Yes, but you do the work of your main profession that you are an expert in, and are compensated appropriately. You don't do a side job bagging groceries or lifeguarding in the summers to be able to maintain living in a home you own.
Legitimate question, do you not see the difference?
I'll say that elementary school teacher who worked as a park ranger in the summer got a good deal as he still had a government job and instead of paying for a gym membership he got paid to walk around in a beautiful place all summer.
I'm sure most teachers don't have it so good but if one were trying to improve the current system you might try to create jobs that are complementary with teaching jobs.
Teaching is one of those areas like software development where the social contradictions are intense because it is a labor intensive practice with very little capital spending (think how the final assembly people on a car have a huge "gun" that hangs from the ceiling and looks like something out of Doom that screws all 5 nuts for a wheel with perfect torque in one shot.) Schools are also funded out of property taxes which are rather regressive and limit the ability of schools to be funded by people who have a huge amount of money and instead pits teachers against people who don't make $60,000 a year and who don't get a few months off in the summer.
One of the best teachers I ever had was our middle school chemistry teacher. He had to lifeguard during the summer to support his family. That seems pretty crazy to me.
Wouldn't summer be the perfect time to update their knowledge? University students are of on vacation, meaning that the professors are available to train the school teachers.
Many teachers have CE requirements they must fulfill over the summer, and summer breaks in some places are as short as 6 weeks.
Some teachers may do the minimum and find the role and their summers relaxing. Yet for the best outcomes and challenging districts it's far from a 'cushy' job.
Attempting to get a seasonal job, year after year, for just 2-3 months a year would be difficult.
My wife is a former school teacher and she spent a considerable amount of time planning and working on things for the next school year. If teachers are expected to all work over summer break to make ends meet then their performance will suffer.
I'd argue that a better approach for teachers and education in general would be to move to more year-round schooling.
Frankly all this stuff boils down to “you get what you pay for.” And for a long time, the US has gotten a lot more than they paid for because there are people willing to take huge hits on QOL and pay to help kids.
But really the folks who have always been antagonistic to teachers showed their cards through the pandemic when they staked out the position that teachers are public enemy #1 for not wanting to literally risk their lives for a public that treats them like a punching bag year in and year out. You know, stupid “Teachers’ Nights” at baseball games aside.
If you want a gradual regression to abysmal education, sure, pay ‘em pennies and then we can instead pay for an uneducated populace via higher crime rates, lower civic participation, lower economic productivity, higher welfare burden, more homelessness, etc etc.
Most of the teachers I know spend their summers on professional development. Taking classes, often paying out of pocket, to improve their knowledge base and teaching skills. If they were in the profession just for money, sure, they might just get a job and phone it in.
A random teacher in any school across the US has done more for society in real terms than you have in a decade.
You could be part of the open data movement and a researcher in your spare time not stocking grocery store shelves.
Yes I’m suggesting your credentials are worthless. Why do we need full time university researcher role play when millions the world over are “researching” software engineering?
There are far fewer teachers. Sounds like a pay rebalancing given market realities is in order. Coders are everywhere. Minimum wage for them!
They shouldn't have their salary entirely prorated, but having a two month vacation during summer, one week spring break, and two week winter break is a huge benefit that should be considered when analyzing their compensation. Especially since they can make extra by teaching summer school, camps, taking other summer jobs.
1. Is it normal for teachers to have alternative income for the days they don't work?
2. Sounds like the term "six figures" has a special meaning other than just being in the range 100.000 - 999.999? It appears like there is a connotation that it is a special things to achieve in your life.
3. Taking inflation into account, shouldn't it soon be normal to earn that amount (when including pensions and benefits like health, which I know is expensive).
Answering #2, six figures refers to the number of digits in your paycheck, so 100k+
Lmao the downvotes are hilarious. I literally am explaining something the parent comment wanted to know. They didn't even have the bit about "100.000-999.999" when this comment was posted, as evidenced by another person quoting the original comment and the commenter saying they clarified the question.
And for the international audience, Americans cite salaries pre-tax. So a $100,000 salary means people earn somewhere around $80,000 after tax depending on their situation and where they live. And then further deduct benefits and retirement savings from that. About $60,000 might actually hit your bank account if you have a 100k salary.
Working most of the year as teachers means they can't make much at that summer job, though. I had a high school biology teacher who worked as lab tech in the summers, which she described as low-level work that she did just because she loved being in the lab. She was extremely sharp, but I don't think there was any way she could have trained for a more difficult position or taken on any higher responsibility when she couldn't stay on the job for more than a few months at a time. That was the only teacher I had who had any summer job that required education, except maybe for teachers who worked at a family business during the summer.
> 2. Sounds like the term "six figures" has a special meaning?
Six figures simply refers to a salary with six digits (i.e. in excess of $100,000). This is nearly double the median income so "six figures" is often just used to mean "a lot of money."
For #2, "six figures" has a connotation of being a large annual income for one person to earn. It's similar to being called a "millionaire". This is a bit outdated now, especially after the last couple of years, as inflation and higher salaries make earning "six figures" less of a rarity than it was in the 1990s and 2000s, but the connotation remains.
Teachers do more work outside of their standard hours than most other professions. I dated a teacher for a long time and she worked much harder for her public school salary (waking up at 6am, prepping, lesson planning, grading, chasing up kids who aren't making it to school, dealing with social workers, etc.), than I do for my cushy six-figure tech job salary.
Besides, why shouldn't teachers make six-figures? Why are teachers treated like this in the US?
> Besides, why shouldn't teachers make six-figures?
Exactly. Compared to what I do, educating 15-20 future citizens and adults seems on par.
And to your broader point, indeed, the average US teacher at this point is 1/5 lesson planning, 3/5 instruction, 1/10 social worker, and 1/10 data entry/report filing.
The U.S. has a large contingent of free-market maximalists. These groups are opposed to public services like education and health care across the board. They are allied with right-wing religious groups who oppose public schools on religious grounds (they want a religious curriculum and that’s unconstitutional).
Their tactic is called “starve the beast.” They believe that underfunding and neglect will drive the best teachers out of the public school system and into private schools. Their goal is to bring about the collapse of the public school system and then ultimately convince voters to abolish public schools altogether.
Here is a thread on r/Teachers where teachers discuss how many hours they work [1]. From a quick skimming it seems to vary with new teachers working really hard, older ones having pretty easy hours, and some teachers doing things like extracurriculars which are not difficult but do take time.
More specifically, teaching is a different skill than knowing. Excellent math teachers are very different than math majors - in some ways it’s less complex (eg pushing the boundaries of the field of mathematics), and in others it is far more (understanding the human psyche and how to effectively communicate abstract concepts).
Schools wouldn't hire math grads even if they could pay them six figure salaries. You'll just end up paying the same type of people you have now six figures.
I am not american, but both my parents were teachers, and they absolutely worked all year round, and longer than 8hr days. There are such a things as lesson plans, and marking homework, and being asked to do extra work such as editing the school paper, or coaching basketball, or whatever.
This idea that teachers work the same hours they are physically inside school and nothing else is laughable.
Though regardless, entry level software developers in the united states get six figures out of the gate, so it seems remarkably reasonable.
Market solves everything! Like that train derailment in Ohio! Certainly no need for a collective organization to step in to oversee clean up or preventative measures in the future.
Why? the market has huge flaws. For example, most money is held by a very small amount of people. Should the market solve for them or for the vast number of people?
The market has externalities, which is a huge flaw in pricing things. This is a known studied problem with markets.
Third, it's one of many optimization processes. If you understand machine learning, you understand that there are different models, different solution spaces, and optimizations (learning) on them requires different techniques. Why should we rely on a highly flawed optimization process like the market to decide these important things in society?
Democratic and consensus building is another way to come to these complex decisions without relying on 'spot trade' and pricing restrictions that the market has.
"The Market" is a technology. Thinking the market solves everything is like saying vacuum-tubes should be used in all electronics.
Like, have you ever wondered why, at your work place, there aren't markets? Why don't most large successful companies have market dynamics internally if the market solves all organizational issues?
The market has plenty of evidence that better education leads to significant economic benefit[0]. Specifically, high quality education, which requires highly trained teachers, leads to higher economic growth (0.63 percentage points per half of a standard deviation of test scores, normalized against other factors)
Surprisingly, there’s evidence that paying teachers more does lead to better teachers. It makes the jobs more competitive, causing an increase in the qualifications and expertise needed to land a job.
That's a tiring argument that's reiterated every time teacher pay is involved. Most teachers also don't get the luxury of working 9-5, they have to do additional planning and grading outside of hours. Also, if you want to compare with the private sector, there are teachers in the private sector who make more.
I don't understand these comparisons. Sure, the pay per hour worked might be the same as someone who works full time year around and earns $100k annually.
But that doesn't mean teachers are paid $100k. They're still paid $60k. It's a $60k job with some large blocks of time off.
They have pretty well given up on eliminating the DoE. Instead, they're just gutting education and getting the money through "school choice" like vouchers and public funding for religious/private schools.
That's internal politics, not even close to related to destroying public services from our federal government. I'm pissed about what they and the media did to Sanders but I wish that Republicans had done the same to Trump.
> but I wish that Republicans had done the same to Trump.
This sounds like a dangerous line of thinking. Like we can argue about Trump till the cows come home but I think it'd be a tough sell to say he wasn't who the Republicans wanted as their nominee.
It sounds like you are saying you wish the political parties would do what they feel is best irregardless of the will of their constituints. That is no longer representative democracy but rather tyrrany.
