you’re making a subtle point that your life was really easy as a result of that fact (not that the generation this and that crap means much anyway though you seem to put some stock in it hence my comment).
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp...
I wonder what the comparison would look like if limited to native born with two parent households?
For example, US spending on education includes a bunch of healthcare costs, as the employers are paying something (as a benefit) and employee salaries need to cover the rest. Somewhere with single-payer healthcare will directly allocate the money to healthcare instead.
Let parents have some real choice of different school to attend. This will allow some experimentation from the ground up to happen organically. Parents who are the most invested in their child's success can have real agency in their future. This will also give teachers more flexibility in the kind of environment they want to work in. They could even start their own homeschooling pods and take in a set number of students from the area.
Once again, the teachers union stands in the way of real progress.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_cmd.pdf
You may or may but know this, but the funding of K-12 education varies by locality and has quite a bit of variability (typically paid for by local taxes).
If you go to the upper-middle class neighborhoods in the US, and certainly in the nicer private schools, you will see a high or very high level of investment in teachers and facilities. These investments typically have good to great returns. There is also often quite a bit of structured parental involvement (which is usually a good thing).
There are a lot of interesting levels of inquiry into this phenomenon:
- Do we need high quality mass education as it is found in these higher quality upper middle class schools? As in, if you magically made these types of schools appear in low SES neighborhoods, would the outcomes/benefits be similar? If not, how would they differ?
- If you take a few low SES students and place them into these better schools, do they get the same benefits as the locals?
- To what extent do better schools and school districts get better results due to the schools, due to the inputs, and/or due to the values of the local community?
People who are looking for good K-12 education in the US can find it, but it’s not universal. Imho, this is due to the fact that the value of education in the US is not perceived similarly across communities.
The article mentions that many parents see schools as child care while the adults do “real work”, and I think that that is the dominant perspective in most communities (note, not most HN communities, not most upper middle class communities — statistically most communities are low or mid-low SES where people are living paycheck to paycheck). As such, the community is sort of getting what it wants when it gets mediocre education results. I think that many people like the idea of a having a better school or school district, but they are not able or willing to do what it takes to make that happen on an individual or community level to make that happen (e.g., through parental involvement in schools, school boards, creating a good learning environment in the home, etc.).
If you ever need a good litmus test for how this looks different across communities and across different SES levels, ask the parents if they read books with their children, and if they did/do, at what age. In most communities, they don’t at all or very little. In the communities with better schools, it’s almost always early and often. There are obviously exceptions (both positive and negative), but this heuristic is extremely telling in aggregate.
Teaching is a precarious job - particularly in early career in public sector schools. And just like many comments already mentioned: There's a global social trend expecting teachers to be some kind of social workers. And older teachers in many countries public sectors are basically grandfathered into previledged conditions that Young professionals will never attain.
1) European perspectives on a lot of American problems miss one of the biggest differences between us: you have a lot more of a homogeneous population. There's numerous differences between designing a school system for basically all Hungarian or all Norwegian kids, for example, and figuring out what the hell you can do with a school mixed with Latinos, Asians, Blacks, and Whites with all different levels of interests, drive, and ability.
2) You've made a few statements of objective fact here without backing them up. Does the US actually invest little in education? I suspect that a lot of the money is of course wasted, but they do spend a crapload of money, and I'd bet dramatically more than many other countries. As another thing, does increasing spending (as the only variable that changes) lead to dramatic differences in educational outcomes? To a point, I'm sure it helps, but at some point, I think it doesn't. As an example, a young Forest Gump might be able to pass Basic Arithmetic in his elementary school if given a private tutor who gave him their full attention and effort, but there's no universe in which Forrest Gump gets an A+ in Advanced Calculus even if he's given 1,000 of the best teachers in the world to personally tutor him 24/7.
3) There's an age old debate about Nature vs. Nurture, which of course will not be settled here today. But I'd like to point out that if "Nature" is generally the most important variable in success, then beyond a certain point, there's a level of diminishing returns with education spending and simply throwing money at schools is not a wise course. Just throwing more money at a problem is, I suspect, the path we've taken up until now.
Coming from Finland which did rather well with much less hours spend it might as well be systematic issue. Maybe process of the teaching itself has something wrong.
> I really recommend you moving out of such third world society.
Well this is the challenge in America and why Finland's education system has it easy. The teaching in Finland doesn't have to be good to beat an average US student.
Why would Latinos, Asians, Blacks, and Whites all require a radically different education? It seems to me that math is math, your country's history is your country's history, biology is biology, etc.
I understand there are cultural differences between different population groups, but that's hardly unique to the US; Europe has differences and minority groups, too.
You would think, but somehow we Americans have found a way to make this question much more difficult than it initially seems (or needs to be, imho).
We can't completely discuss the reasons for different educational outcomes between population groups in America in a civilized forum such as HN, so let's only mention that different educational outcomes between groups exist.
Since different population groups have different educational outcomes in a multicultural society, the groups that are left behind will always feel slighted and resentful and the educational system would have to be continuously redesigned to accommodate the least common denominator, IMO in a fashion resembling the famous Harrison Bergeron short story.
In basically every city with a substantial multicultural society in America in recent years, you can find articles similar to this.
> Boston Public Schools Suspend Advanced Program Because Officials Were ‘Disturbed’ By The Number Of Asian And White Students https://dailycaller.com/2021/02/26/boston-public-schools-adv...
> Desegregation Plan: Eliminate All Gifted Programs in New York https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/26/nyregion/gifted-programs-...
> To Address Inequity, Let's Do More Than Eliminate 'Gifted And Talented' Programs https://www.forbes.com/sites/nataliewexler/2019/08/28/to-add...
Europe doesn't have to account for this kind of thing anywhere near the level that America does. Their educational systems can largely focus on what's best for education.
This is one of the biggest challenges in many US states. For example, 20% of students in California do not have basic proficiency with English and 40% of students do not speak it at home. This puts a huge burden on teachers and school systems.
My family is full of teachers. I have many friends that are teachers.
It's amazing how "solutions" never seem to actually get around to simply paying teachers more, and maybe not expecting them to be child-rearers, in lieu of parents.
It will help, and we should certainly pay teachers more, but it isn't the whole solution.
It’s more complicated than paying more money automatically means better workers, but higher pay does let an industry be more selective.
No, it won't, because in the private sector you can have a growing career. If you are teaching it's very likely to be the very same job until you retire.
It does miss that a person's desire to educate can far exceed their desire to ply the trade and they are willing to sacrifice their pay at that particular altar. But given most teachers do not seem irrationally excited about teaching or being teachers that line of thought is quite diminished.
The best teachers that I ever had, were ones that were trained as teachers, and were not necessarily content matter experts.
The worst teachers that I ever had, were content matter experts. Almost universally, they had no patience for folks that had a hard time coming up to speed, or that weren't already at a level beyond the class they were teaching.
They would ridicule you for asking "stupid" questions (that's me -I ask questions that have the whole class in stitches, but by the end of the semester, I'm coaching my classmates). They would start from a baseline that actually assumed the student had already completed and passed the class they were taking.
I would sign up for a class, because of the bona fides of the teacher, but would end up regretting my decision.
If teaching was like a FANNG tech job, with limited availability due to demand and salary, then it would be "discovered" to be prestigious and valuable and important.
And moreover, everyone would be free to come up with their own performance management BS because you'd actually have the glut of incoming talent that supports failures removing people from the industry (or screw it up so bad that despite the money no one bothers - also a FANNG phenomenan).
Money is not sufficient to overcome the problem on its own, but it is necessary, and not having enough of it caused the problem.
because those who can go to industry for real cash
I think.
The level of demand, however, can vary. Do Americans even want good public education? Or it is an afterthought?
This very observation is telling us that the entire system is outside the market (why, for example, people from other locations cannot choose this particular school if it is better than others?)
Money does not come from the skies, it's about what the market agrees the value actually is (when it comes to private education) or what the government decides (for public education). Public education is a problem because in many western countries it's already the largest budget and it's still a shitshow so you are going to have a hard time to convince everyone that injecting more money is going to make it better.
My wife is (ex)teacher. Parents would flat-out say that they can't respect her because of her salary. Along the lines of, if you're smart and can do stuff, why the hell are you working for such a low pay? Ergo teachers are dumb and parents (along with their kids) feel free to make fun of dumbasses who work in schools.
On top of that, paying more would help with self-respect. It's damn hard to be an authority to kids when you live paycheck-to-paycheck. Especially in teens' world where appearance matters a lot.
Damn, that is so gut wrenching to read. It's so short sighted that society does not value teachers more highly. The next generation is the ultimate investment.
Another semi-related issue is school system used for virtue signalling first. For example „special needs“ kids integration. It sounds nice on paper, but in reality one kids holds up whole class. And then smarter kids riot because they get bored. But hey, that's teacher's fault..
IMO that will be the crucial piece for West decline. This is reverting the best bit in post-industrial-revolution welfare states. Teach the masses to fish out the brilliant mind from the whole pool. But now we're reducing the pool to those who can afford private schools. And loosing lots of talent in the rest of society. If that trend continues, soon we'll be back in nobility-peasants split with little social mobility. Which a loss not onlh for the society as a whole, but for neo-nobility as well. At first it may be cool to be richer-than-thou, but over time „richest in the room“ will turn out to be poor at global scale.
Attacking the teachers have been a long term goal. School funds already are now allowed to be directed to parochial (religious) schools from the state school coffers. This starves the public school systems one by one.
No Child Left Behind guaranteed that bad schools get less money, and get worse. This all but guarantees that low income areas have terrible school systems that are more just juvenile delinquency prevention and babysitting services.
Book bans are pushed by the "right" (which they rarely, if ever, are), with obvious canards like "Harry potter is evil occult and should be burned". Naturally, with the exception of https://www.vice.com/en/article/epzv9j/texas-school-bans-the... , most of the bans are done explicitly by the christian fascists forcing their beliefs on others.
Or, instead of more money and resources, we see Texas state legislature forcing schools to hang banners of "In god we trust." https://www.texastribune.org/2022/08/18/texas-schools-in-god... . Again, it's the forcing of one myopic direction of religion on the masses. It brings the parochial school into the public piece at a time.
All of these different directions have the ultimate effect - deprecate the "godless" education to something with their variant of religion in it. And naturally, we get pablum like "Noah and dinosaurs lived together", and other completely non-science garbage taught as fact.
https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/surveyed-lawyers-rep...
If our goal is to shovel new people into the system as quickly as others are quitting, I suppose lawyers are a good aspirational example. But if we assume that the best teachers are ones who like their jobs and have been around for a while, we might want to try a different model.
The much higher salary makes up for it, but you can't seriously expect teachers to get the same salary as lawyers.
One of the reasons that the NEA is such a powerful union, is that its members, are, by definition, educated to a Masters Degree, or better.
Although the bar exam specifically is probably harder than any single component of teacher licensure, overall they are comparable, as teachers have more components.
Lawyers will mostly attest how divorce/family practice has nothing on actual criminal practice, and it might be even harder. Most people don't know about the long hours, the case studies, etc. They think it's the romantic view of what they see on TV
Doctors have to know how to deal with bodly fluids. Of various kinds. They have to learn how to tell a family a dear person died. They have to literally survive residency.
Same with writing software. I get rather tired of running into people that obviously took it up for the money, then found they weren't particularly good at it. Being a good engineer (software, or otherwise) is hard.
In my experience, these folks tend to be quite concerned about the "culture," as opposed to the actual art of the field. They look and sound great, but don't rely on them to actually ship anything.
Delivering software is really difficult. I've been doing it for my entire adult life, so it's become pretty much habit. It's always shocking to encounter folks that aren't able to deliver software, yet have been in the field for a very long time.
But money is at least a big factor: even those who keep up with self-motivation and co-worker’s appreciation can’t go on if money isn’t there. Paying them fairer prices is the first step in any attempt to make teachers come back.
Virtually everyone else has a boss that judges his or her performance. Sometimes those judgments are wrong or unfair. Almost every institution has determined that’s still better than nothing. But somehow not schools.
There is no logic in this affirmation. There are no such direct links between tenure and pay.
Saying that only confirms what the article says on the American public feeling about teachers' pay.
They are too low.