Winner in a broken system means the system is broken not that the winner was always going to win. Like any president who lost the popular vote, or trump who won the nomination because of longstanding apathy, not because the majority of anybody likes him.
>'Representative Thomas Massie announces that he has introduced H.R. 899, a bill to abolish the federal Department of Education. The bill, which is one sentence long, states, “The Department of Education shall terminate on December 31, 2022.”'
That's not a serious bill. One sentence is the minimum required for this person to put out a press release. This is nothing more than a PR piece for the Representative. Even the most mundane and simple bills are in the 10's of pages.[1]
Instead, allow for a voucher system where parents can apply the equivalent amount of money the public school spends and apply it towards private schools. Make it easy for teachers to start their own school or coop to compete for vouchers. Definitely a pipe dream but it might work.
One thing that it’s really good at is diverting money from public schools to religious private schools. It’s also good at segregating the student population.
There are a limited number of spots in private schools, if everyone suddenly has $x more dollars to spend on private schools the private schools will raise prices by at least $x to reduce demand. The wealthy will still be the ones in private schools and tax payer money is diverted to the private schools instead of the public schools while the poorest are still in public schools.
There are also other hurdles to poor kids attending private schools, for example private schools don't have school busses, so they are reliant on kids having parents with the ability to drop their kids off and pick them up every day.
I went to a small private school in a low income area. No one in my school was wealthy. Tuition was low. The school was a non-profit. You are spreading FUD.
Who said schools have to be for profit? In my state we have vouchers, and most voucher money goes to schools operated by not-for-profits. We also have charter schools, and most of those are operated by for-profit companies. Either way, they offer a way to get kids into a better environment/institution than trying to fix a failing public school system.
The biggest risk is the status quo - kids forced to spend 13 years in failing schools is guaranteed to get the same results.
Vouchers are generally used at existing private and parochial schools, who do meet state education standards, and frankly, usually vastly outperform public schools on education outcomes... and in many cases offer opportunities outside the classroom that public schools can't really match (i.e. many elementary schools in Indiana don't offer arts, sports, scouting and other clubs where the private/parochial schools do) Most often those schools have been outperforming the local public schools for decades. It's really low risk and has been nothing but wonderful for the kids.
The charter schools are much more risky - they are much more like business startups, and many fail. But, again the worse risk of all is entrusting thousands of kids for 13 years to failing education systems, and that is the alternative.
False choice. It’s not failing system vs vouchers. It’s failing system vs vouchers vs fixing system.
You’re advocating for a solution to failing system, but it’s not the only one. And frankly, it’s likely it’s worse now than it was 13 years ago… i can think of one possible explanation why
Kids don't have 20 years to wait for laws to change, demographics to shift, politicians to retire and local attitudes to change. They are in school for 13 years.
> False choice.
Nope, vouchers give families a choice. Doing nothing gives no choice.
Kids don’t have 20 years to wait for some voucher bill to pass, and then new schools to open up and then bad ones close down and better ones open up, all while social infrastructure develops to circulate good information about outcomes so parents can make informed choices, and backstop laws and bills to prevent islands of no-schooling or no-good-schooling to be passed either.
Both solutions take time. One solution injects a whole lot of the worst capitalist incentives into education (grift, hype, profiteering), the other doesn’t.
From an economic scale perspective, I don't think you can just parcel out an individual student's "cost" like this.
Put another way: the tax is lower than the net individual cost. I suspect that most school voucher advocates understand this, and see it as a convenient way to additionally weaken public schooling.
Isn't the typical argument against such vouchers in Housing that companies will simply bake the voucher amount into the price, leaving us in the same place without a public option?
None of the voucher systems I've heard of abolish the public system. It simply gives parents and students more choices and actually forces the public system to compete instead of continually beg for more funding that ultimately goes into the pockets of administrators instead of teachers and resources for students.
I do not see what public education advocates are fearing here. If their systems are so amazing and essential than surely the private sector can do no better, right? This will force school systems to become more lean from an administrative point of view.
One issue is that good quality education isn’t linear in cost. A school with 5 students may have lower overhead but will lack amenities that enable better learning, eg athletic infrastructure, libraries, etc. We provide public versions of those things, but then we’re back to funding parts of the education system with public levies. Furthermore there are some economies of scale that a public system enables, particularly around equitable access. For instance, I read somewhere that the postal service loses money delivering to remote areas. But given their mandate to serve all Americans, those in remote areas have access to a postal service. A private model would not likely serve those people well, if at all.
The most important thing for young student success is small class size. These concerns you have are more applicable for older students but I’m sure there’s ways to mitigate them.
You do understand how this would and has played out, right?
Basically the government would be subsidizing private schools for the rich, and since rich people are getting their needs met the funding will evaporate for schools in poorer neighbourhoods. Society will be move divided and your ability to succeed will depend on the class you’re born into above all else.
How can developers understand the value and need for dogfooding your own products, and yet advocate for a two tier public-private healthcare or education system?
We did this in Indiana and handled this by having an income cap for voucher eligibility. The reality is that people living in poor areas now have access to better schools. Rich people don't get vouchers.
The means test was added to Indiana's voucher program to get it passed, and it was a good thing. I put a lot of time in doing grass-roots work to get it passed, and honestly it has been great for kids, teachers (unions are good, but having employers compete for you is even better)... the only people it's been bad for are professional public school administrators and construction companies that sell school districts new buildings instead of paying teachers more.
I’m with you on this generally, and I’m glad Indiana included a means test. But I’m not sold that a shift to voucher systems more broadly will include means tests.
We did this in Indiana. Vouchers have been very popular, particularly with lower income families who are stuck with failing traditional public schools. In short, kids really don't have decades to wait for the existing system to be fixed, and vouchers give parents a way to make sure their kids are in better situations. It also has forced public schools to up their game in every way because if you don't offer what parents want, you will get competition. In well-funded, wealthy areas, vouchers have mattered a lot less.
What would stop this from further becoming a segregated system where public schools are left supporting IEP and other expensive student groups on a shoestring budget while private schools accept only the most profitable students?
Make sure IEP is covered as part of the law and the budget is allocated adequately? This is a hypothetical law, you can suggest whatever you want for the sake of discussion.
I'm in NJ where we value public education, for the most part. According to National Center for Education Statistics our average teacher pay was $77,489 in 2022. This is excluding benefits/pension.
School choice via vouchers, etc would allow parents to decide for themselves how outcome is measured
Edit: why the downvotes? If you are uncertain of or unamenable to the way outcomes are measured, vouchers are a reasonable solution that puts the power in your hands
2/3 of private schools are religious. And many private schools were literally founded as a response to brown vs board. Parents are not choosing schools based on academic success alone.
An extremely significant part of how parents choose schools is based on the social groups they want their kids associating with.
99% of the academic success of private schools is attributable to their ability to exclude poorly performing students, not some magical pedagogical secret.
It’s the same exact reason why homes of equivalent quality in two different districts of the same school system may have 2x or 3x price differentials. Because parents pay hundreds of thousands so their kid doesn’t sit next to a kid with parents who can’t afford the same.
No they pay hundreds of thousands of dollars so they don't have to deal with the school refusing to take action on bullying or disruptive behavior.
If schools are unwilling or unable to provide a stable learning environment then parents move on. There has been a lot of ink spilled on exactly why this is, including the racial and religious issues you allude to, but the brute fact is that in many communities families flee or switch to religious school because their children suffer violence at the hands of their fellow students.
It's the same thing, phrased two different ways. There's not some magical action any school administrator can take to make poorly raised kids behave. Especially in an understaffed school. You can make them leave the school, which removes the problem temporarily, but then what? Truancy is already a problem, expelling more kids is not going to fix the problem. The US already has one of the largest criminal underclasses on the planet. Fixing a classroom by ignoring tough situations just kicks the can down the road. Your kid will have a nice classroom experience, and when they graduate, they'll be robbed by the kid they didn't have to sit by.
IMO this entire problem was caused by segregating our schools to begin with. The problem of misbehaving kids isn't going to be fixed by giving them free vacation on the streets. They need to see with their own eyes that their behavior isn't acceptable, and that means putting them in environments where they are outsiders. Kids are a product of their social environment, full stop.
Well, if you get to teach a lot of well-off kids who have a lot of extra support at home and you can siphon off the undesirables onto others, you get good marks when most of them inevitably "succeed".
If you have to teach the kids who need help, you get poor marks when some of them inevitably fail.
The state doesn't have unions, the teachers do. The state negotiates with the union and then the teachers vote to approve the agreed on contract. If the teachers don't like the contract the union has negotiated, they can vote against it. If the union leadership continues to negotiate unacceptable contracts, the teachers can vote their union leadership out.
I don't like this argument at all. You are trying to enforce excess rules and micromanagements on teachers. I live in an area where teachers are paid well, and know a lot of educator who have been at it for 20+ years. Guess what, most them aren't trying to game the system. They care about their students and doing a good job. Sure some people might just try to coast, but it's not the majority. By trying to punish this minority, you end up hurting everyone.
Teaching jobs don't exist in a vacuum, and the reason to have pay based on seniority is simple. If you want competent people to go into the profession from the start, they need to know they have a steady and worthwhile career. If you can provide that, like NJ does, (and where I live in NY does) then you might actually get good teachers. If instead you make it unappealing and difficult because of uncertainty, you will only get people who are incompetent and have no other options.
I'm not going to defend New Jersey's teacher unions specifically.
However, pay based on outcome is really hard to get right, especially for something like teaching. What is the outcome? Well, what we really want is adults who can contribute to society. But that's too hard to measure and would take too long, so we need a proxy. Anything to do with tests is tough: not only do you have to (somehow -- this isn't a solved problem) calibrate for the students themselves to suss out what the teacher's contribution is, but there's immense pressure to teach to the test and prep for the test specifically, even at the expense of actual education. Not nothing, but imperfect. Other measures suffer from the same basic problem: any measure that becomes a goal ceases to be a useful measure because people optimize for that.
So what's an alternative? Maybe it's to make teaching a respected, well-paid profession where you have stability and advancement. One good way of doing that is by having clear seniority-based pay, not because it reflects how good at the job you are, but because that attracts teachers who are serious about making it a career and establishes it as a mainstream, lucrative profession.
But I don't know. This stuff is all extremely hard, and I don't think anywhere has figured it all out.
Measuring "outcome" in education is very hard, specially when deciding pay, as it creates perverse incentives. For example, teachers optimizing for test results instead of actual education, disadvantaged classes getting less attention (because results will be worse so it will affect teacher's evaluation)... Evaluating teachers based on outcome is something that sounds good at first but it's plagued with problems no matter how you try to do it.
it is 100% worth it but most states also don't have the property tax like NJ does. Imagine if California somehow voted to drastically up the property tax. The homes might become semi affordable.
Title of that article: "NJ 4th Graders Score Low on Literacy, Still Ahead of Nation"
Throwing more money at the problem often makes some progress, but it's not always a definitive solution. Tough problems usually involve reorganizing processes, which tends to be harder than spending more money or recruiting more talented people.
It doesn't help that teaching programs in universities hold anti-science views about reading and reading comprehension and still cling to whole language nonsense. Furthermore they often reject broad cultural knowledge and vocabulary as key components of reading comprehension and insist that (despite evidence to the contrary) that it is a discrete skill that can be built in a vacuum.
A hypothesis- their school reading lessons aren't being reinforced at home. Maybe their parents are too busy to do that reinforcement, working long hours, etc. Or there's a housing stability issue that lower income families often encounter.
How are the other 22% of low income fourth graders able to read?
Not being proficient does not mean they can't read, it's more that they're not "good" at reading. The same article says that the national numbers are even worse. The article only states that the gap between low income and wealthier students increased by 3% but it's not clear what the actual total difference is. If you look at the underlying data[1] you'll see that the national average is actually below proficient and that New Jersey is consistently above average, regardless of income. Certainly there is a difference in proficiency by income but there are far more factors at play there, most importantly the child's home life.
I lived in an area for a little bit Strongsville OH where the teachers went on strike because they wanted better benefits and they were making 90k. My mom with a master's and 7 years experience was only making around 40k as a school teacher where I grew up. It is interesting.
In another part of Ohio my SO was making 46k as a teacher. Keep in mind not every teacher is paid the same. To get higher salaries they often have to take on more preps or administrative duties, requiring even more hours.
Yeah but in NJ, that's 35k-45k in most other states. Not really worth bragging about. If it was over 100k for NJ, I'd say it was an leading. 75k there just barely pays rent on a small apartment.
60k is okay in some areas, personally I think the average salary should be 85-90k and over 100k where cost of living is much higher.
Does NJ really value education? Or do you value education funding for other reasons?
I remember a while ago, googling around about the schools of Newark NJ, because of a rather complicated Mark Zuckerberg story. The school district's budget was around a billion a year, while a third of graduating students weren't proficient at reading.
And when public officials were trying to do something about this, their motives were rather ...peculiar. I think the words of governor Christie were something like "Nobody votes for me in Newark, so why not do the right thing?"
Think about that for a minute. The governor would have expected to to loose votes for trying to improve a city's public schools. Does that sound like a place that values the education of it's children?
I don't live in Essex County so Newark's schools don't effect me directly.
Newark's problems are at the family level, not at the school level. Parental involvement is a baseline requirement for a successful student. It's unfortunate but Newark is hurting in this regard.
Why? Why would you imagine that a globalist neoliberal who continued growth of funding to the military industrial complex would end up assassinated while POTUS?
The executive branch has a lot less power than people think it does. Aside from the executive orders on "how" to implement laws that congress passes and the curtailments to power by the Supreme Court, they don't have much control over the purse strings. If congress doesn't like the "how" they either update the law or have the SCOTUS to make a ruling that says they don't have that power in the first place.
A president can say to congress "I'd like you to pass a bill that..." and they can change some things for federal workers - but for states, they've got very little regulatory power outside of what has been granted to them through the various departments (e.g. Department of Education).
2016 had a 52/46/2 senate composition with a republican majority. The house was 241 to 194 with a republican majority.
My crystal ball for a hypothetical president Sanders shows a president who would have been able to do very little except for some executive orders which would get overridden by congress. The house would have been very unlikely to give him the budget to fulfill his promises and ideals while blaming him and every executive branch agency for every failing and catastrophe that occurred in 2020.
We wouldn't have had tax cuts in 2017 and we would have a much more liberal Supreme Court. I guess Jan 6th wouldn't have happened either. I have no idea how we would have fared differently through the pandemic. I don't think Bernie would have gotten any meaningful legislation passed but I've been wrong before.
My first “real” job after college (2013) I started at $60k. It was more than my mom, an elementary school teacher, ever made. It felt embarrassing. Teachers are at least as valuable as software developers (probably more), given their impact on society. Why do they make so little?
Supply and demand, like always. The market cares not one bit about what someone “should” be paid, it cares about the price where no one is left willing to do the same job for less.
If you want teachers to be paid more, increase the requirements to be a teacher. I’m a proponent of requiring at least n years experience in real world work, plus education in a hard science or trade.
What other requirements? Teachers require at least a 4 year degree. Specialists like speech therapists require a masters degree. Try paying off a masters degree with a teachers salary.
I mean, we already have massive teacher shortages. Class sizes keep going up, and many school systems are switching to four day schedules because of staffing issues.
Not everything can be looked at from a macro econ 101 supply and demand take; the real world is much more complicated than that.
Sometimes it is more complicated, but in this case the analysis does apply. The problem isn't on the demand side, but on the supply. And one way to increase supply is to charge a higher price, or otherwise compensate (more time off, better work environment, prestige, etc ...) and a big part of the reason we have a teacher shortage is that there aren't enough compensatory incentives.
Sure, my point was more about the parent's analysis of "if you want teachers to be paid more, make less teachers".
ie. I'm saying that we don't have to put our hopes in the basket of hoping that economic pressures force higher wages if we make teachers less prevalent; we can simply pay them more.
Not everything follows the rules of capitalism, especially when public school teachers are paid by the government. There are giant teacher shortages across many locales in the US, so according to you we should see skyrocketing teacher pay, but that hasn't happened (pay has gone up in some locales but nowhere near the amount needed to fix teacher shortages).
The government doesn't have traditional shareholders like a corporation. Obviously they have their citizens as shareholders of a sort, but at the moment it feels like the loudest groups are prioritizing budget over outcomes.
Ideological divides aside, this is an obvious downside of modern capitalism; Value is defined as what brings in money, which I would wager 99% of people would generally agree is not the best definition for the public interest. It is the easiest to measure, though.
Trite as it may be to say, there's an obvious value to attracting a larger amount of people to teaching, it's just hard to quantify and takes longer than most politicians' term limits to see the larger benefits.
> this is an obvious downside of modern capitalism; Value is defined as what brings in money,
And in communism value is defined as what will get you promoted.
And in autocracy value is loyalty to the party line
And in Neo-Nazism value is what kills the most Jews
And so on and so forth, let's not pretend that people making short sighted decisions for personal gain is limited to a single economic system it may be more visible or exactrebated by one system or another but it isn't like Lusheynkinism was pushed because it helped the students of the USSR better feed their people.
The problem I'm trying to highlight is that the capitalism and focus on the short-term of business is leaking a bit too much into the operation of government. Instead of directing resources in a thoughtful way, it seems more like we're trying to check boxes for the lowest price and forget about the purpose of that funding.
Except with something like K12 education we don't actually allocate resources in a market/capitalist fashion. So is your argument that we have a "mindset" problem?
One could suggest the opposite problem, we don't have enough markets in eduction and could do more with charters and vouchers, or programs like magnet schools.
"brings in money" is so specious. The whole system is subject to how the accounting is structured.
Education certainly produces community value. Moving around what column the cost and benefits should be attributed to is a kind of social gerrymandering.
It's a function of ideology and power asymmetry. A well educated populace will of course be better off.
You're not going to find out why police make twice as much as teachers with neoliberal economics. Fabulists depict things this way to remove human agency and make specific legislative and policy decisions take on the authority of natural law, as if it's a scientific absolute.
It's just a slight of hand. All these things can be changed and the sky will not fall.
What demand though? Nobody “buys” what public teachers produce - it’s a public service. It’s up to the state (and ultimately, voters) to decide what teachers make. And it’s even harder for teachers to advocate for themselves in states where teacher unions are banned.
There’s absolutely a supply demand cycle here. If wages are too low, teachers will do something else. School quality suffers, parents (may) make noise, politicians raise the wages (or do something else to appease their constituents).
I think we tend to see the opposite cycle playing out more often:
"We can't hire enough teachers" -> "Let's reduce the requirements" -> "These teachers aren't very good or qualified, there's no reason to give them a raise" -> "We can't hire enough teachers!"