In a neighboring town parents tried to set up a "hotline" where teachers would have to be available at night to intervene on google chat related social incidents. They just don't seem to get that at 3:15, the kid is your fucking problem again. Leave these poor teachers alone.
It is all about giving them tools to solve issues with those children that cause issues. And maybe cultural change back to state where it is most of the time kids fault. Not teachers... And lessening the work load where possible. Maybe increasing number of assistants available and resources of special education.
Most of the teachers that I know, personally, mention this as the first problem to solve. I don’t think any of them believe that it’s the only problem to address, but there’s not even a tiny doubt that the great majority of teachers believe it to be something that needs to be dealt with, before tackling the rest of the pile.
But looking at this very conversation, shows that the idea of paying teachers more, is quite unpopular. The verbal and mental gymnastics that people go through, to avoid coming to the conclusion that teachers simply need to be paid more, are kind of astonishing. We have no problem at all, coming to that conclusion for many other vocations (especially the one we happen to be in).
I guess, because of my own family/friend situation, I find this stance puzzling.
I assume, then, that a good place to start, is to find out why people don’t want to pay teachers more, and address that.
What a bad article.
Not exactly news, these days.
In much of America, local school districts still have quite a bit of autonomy. As thing keep getting worse, there might be a district or few, here & there, where a different approach gets an honest try.
Might.
If you mean "having an education degree" or "getting a grossly irrelevant teacher's certificate" then no, those are not "qualifications." Those are just the teacher's union contract provisions.
Some states, if a teacher says some phrases they could, get fined, loose their job or maybe in rare cases face jail time. This may even spread across the Teacher's life style. Not to mention in many places the pay is not worth it.
Forgot to mention, some states also require a Masters Degree even to teach very young children, the expense of getting that degree is not worth it.
Should I get paid less and get kicked, bit, and punched all day and then be told it is my fault for not properly simulating their angel child? Or should I just get a job where I can work from home and make more money?
Teachers, companies are discovering, are desirable sales reps because they are experienced at being high energy, talking extemporaneously, and may have some domain specific knowledge that is valuable, such as a chemistry teacher going into pharmaceutical sales.
Most teachers will never make 100k in their entire career. Some districts pay well in high COL areas, but this is the exception not the rule. Entry level pay for teachers is actually pretty good, but your salary does not scale as it does in most other careers. It typically takes 20+ years to get to six figures if you can at all.
What confuddles people in education is the same thing that causes endless articles about housing, healthcare, inflation… it’s called “basic economics”. Just because education is heavily regulated by the government and full of people ideologically predisposed to pretending economic rules don’t apply, doesn’t mean supply and demand is false and the normal rules of gravity are suspended.
I myself have children and live in Boston, Massachusetts. The per-student funding here is $25,000 per year. Yet excluding a few meritocratic public schools that you have to test into (which they are making ever harder for my Asian children to get into as they reduce the seats allocated to tests and give away to “underprivileged” races, aka not Asians or whites) the schools are dog shit and anyone with a few bucks avoids them like the plague. So money is not the problem in Boston, it’s the horrible nature of the public school system.
I went for cheap 20 years ago, but my younger siblings did not. Not even a discount
Unlike many on the left, who despise monopolies in business and ruthlessly hunt them down, yet worship monopolies the government has (like in public education), I think public dollars should be allocated to the parents to make decisions they feel are best for their children. Saying “just move if you don’t like your public school” betrays the reality of how difficult it is to relocate for the non-tech elite who can’t just work from anywhere.
I don't know how to fairly evaluate a school's performance. I guess we could ask if the students perform better in the job market 10-20 years later, but that's not obviously not helpful or useful information on which to make a decision now.
I get why the voucher system is appealing on first glance. After all, you often can evaluate the quality of goods and services. You can, say, estimate that a shirt you find at the mall will last a few years or that it will fall apart in a month. I just don't think you can do the same for schools. I have a feeling most people will evaluate education based on their beliefs (religious, etc) and the grades their kids "earn".
Further, how many Harvard-level grade schools do you think we can run as a society? Given that private school pay is substantially worse than public school pay on average, how could one say that private schools, again on average, would outperform public schools?
You’ve got a point - quality schooling does exist, if schools can pay well and offer sensible class loads. However to apply that to the current public school system requires significant dollars long term, and a lot of people don’t want to pay for that - think retired people whose children are out of school, or couples who have no children.
I don’t agree with that, but I’m simply stating some different positions from people whom I’ve talked to about this topic.
America is unique. A lot of our public services are quite expensive and quite low quality. Our system is organized around the private sector and the more we embrace the private sector the better things are.
https://rebekahjbuchanan.com/2018/10/21/teaching-in-norway
The environment Rebekah describes seems like a modern US tech business. Everyone is expected to be where they're needed, treat each other with respect and focus on their work. Sometimes I wonder why successful businesses can create the environment schools can't and then remind myself that businesses (and private schools) can easily exclude troublemakers, malcontents and people who don't fit in for whatever reason. Also some of the things you mention (e.g. mono-culture) make it easier to create an environment suitable for learning.
It shouldn't be a priori to honor the private sector and shit on the public sector but as long as we do we shouldn't be surprised at the results. Teaching and education simply needs to be valued more than it is. We shouldn't have to beg people to do the job. Instead we should reward and honor the profession so well that we can set high standards for teachers and still have a surplus of applicants.
Perhaps if we compensated teachers more like police or firefighters and required advanced credentials as more successful countries do our schools would be better.
Like it or not students are not born genetically equal. Throw in poverty and lack of effective parenting and there’s no hope that endless funding will somehow fix that situation.
I do appreciate your perspective by the way, thanks for engaging.
Isn’t it obvious that good teachers want to teach children with parents that want them to learn? And punish their children when they are disruptive? And the school can kick out bad kids?
The current vogue of reducing everything in education to the lowest common denominator - eliminating gifted programs, enabling disruptive kids to ruin classes, removing suspensions and expulsions - is exactly why private schools are growing. I don’t want education to optimize for the worst kids who won’t go to college and into intellectual pursuits anyway. I want to optimize education for the kids who will actually get value out of it.
Perhaps, but that kind of school is doing a different “job” than one tasked with ensuring a base level of education for all young people.
We are forced to go full circle now. Throwing out garbage, as we can't keep up. That's a good thing.
Some private schools (many focus on making parents happy in short term..) and tutoring is the last refuge of the art of Teaching.
Assuming you had all the skills required to be an effective teacher, would YOU put up with everything they put up with for that salary? Because I sure as hell wouldn't.
(As an aside, it's different depending on where you are but in Australia, comparing teacher salary can be difficult because "they get 12 weeks of holiday a year" and "they only work 6 hours a day" but also they do 3+ hours of unpaid marking and lesson planning a day, they're expected to show up at the end of those 'holidays' prepared for whatever courses they've been assigned for the next term, etc. A close relative is a teacher and it's insane what they have to deal with.)
The problem is that the scope of the job has changed and you can't pay people enough to do it. Here are some issues, straight from teachers I was talking to last week:
* Admin who constantly wants teachers to do more with no additional resources so they can get credit for it and advance their career. They were very frustrated by this.
* Teaching evaluation based on absolute standardized scores rather than relative. So you can have a bad class, lift them a lot, but still be viewed poorly because on absolute terms, they are still weak. You might say that evens out over time, but it doesn't because some teachers are better with difficult students, so they get more than their share of these issues.
* Special needs students mainstreamed - kids with emotional issues that flip desks and yell out constantly, physical issues such as seizures if they bump their head, but parents will not let them wear protective gear because they will stand out, elementary school kids who are constantly in physical altercations with other kids.
* Kids come to school not having eaten since the day before, cloths that haven't been washed in days, etc.
* Unable to give accurate grades because parents fight back and so teachers are forced to pass kids even though they know they are just pushing a big problem on the next teacher.
* Zero support from parents and in many cases, outright hostility.
* The classroom is a minefield regarding what can be discussed and cannot be discussed. Everyone has an opinion on how it should be done, but almost none of them have ever actually taught.
That many teacher’s pensions require one to give up social security benefits makes the decision to teach more difficult, I would think, especially for those who are later in their working lives.
Patently untrue unless maybe you work for the Dept of Defense or something. Teachers can collect SS like any other employee.
"Windfall Elimination Prevention" and "Government Pension Offset" are things you can google if you're interested in learning a bit about this stuff.
[1] States whose teachers participate in their own pension plans instead of Social Security include California and Texas, so it's not like these are rare concerns
https://www.socialsecurityintelligence.com/teachers-retireme...
This is not the case for NY, and not in WI and PA as I have heard from teachers there.
In cases where they don't receive it though, they're not paying into it either. I can't comment as to whether that is a good or bad thing, because I don't know those cases. Maybe the union membership by in large doesn't want to?
For the benefit of others, I post this authoritative link from the USDOE: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/mapED/storymaps/TeacherSocialSe...
If the "it" you're referring to is social security, this is, to use your phrase from above, "patently untrue." It would be comforting if that were the case, but there are cases where a person who has paid into social security will not receive anything from it, and will not receive their spouse's Social Security survivor's benefits, under WEP and GPO rules. As I explained above, I know one of these people and help her manage her money.
To the original point in my grandparent post: just having to do the math on this stuff could be deterrent to someone trying to make a decision about whether teaching is a smart career move.
> Maybe the union membership by in large doesn't want to?
WEP and GPO are a matter of federal law, although "maybe the unions want this thing that is obviously hostile to their members" is certainly... a thought a person could have. As it happens the American Federation of Teachers is lobbying to eliminate WEP and GPO, and I assume there are other unions who are acting similarly:
https://www.aft.org/resolution/repeal-windfall-elimination-p...
https://sports.yahoo.com/congressional-bill-may-soon-end-194...
(some potential disinformation in the second link, but the point is, this is a pretty active debate)
edit: It occurs to me that maybe you meant "maybe they do not want to pay into Social Security," which is probably true. To keep this in perspective, these teacher pensions which were considered an alternative/supplement to Social Security are a lot older than the WEP and GPO, which came along to kick those with these pensions in the nuts in the late seventies and early eighties. The teachers and their unions were already committed to the path they were on when the federal government changed the rules on them.
> If the "it" you're referring to is social security, this is, to use your phrase from above, "patently untrue."
? Because everything I am reading suggests those states whose teachers whose work years only go to pension and not SS eligibility are not having their teachers pay into SS.
I’m not fully familiar with the stated justification for these laws, or why you’d want to treat a pension as a ”windfall,” (or maybe they’re trying to keep social security benefits from being a “windfall?”) but I guess my main thought on that as a non-teaching, non-union professional is that we are all very lucky these rules were drafted a year or two before 401ks came into wide use, such that we avoided someone in congress getting the bright idea of treating our tax deferred retirement savings as a “windfall” to be factored into the SSA’s payment calculations as well.
I believe the problem of losing a spouse’s survivor’s benefits happens under the GPO rules, and that is similarly unpopular.
I have family who were teachers in CA and lost all of the SS benefits they paid into.
It is a terrible injustice. So much so that whenever I bring it up, people simply refuse to believe it is true.
Personally, I don't have much faith in pension systems either. The growth ponzi scheme for US stocks can only go on for so long, and many pensions have gone belly-up in the last decade or two even though the market has been incredibly good for most of that time. If we enter a recession that lasts more than 1 or 2 years, those pensions are going to end up in worrying places for anyone who isn't already cashing out.
I do agree that the single pay scale across all public school teachers is an issue. You will never get someone to teach high school math, science, or tech if salary is a significant consideration.
Ultimately teaching salaries are fine. The median teacher makes about the median salary. But it comes with great job security, benefits, and significantly more time off than the median job. The benefits are high enough to attract enough teachers.
The problem are parents and administration. And more recently kids missed a couple years of school due to Covid and went feral. It's gotten to be a significantly worse job. Solution is to cut the bullshit. Not pay more to incentivize people to put up with the bullshit.
I know 3 public school teachers, in CA/NYC/NJ. Their 6 to 8 weeks off in the summer (if that, due to ongoing training), is nowhere near enough to offset the low pay per hour and most importantly, having to deal with garbage parents and their misbehaving kids.
They also work many extra hours at home during the school year doing grading or prepping exercises or whatever. If we have a get together, the teachers will pretty much guaranteed to be working all or some portion of the evening.
> The benefits are high enough to attract enough teachers
Only if you think 30+ kids per class is acceptable. I would want no more than 20 kids per class.
The question of if teachers are sufficiently paid is answered by asking if current classroom sizes are sufficiently small and staffed by sufficient quality teachers. Whatever price that makes that happen is the appropriate price, regardless of what people in other jobs are earning.
Who do you want to compare them to?
>The question of if teachers are sufficiently paid is answered by asking if current classroom sizes are sufficiently small and staffed by sufficient quality teachers. Whatever price that makes that happen is the appropriate price, regardless of what people in other jobs are earning
Like I said before the solution is to cut the bullshit. Not pay more for people to tolerate it.
For the purposes of determining appropriate prices, why is it necessary to compare their price to anyone? Supply and demand determine appropriate pricing.
In the Boston area it’s absolutely possible to exceed $100,000 salary. The pay scales are public, look it up yourself. I’m willing to believe many teachers are underpaid, and that those in Boston have legitimate gripes too, but we need to be clear about which context we’re discussing.
My experience is that the grids have $100,000 sitting out there like a Cadillac, but 99% of teachers get steak knives.
Is the median the correct benchmark? The median household income in NYC was $67k in 2021 [0]. Why would someone choose to be a teacher making around the median [1] when you could be a software engineer and make 3x as much?
It's not just a matter of trinkets and baubles. That difference allows you to comfortably afford a nice family sized apartment [2] in a safe area with a convenient commute.
[0] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/newyorkcitynewy...
[1] https://teachnyc.net/about-our-schools/salary-and-benefits
[2] https://streeteasy.com/building/15-gates-avenue-brooklyn/h
My post does assume that the career would attract more highly qualified candidates if the pay was higher.
I’d guess I’ve met and spend significant time with 100 teachers. And a handful were capable of being a professional programmer.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/2020/06/10/heres-h...
EDIT: found an interesting "day in the life" article by a self-labeled urban teacher.
https://theeducatorsroom.com/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-teacher-...
Of course you have to be a PM, so there’s that. I’d rather literally herd cats or manage a kindergarten class.
"I call people and ask them to do the things they said they would do, on time. Then we have meetings about it for 4-6 hours a day. Technically I'm in charge."
Why aren't you a hedge fund manager?
Anyone who's actually been or known a teacher knows this is false.
During the school year, in the time they're not actively teaching, teachers are
- Coaching sports
- Overseeing other student extracurricular activities
- Making/updating lesson plans
- Presiding over detention
- Tutoring students who need more 1:1 time
- Serving on school committees (especially in larger districts)
During the summer, teachers generally spend a large percentage of their time laying out the curriculum for the coming year. This is especially true for those in smaller districts, where one teacher has to teach three or four different levels of the same subject (or even multiple completely different subjects!).
I certainly don't deny that teachers spend a lot of time working on their "time off". But that said, I've known more than a few teachers personally, and yes, they still do get enormous amounts of time off. Heck, a bunch of them will even admit it is the biggest perk of teaching (because otherwise there aren't many).
Teachers have plenty of real, valid complaints about the environment of teaching, and more importantly, it's clear with the current teacher shortage that something is really broken. Still, I don't think it wins them any supporters when teachers try to deny that most of them have vastly more time off than other professionals.
Most weekends I'd dedicate around 5 or 6 hours to work, so that puts me up to about 61 hours a week. Of course we got those amazing holidays. Holidays when you were still expected to answer emails, mark work, write reports, plan assessments and lessons. One year, I remember working from September through to August, and my total time off was Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. In August the exam results come through, so I was expected to be in school to coach children on their options, and then write a 15 page report on the reasons my department had performed or under-performed.
I appreciate that this has turned into a rant, but don't ever think that your job is harder than a teacher, if you are a software engineer. It's not. I can testify to that. Teaching involves understanding your subject, understanding pedagogy, being a parent, councilor and sometimes prison warden to children who are often going through the most difficult times of their lives. You have to do all of that, while basically performing on stage for 5 hours a day, and your lunch break is spent ramming food down your throat so you can get out to the playground on time to supervise the kids out there.
An ex-colleague of mine has asked me to go back into teaching in his school. My response was "okay" can you pay me 150K, because I wouldn't do it for anything less.
When I was in HS, it was not uncommon to have lecture most days and a graded assignment once a week or even less. This is obviously a lot less work for teachers. In the best cases it can be a 7—4 job with summers completely off.
Why? Are they really better than khan academy at doing a lesson plan? Isn’t this like a software engineer complaining they have to write their own database driver in their spare time after work?
Yes
> like a software engineer complaining they have to write their own database driver in their spare time after work?
No
Are you claiming teachers can personalize a lesson plan for each individual student in a class? To a granularity finer than what Khan Academy can do?
Also, individual teaching methods don’t work well in certain subjects; as an example, you need a few people to put on a theatrical production, perform ensemble music, or have Socratic discussions.
You could argue it would be better if teachers were paid to personalize lectures, but they aren't. Maybe some document somewhere says they should, but in practice nothing will happen to you if you just use standardized lectures so that is what most will do and that is what the expectations of the job is built around.
Sometimes, a group of students might need to speed up, slow down, or go in a wholly different direction depending on what happened with the previous lesson. There’s a lot of variation between one class of students and another, and teachers are not some kind of omniscient perfect predictor of behavior. And ultimately, you need to cover a whole curriculum.
There is a whole spectrum between teaching centrally dictated lesson plans and individually crafted tutoring, and one of the requirements of teaching is to be able to adjust lesson plans according to reality. We don’t expect software engineers to waterfall every last character in code down to the wire, but teachers are supposed to do this with unpredictable human children?
Teachers are 100% supposed to teach the standardized kids, the kids with disabilities, and the kids who are a little faster than everyone else. It's simply not possible to do with one standardized lecture without individual attention to those with special needs.
It's not some document, its literally a major movement decades old in education.
Isn’t the answer to this quite obvious? It’s harder to be a software engineer. And there’s more risk to the profession.
Programming is interesting as you can be self-taught and be great. And it doesn’t require any formal training. I started as a college dropout (from a different major nothing to do with programming) and there’s lots of boot camps.
Anyone with the inclination can do what you suggest. But I think programming is hard so many are incapable.
Is that a serious question?
Why indeed? Maybe because a union job with a state pension (yes, defined benefit pension) that starts at 62K and has an advancing pay scale based only on education level and seniority (yes - job performance unrelated to pay) and very high job security ain’t bad place to be if you can get it.
(And also I suspect that a lot of the people getting those teaching jobs simply would not be able to get 200K software development jobs.)
Do they? I read that as implying that physics teachers could potentially get some stem jobs. But is that actually true? If you can do math, you can teach yourself enough physics to teach in high school. But that gets you nowhere near the knowledge necessary for applying non-trivial physics at work.
No, you can't. Even at the high school level there is jargon, historical methodology, and domain-specific nuance that isn't accessible to the self-taught. That's true for almost any subject one might think of, in fact.
Or, the ability to explain physics to one person is not the ability to successfully teach physics to 30 teenagers in a high school setting.
Many suburban schools pay decent, but often urban centers pay poorly.
I know one person who was offered under $30k for teaching young special Ed folks. This is someone who has a masters and extra certs on tops of that.
Your argument about physics teachers being more sought after is interesting but misses the point. As a society we want our children to have the best outcomes, providing them with the best education at early ages provides that.
To have the best education you want to pay well and attract the best candidates. Not have those teachers splitting their time with Uber so they can afford rent.
There was a study that showed the value of great kindergarten teachers and it’s over $300k a year.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2010/07/28/128819707/the-...
Also, the average kindergarten teacher probably generates a lot less than $300k per year.
If a software engineer is contributing millions of dollars in value each year, they are doing it on the backs of the giants that taught and coached them to get to where they are today.
The truth of where the value to society comes from is somewhere between the "shoulders of giants" myth (that everything is obvious in light of what came before, and nobody really creates any value) and the "lone genius" myth (that value is created solely by bright individuals).
Some component of the value that we attribute to a person likely comes from their teachers, but it may be 0 (or negative - lots of teachers demoralize their students too). However, a significant portion comes from them.
Some ultrabight people did the hard work, and you're just using their stuff. There's no spectrum between 1 and 1
The diaper-changing-babysitting end of things is probably the most difficult job in the school. Think about it, it's one step away from working in a mental institution.
The whole USA teaching system exploits nice salt-of-the-earth types, chews them up, then spits them out. The system makes it difficult to even stay in it as a teacher, the job is littered with madness compared to many other government and private sector jobs.
Do you know how frustrating and exhausting teaching is? Very. They also don't get hazard pay for working in dangerous schools. One teacher I knew literally stopped teaching and became a kind of official bouncer (I don't know what it's called); when kids would get violent his job was to restrain them. The reason he switched was the kids' disrespect and his own desire to see them improve was crushing his soul.
Many teachers use their own money to buy their students' class materials.
If you're a teacher in New Jersey, you have to also live in New Jersey, a state with a ridiculously high tax rate.
The years of service thing is a fair yardstick because it's comparing apples to apples. We are not paying them based on what a different job would pay them, we pay them based on the job we want them to do.
Benefits and pension are wildly overblown. Half of teachers don't even qualify for pension and benefits vary greatly. https://www.teacherpensions.org/blog/what-average-teacher-pe...
It's not enough money.
In general, the hours spent teaching diminish over time. At the beginning of a teacher's career, they spend a lot of time outside of class building lesson plans and creating tests and homework assignments. These legitimately take a lot of time. And they aren't perfect, so the teacher often sees that they need to make big changes after those lesson plans and tests and homework assignments hit the students.
But after a few iterations, they have those tools, and at that point things settle down a lot. The material only needs to be updated infrequently. Most of that time that in the first few years was spent building those things is freed back up, and it's not replaced by anything.
I suspect this is because teaching is arguably the most stable job in rural areas.
I'd disagree. Some anecdotal evidence - I'm from a HCOL suburban area with a nationally ranked public school system. Teachers here are generally considered "well-paid" by teacher salary standards. Many of the teachers in my area literally cannot afford to live here, and have to commute 30-40 minutes in.
My mom was a teacher there. She was making about $80k a year at the end of her career, with 2 masters degree and 20 years of experience teaching (so she was pretty much maxed out on her salary). Her pension is something like $20k a year (also maxed out due to her YOE). My dad was in between jobs for some time in there, and my parents, who are frugal people, struggled to make ends meet on just my moms salary, borrowing against their mortgage for the year while my dad was unemployed.
The interesting thing to me is I see people almost universally praise our teachers, and comment on how great and caring they are. The money seems to be attracting the raw talent, so I'm leaning towards something else is much more broken in our system.
What’s the ROI on properly learning to read vs learning that force=mass*acceleration?
Apologies for extended metaphorical language, but the underlying point is really what I think: Pay the ones at the front the most. They do the groundwork.
This was really well put, and applies to any profession, not just teaching. Consider software security experts, who know all the ins and outs of making systems secure. They advise, the offer guidance and best practices on very complex material.
And yet at the end of the day all that work gets thrown out by some PM’s that think it only adds complexity, or worse yet users simply don’t use the more secure features of an application.
I’m not sure what’s better, though.
Imagine if we put in charge of a tech firm the dude with the best understanding of category theory.
- do not improve
- do Source : https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29874/w298...Of course what they mean by “complexity” is money.
What experts recommend costs money, where the MBA/PM will come with dumb solutions that cost less on paper.
This is true, on both counts. Adding top end security does add complexity. The business should decide if it's worth it. And users generally want whatever is simpler, and will only use MFA if it's forced upon them.
I see at my university the outside consultants telling us how and when to teach. But OPs first sentence here seems to ring true a lot on my campus. Your boss, HR, some organization called "student success" which is made up of MBAs that have never taught a class, some VP of whatever division, they talk down to you. Tell you, as a professor with great student feedback and high marks all over the place, that you do not understand "how to teach" and that we should have Elvsiver, Pearson, or some other bookseller tell us how to teach, or even better, that we should just outsource teaching to them.
They can not imagine why people are leaving.
For all the reasons mentioned in the article.
Here above you was a professor stating how shit it is to be one, and the very next comment is a student shitting on professors in general.