Because of targeted propaganda and attacks by an organized political group that holds, as an ideology, that public institutions should not exist and everything should be done by the private sector.
The claim was that school teacher salaries were low "Because of targeted propaganda and attacks by an organized political group that holds, as an ideology, that public institutions should not exist and everything should be done by the private sector.
reply".
Since private schools are not subject to these attacks, their salaries would not be lowered by these attacks, making them relatively higher.
That could only happen if private schools hired from a closed environment. In reality, there's a large pool of underpaid public school teachers that private schools can hire from while giving a 5-10% raise, which leaves private school teachers with 1.1x of a low salary.
Difficult how? A relative of mine is a teacher in a high-poverty area and it seems like a very taxing job. Regularly having to deal with children who are emotionally or physically abused, or who recently immigrated and don't even speak english, and trying to teach them math. I daresay this is not a set of challenges most software engineers I've met would be well equipped to handle.
I'd strongly disagree with your assertion that teaching is not a difficult job. I won't address the exertion that goes into individual parts of it, but all of the teachers I know regularly work nights and weekends in addition to handling the emotional stress of teaching, which itself is a huge burden, especially for those working in less affluent schools.
In any case, the measure for teachers should not be "how hard is the job" but rather "how important is the outcome". It might be easy enough to replace a teacher without raising the salary (another assertion I have issues with - there are rampant teacher shortages nationwide), but could you not be potentially getting a better teacher and having broadly positive effects on society if you're offering more money?
> all of the teachers I know regularly work nights and weekends
There's a difference between difficulty and exertion.
> how important is the outcome
It's pretty damn important that the garbage man comes and collects the trash every week, but we don't pay him the marginal value of trash collection to the county.
> another assertion I have issues with - there are rampant teacher shortages nationwide
I actually agree that the market doesn't seem to be clearing due to stingy education departments and state government. We should probably break their monopsony power by privatizing education.
> could you not be potentially getting a better teacher and having broadly positive effects on society if you're offering more money
If you want to make the argument we should fire all the current teachers and replace them with people who would otherwise be accountants or actuaries or software engineers, I'd be amenable to the argument.
Note we tend to pay garbagemen more than teachers! I think that probably seeks to the job desirability. More people are willing to be teachers than haul garbage and that is reflected in the pay, net of other impacts.
According to the BLS garbage collectors have a median annual wage of $ 42,780[1] whereas elementary school teachers have a median annual wage of $61,400[2].
> I actually agree that the market doesn't seem to be clearing due to stingy education departments and state government. We should probably break their monopsony power by privatizing education.
If the state is still paying, they're still going to be stingy.
A private school has roughly the same administrative staff as a public school. Their buildings may be a little bit less expensive, as they probably can get away with less ADA accessibility. They probably don't pay into pensions and may not provide as nice of health care, so they may be able to move more of total comp into salaries, but they may also compensate their board members more. Word on the street is private school teachers get paid less and have less due process, but also have less stringent degree requirements and fewer mandates in their classroom. But they also get a lot more parental engagement, and a rather different cohort of students.
>Teaching is not a particularly high skill or difficult job.
Even though I disagree with you I can see where you're coming from with this sentence, but: the impact is HUGE. The impact of good teachers on society cannot be overstated. It's an amazing ROI and everything we can do to further the education of humankind is worth doing.
Programming (mostly) isn't that hard as well, compare software engineering with electronics engineering, for example, but the impact is huge: that's why you're probably well paid to do it and your company makes your life really easy, with all the bells and whistles to make you happy.
More people could be trained to program, especially in a casual way many more (spreadsheet formulas, low-code forms or glue) but working as mentor in high-school CS programs, I've been surprised in both directions. There are a bunch of bright people out there that could move into programming with just a boost to their training to enable them to bootstrap further ... and there are lots of people that just don't have the mindset. Abstract reasoning or modeling the world is just not something they are capable of doing without intense concentration, if that. It just doesn't come naturally to these people.
Impact is huge, but they don't generate revenue for the organization which pays them. Therefore - their pay is a function of the budget that is available.
Public school budgets are set of course by property taxes. If you teach in a rich district, you get paid more. If you teach in a poor district, you get paid less. The way public schools are funded helps keep the rich rich, and the poor poor.
Unfortunately, the political clout is held by the rich who want their tax money to go only to their children and not those other children (or "those othered children" if you like). Even though, if we switched to a more equal funding model for public schools, we'd see improvements in the wealth gap and society in general within a generation or two.
> Public school budgets are set of course by property taxes. If you teach in a rich district, you get paid more. If you teach in a poor district, you get paid less. The way public schools are funded helps keep the rich rich, and the poor poor.
That depends on the state. In California, most school districts have their budgets set by the state funding formula which provides state funding above the local property tax revenues. There are a handful of school districts where local property tax revenue provides more than the state formula, although I haven't been able to find a list of those districts recently.
The California funding system was in place since 1972 (with major changes in 2013). Have we seen improvements in the wealth gap and society in general?
I wasn't aware of this funding system, so I had to look it up. The (quite prolific) literature suggest that the funding system was severely limited in 1978 by Prop 13.
Sure, school funding has been limited; but the point is that excluding the basic aid school districts (which are mostly smaller districts, afaik, the largest is Newport-Mesa Unified), all of the school districts across the state have been subject to the same funding formulas.
Your comment was that equalizing funding would make society better; my question is, given that funding has been mostly equalized in California, is society better?
In Washington state, funding for basic education is apportioned from state revenues; local districts can raise taxes for enrichment, but there's a cap, and state funds are provided if local taxes don't meet a minimum. I'm not familiar with other states, but there have been several court cases where states were forced to reform systems that relied on local property tax [1]; and I'd imagine many states would have changed their systems after seeing those results, rather than waiting for their own case.
maybe because "impact on society" is a totally delusional way to make pay scales. Pay is almost entirely based on talent scarcity. Thats why low skill jobs are lower pay, and highly skilled professions pay more accordingly. It doesn't matter at all what your impact is, think of people who work(ed) in mines or in the fields.
I'd argue it's not just talent scarcity it's measurable talent scarcity. There are really great teachers out there that do a fantastic job there are terrible teachers that suck, they are mostly paid the same because it's hard to differentiate between a good teacher and a bad teacher.
Whereas with a software developer especially at small orgs their ability is easier to measure and evaluate.
I'll just throw out there that the elementary school bear where I live pays teachers around 20-25k. It is a LOC area for now, and it works out for the most part because most of the teachers there are doing it as a second job while their husband works (and yes the fact of the matter is where I live it is heavily cultural for the man to be the primary breadwinner in a home) but I worry about it shifting as we are seeing more and more people move in and it straining teaching resources more and more.
CoL differs significantly within states and across the country.
There should be a base plus CoL adjustment adjusted annually to account for inflation or deflation. A flat standard amount for anything does not make sense given the CoL disparities. 60,000 dollars is good for someone in Ukiah CA or Huntsville AL, but not for someone in NYC or Burbank, CA.
Reminds me of lots of things kicking in at $10Gs. A figure that was set in the '70s and has not been revisited since.
Then maybe we can do the same for the Federal minimum wage? This is just a floor. States can take this and run with it to increase local teacher salaries beyond the floor. Sanders knows it won't pass in this corrupt senate, but possibly a future one may take this seed of an idea and make something workable.
The actual correct alternative would have been to not freak out about COVID. I can understand the first 3-6 months of restrictions. The rest was a total own-goal. A politicized circus. At least we didn't own ourselves for almost 3 years like China.
One small part of the complicated answer to that question - a huge portion of that free money went to businesses in the form of PPP loans in a top-down kind of approach, which resulted in a dramatically high amount of fraud and misdirected public funds that will take tens of years to unravel.
To ask another question: (presuming our hands were to be tied to give out that free money) Had we instead given that money directly to teachers and other low income individuals, essentially doubling or tripling the proportion we actually gave them, would we have seen the same level of fraud or waste? I can't imagine so. Would the economy have been better off? I feel like probably, but I'm no economist. It's a supply side argument and I have a hard time believing those based on the results of 'corporate socialism' experiments.
"Had we instead given that money directly to teachers"
You mean the people who went to great lengths to be considered non-essential, so they could work remotely? We know the result of that was historic learning loss for American children. They don't deserve another dime.
I sense a polarity in our opinions regarding responses to the pandemic that indicates we're unlikely to come to an agreement on much with regard to adjacent topics, which is okay with me. Trying to put myself in your shoes, my heart breaks for the things you probably saw and experiences you probably had during the pandemic that I presume contributed to this harsh perspective on the public education system in Chicago. The next generations are so important and I think we agree we should strive to serve them as best we can. Wishing the best for you and yours.
Thank you for your comment. It's not often someone tries to empathize with someone on the opposite side of an argument. Especially on the internet. Indeed, I saw things I hope to never see again.
Generally tax structures should be set up to tax the most wealthy entities first, and the poorest last, by my understanding. The wealthiest entities are going to be corporations and their leaders and they don't live where the teachers do.
So, from the perspective of businesses and individuals that live where the teachers do, yes, the largest taxpayers do usually burn money.
(Quite literally, in the form of things like very expensive-to-operate private planes, such as to attend the recent 'super bowl')
It's a tough nut to crack, I do agree. On one end of the scale you have labor incentive systems that are overly associated to (perceived) performance, which can produce much misery, inequity, and arguably reduced productivity - toxic stack ranking, the 2014 amazon NYT article, 996 Taylorism, etc.