This very thread exemplifies why no one wants to teach.
A lot of professors do actually care about teaching and genuinely want to help students, but the system as designed strongly disincentivizes (or actively punishes) doing more than the bare minimum. I know a professor who was recently denied tenure at a research university that likes to describe itself as very "undergraduate teaching focused" -- he had decent but not outstanding research output, but had gotten several university-wide teaching awards and was broadly considered by students one of the best lecturers in the department. Some of the comments he had received suggest that this actively hurt him for tenure, because they felt he was too focused on teaching over research.
Even then I have seen myself they lean too much on TA's who are barely a semester ahead sometimes.
Thanks for clarifying about the research side, really appreciate it.
All of this is just so sad.
I would probably argue, as another poster noted, that the really good ones quit, or their classes are perpetually full as they are the good ones. In the CS department where I teach, we generally do not have the luxury of multiple sections after the intro courses, but in say Mathematics, you really see this point driven home. The "good" Calculus I profs class fills instantly, then everyone else is left with "that researcher person" who does not like to teach.
Of course, the obvious solution: have research professors and teaching professors. Right? Nope, colleges are run by business people. "Have people just do research??" Only the well off colleges can really do that.
Security, as you mentioned, is definitely a balance with what your users will actually want to do. Security experts see doomsday scenarios everywhere, but if their solution is a hassle, your customers will just go to the less secure competitor.
I’ve worked with DBAs who were absolutely experts and knew far more than us but wanted to normalize the data to the point where actually retrieving it would have been a major hassle of JOINs. There’s a balance there that experts miss.
"Experts" in my general experience often lack the big picture. They get so honed in on their little area of expertise that they can forget that people don't value what they value to the same degree.
That said, I couldn’t have installed solar on my home, built a deck, replumbed my house, etc. without Youtube.
I don't have the data to back it up, but I would expect a few European countries to be the only exception, and only those that have moved on from older educational models.
Not just "nowadays." I recall (I've looked around, but can't find it archived) an article from 2000 in the San Jose Mercury News about full-time public school teachers living in homeless shelters because they couldn't afford housing in San Jose.
So, no. Not new. Still a big problem, but not a new one.
https://www.zumper.com/rent-research/savannah-ga
You won't get an argument about that from me. I wasn't trying to deride or minimize the issues you mentioned. At all.
Rather, I was pointing out that low pay for K-12 teachers isn't a new phenomenon.
I wholeheartedly agree that this is a pressing issue right now, and in lots more places than Silicon Valley.
One good thing about C19 is that it forced us to re-examine how we taught and what we taught.
And I think we clearly see that we are spending too many hours in classrooms with boring teachers.
Looking back many years at my schooling I can see that much of it was impractical and unnecessary.
Things like math were not tied into the real world so I was never really taken with it.
It Was very boring and when I became a teacher years later, I burned out after a year of following the curriculum.
I could not really grok chemistry and physics in high school because it was mostly just theory completely divorced from the normal word.
On the other hand our biology teacher gave me a lifelong start in that subject because she really tied it into our daily lives and we could relate.
And I was not the only one.
There are very very few teachers who teach like that - and so, most people just finish school and promptly forget everything they learned.
Can this be fixed?
Not now. We are more focused on culture wars that improving the way how we teach.
It would take a really serious event (not any politician) to make changes.
And that’s why as more parents wake up, home schooling has increased from about 50,000 to well over 500,000 as of last year in the USA.
https://www.unschooling.com/t/the-seven-lesson-schoolteacher...
I just had this conversation last week with a couple teachers. If this matters to you, I suggest you find some older teachers who have been around long enough to actually see how the job has changed and ask them what they think.
It has become an impossible job for any amount of money.
The smart people who once might have found their vocation in teaching, now prefer to set up YouTube channels.
The role of teacher is splitting into content makers and babysitters.
Educational content is amazing, but it's not teaching. It's a resource. It's like saying that the existence of books negates the need for teaching and that all the clever people are now writing books.
Video is a replacement for teacher-centered lectures, that don't do these things either. Of course the tutoring part of education is also important.
(I vaguely remember being shown some educational video in class that was over half old wireframey CGI transitions with what an old person thought technobabble looked like all over it. It was supposed to be about the environment.)
It's a supplemental resource, not core instruction.
Don't try to make it into something it was never intended to be.
If they know stem at all, why teach? If they can handle foreign languages or wield words, why teach? If they can work with their hands, there are trades and the like dying for people…. The buzz from a success has to be balanced against all of the issues discussed here in, and now the risk of physical harm is quite high.
And as result of that only very bad are still teaching: the ones that hate the job, hate the kids and, in general, not nice people.
I think the only way we can sole this is the following:
- clamp down on union: it should easier to fire bad teachers
- class size should be less than 10. Expensive yeah…
In California the other problem is that 10%+ of the students are ESL. With a large undocumented immigrant impact to school resources.
My last job wanted me to replace the existing management. They tried to sell this to me by complaining about all the different bosses they had to report to, how difficult the job was and how they want to retire and stop doing the job. Combined with all the other structural issues and tribalism within the workplace, having a management team that is happy to spell out their own doom is criminally incompetent.
You can pretty up the teacher or management role with money and pride, but it's still going to fall apart if you're hellbent on overworking your staff and killing the golden goose. Everyday the terrible management continues, the more and more relatable Anakin looks. Disappointment is a weekly reality.
Relatively speaking this salary/benefits has higher expected lifetime earnings than a software developer.
One negative is that the unions are also strong enough that teachers can't be fired/replaced for performance (this is similar to Police...etc). As with any profession the worst of the bunch is very bad, and unfortunately they keep doing it until their fifties at the cost of the children.
https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/research/how-strong-ar...
When you evaluate things beyond the partisan lens, poverty is a massive predictor in education outcomes which is why many deep blue cities do poorly and why many deep red states do poorly as well.
Separately, the suburbs in the US are about as purple as it gets. Suburbs also have the lowest rate of poverty compared to urban and rural. [2]
[1] https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/education
[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/10/02/5-facts-abo...
Most of the best school districts are in purple districts. The worst ones are in heavily red or heavily blue districts, largely correlating with poverty.
For root causes, the morale environment is largely politically induced in a coordinated attack on public education that goes back to the 80's. For some examples...
* cuts on school lunches https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketchup_as_a_vegetable
* voucher programs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_voucher
* vast finanical aid cuts http://tech.mit.edu/V105/N2/budget.02n.html
These policies have persisted off and on since then.
1. For as much as we spend on education, teachers seem to be grossly underpaid - to be getting robbed of their share of the budget. Where does that money go?
2. It seems that education degrees are seen as easier to achieve than others.
3. Teachers frequently complain about how they are unappreciated, yet children spend _12 years_ in their care. Why do people come up to them and say they hated school rather than “thank you”?
4. Many school problems are caused by disruptive children.
Disruptive children are caused by parents who frankly just don’t give a shit. Throwing more money into schools won’t ever fix this problem.
5. Schools are just too darn big. Thousands of kids in a big prison-shaped building and we wonder why everyone is alienated, miserable and dehumanized?
> Disruptive children are caused by parents who frankly just don’t give a shit.
This isn’t necessarily true; sometimes the parents simply don’t have the proper info or education themselves. Example: parent of a kid with ADHD who has no understanding of what ADHD is or how it presents, and thus that their kid even has it.
Almost always in the examples of why teachers don't want to teach anymore. The focus is always on pay, testing, and administration. But who wants to come to work and teach children that are so disrespectful and so disruptive that class can't be taught. My salary wouldn't be the deciding factor here.
2. Depending on the state you may not even need one
3. It's the parents, not the kids that make them feel this way. Kids typically love their teachers
4. 100%
5. Building a new school is 10-100s of millions typically. Why it costs so much is worthy of debate, but plunking down new schools these days is far more costly than in the past.
2) How little do you pay babysitters? At, say, $5 per kid per hour, a teacher of 20 would be doing pretty well, and that's on the low side of class sizes these days I think.
Yes. Gone are the days that you would hire a teacher to teach you something. These days you turn to automated teaching services. The fact that the word teacher is now synonymous with the K-12 school teacher further emphasizes that the career in general has effectively disappeared. As before, "teaching" has survived as a career where childcare is the actual service offered.
> How little do you pay babysitters?
In my case it is $3 per hour for a daycare provider that cares for no more than five children at a time. If the babysitter cared for more children I would expect to pay less as I would get much less value for my dollar. The quality of care and attention declines as the number of children increases.
Large class sizes are accepted because we are going for bang for our buck over quality of care. If teachers were charging on the same order per child as other daycare providers providing higher quality care, indeed it would be good money, but there would be a shift to putting children into those better care facilities and so it wouldn't last. Why pay the same amount for lesser care?
Like I said before, we don't even recognize the existence of general teachers anymore, with the word under typical use now only referring to those who work at schools for children.
You have not heard of automated teaching as a thing because we invent names for automation. The automated kitchen servant isn't called an automated kitchen servant, it's called a dishwasher (among others).
Likewise, automated teachers are not called automated teachers. They are given names, depending on the teaching method at play. Automated teacher is used here as a generalization as the specific automation is immaterial.
I would imagine the 10-20x value-adders aren't incentivized and are probably actively de-incentivized in the faculty senate/union dynamic unless they literally love the job that much which is debunked in the OP post.
Wishful thinking. If kids magically taught themselves there would be no schools. Some do. Most don't.
Children require care. Again, "teaching" survives when children are present because childcare is the functional service offered. There is no impetus to move to automation here as childcare is not easily automated, necessitating a warm body anyway. However, the value of a teacher is constrained by the value of childcare as there is no longer market value in teaching alone.
Like I said in the other comment, teaching outside of schools for children isn't even recognized in the word teacher anymore because the career, as a general one, effectively no longer exists. You've proven my point.
Any loss that occurs, no matter how low probability it is, get litigated and once litigated gets incorporated into expected losses by insurance companies and mitigations for it get stipulated into the insurance coverage.
Fire, handicap accessibilities, school shootings, tornado, earthquake, trip and falls, sports equipment injury, etc.
If an entity does not cover its ass head to toe on “known” risks, and lets a loss happen due to negligence, then it is on them. The response to this is lots of protocols and code requirements, and lots of additional bureaucracy to continuously check if those protocols and code requirements are being followed.
You lose some efficiency of scale with smaller schools, but they'll be cheaper individually.
Hell no. What made you think that? Kids like teachers that are likeable and hate those that are hateful.
I was a disruptive child and my parents were the opposite of people who didn’t give a shit. Both of them highly valued education and spent plenty of time with me. they just had to contend with a child who wasn’t well behaved at school and it was genetics more than anything they did. They spent thousands of dollars on therapists and medicines and it didn’t help that much. Luckily for me, puberty seemed to turn things around and I ended up doing well in high school and very well in college (at a good school). Now I’ve got two little trouble makers of my own and it’s pretty obvious to me where they got those genes from.
I agree that dealing with problematic kids is a pain in the ass for teachers and I do try to thank them when I see them, and I even agree that parenting is often the issue, but a lot of it is genetics and luck.
A good friend of mine at high school was very bright, kind of a troublemaker, diagnosed with ADHD, took prescription Ritalin, was a bit of a pain in the ass with his teachers, but had parents who cared and he ended up graduating and doing fine.
I don't know if they think their children just aren't capable intellectually or what.
There is a whole industry around youth sports that is designed to extract money from parents. That doesn't mean that the kids don't enjoy it though.
How does a parent prioritize their kid growing tall?
I’ve asked this question of some acquaintances that prioritize sports above all else. Their kids play different sports all year around and are on all these traveling teams. I’ve asked them if they seriously think their kids will be good enough to get a college scholarship or play pro sports (I’ve seen them, they won’t be). They just shrug. I have to presume this is how they were raised and so they are doing it to their own kids.
Because in order to even get a shot to play professionally, you have to play well in college, preferably at a notable school. In order to get a shot to play well in a notable college, you have to play well in high school. That means you have to make varsity, play on the team, be a starter. And that usually means you have to be ready to play when you get to high school. And the best way to do that is to play peewee, travel ball, etc.
You'll find out if the kid is coachable, if he can be made coachable, if he's got aptitude, etc.
Now I have a highly disruptive 2-year old that Preschool calls "behavioural issues" and wants psychologists involved. And I'm like "yes, we're willing to have those conversations", but secretly I think "He'll have the same journey as me - I will need to make sure he's sufficiently physically and intellectually stimulated for the next 20 years, and everything will turn out fine." Of course it's not fair to place that burden on others - his peers, or educators - and I will do as much as I can in extracurricular time, BUT, there's only so much my partner and I can do.
Note, I'm biased. My undergraduate degree was not in teaching but in physics. I did a masters programme in teaching to transition to becoming a teacher. I enjoyed teaching, but just ended up finding it boring teaching the same thing six times a day, so when an opportunity to do a new masters came along, I took it. I didn't leave because I got burnt out or hated it, I just wanted something a bit more challenging.
2) They are. The masters I did for teaching was a joke. I've seen high schoolers with better writing abilities than half my professors. And these are people with 'educational doctorates'. Also, this might be different at better universities, but at least in my state several are propped up by their online teaching masters (the state requires a masters) and they exist just to pump them out. If you don't get a 4.0 something is wrong. I've heard similar issues with the undergraduate programmes in the state.
3. Kids don't want to be at school. They want to be out doing kid things, which we are limiting more and more in school. They also don't want to necessarily sit and learn the stuff they're supposed to learn. It's a complex issue, but that's my take on it a lot.
4. Yep. This is, in my opinion, the number one issue facing American schools, and why private/charter (sometimes) do so much better. They can be picky about the students they take -- thus they only take those who are well behaved and who want to be there and have active parent involvement. Parent involvement is a huge predictor of school success. Until we fix that -- including the issues of poverty and not social safety net -- some schools won't improve. Kids need a safe place at home and at school if they're to truly learn and achieve what they can. Sadly, nobody talks about this issue, nor are any steps taken to change it or the culture around education. I'm from a rural area, there's people proud they dropped out and didn't get a degree and even more proud they didn't get a college one. It gets passed on.
5. Absolutely. It's incredibly difficult to teach 30+ kids at once, of various levels. Especially when they refuse to create differentiated classes. I had some classes that ran the gamut from kids who needed extra assistance and had learning disabilities to kids who would literally be in the running for valedictorian and had all accelerated classes in the subjects that had it. If I spend time on one subset of those kids, it immediately hurts the other. Now, this is a school-specific problem and lazy guidance counselors and a principal who just didn't give a shit about academically gifted students, but I had a cousin leave the school just this year because they don't care about academics because they're too worried about passing the weaker ones (not catching them up, but just making sure they can squeak by with the bare minimum). Not entirely the dehumanisation and alienation you mentioned, but I think it leads to it when the classes can't be catered towards them.
This is the one thing where I think more money could help -- get more teachers and get smaller class sizes. It'd also be nice I think to have a teacher go all four years with the students in high school, unless there's major issues, so the students get to truly know the teacher and feel like they can trust them. It could work in my state, except for science because each subject has its own certification as opposed to just one for 'math'.
I feel like a more trades-oriented approach with kids who don’t have the desire, motivation or aptitude for college would lead to more engagement and give those kids a better chance at success.
But, to answer the question more broadly, it's the 'equality' bit I think. I'm all for giving everyone equal opportunity, and the ability to move into accelerated pathways if you can prove you have the requisite knowledge to do so. But if you stick students with learning disabilities with accelerated students nobody is going to have a good time. It doesn't help either group and just harms them.
And, again, I say this as someone who didn't think California's math updates were all that terrible. Pushing kids to do stats as opposed to just the whole "everyone needs to aim towards calculus" attitude is a great thing and I stand behind that. But if we can differentiate classes, we can serve all groups of kids better and provide better outcomes for all. But the whole class needs to be differentiated; differentiation within a set of 30 kids is nigh impossible, especially when there's such a gap between abilities. For a personal story, the smartest kid I ever taught was in my last year teaching. He worked hard, if there was something he didn't understand he asked for more help and practice problems. The lowest kid I ever taught was in the same class. The kid was a freshman in high school and couldn't add single digit numbers without a calculator. There's no way that should ever be happening.
This was explicitly the operating philosophy of my middle school. It was terrible.
The concern is that they become a self-fulfilling prophecy. You get sorted into the lower grade, perhaps because of maturing more slowly in the early years, or a home environment non-conducive to study due to two working parents, or just economic disadvantages like having to live further away from the school and therefore spending time commuting that other kids are spending on study. (and in the US there's a correlation with race for the structural disadvantages because of more outright historical racism).
So students end up in a lower grade of class, don't get taught as complex versions of their subjects, and finish school with a lesser educational attainment, thereby setting the seeds for their next generation to be in the same place.
Even without seperated classes, this does happen to some level between schools.
An effective education is ultimately the student's responsibility. If we could somehow teach that at an early age, lot of these problems become irrelevant.
As a freshman I was placed in a geometry class in high school that included several seniors that obviously came to class high and some that spoke 0 English. I asked for more difficult problems in class, unaware that an advanced geometry class even existed at the school.
After taking a precalc class as a junior (which was after I took a precalc summer class at a local university), I was told I would be placed in AP calc AB.
I literally had to accost the teacher after class and say that was unacceptable. He said if I could convince the Calc teacher I should be in BC calc, I could take it. As luck would have it, the calc teacher was my former geometry teacher. I finished AP calc BC with an A and a 5/5 on the AP exam, but what if I hadn't been so lucky (knew the teacher) or so pissed off with my education up to that point that I had respected the precalc teacher's decision?
(1) My mom was a teacher there, so she knew what classes were offered better than I did, and was able to help me plan stuff early on without the counselor.
(2) The curriculum director used to teach beside my mom and got hired the same year (and they retired the same year even), and had known me my entire life. She often just went over the counselor's head to make sure my schedule lined up like I needed it to
(3) I had an uncle who worked over at the central administration for the school. He got sent lots of information about summer camps, etc, and passed them on both to my mom and the curriculum director to advocate for them.
All three of them are, sadly, retired now (though my mom keeps coming out of retirement because they can't find biology teachers) and there's not many at the school who advocate for the kids in the same way. The old principal (left at the end of the 2021 school year) was horrible too. I've heard the new one is better, and is slowly trying to re-rigourise the curriculum, but he's fighting against a lot of lazy teachers and our guidance office. It's a mess, but I truly hope he succeeds. It's almost made me want to go back to help push for that and for academically gifted kids, so they actually realise what's available.
My single mom worked three jobs to put me through private school and pay for my college. I grew up thinking that no college == bag groceries for the rest of your life.
How could anyone be proud of depriving themselves of the tools to succeed in life? It's like being proud of gouging out your own eyes and walking around blind.
Though lots of America is fundamentally based in anti-intellectualism. Anti-Intellectualism in American Life was an eye-opening read and helped explain a lot of what I saw around me in the rural Bible Belt.
From my experience teaching in multiple Western and non-Western countries, I believe that this factor outweighs all the others put together.
My father is a black American who never went to college. He doesn't understand the point of education. He wanted me to a be a movie director or singer or otherwise "famous". He didn't give a crap about school and let me do whatever I wanted when I stayed with him a couple weekends a month.
My mother, an Indian immigrant, sat me down every night and made me do my homework even though she worked three jobs. She paid for twelve years of private schooling. She told me every single day that my education was the only thing I would ever have that would let me survive in this world.
Thanks to her obsession with education, I completed college and never stopped educating myself. I now work as a front-end dev and make six figures. I'm currently preparing to apply for master's programs. I live a happy and comfortable life. I have some savings in the bank. I am constantly working to educate myself. I don't have vague fantasies about becoming "famous" or winning the lottery to support myself.
Education is truly the only guarantee for people of color to achieve a comfortable life in the US. I would never have understood this without my Indian mother's cultural drive towards education.
2. They are, and there is a useless but direct correlation to pay and degree attainment. Having more degrees will get you more money, but rarely has any correlation to the quality of teacher.
3. As in most industries where the customer isn't the payer compensation does not correlate to performance. The worst teachers make the same as the best, or more if they have the degrees.
4. Equality, no child left behind and related concepts dictate that the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Any efforts at exclusion are met with resistance, typically by unaffected / uninvolved parties.
5. The idea here is that consolidation of services will save money. The trend away from neighborhood schools to mega-schools / school complexes looks good from a burecratic view.
Counterpoint: teachers' pay is great, it's just backloaded in pension plans.
> 2. It seems that education degrees are seen as easier to achieve than others.
Yeah, but cost is the same and cost is what's important.
> 4. Many school problems are caused by disruptive children.
Bingo. Half the success of 4-year colleges is that it's the first time the bottom 50% of the students are filtered out.
Story time. I was an ESL teacher for 5 years in Asia and planned on coming home to the USA and getting my teacher's license in Math to teach at international schools. I am not currently a teacher, I'm a quant at a big bank.
Why didn't I end up in teaching? The licensing requirements in Minnesota are insane. Counselor's straight up told me I'd have to borrow ~$50k from the UMN for a MS in Curriculum and Instruction before I could teach.
The labor unions along with politicians have built a structure in which there is artificial scarcity of teachers. Not only is the profession filled with disrespect, but it's outrageously expensive and bureaucratic.
Lastly, the Economics of Education field is wild. Clearly there's value to basic reading/math/science education, but it's not clear at all whether teachers are schools matter than much (wealthy communities/parents matter a lot).
Edit: feel obligated to add that k12 education is financed and administrated at the local level, which means our experiences with this likely vary a lot. Mine are specific to trying to move back to the USA and become licensed in MN.
Yes, getting born with parents who care about you is definitely a smart life hack.
Admission is by lottery if there are more applicants than places, not by cherry-picking applicants. They hire teachers with subject-matter degrees and experience: they have some PhDs and a couple ABDs (all but dissertation). Half-jokingly they said they didn't look to hire people with teaching certificates, but wouldn't hold that against them. I had a master's degree in computer science and worked summers to get another master's.
The school was smaller (maybe 700 total students K-12; the class of 2022 graduated 26), which right there, I think, made for fewer behavior problems. There was a well-thought-out discipline policy which was enforced by the administration and backed up by the board and most parents. After all, parents had made a choice to not go to the regular district schools but enroll in this school instead.
I agree that the odds are much better for school success with smaller sizes, a focused curriculum (whether it's International Baccalaureate, Core Knowledge, STEM, arts, or whatever), highly qualified teachers, and supportive parents.
Filtering out kids who's parents aren't willing or able to complete the application process is the cherry-picking.
The admissions people take some time to represent the whole story or big picture to prospective parents, because the school is not for everybody. I don't think it's cherry-picking to encourage parents to find the best school for their children, even if it isn't yours.
The school accepted applications from parents who had had unsatisfactory experiences at former schools, who were willing to go through the extra steps to try to get better outcomes for their students. The school had its share of free-and-reduced-lunch students and students with individual education plans and such.
I heard parents give heartfelt thanks to everyone at the school who had helped their child overcome what other schools termed learning disabilities. Is it the opposite of cherry-picking to accept a student other schools have, in effect, given up on? I believe the small size of the school and individualized attention helped many students in similar situations.
Why? Because "cherry-picking" is bad and the best things for children are good?
It's, of course, exactly cherry-picking to find the children with the most interested and motivated parents, then filter them down to the ones that you like best. Fuck the kids with bad or no parents.
This isn't a moral condemnation of you, it's just the fact-based explanation for why schools that you have to apply to produce better academic outcomes than default public schooling. If those public schools could just drop the cohort of students whose parents couldn't be arsed to apply to a special school, their quality would also go up.
There is bias in everything, but at least they aren't adding more than needs there needs to be.
At some point, some school is going to have to take the kids who don’t bother applying, since we can’t put 100% of schools behind an application and preserve its benefits, and we should not be surprised that such schools do worse, if the ones who do apply happen to be better.
This is no longer true in most places, and was never a good enough reason to justify paying starting teachers poverty wages.
New York State, which I think most will agree is a state with a strong teachers' union and all that goes with it, has been phasing out defined-benefit pension plans over the past few decades. My mother-in-law, who retired about 10 years ago, was among the last wave to get the "Tier I" full-salary pensions; if you become a teacher in NYS now, you get a much less generous package (I don't know offhand whether it's still defined-benefit, just less, or if they've switched to defined-contribution plans now).