On the other hand you have systems that you describe that are not at all calibrated to performance, and only care about seat time. Such as, toxic school systems or government agencies.
But, somewhere in between, there is a tremendous amount of happiness, equity and productivity. Such as, the customer service representatives that have worked for Amazon in Germany in the same roles since 1998. Or, airline pilots who, setting aside the various labor and equity troubles for a second, get great performance results from a seat-time oriented approach. Or someone that happily worked as a dishwasher at a restaurant in Rome for 20 years. In USA there's also a good deal of civil servants that have faithfully served our local societies for decades with a high quality of labor and life. The USPS mail person that delivers to my parents' house has been running that route for like 2 or 3 decades, he's still great at it and spends as much time playing with my parents' dogs as he wants.
I don't know what the perfect formula is, but I do think it involves outpacing inflation for compensation increases regardless of performance, and some amount of performance evaluation too. But maybe not too much of either.
At the expense of the school system itself, and students therefore. Illinois has to diminish services and sell the school system’s assets in order to fund the underfunded pensions, which cannot be diminished, as per the Illinois constitution.
> We want to pay them more because they keep saying that if we do they'll teach better.
Given a choice, would you prefer the teacher of your kid paid 30k or 60k? I'd prefer the second option even if it would be the same person teaching, because do you really want your kids to be raised by people in dire financial situation?
A prospect of smarter folks becoming teachers (or staying in the field if they're there already) is a nice bonus.
I'm perfectly happy with a teacher making 60k provided that they're teaching my kid well. I'm not happy with giving them a raise if they're not, and "their lives could be easier so we should do it anyway" is not a compelling argument. In the rest of the professional world we have to earn our salaries.
What if underperforming teachers were fired and replaced with high-performing teachers? This is really what needs to happen, but...
It's way harder to find high-performing teachers when you lowball salaries. It's actually way harder to find _any_ teachers when you do that. So if you're not willing to raise pay, you'll take what you get and you'll like it.
> In the rest of the professional world we have to earn our salaries.
As someone who worked decades in the professional world before giving up a huge chunk of salary to pursue my passion for teaching, this is not entirely true. There are tons of slacker leeches in the professional world. I've seen it worse than in teaching.
As someone who spent their formative years primarily interacting with teachers I think I can say that I do. Most teachers underperform, so even if you have a hard time, just assuming that one is not a good one will have you right more often than not.
The few teachers I had that left a lasting impression on me I value greatly, I wish more teachers were like that. And that's a teachers job, isn't it? Without a lasting impression most of what was learned is lost, so then it's not really teaching, just busywork.
I will say that there are probably a good number of teachers with the drive just beaten out of them by the bureaucracy. When you go into your profession to educate and you spend more time dealing with authorities, paperwork and silly requirements, that has a tendency to drag your performance down. The flip side of that though is ofc that that bureaucracy was largely created by teachers, probably the ones who would get fired without it protecting them.
I don't believe there is a strong or even weak correlation between teachers' salaries and educational outcomes. Chicago teachers get paid the most yet their schools are among the worst in the nation. Private school teachers get paid less than public but produce better outcomes. Etc. There are other, far more important factors we ought to be paying attention to
> Private school teachers get paid less than public but produce better outcomes.
I'd like a citation for that. I can't help but imagine that private schools game the numbers, because when I worked for a school district that's what I saw: private schools can easily get rid of underperforming students and pretty much never take any with disabilities.
On college entry tests such as the SAT, NAIS found that students in private schools consistently out-performed their public school peers in all subject areas.
I don’t doubt that private schools teacher have students that score better than public school students (we can argue the weight of all the factors later) and I don’t think GP is doubting that.
His doubt is that private teachers that are paid less than public school teachers provide better results. To prove the original assertion you need to include the income levels of these private school teachers and graph them against the performance and income level of the public school teachers.
Cite a source on Chicago schools being "the worst in the nation"? Chicago is a huge city, and large tracts of it are locked into generational poverty as a result of redlining, which sets up a vicious cycle with low-performing schools in those areas. It does not follow that the whole CPS system is the worst in the nation, and given state rankings and the population distribution of Illinois, that in fact seems very unlikely to be true.
No one could achieve all that we ask of our public school teachers, because the set of tasks does not lie within the realm of reality to accomplish, and most municipalities would go bankrupt before they finished trying to atone for that fact by dumping truckloads of money on teachers.
Despite all that, those teachers choose to work in those jobs. Are manning shortfalls at public schools significantly more than in other comparable sectors of the economy?
You are not paying teachers a living wage so it “solves” public schools problems. You are paying them a living wage because it is the correct thing to do.
One notion, then, since paying people seems to bring up so much emnity, is how about giving the teachers $10/yr expense accounts instead/as well. What's so heartbreaking about paying schoolteachers so damned little, isn't that they make so little, though that is a travesty in and of itself, but that they have to make a choice between spending money on food for themselves, and school supplies for the children they teach. Notebooks and pencils and shoes are the parents responsibility to purchase for their children, but what's a school teacher to do about a neglected child? A child who's parents can't or won't afford lunch for their kid? An expense account for the teachers would go a long way to improving student outcomes, without actually having to pay the teachers more, which seems to be controversial, for some reason.
Actually good teachers should be paid much more than that, but the bad teachers which are setting up kids for failure in life should be shown the door. Unfortunately that’s not how the teacher unions want it to be.
Hard to reward the good ones well if you can’t get rid of the bad ones.
How do you rate a good teacher with a bad one? Education is a bit different than most professions. Testing kids solves for the wrong thing as teachers are forced to "teach to the test" instead of educate children. I recommend the work of Alfie Kohn to learn more.
If the education experts can't tell the difference why bother trying to find good ones? Pay low wages and scrape the bottom of the barrel, there is no measurable difference between any of them right?
How do you rate a good software developer with a bad one? Software development is a but different than most professions. Counting completed Jira tickets solves for the wrong thing as developers are forced to game the ticket system rather than optimize for business value. /s
And yet somehow we continue to hire and manage software developers, evaluating their performance holistically.
What is it about teaching that supposedly makes skill so uniquely opaque to administrators that it's (teach to the test) XOR (pay by seniority).
Software development is a far more evaluable profession than teachers. Most of the "problems" that bad teachers create don't show up for a few years.
Contrast that with code that doesn't compile/link or requires way more QA. Or personality issues that are sorted quite easily by a functional team/leader.
Teachers are more like naval vessel commanders than software engineers.
Salary most likely isn't enough, but it's an easy area to focus on. Danish teachers aren't pay particularly well either, but they are better paid than many other professions, yet salary is the main area of complaint.
I suspect that you could get away with a lower salary, if teachers are given more support and more autonomy. If you have to deal with troublesome students, parents and micromanaging politicians, then you want a lot more money.
That's a right wing site that runs tabloid stories about "black on black" crime and the criminal history of Ja'Mal Green (who was arrested at a protest). The 2019 outcome it claims are apparently the opposite of the truth; the overwhelming majority of CPS students met or exceeded standards in 2019.
(The pandemic kicked the shit out of those statistics, but we're not debating whether remote schooling was a good policy; it wasn't.)
Even if the statistics were true (again: looks like no), the conclusion that it's drawing is unsupported. The very best teachers in the nation would have a hard time putting up New Trier stats teaching in Lawndale or Englewood. And the very best teaching is probably what it actually takes to eke out any kind of performance from the lowest-performing schools in Chicago, which serve students locked into generational poverty by redlining.
I'd be OK with raising the minimum salary for public school teachers a LOT more, BUT ONLY for teachers who graduate in the top 10% of their high-school class and in the top 10% of their college class -- like in Finland, which has one of the world's best public school systems.
It makes sense that if public schools hire teachers only from the most academically competent population in a country, and pay them well, those individuals will figure out how to improve the quality of public education.
Some years ago I recall seeing a study by McKinsey which found that a majority of public school teachers in the US came from the bottom of their high-school class and the bottom of their college class.[a] Quite literally the opposite of Finland.
I didn't say we should aspire to be more like the Finnish. What I did say is that I would be OK with teachers getting paid a lot more if they are drawn from the top of the distribution of academic performance in the country, which is what public schools in Finland do. It makes sense that if public schools hire teachers only from the most academically competent population in the country, and pay them well, they will improve the quality of public education.
There's a significant number that would rather do it themselves or simply be given vouchers to select an educational institution of their choice, because they believe government-provided educators don't teach things correctly or they want their children to be provided religious-focused instruction.
I know this is crazy but:
Recently I was thinking about opening a foundation that will create a universal multimedia "product" (combination of software, movies, games, maybe vr) that will teach kids around the world in schools subjects that all nations agree upon like mathematics, physics, chemistry, informatics etc. This is extremely challenging to convince governments to impose this in the schools but the gains are huge - naming only few:
- We can release the workforce of millions teacher around the world that do repetitive job every day so that can focus on different aspects of education
- We can hire the best of the best in the world teachers to prepare the product and all the kids around the world, no matter if big cities or small towns will have access to the same best possible education.
- Education could be totally individual and adapted to every kid
- Education can be fun so kids actually will like it
It will need to be done step by step. When nations see how good and cheap this system is and how great are the education results they will be more willing to join.
I also think that AI can play a huge role in this - but for sure it needs to be improved.
In short "yes". Millions of teachers around the world every day do exactly the same work as other teachers - this is a huge waste of talented resources. If they don't need to do repetitive job, that can focus on individual learning for those who really need it or help society in other way.
Did you ask the kids whether they would rather be educated with a teacher in the company of fellow same-age kids, or with "technology" and "multimedia" without any chance to raise a hand, ask a question, get a slow answer?
Sorry, but this just reeks brutal tech-broism to me. "We have such a powerful technology that we can do everything, nevermind asking if we should."
My kids were confined to the home at the covid-19 lockdowns, and the learning over zoom not only wasn't even remotely efficient, it had profound long-term negative effects on their psychological well-being too. They actually enjoy being in the classroom with their friends and their teacher.
I work in ed tech and the best we can be is a force multiplier for teachers. If they have to spend less time creating and grading certain kinds of thing, that's good and that's what we aim to do for them. But replacing them is a) impossible b) a dumb idea anyway.
It's not impossible - it's other way of thinking. Yes it's hard as it needs to fight something that we have been doing for ages.
It's dumb to forget about all the kids that have terrible or average teachers or don't keep up with other kids and they are to shy to say it clearly which means for them to take additional classes after school or try to do it alone wasting a lot of time of their childhood.
It's not an imaginary tech robot that will do this. It's a product combining the best what we have. Maybe the question to kids should be different: Do you want to watch super interesting interactive movie / play game that will teach you this in 20 minutes and the rest 40 minutes you can enjoy with your friends or you want to sit in a classroom for one hour and learn it traditional way? Also I don't have in mind remote teaching. Kids should be in a school anyway to interact with each other.
> Recently I was thinking about opening a foundation that will create a universal multimedia "product" (combination of software, movies, games, maybe vr) that will teach kids around the world in schools subjects that all nations agree upon like mathematics, physics, chemistry, informatics etc.
If this ever got made it would only be used my school administrators as a cudgel to discipline teachers unions. It would never get used to actually teach children.
I would say that teachers unions will definitely not be happy about it as work style of all teachers will need to change and a lot of them will not be necessary anymore. But kids will have the best possible education. We do it for kids, right?
The only way teachers would ever be able to make a lot of money is if some metrics apparatus was created by the United States and income outcomes were traced back to individual schools and teachers in said schools got some portion of that as part of their salary.
Of course, the USA would have to bootstrap the first "cohort" of this.
Otherwise, the point is simple - good teachers don't get paid more, because there's nothing you can point at to justify giving them more money, because the money that comes from the municipality (to fund the school and consequently the teacher) has nothing to do with the outcome.
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It's sad that the "privatize school", or "school voucher" discussion has become so corrupted by politics. Regardless of whether or not you agree with it, or not, it's worth critically thinking about and whether the implications of that kind of change are good or bad, and why.
I'm not sure how you reward outcomes of teaching without also actively discouraging teachers from taking positions at any school that could be seen as "struggling" from an academic perspective.
I'm not sure if anyone has tried doing this as a going concern, but economists have done a pretty convincing (IMO) analysis of teachers value-add ex post. The most well known is the 2014 Raj Chetty paper. Seems to support your view.
I definitely agree that teachers in many areas are underpaid, but I think a single nationwide minimum wage for teachers is a bad idea. There is just way too much variability in cost of living between different locales for a single amount to make sense. Would much rather it be based on some localizable metric, e.g. X times the median apartment rent or some such (don't want to get caught up on the details, other than to say it should take some form of regional COLA into consideration).
See this is something I wish people would understand more when talking about economics things like a federal minimum wage in a place like NYC or Cali may not sound like much but in rural Missouri or Arkansas that could bankrupt most of the businesses overnight.
If only we divided the country into geographical areas that could each be responsible for administering their own issues for the most part, so they would have a better understanding of the costs and tradeoffs, and be able to live they way they want without enforcing their way of life on people halfway across the country, and instead of the people in a few big cities and Washington DC ruling everyone from afar each regional area could be self governed.
Oh well that sounds like nonsense anyway after all the same things that are good for NJ are obviously the way things should be run in Montana .
I don't see why this couldn't be done on a smaller (state or county) level instead. If someone starts offering an attractive starting salary and that leads to better educational outcomes you would expect others to follow (at least make it easy to campaign on it).
Edit: And obviously adjust the salary to match local conditions as you point out.
This Raj Chetty paper on teacher quality makes a strong case for doing whatever you can to get as many good teachers as possible (and as few bad ones).
They claim replacing a bad teacher with an average teacher is worth like $250k in earnings per classroom. It's unclear what effect a blanket minimal salary would have on teacher quality. I'd be worried that it might make bad teachers stick around with good ones already making more than that.
Would paying more get the results we are looking for? Or does additional funding just pad the pockets of administrators? Also why should we pay more for the poor education of the pandemic? We should be funding alternative strategies.
This is one of those things that just makes sense and unfortunately will likely not happen. Teaching should be a profession that attracts the best instead of one that attracts those who can afford to do it.
Unless federal gov will fund this, it doesn't make sense to set it like that, it is more feel-good measure. Teachers and staff need to be paid well for sure but also a lot of funding need to be spent on schools and infrastructure and equipment for example.
Federal Government could help with standardize maybe software and equipment for kids... that is if they were not corrupted like they are.
not sure this really fix any problem. $60k good salary in arkansas maybe. if you in expensive city..not go very far.
have kids in public america school system. government spending money in my opinion uncompetitive and wasteful. but public education must all support. it still good in america.
national minimum salary ok but need states or cities to tune to living cost. $60k only work maybe in central us.. cheaper state or city.
I mean it's a national minimum. School systems would be allowed to continue to pay more.
It'd help here in Colorado which is both a relatively HCOL area and a place that pays our teachers peanuts. I know teachers here that get less that $60k/yr as it is.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 286 ms ] threadLegitimate question, do you not see the difference?
I'm sure most teachers don't have it so good but if one were trying to improve the current system you might try to create jobs that are complementary with teaching jobs.
Teaching is one of those areas like software development where the social contradictions are intense because it is a labor intensive practice with very little capital spending (think how the final assembly people on a car have a huge "gun" that hangs from the ceiling and looks like something out of Doom that screws all 5 nuts for a wheel with perfect torque in one shot.) Schools are also funded out of property taxes which are rather regressive and limit the ability of schools to be funded by people who have a huge amount of money and instead pits teachers against people who don't make $60,000 a year and who don't get a few months off in the summer.
Some teachers may do the minimum and find the role and their summers relaxing. Yet for the best outcomes and challenging districts it's far from a 'cushy' job.
My wife is a former school teacher and she spent a considerable amount of time planning and working on things for the next school year. If teachers are expected to all work over summer break to make ends meet then their performance will suffer.
I'd argue that a better approach for teachers and education in general would be to move to more year-round schooling.
But really the folks who have always been antagonistic to teachers showed their cards through the pandemic when they staked out the position that teachers are public enemy #1 for not wanting to literally risk their lives for a public that treats them like a punching bag year in and year out. You know, stupid “Teachers’ Nights” at baseball games aside.
If you want a gradual regression to abysmal education, sure, pay ‘em pennies and then we can instead pay for an uneducated populace via higher crime rates, lower civic participation, lower economic productivity, higher welfare burden, more homelessness, etc etc.
Good trade!
You could be part of the open data movement and a researcher in your spare time not stocking grocery store shelves.
Yes I’m suggesting your credentials are worthless. Why do we need full time university researcher role play when millions the world over are “researching” software engineering?
There are far fewer teachers. Sounds like a pay rebalancing given market realities is in order. Coders are everywhere. Minimum wage for them!
1. Is it normal for teachers to have alternative income for the days they don't work?
2. Sounds like the term "six figures" has a special meaning other than just being in the range 100.000 - 999.999? It appears like there is a connotation that it is a special things to achieve in your life.
3. Taking inflation into account, shouldn't it soon be normal to earn that amount (when including pensions and benefits like health, which I know is expensive).
Lmao the downvotes are hilarious. I literally am explaining something the parent comment wanted to know. They didn't even have the bit about "100.000-999.999" when this comment was posted, as evidenced by another person quoting the original comment and the commenter saying they clarified the question.
Six figures simply refers to a salary with six digits (i.e. in excess of $100,000). This is nearly double the median income so "six figures" is often just used to mean "a lot of money."
"Six figures" appears to be an idiom in American English that should be abandoned.
Besides, why shouldn't teachers make six-figures? Why are teachers treated like this in the US?
Exactly. Compared to what I do, educating 15-20 future citizens and adults seems on par.
And to your broader point, indeed, the average US teacher at this point is 1/5 lesson planning, 3/5 instruction, 1/10 social worker, and 1/10 data entry/report filing.
And it should be very easy to fire bad ones. Basically should be at will employment with school district.
This is thorny, because it gets into the problems tenure was created to combat: school administration's goals aren't always student success.
Especially now, they can be myopically assessment-focused or political.
Subordinating teachers to the whim of administration wouldn't help this. Jury-of-their-peers is slightly better, but has its own issues.
If you want to know how badly otherwise seemingly mature adults can behave, come to a local school board meeting in Florida.
"For the kids" + average parent = asshole with no holds barred
The U.S. has a large contingent of free-market maximalists. These groups are opposed to public services like education and health care across the board. They are allied with right-wing religious groups who oppose public schools on religious grounds (they want a religious curriculum and that’s unconstitutional).
Their tactic is called “starve the beast.” They believe that underfunding and neglect will drive the best teachers out of the public school system and into private schools. Their goal is to bring about the collapse of the public school system and then ultimately convince voters to abolish public schools altogether.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/6f1m76/how_many_h...
I know this is a biased sample.