Counter-points to that:
You still have to pay the bills before retirement.
And this even assumes they get a good pensions, because a lot of states don't bother funding their public employee pensions properly (using current-year tax income for splashy announcements instead, kicking the liability down the road for the next politician):
* https://vtdigger.org/2021/01/17/painful-cuts-proposed-in-pen...
In various Canadian provinces teachers get decent salaries and good pensions: why can't US states do the same?
You'll have to learn to live on a low salary for the first 5-10 years of your career. But pensions are paid based on your terminal salary, not your average salary. For elementary school teachers in my district the terminal salary was in excess of $100k as of 2017.
While that may be true, it's important to note that the pension is only salary (and usually only 80% of your terminal salary) and not benefits.
So you'd spend a significant part of that money on getting health insurance.
Most teachers who have earned full pensions wait to retire until 67 anyway so they can get Medicare (and not Social Security, because they don't qualify for it since they have their pension unless they worked another job as well).
My aunt did exactly above, and felt it was a moral duty to let new younger teachers have the spot (nevermind it meant that she was going to draw a pension from the system for more years than she'd actually worked).
Plenty of other teachers feel the same way, though obviously not all.
But basically the only reason we can afford to live in the Silicon Valley is because I'm an engineer with a decent salary. A lot of her paycheck went right back into her classroom, and with the hours she worked, she was basically make $3/hr, despite getting some of the highest teacher pay in the country.
And all of her coworkers were in the same boat -- almost every one of them, even the senior teachers, were married to engineers. The few that weren't either had family money or at least had parents who bought them a condo or house. Or a good friend. We let one of her young teacher friends live with us for a couple years until she managed to save up enough for a down payment on a small condo, and then got married and got a second job.
It is basically impossible to be a teacher in Silicon Valley without a highly paid spouse or multiple side hustles.
The existence of California -- and San Francisco, in particular -- makes discussions like this one difficult, because yes, sure, San Francisco is too weird to exist and is therefore basically irrelevant in national policy discussions.
I live in Rhode Island. East Coast. An hour from Boston. Expensive real estate, high-COL (top 10 or 15, depending on which numbers you trust), etc, etc -- and yet, we are just absolutely nothing at all like California, which is its own very weird outlier that has nothing to do with the experiences of the almost 300 million Americans who aren't Californians.
Not SF, but more people live in LA County than in the ten least popular states. If only we could ignore them and their 20 senators as completely irrelevant when it came to national policy discussions...
(We can't, and we don't.)
[0] I would tell California that they need to permit about 10x as much housing if they want any more federal help. The U.S. Government should not take on the role of dealing with the consequences of such an obvious self-own. "Our teachers can't find places to live and also it's illegal to build apartments on practically every single lot in the state -- what should we do?" is a question that answers itself.
If you want to be in the Union, then one thing you have to do is allow internal migration, and by that I mean actually allow it, which means you have to allow newcomers to build housing. If you're not allowing newcomers to build housing, then you are not actually in any real sense fulfilling your obligations to the rest of the country.
That's a valid point, but choices need to be made. Go to the teachers union and ask if they'd be willing to drop future pensions (and cap current ones to the benefits payed in so far) in exchange for a higher salary (based on the amount saved by not longer having pensions). My guess would be that they wouldn't even be willing to discuss it.
But actually, you're the only commenter I've so far seen in the thread who claims that their pensions are enough to make up for their salaries. Personally I think both salaries and pensions for (most) teachers should increase, in most countries including the US, and I have no problem with teachers' unions not being willing to have a discuss boxed into your opinion that they already get as much as they deserve.
That is not true, given that I was replying to you, and you were replying to the person that said _this_.
> Counterpoint: teachers' pay is great, it's just backloaded in pension plans.
That being said, in some places the teachers make good money when you include their pension; in other places they do not. It's not consistent across the country.
> You're talking as if "choices need to be made" doesn't extend to the question of whether or not they get enough tax dollars total
That was not my intent. My intent was to indicate...
If you think that teachers make enough when you include their pension, you can't complain that their pension causes a hardship early in their career; because the choice of a pension is likely not something they'd be willing to give up". If you think the pension causes a hardship earlier in the career and that that needs to be changed, then either 1) You do _not_ believe teachers make enough including their pensions, OR 2) You think pensions should be done away with (which I doubt will be supported by the teachers/union).
a) Oops! Not sure why I thought that diognesofsinope's comment and your comment were written by the same person, my bad.
b) You've either made the same mistake I did or you've excellently satirised my mistake, as you were replying not to me but to somebody else :P
So fair enough, sorry I thought your comment that I replied to was the owner of the original belief that salaries + pensions = enough currently, and then expanding on that belief.
If anyone wants in on it, IT at a large public sector university.
The public sector employees getting generous retirement packages are not the enemy. They are not the reason the rest of us are getting pissed on and told it's raining. That's the very wealthy and the politicians they've bought.
No they're not. We just want qualified people teaching our children. There's a reason why Minnesota has some great schools.
I received my teaching license in Wisconsin and transferred to Minnesota by doing little more than passing the licensure exam. I did not have an MS at that time or when I started teaching in the Minneapolis suburbs.
I believe you were somewhat misled.
Grad school at the UMN is ~$10k a semester (https://onestop.umn.edu/finances/costs/tuition). Would have been ~30 years old, $40k in debt as a beginning teacher in MN. Amazingly, none of that includes actual experience teaching lol.
The teachers union has been waging a war against future teachers to benefit current teachers for 30 years and this is what that looks like after 30 years.
Similar to housing and zoning, education is a government racket.
this statement is presented as The Truth, do you have some information that backs this up?
It's absurd to think someone needs to take a $1k 'Philosophy of Mathematics' class to teach 10th grade geometry.
Considering that the primary complaint 10th grade math students have about math is often "How is this relevant to me and my life?", wouldn't studying the philosophy of mathematics help a teacher in addressing this concern?
Yet another counter counterpoint - there are still companies and government jobs with defined pension plans that pay far more than teachers. Even without those, there are still many, many jobs requiring a comparative amount of education, far fewer hours worked, and pay more even once you subtract maximizing 401k contributions yearly (let alone considering the added costs of buying school supplies).
I feel like most people haven't been in an actual ~5th grade classroom in a long time -- literally half of it is playing games/trying to have fun.
And Youtube, good god has the educational content on Youtube evolved in the last decade.
The rest of their day 8:30 AM - 3:30 PM is composed of maths, language, science, history, and technology education all done on paper or at purpose-designated computers. Next year they will receive their own devices.
The playing with blocks and Lincoln logs ended in kindergarten, with the introduction of spelling test and arithmetic quizzes in first grade, so I’m not sure if I’d characterize the work my childrens’ teachers do as “literally half of it is playing games/trying to have fun” or that “[h]alf the reason to be a teacher is because half the job is having fun.”
Seems like it is hard work, with both practical instruction directed toward 20-30 children with varying levels of discipline, interest, and abilities, and management of just as many if not more parents with similarly varying levels of discipline, interest, and abilities.
This is a public school in one of the largest state systems in the country (United States) so perhaps your experience is informed by something more niche.
It’s just like thinking enjoying having a pet means you’d love working with dozens of dogs all day. If you’re lucky to have well behaved dogs, it’s okay. But you’re most likely going to have some barking all day, one’s going to vomit, some are going to fight, and any time anything happens the owners completely blame you and will threaten you in every way they can imagine.
Teaching is work. I have the feeling you haven't been in a 5th grade classroom in a long time. Or any grade. People get into teaching because they want to help others. Especially if they get into special education.
You know, having known and being related to multiple teachers, I've not heard any of them express it as -fun-. Meaningful, important, challenging, yes, but not 'fun'. The two college professors I know have expressed it a such, but that's it. Of the teachers I had, I could see some of the advanced placement ('gifted') teachers viewing it as fun, because we were generally well behaved and smaller class sizes, but even there a common through line was taking advantage of the class' temperament and offloading the curriculum back onto us (i.e., "pick a topic in (X) to teach to everyone").
There is a tradeoff in lesson planning; there are resources around the proscribed curriculum (i.e., teach to the book), but that is decidedly not fun or interesting and the kids -will- misbehave more; the alternative for most classes (the advanced placement as mentioned above notwithstanding) is to prep something more interesting, but that requires using more time outside the classroom for 'work'.
Outside of the workday, which runs from 7-3:30 or so (and sometimes both before and after, if there are faculty meetings and things, or if they recruit from the teaching pool to help with kid drop off/pick up), there is grading, so it is not uncommon for a teacher's workday to run close to 12 hours.
You do, as you say, get summers off, but again, nearly all the teachers I know use that time to look for summer jobs, because the pay is so poor. Sometimes it's summer school or just independent tutoring, sometimes it's service industry work; nothing quite like running into your students from the prior year while handing their mom their McDonald's from the drive through. The only teacher I know who didn't (recently retired) do that had inherited their house, so had no rent/house payment to make, and -could- live, frugally, on a teachers' salary.
25% of teachers in Minnesota leave the profession within three years [1] so they see no pension. This sort of weed out is common in a lot of professions and it's probably for the best, but weed out careers often combine high starting pay to attract a large pool of candidates. Public sector jobs exchange low pay for a pension and stability. Teaching doesn't offer the latter.
1. https://www.educationworld.com/a_news/state-report-reveals-o...
Even if you don’t contribute to the pension with cash, capital is still allocated on your behalf into the fund that could have been paid to you directly.
For taxpayer funded pensions, it is more like future taxpayers’ capital is allocated on your behalf.
Meaning, the actuary will calculate the government needs to set aside $2 today, the government leaders will say change that to $1 so the taxes are low today, and will end up actually contributing $0.50 because some of the funds were needed to make up for yesterday’s shortfall.
Nonsense. Even the most basic look at the numbers shows you this is absolutely false.
Let's take a rich liberal state first. MA. Average teacher salary: $60k. Average pension $43k. Teachers contribute 9.78% of their salary in order to get this pension! The state contributes 18.17% This is not all that different from a 401k.
You're confusing teachers with police officers, where the average pension is twice as high.
> Why didn't I end up in teaching? The licensing requirements in Minnesota are insane. Counselor's straight up told me I'd have to borrow ~$50k from the UMN for a MS in Curriculum and Instruction before I could teach.
Then you got terrible advice.
Because the licensing requirements in Minnesota are very lax: https://mn.gov/pelsb/aspiring-educators/portfolio/
You take two tests and fill out some forms. You don't even need a Master's in education.
They should really tighten that up. btw, you can definitely do that MS for <$20k online.
In our district, once you qualify for a pension you get 2% of your terminal salary per year you work. If you work for 40 years, you will be paid 80% of your last year's salary.
I quoted you the actual statistics for MA. https://www.teacherpensions.org/state/massachusetts
Teachers pay into the system, quite substantially, at rates that are similar to what you would pay for a 401k. And their average pensions are quite low.
This is nothing like a 401k.
Pensions are cheap. I have a much better pension plan than the teachers in my state and the long term cost is about 16% of payroll - 8% from my employer and 8% from me. Hardly unreasonable cost, and yet I'll be able to comfortably retire around 55 and never worry about money again. That's not insignificant but it's not what is causing public schools to be underfunded.
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/02/the-ex...
"...men continued to make up most of the high-school teaching force until the late 1970s"
Humans are still largely primal and male presence tends to instill respect and behavior changes in younger people; I suspect the absence of it has not helped the current situation in many schools.
Well many students hated school, it is what it is. If you get beat up on a daily basis or are bored out of your mind (because let's face it, most of the material IS boring) I don't see why you should feel obligated to thank your teachers. It's not their fault but they also don't really deserve a thank you. Yes most teacher do what they can but it doesn't change the fact so many students are generally unhappy in school.
I'm not sure where you're from, but every single teacher I have known, both as a student, and as an adult, has been incredibly motivated to teach.
Exceptional teachers help kids survive, not thrive.
Here is the problem. Teachers in America compare themselves to professionals, but their test scores are below the average for college educated people generally: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2017/.... Now 40% of college graduates don’t even get a job that requires a college degree. Disproportionately, those are people with lower aptitude scores. Teachers as a group are right on the borderline above those folks.