If you want maths taught by actual maths grads, then you will need six figure salaries to attract them.
60k is extremely low for CS grads in any moderately-sized city but they might be willing to make that trade for two months off in the summer.
This idea that teachers work the same hours they are physically inside school and nothing else is laughable.
Though regardless, entry level software developers in the united states get six figures out of the gate, so it seems remarkably reasonable.
The market has externalities, which is a huge flaw in pricing things. This is a known studied problem with markets.
Third, it's one of many optimization processes. If you understand machine learning, you understand that there are different models, different solution spaces, and optimizations (learning) on them requires different techniques. Why should we rely on a highly flawed optimization process like the market to decide these important things in society?
Democratic and consensus building is another way to come to these complex decisions without relying on 'spot trade' and pricing restrictions that the market has.
"The Market" is a technology. Thinking the market solves everything is like saying vacuum-tubes should be used in all electronics.
Like, have you ever wondered why, at your work place, there aren't markets? Why don't most large successful companies have market dynamics internally if the market solves all organizational issues?
0: https://www.educationnext.org/education-and-economic-growth/
Why kill the beast when you can milk it?
And why was it that Bloomberg was running for only like 3 weeks right around super Tuesday and then folded after that?
Maybe they are the same they just pretend ti act differently in front of the camera?
This sounds like a dangerous line of thinking. Like we can argue about Trump till the cows come home but I think it'd be a tough sell to say he wasn't who the Republicans wanted as their nominee.
It sounds like you are saying you wish the political parties would do what they feel is best irregardless of the will of their constituints. That is no longer representative democracy but rather tyrrany.
One "side" is a whole lot worse than the other hahaha
>'Representative Thomas Massie announces that he has introduced H.R. 899, a bill to abolish the federal Department of Education. The bill, which is one sentence long, states, “The Department of Education shall terminate on December 31, 2022.”'
That's not a serious bill. One sentence is the minimum required for this person to put out a press release. This is nothing more than a PR piece for the Representative. Even the most mundane and simple bills are in the 10's of pages.[1]
[1] https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2009/08/is-1000-pages-lo...
There are also other hurdles to poor kids attending private schools, for example private schools don't have school busses, so they are reliant on kids having parents with the ability to drop their kids off and pick them up every day.
Vouchers are generally used at existing private and parochial schools, who do meet state education standards, and frankly, usually vastly outperform public schools on education outcomes... and in many cases offer opportunities outside the classroom that public schools can't really match (i.e. many elementary schools in Indiana don't offer arts, sports, scouting and other clubs where the private/parochial schools do) Most often those schools have been outperforming the local public schools for decades. It's really low risk and has been nothing but wonderful for the kids.
The charter schools are much more risky - they are much more like business startups, and many fail. But, again the worse risk of all is entrusting thousands of kids for 13 years to failing education systems, and that is the alternative.
You’re advocating for a solution to failing system, but it’s not the only one. And frankly, it’s likely it’s worse now than it was 13 years ago… i can think of one possible explanation why
Kids don't have 20 years to wait for laws to change, demographics to shift, politicians to retire and local attitudes to change. They are in school for 13 years.
> False choice.
Nope, vouchers give families a choice. Doing nothing gives no choice.
Both solutions take time. One solution injects a whole lot of the worst capitalist incentives into education (grift, hype, profiteering), the other doesn’t.
Put another way: the tax is lower than the net individual cost. I suspect that most school voucher advocates understand this, and see it as a convenient way to additionally weaken public schooling.
I do not see what public education advocates are fearing here. If their systems are so amazing and essential than surely the private sector can do no better, right? This will force school systems to become more lean from an administrative point of view.
Basically the government would be subsidizing private schools for the rich, and since rich people are getting their needs met the funding will evaporate for schools in poorer neighbourhoods. Society will be move divided and your ability to succeed will depend on the class you’re born into above all else.
How can developers understand the value and need for dogfooding your own products, and yet advocate for a two tier public-private healthcare or education system?
In many US states this will have to happen.
Well worth it.
Edit: why the downvotes? If you are uncertain of or unamenable to the way outcomes are measured, vouchers are a reasonable solution that puts the power in your hands
An extremely significant part of how parents choose schools is based on the social groups they want their kids associating with.
99% of the academic success of private schools is attributable to their ability to exclude poorly performing students, not some magical pedagogical secret.
It’s the same exact reason why homes of equivalent quality in two different districts of the same school system may have 2x or 3x price differentials. Because parents pay hundreds of thousands so their kid doesn’t sit next to a kid with parents who can’t afford the same.
If schools are unwilling or unable to provide a stable learning environment then parents move on. There has been a lot of ink spilled on exactly why this is, including the racial and religious issues you allude to, but the brute fact is that in many communities families flee or switch to religious school because their children suffer violence at the hands of their fellow students.
IMO this entire problem was caused by segregating our schools to begin with. The problem of misbehaving kids isn't going to be fixed by giving them free vacation on the streets. They need to see with their own eyes that their behavior isn't acceptable, and that means putting them in environments where they are outsiders. Kids are a product of their social environment, full stop.
If you have to teach the kids who need help, you get poor marks when some of them inevitably fail.
[0]https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/education
Teaching jobs don't exist in a vacuum, and the reason to have pay based on seniority is simple. If you want competent people to go into the profession from the start, they need to know they have a steady and worthwhile career. If you can provide that, like NJ does, (and where I live in NY does) then you might actually get good teachers. If instead you make it unappealing and difficult because of uncertainty, you will only get people who are incompetent and have no other options.
However, pay based on outcome is really hard to get right, especially for something like teaching. What is the outcome? Well, what we really want is adults who can contribute to society. But that's too hard to measure and would take too long, so we need a proxy. Anything to do with tests is tough: not only do you have to (somehow -- this isn't a solved problem) calibrate for the students themselves to suss out what the teacher's contribution is, but there's immense pressure to teach to the test and prep for the test specifically, even at the expense of actual education. Not nothing, but imperfect. Other measures suffer from the same basic problem: any measure that becomes a goal ceases to be a useful measure because people optimize for that.
So what's an alternative? Maybe it's to make teaching a respected, well-paid profession where you have stability and advancement. One good way of doing that is by having clear seniority-based pay, not because it reflects how good at the job you are, but because that attracts teachers who are serious about making it a career and establishes it as a mainstream, lucrative profession.
But I don't know. This stuff is all extremely hard, and I don't think anywhere has figured it all out.
[0]https://acnj.org/newsroom/news-releases/nj-4th-graders-score...
Throwing more money at the problem often makes some progress, but it's not always a definitive solution. Tough problems usually involve reorganizing processes, which tends to be harder than spending more money or recruiting more talented people.
How are the other 22% of low income fourth graders able to read?
The data from here: https://www.aecf.org/resources/2022-kids-count-data-book/aux...
Table 1.6. Confidence Intervals for States and Nation, 2009 and 2019 New Jersey 2019:
58.1% Percent of fourth graders not proficient in reading
[1] https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading/states/scores/?gra...
60k is okay in some areas, personally I think the average salary should be 85-90k and over 100k where cost of living is much higher.
I remember a while ago, googling around about the schools of Newark NJ, because of a rather complicated Mark Zuckerberg story. The school district's budget was around a billion a year, while a third of graduating students weren't proficient at reading.
And when public officials were trying to do something about this, their motives were rather ...peculiar. I think the words of governor Christie were something like "Nobody votes for me in Newark, so why not do the right thing?"
Think about that for a minute. The governor would have expected to to loose votes for trying to improve a city's public schools. Does that sound like a place that values the education of it's children?
Newark's problems are at the family level, not at the school level. Parental involvement is a baseline requirement for a successful student. It's unfortunate but Newark is hurting in this regard.
A president can say to congress "I'd like you to pass a bill that..." and they can change some things for federal workers - but for states, they've got very little regulatory power outside of what has been granted to them through the various departments (e.g. Department of Education).
2016 had a 52/46/2 senate composition with a republican majority. The house was 241 to 194 with a republican majority.
My crystal ball for a hypothetical president Sanders shows a president who would have been able to do very little except for some executive orders which would get overridden by congress. The house would have been very unlikely to give him the budget to fulfill his promises and ideals while blaming him and every executive branch agency for every failing and catastrophe that occurred in 2020.
If you want teachers to be paid more, increase the requirements to be a teacher. I’m a proponent of requiring at least n years experience in real world work, plus education in a hard science or trade.
Not everything can be looked at from a macro econ 101 supply and demand take; the real world is much more complicated than that.
ie. I'm saying that we don't have to put our hopes in the basket of hoping that economic pressures force higher wages if we make teachers less prevalent; we can simply pay them more.
Not everything follows the rules of capitalism, especially when public school teachers are paid by the government. There are giant teacher shortages across many locales in the US, so according to you we should see skyrocketing teacher pay, but that hasn't happened (pay has gone up in some locales but nowhere near the amount needed to fix teacher shortages).
Trite as it may be to say, there's an obvious value to attracting a larger amount of people to teaching, it's just hard to quantify and takes longer than most politicians' term limits to see the larger benefits.
And in communism value is defined as what will get you promoted.
And in autocracy value is loyalty to the party line
And in Neo-Nazism value is what kills the most Jews
And so on and so forth, let's not pretend that people making short sighted decisions for personal gain is limited to a single economic system it may be more visible or exactrebated by one system or another but it isn't like Lusheynkinism was pushed because it helped the students of the USSR better feed their people.