Teacher salaries are not low compared to jobs typically held by people with similar test scores—especially when you account for degree-required jobs that pay a premium for mathematical aptitude (accounting, engineering), or dealing with blood and body parts (nursing).
You don't need to be a genious to teach. You need to have good social skills with kids, care about doing a good job, and a mastery of the subject matter (which not very demanding for even average-intelligence adults, at least until the latter part of high school).
You left out "willing to do whatever it takes for THAT kid, regardless of what the textbooks or principal or union says."
I'm not a betting man, but I'd feel comfortable wagering that you are a STEM grad with solid SAT scores.
That’s a bit more accurate than your comment.
It's not at all the case that teaching isn't competitive with other degree-requiring white-collar professions; depending on where you are in the CS/IT food chain, it's quite competitive with tech.
Defined-benefit pensions have become so alien to private market jobs that it's easy to overlook how valuable they are, or to forget that a lot of people are very happy to work towards a strong retirement.
IT in my area pays anyone with a pulse and basic computer skills $40k. A rookie developer from our land grant university can easily start at $60K with no experience. And that same developer can earn $100k with two years of good experience. Show me a 3rd year teacher pulling in $100k in my school district. No such unicorn exists.
The city doesn't have a DB pension, just a 403k.
Granted, the newbie teacher gets 1.5 months off in the summer, compared to 2 weeks PTO for the developer.
After 10 years, even assuming the teacher gets a Masters, the pay differential is huge.
How about you look at the number of teachers employed by OPS vs DC West? They have one elementary school, one middle school, and one high school in that district vs OPS serving an area encompassing hundreds of thousands of residents.
You were excited about 100k/year in California? Please tell me that's not the Bay area where that still leaves them unable to purchase a home anywhere near the area.
You also understand extracurriculars are a lot of extra time and work for a bit of extra pay, right? One of the biggest complaints I've heard is that teachers are being forced into running extracurriculars because they already work way too many hours for the pay and for any kind of work/life balance.
I don't know what "excited" means. By national standards, I've been extraordinarily lucky; a $100k/yr comp package wouldn't excite me right now. But I can compare what teachers make to what other white collar professionals make, and I understand how to account for the rest of the compensation package --- a defined-benefit pension in many major districts (actually, a defined-benefit pension would light me up right now) and an enormous allotment of vacation days.
Speaking only to my local school district, which breaks comp out, extracurriculars are not a "bit" of extra money; it's as much as a 20% pay boost. My real point though is simply that the base salary is where most teacher comp packages start, and there's other things that go into it.
I'm not saying "teacher" is the best deal in the whole economy, but in major metro school districts, it's not a bad deal.
And, just to be ultra clear: obviously there are a lot of school districts, especially rural districts, where this isn't the case at all.
But even if education major SAT scores are lower on average, it it seems like backwards thinking when talking about pay. The point isn't that all current individual teachers deserve to be paid more; it's that teaching as a profession should pay more to attract talented people who otherwise pursue more lucrative fields, just like any other profession. If you paid doctors and engineers low wages, you'd probably fail to attract some top talent as well. But that doesn't then become a justification for those low wages since the low wages caused the issue in the first place.
It assumes that education majors have similar SAT scores to other majors in a given school. That’s an assumption, sure, but I think a pretty reasonable one.
That said: practically every college student knows that the Education majors are the dumbest people on campus.
I agree. Some of the nicest, kindest and best people I've ever met aren't very bright, and some of the nastiest, stab-you-in-the-back jerks are quite intelligent.
That's not to say the converse isn't true for many folks, but "intelligence" isn't a proxy for the quality of a human, IMHO.
So the problem I have with this argument is that it implies that virtually all of the essential skills (as I see it) that are required to be a good teacher shouldn't be compensated. Instead, teachers should be compensated for the skills that make them a good engineer or historian.
Some disruptive children have undiagnosed learning disabilities. Having more money for screening and special education can help get them the support they need.
Class sizes are also going to matter. Many disruptive children are just seeking attention. With smaller classes teachers can spend more time with each student, which will help with behavior management.
I don’t know what the right level of investment here is, but from speaking with friends who are teachers it sure seems like classes are too big and special Ed is stretched incredibly thin.
I was disruptive. I had ADHD. Parents did a fantastic job being present and caring but strict. My brothers and I were in multiple sports leagues.
Couple that with high licensing requirements and bad working conditions, neither of which are secret, and of course the best and brightest do not consider it a real option.
The fact is most people are average. We freak ourselves out about these very few super teachers or super devs but most are not these people and they still need jobs and perform valid functions.
Not every kid should be going to high school. They and/or their families are not capable of supporting them through it. We need public vocational and alternative high schools.
The majority of teachers make a median US wage fairly early into their career and plenty make a multiple of it later on, on top of great benefits. Their job is no more challenging than nearly all other professions. “But they have to”… yes, everyone else has shit they have to deal with. The fact that the Waltons, crypto lottery winners, etc. exist is a separate problem that doesn’t mean teachers are underpaid.
Education majors are easier.The sky is blue. If we even remotely believe in a meritocracy (liberals often really don’t when you dig into their beliefs, granted) starting teachers should not make as much as a starting EE major. Nobody in their right mind would or should pursue an engineering career if teaching paid equivalently.
Being able to fire your students is greatest advantage that private schools have over public ones.
Math teachers could be using Jupyter notebooks and decent plots. Instead they are using their poor drawing skills.
Everyone should do what 3b1b is doing.
They could be using cool physics simulations, but instead everything are lame poorly drawn arrows.
Technology that exists for education often has developer art level UX and bad usability.
7. Art used in school material is cringy as fuck. What artists think kids like and what kids actually like has nothing to do with each other.
8. There could be a github or reddit of class material that teachers could use, saving teachers' time and improving the learning experience.
9. People in the department of education are fucking bozos and should all be fired. Their job is to neglect education so that politicians can keep using better education as vote bait.
They absolutely are. I taught math as a university lecturer while I was finishing my PhD. I taught one Algebra course and one Geometry course to education majors. These were both literally just high school math courses and the people I taught were mostly not able to do the work. Yes, literally high school math and over half flunked the courses outright. That is just pathetic. I was told to pass 85% of the class, so most got curved right into a classroom anyway, against my wishes. This is what teaches your kids. I can also anecdotally report that they were clearly the dumbest people I ever ran into teaching. Bad English, can't think in a straight line, and ready to argue at the first sign that you might enforce standards and fail their pitiful "work". They were perfect for a bureaucratic job that rewards idiots.
Ironically, given the social politics implied by the author, a significant amount of administration bloat is specifically tied to DEI.
2. Well, they are. A teaching certification used to only require two years of higher learning compared to typical 4 for other things. That said, most teachers are actually more highly educated than the average person because schools use educational attainment as direct basis for pay. My mother has a Master’s and is shy only a few hours and a dissertation from being a Ph.D. This was relatively common, especially for special ed teachers or those who focus on a specific subject like Math or English.
3. Partly because school in the US is boring and designed to grind out individuality in favor of making good industrial cogs. We no longer have an economy that rewards industrial cogs so students resent their school experience in adulthood as they discover how illy prepared they are for the world. That and parents/social fabric encourages and allows anti-social behavior and viewpoints.
4. Yes, and parents not giving a shit isn’t even a cause, it’s a symptom of larger and more intractable social and cultural problems in parts of America. Fixing this is nearly impossible because those most motivated to fix it are even more heavily motivated to ignore significant amounts of critical data about the causal factors.
5. Yes. Scaling is hard, and we’ve roughly tripled the population since we built the institutionalization of education in the US. It’s obvious a breakpoint exists somewhere and we failed to pivot.
How exactly do you mean this?
The U.S. spent $90.5 billion for "Elementary, Secondary, and Vocational Education" in 2021* (a subset of "Education, Training, Employment, and Social Services"), which is 1.3% of $6.82 trillion in total 2021 government expenditures. Compare to $696.5B for Medicare, $754.8B for National Defense, etc.
If anything, this illustrates how relatively unimportant a base level of education is in the U.S.
* https://datalab.usaspending.gov/americas-finance-guide/spend...
My state of Washingon spent $17.5 billion on schooling this year, on top of that federal funding.
That looks like ~28% of the state budget, and per-student spending appears to very high (the 4th highest in the U.S.). Washington is spending 1.5X per student as compared to California, and is apparently not seeing commensurate improvements. I wonder if there are folks working on debugging the apparent inefficiencies of state education systems.
https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66
Per the US Department of Education[0], the US spends 34% more per student than the OECD average. At the post-secondary level, the US spends double the OECD average.
[0] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp...
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57172
For example, each school in my county has at least one person dedicated to managing iPads and tech equipment. This isn’t the networking and server support or even desktop support, that’s done centrally. This is just a human who hands them out, collects them, and processes warranty claims. The person knows nothing about the equipment and is basically just an asset manager.
That’s one of many examples of people who don’t perform much value add and take resources from higher priorities. Why not hire a dedicated librarian who also manages devices but can help with organizing information, research, etc.
You might argue that managing inventory should be automated but... that's just not how systems involving lots of random people work. The reason it's a full-time job to keep track of iPads and laptops is because the people using those things are kids and distracted parents. Stuff gets lost, power adapters get yanked and broken, etc. A parent stuffs an iPad in a random bin in the teacher's classroom. They think they "returned" it, but no one knows it's in there. Someone has to do actual communication and legwork to sort all that out. It's a real job.
My point is that hiring an iPad manager as a 100% human is a bad idea. I suggested hiring an additional librarian, not adding extra work to the existing librarian.
The librarians in my city manage computers in the library and manage short term loaners of tablets and laptops.
I work with librarians who have masters and phd and I don’t work in education. It’s an interesting job.
I think I have enough of an understanding that it’s fair that a librarian could manage the iPad distribution for a school. It’s busy two times of the year and other times they could do more productive tasks.
The current iPad wrangler is there all year and does nothing beyond hand out and collect iPads and coordinate the repairs (<5%/year).
A difference in learning format that can be beneficial to some. It is helpful just to introduce children to technology as well. And for some it may spark interests that paper does not.
If you take any school budget, and strip away everything that is not an actual classroom teacher, you will find that ~1/3 or less goes to "frontline" teaching costs.
Another 1/3 goes to special ed and all that is attendant with that. I mean, my district BOUGHT a car and hired a FULLTIME driver for one student who had to be taken to special programs. You have 1:1 class aids for many kids. Special ed is < 10% of kids, and even then the huge costs add up for the 1%. This is a massively subscale operation where every school is legally obligated to deliver services.
Then you have the last 1/3 which is everything else. Food, facilities, sports, admin, transportation, etc. Admin is actually a leaner slice than most unless you are getting into really small schools where you have a principal on top of the teachers and that adds significant salary. In bigger schools this fades away with scale.
Basically most of her time is spent dealing with the one kid. Or the aftermath. Not fun calling parents telling them that Susan is bleeding from a thrown chair. Of John was assaulted in the bathroom.
Lots of time spent chasing kid when he runs away.
Never mind her own wounds. These are kindergartners.
This year She’s currently has 2 full time aids for basically 2 kids. She only got the aids because she threatened to quit on the spot.
She deals with other 22 kids.
Pay is crap.
A lot of time and talk gets spent about equity between poor and rich kids, or white and black kids, but you rarely see talk of normalizing the spending differential between special and gen pop.
As I said elsewhere, I defy anyone to claim that Finland doesn't care about kids' special needs. They have the best education in the world. What percent do they spend on it?
because it's hard to get, poopy. Even for the US.
I can find their total spending & their general policies on special ed (which I did share), but not that. On the other hand, we do have some Finnish people on HN, so maybe they know.
> If Finland is really significant to this debate
If? They have what's generally considered the best education in the world.
I'm guessing "special ed" costs have increased the most. Why is that?
For example, all the classroom aids are typically assigned as teaching costs. But the reality is that they are assigned to individual students with IEPs (individual education plans), ergo, they should be categorized as special ed.
Same thing in pulling out transportation. Or tuition to other districts. Admin dealing with special ed grants and recordkeeping. It goes on and on...
The absolute dollar amount does matter, and it has nothing to do with being assholes or not. There are different ways to meet children's needs and spending an infinite amount of money is just not sustainable.
On the other hand, as a way to provide social services to underprivileged children they are pretty decent. But that's not what they're advertised as (school isn't known as an acronym for Social Care and Health Out Of a Location), and people end up pissed.
In Finland and Singapore (two countries with education systems among the top in the world):
1) What's the percentage of education spending that goes to special ed?
Looking at Finland, we can find their total spending:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/538122/general-governmen...
and we can find ample evidence that they care just as much about special needs kids as the US does, if not more:
https://www.heischools.com/blog/finlands-approach-to-special...
What I'm having a harder time finding is: what percent of the education budget goes to special ed?
This in turn leads to building a society in which the disabled are discarded as an inconvenience to society, rather than as people with equal rights to public accommodation.
If I give Johnny, Jimmy, and Karen an equal investment of $20 and 20 hours of labor each for their education, I haven't "discarded" Karen, even if she needs more money and more time to get the same equality of outcome. In the same vein, I don't at all want to "discard" special ed children, I just want any public funds provided to the other children to be a nearly equal monetary investment.
>That’s why we have laws like the ADA
The period after passing of the ADA was associated with sharp drops in employment inclusion of the disabled [0]. The ADA may have actually been one of the biggest drivers of the discarding of the disabled. Not only that, the ADA encouraged racketeering against business owners for disingenuous accommodation complaints (someone off the street runs up, asked to use your bathroom, you allow the public to use it just this once and bam ADA complaint as they were secretly working for a lawyer checking for the "right" kind of grab bar) where businesses sometimes end up closing accommodations to the public. Personally I am heavily against the ADA as I believe eliminating these "protections" helps protect the disabled's inclusion within society.
[0] https://economics.mit.edu/files/17
An equal $4000/student/year is not enough to hire anyone for a special needs student, who 1) won’t be able to benefit from the economy of scale in a normal classroom and 2) has needs that require a larger portion of a person’s time to attend to.
You need many multiple times the investment to accommodate kids with special needs because they have special needs.
>An equal $4000/student/year
You're off by almost 4x the average if you live in the US. For reference, for the $~16k spent per year, I was able to (privately) hire someone to take care of my infant over 40 hours a week (and all 12 months), an infant that needed around the clock care and couldn't be counted on to go unwatched for even a few seconds and who constantly irritated others with utterly mind-shattering screaming colic.
Let's say the state spends $15K per student with no disabilities. The state says to the parent, "OK, we'll give you $25K to take care of your kid."
The parents grumble, but they find a school that caters to those kids and will take that voucher. Would it be much worse than they're getting now? I doubt it. If it is, the state can subsidize that school, and probably still end up spending less than they are now.
Now it's a question of money, as it should be for a state-wide program. Would the state say "we'll give you $150K to take care of your kid?" Probably not. Really extreme cases that need that much money could be handled by other public & private organizations, but the state gains a measure of reasonableness for the school budget.
I disagree with the rest. Universal schooling is an important part of a health society. It is up to the government to provide adequate funding for its obligations. Systematically discriminating to ease budget constraints is not an ethical solution.
It’s easy to say X is expensive or Y takes up Z part of the budget. We saw a lot of that with the whole defund the police movement. But no one asks what should X cost? Maybe it’s already at the required level, or even less, despite it being such a large percentage of the budget?
But the reality is it a) very expensive and b) very disruptive. As some siblings mention, you will often have a class with 3-4 adults, only one of which is a teacher. And then several students who (through no fault of their own) can barely hold it together. For the 90% of kids in class, this is not helpful. And distributing it amongst many classes vs a more centralized special ed delivery system compounds the cost.
We have aggressively used the school system as a distribution point of social services. Again, this seems logical. But this takes focus away from what the main intent is for the school system.
There are pros and cons to this approach. I don't exactly know the answer, but instead of blaming administrators or teachers, we should be looking at what else we are asking schools to do besides educate. I know personally that the principals and superintendents spent less than 20% of their time thinking about how to make education better for the 90%.
Instead, all students would be better served (and served more efficiently) if schools would admit that people learn at different rates, and segregated the children based on that. The disruptive special ed kids, who are often years behind, should have very small classes with other kids of the same level and lots of attention from teachers. Conversely, the kids who are good at math or reading should be put in accelerated classes.
Unfortunately, this kind of separation makes parents unhappy: they want their kids to all be in the "super special" classes despite the fact that on average, their kids are average. Parents are the ones who vote for school board, so school boards are unlikely to do anything that makes parents unhappy.
Conversely, the kids who do need tons of resources are usually kids with severe mental or developmental disabilities. These kids usually have a 1:1 aide telling them what to do and trying to help them either understand the lesson or work through a totally different lesson (which also must be a humiliating experience - I would never want that for my child). I have seen both of these cases in public schools. These kids would certainly be better served by having a teacher who can pay attention to their needs instead of a teacher who can't and an aide who tries to keep up.
I saw the corrupt administrators in certain schools effectively diverting funds for things like special education by hiring their friends for the well-paid jobs like special ed and resource specialist and then calling a substitute (me) to actually do the job.
And that isn't saying this always happens (I imagine the smaller suburban schools with people involved would have less of this). But the existence of these special programs present a great opportunity for graft and so there's incentive to avoid making special education at all efficient.
To be fair the author was fairly balanced and presented the arguments against, such as that they tend to come from wealthier families that can provide that support, that they will be fine on their own without it whereas the bottom 1% need the support, and so on.
But it was an interesting thought experiment none the less. What would our society look like if we spent as much on the top 1% of students as the bottom? Or do we already via college education?
Spending for gifted children means putting other kids even higher up the pecking order than their own average kid. Who wants to spend a bunch of money to watch their kid get left further behind the front of the pack?
Both are total grifts. I'd rather that money went to teachers.
This is under-appreciated. I don’t know about other 1990s kids, but a lot of my teachers growing up pushed a “question authority” attitude. Like, painting the Tinker anti-Vietnam War protestors in a positive light, etc. “Follow social norms without questioning them” definitely wasn’t a thing we were taught. Is it really surprising then that you ended up with a generation who thinks Joe Rogen is a smart guy they should listen to?
But that guy was awesome, fun, and super clever. His lowest score was an A-, and he had a great character. I'm sure he had to work ten times harder than I ever did just to get into that position, but I never heard him complain. Personally, I think keeping a mind as great as his in some sort of hedonic trance instead of letting him learn and contribute would have been a great loss, and possibly quite cruel.
What do countries with education systems that are superior to the US in almost every metric do with these kids? We need to look at the best way to handle it, not just how much we care in the abstract.
Did the University pay for that? Or did that student / his family carry pretty much all those costs, except maybe the campus being built to ADA requirements? If a parent wants to spend 10x on their kid verse the 'average' kid I have no problem with that at all.
Gifted children fall under the banner of special education as well. They also require resources average students don't.
Meanwhile I saw nearly daily the math teacher spend 20 minutes trying to console the girl in the previous period who would beat the chair I was going to sit in senseless.
Personally I would have been much happier in 'gen pop' anyways and then there would have been even easier bullshit tests while I spent my public school time reading college CS and chemistry books.
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>You were in "gen pop". Honors classes are just that, honors classes. Gifted classes are another thing altogether.
My school was a country school, we didn't have anything beyond 'honors' classes. If you want to call yourself gifted and the people in my country school's honor class not, that's fine, I don't think we were particularly gifted. In my experience the student:teacher ratio were significantly tighter in these classes. I realize some people only consider 'gifted' as the very most challenging class in a large school system (not including 'honors' even if that is the highest available in the school) whereas others may call the gifted classes anything more challenging than the 'normal' core (I call gen-pop) curriculum.
>If you agree with the guy I responded to, in that you wouldn't mind removing the mentally challenged from the school system entirely, boy, that's not a good look for you.
I would think someone so eager to call themselves 'gifted' and the people they are speaking with 'not' would understand this is what's called a straw-man. I'm only asking for the gen-pop kids to be given roughly equal financial per-capita investment as special-ed.
>ifted classes are like 5 to 10 students.
Lower ratios to the extent you spend significantly disproportionately more than the average student are exactly the kind of special treatment I'm against when using public funds. If you want a private school for that where the student or their family pays for it, have at it.
If you agree with the guy I responded to, in that you wouldn't mind removing the mentally challenged from the school system entirely, boy, that's not a good look for you.
Because the difference between the average student to those with severe learning disabilities is the same as the difference between truly gifted students and even the honors students. And here's how you can tell the difference. Honors classes are always a full class. I've not been in a single honors class that wasn't the average class size. Gifted classes are like 5 to 10 students. I personally knew every other gifted student in my high school. Grades 9 - 12, knew them all. There were not that many, roughly 30 any given year. Across all four grades.
If by industrial cog, you mean someone who's suited for work in manufacturing, the US certainly isn't producing those at even the level it's reduced manufacturing base needs. It's hard to say what the exact aim of the US education system is though it does produce some amount of people sort-of competent for the jobs that are out. It's one of X many bureaucracy/industries that both produce stuff, that once produced stuff quite efficiently but become more and more characterized by an interlocked combination of administrators/pseudo-entrepreneurs who use their connections and framework of capital investment to soak a large portion of the funds going into the industry. I mean, aside from education, you have health care, the police/judicial/prison complex, the construction industry (note recent mention of $4 billion planning in the creation of high speed rail) and etc. You could say the special product of the US education system is people appropriate to be either petty bureaucrat such as social workers or people appropriate to be client of the petty bureaucrats. But of course, the education still does, to some extent, teach people ordinary skills for more ordinary jobs but in fashion abusive to both teachers and children and profitably to those in the rackets.
(That's not to say DEI is necessarily benign or useful; the jury is still out for me.)
Incorrect: it depends on the state, the subject, and the grade level. For secondary education of a core subject, in Michigan, for example, I had to take all of the classes for a normal 4-year degree in the subject, plus taking the equivalent of two years of education classes. Taking 18-20 credit hours per semester, it took me five years to graduate. So the requirements can actually be much more difficult than a normal degree.
When I taught Title I, there was an additional requirement that you had to be "highly qualified". That typically meant a 4-year degree out equivalent experience, no matter the subject or grade level.
Many teachers have a master's not due to pay, as you claim, but because states essentially mandate it. In Michigan you're required to get continuing education credits. I believe the requirement drops off once you have a master's. So it doesn't make a lot of sense not to get one.
They exist. What are you going to do with their children? Teachers are the people who have to answer that question.
Is this true? It seems like teachers in the US [0] make the 7th highest in the world on average. Of course the US is big and has lots of diversity so there may be pockets that aren’t paid more. But I think they are paid more than other countries.
I think the issue isn’t pay as they are paid more than the US median and mean for annual salary (since they aren’t paid for their two summer months off). And they have more vacation days than any other profession with their 40-60 days of leave.
It’s an important profession, but it’s pretty well paid and stable.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/teacher-salaries-by-country-...
There are over 8 million people employed in primary and secondary education, which is about 5% of the workforce. Public spending on primary and secondary education is 3.2% of GDP and private spending is 0.3%. By the latest numbers, that's about $800 billion/year. If we assume that 2/3 of the costs are personnel and 1/3 are facilities and other expenses, that leaves just $65k for the wages and benefits of the average employee.
> Disruptive children are caused by parents who frankly just don’t give a shit. Throwing more money into schools won’t ever fix this problem.
Some. Most children I believe require an approach that the education system cannot adequately provide (for numerous reasons). Children are relatively malleable and in the right environment will thrive.
Personal anecdotal: I started programming on my own freshmen year of High School and I wrote and self published a book sophomore year. When I showed my computer programs and a physical copy of my self-published book to my teachers, they basically gave me a pat on the back. I did not receive 1 point of extra credit. I was told to take my seat and learn about Microsoft Word (by my computer teacher) and to write a 3 page story like everybody else (by my English teacher). As I’m sitting in my desk, I’m thinking “Why waste my time with Word, clearly I’m beyond it? Why am I writing a 3 page paper, I already wrote a book!”
What I concluded from this experience was that the education system is not designed for self starters. It’s designed for the lowest common denominator. I don’t dislike my teachers, rather I dislike the education system for being inflexible. I can only hope technology will allow students in the future to customize their educations to a degree beyond what I was offered. Another commenter mentioned schools being about churning out cogs. I don't disagree.