One could suggest the opposite problem, we don't have enough markets in eduction and could do more with charters and vouchers, or programs like magnet schools.
Education certainly produces community value. Moving around what column the cost and benefits should be attributed to is a kind of social gerrymandering.
It's a function of ideology and power asymmetry. A well educated populace will of course be better off.
You're not going to find out why police make twice as much as teachers with neoliberal economics. Fabulists depict things this way to remove human agency and make specific legislative and policy decisions take on the authority of natural law, as if it's a scientific absolute.
It's just a slight of hand. All these things can be changed and the sky will not fall.
The voters are the customers.
"We can't hire enough teachers" -> "Let's reduce the requirements" -> "These teachers aren't very good or qualified, there's no reason to give them a raise" -> "We can't hire enough teachers!"
Since private schools are not subject to these attacks, their salaries would not be lowered by these attacks, making them relatively higher.
But this isn't helpful. Those need to be normalized by the median by country and then expressed in some deviation metric to get a real idea.
In any case, the measure for teachers should not be "how hard is the job" but rather "how important is the outcome". It might be easy enough to replace a teacher without raising the salary (another assertion I have issues with - there are rampant teacher shortages nationwide), but could you not be potentially getting a better teacher and having broadly positive effects on society if you're offering more money?
There's a difference between difficulty and exertion.
> how important is the outcome
It's pretty damn important that the garbage man comes and collects the trash every week, but we don't pay him the marginal value of trash collection to the county.
> another assertion I have issues with - there are rampant teacher shortages nationwide
I actually agree that the market doesn't seem to be clearing due to stingy education departments and state government. We should probably break their monopsony power by privatizing education.
> could you not be potentially getting a better teacher and having broadly positive effects on society if you're offering more money
If you want to make the argument we should fire all the current teachers and replace them with people who would otherwise be accountants or actuaries or software engineers, I'd be amenable to the argument.
According to the BLS garbage collectors have a median annual wage of $ 42,780[1] whereas elementary school teachers have a median annual wage of $61,400[2].
[1]https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes537081.htm
[2]https://www.bls.gov/ooh/education-training-and-library/kinde...
If the state is still paying, they're still going to be stingy.
A private school has roughly the same administrative staff as a public school. Their buildings may be a little bit less expensive, as they probably can get away with less ADA accessibility. They probably don't pay into pensions and may not provide as nice of health care, so they may be able to move more of total comp into salaries, but they may also compensate their board members more. Word on the street is private school teachers get paid less and have less due process, but also have less stringent degree requirements and fewer mandates in their classroom. But they also get a lot more parental engagement, and a rather different cohort of students.
Even though I disagree with you I can see where you're coming from with this sentence, but: the impact is HUGE. The impact of good teachers on society cannot be overstated. It's an amazing ROI and everything we can do to further the education of humankind is worth doing.
Programming (mostly) isn't that hard as well, compare software engineering with electronics engineering, for example, but the impact is huge: that's why you're probably well paid to do it and your company makes your life really easy, with all the bells and whistles to make you happy.
More people could be trained to program, especially in a casual way many more (spreadsheet formulas, low-code forms or glue) but working as mentor in high-school CS programs, I've been surprised in both directions. There are a bunch of bright people out there that could move into programming with just a boost to their training to enable them to bootstrap further ... and there are lots of people that just don't have the mindset. Abstract reasoning or modeling the world is just not something they are capable of doing without intense concentration, if that. It just doesn't come naturally to these people.
Public school budgets are set of course by property taxes. If you teach in a rich district, you get paid more. If you teach in a poor district, you get paid less. The way public schools are funded helps keep the rich rich, and the poor poor.
Unfortunately, the political clout is held by the rich who want their tax money to go only to their children and not those other children (or "those othered children" if you like). Even though, if we switched to a more equal funding model for public schools, we'd see improvements in the wealth gap and society in general within a generation or two.
That depends on the state. In California, most school districts have their budgets set by the state funding formula which provides state funding above the local property tax revenues. There are a handful of school districts where local property tax revenue provides more than the state formula, although I haven't been able to find a list of those districts recently.
The California funding system was in place since 1972 (with major changes in 2013). Have we seen improvements in the wealth gap and society in general?
Your comment was that equalizing funding would make society better; my question is, given that funding has been mostly equalized in California, is society better?
In Washington state, funding for basic education is apportioned from state revenues; local districts can raise taxes for enrichment, but there's a cap, and state funds are provided if local taxes don't meet a minimum. I'm not familiar with other states, but there have been several court cases where states were forced to reform systems that relied on local property tax [1]; and I'd imagine many states would have changed their systems after seeing those results, rather than waiting for their own case.
[1] https://edeq.stanford.edu/sections/section-4-lawsuits/landma...
Whereas with a software developer especially at small orgs their ability is easier to measure and evaluate.
Education Expenditures by Country https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd
Government expenditure on education, total (% of GDP) https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.XPD.TOTL.GD.ZS
I think this only counts federal spending - state and local spending total to ~3.5% of US GDP.
There should be a base plus CoL adjustment adjusted annually to account for inflation or deflation. A flat standard amount for anything does not make sense given the CoL disparities. 60,000 dollars is good for someone in Ukiah CA or Huntsville AL, but not for someone in NYC or Burbank, CA.
Reminds me of lots of things kicking in at $10Gs. A figure that was set in the '70s and has not been revisited since.
It hasn't solved Chicago Public Schools' problems.
Source: https://wirepoints.org/chicago-teachers-are-paid-some-of-the...
sure but it probably has solved many financial problems for Chicago teachers, which is a good enough reason to implement a tool like this.
Also, there was some inflation.
To ask another question: (presuming our hands were to be tied to give out that free money) Had we instead given that money directly to teachers and other low income individuals, essentially doubling or tripling the proportion we actually gave them, would we have seen the same level of fraud or waste? I can't imagine so. Would the economy have been better off? I feel like probably, but I'm no economist. It's a supply side argument and I have a hard time believing those based on the results of 'corporate socialism' experiments.
You mean the people who went to great lengths to be considered non-essential, so they could work remotely? We know the result of that was historic learning loss for American children. They don't deserve another dime.
So, from the perspective of businesses and individuals that live where the teachers do, yes, the largest taxpayers do usually burn money.
(Quite literally, in the form of things like very expensive-to-operate private planes, such as to attend the recent 'super bowl')
Maybe that’s the stated reason, and maybe it’s used to drum up political support, but it’s never the real reason.
The existing seniority based pay system completely decouples money as an incentive, doesn’t it?
On the other hand you have systems that you describe that are not at all calibrated to performance, and only care about seat time. Such as, toxic school systems or government agencies.
But, somewhere in between, there is a tremendous amount of happiness, equity and productivity. Such as, the customer service representatives that have worked for Amazon in Germany in the same roles since 1998. Or, airline pilots who, setting aside the various labor and equity troubles for a second, get great performance results from a seat-time oriented approach. Or someone that happily worked as a dishwasher at a restaurant in Rome for 20 years. In USA there's also a good deal of civil servants that have faithfully served our local societies for decades with a high quality of labor and life. The USPS mail person that delivers to my parents' house has been running that route for like 2 or 3 decades, he's still great at it and spends as much time playing with my parents' dogs as he wants.
I don't know what the perfect formula is, but I do think it involves outpacing inflation for compensation increases regardless of performance, and some amount of performance evaluation too. But maybe not too much of either.
Just my two cents, not an economist, etc.
A teacher is supposed to teach. We want to pay them more because they keep saying that if we do they'll teach better.
We don't owe them money simply because they exist.
Given a choice, would you prefer the teacher of your kid paid 30k or 60k? I'd prefer the second option even if it would be the same person teaching, because do you really want your kids to be raised by people in dire financial situation?
A prospect of smarter folks becoming teachers (or staying in the field if they're there already) is a nice bonus.
It's way harder to find high-performing teachers when you lowball salaries. It's actually way harder to find _any_ teachers when you do that. So if you're not willing to raise pay, you'll take what you get and you'll like it.
> In the rest of the professional world we have to earn our salaries.
As someone who worked decades in the professional world before giving up a huge chunk of salary to pursue my passion for teaching, this is not entirely true. There are tons of slacker leeches in the professional world. I've seen it worse than in teaching.
Now, that's hard and I get that, just deciding how to measure teacher performance is difficult, but if it can be done it should be done.
The few teachers I had that left a lasting impression on me I value greatly, I wish more teachers were like that. And that's a teachers job, isn't it? Without a lasting impression most of what was learned is lost, so then it's not really teaching, just busywork.
I will say that there are probably a good number of teachers with the drive just beaten out of them by the bureaucracy. When you go into your profession to educate and you spend more time dealing with authorities, paperwork and silly requirements, that has a tendency to drag your performance down. The flip side of that though is ofc that that bureaucracy was largely created by teachers, probably the ones who would get fired without it protecting them.
HN: $100k/yr to write webshit is a poverty wage!
Also HN: $60k/yr is too much for the people we expect to educate our children!
I'd like a citation for that. I can't help but imagine that private schools game the numbers, because when I worked for a school district that's what I saw: private schools can easily get rid of underperforming students and pretty much never take any with disabilities.
https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/dashboards/schools_dashboa...
On college entry tests such as the SAT, NAIS found that students in private schools consistently out-performed their public school peers in all subject areas.
https://www.nais.org/magazine/independent-school/spring-2016...
His doubt is that private teachers that are paid less than public school teachers provide better results. To prove the original assertion you need to include the income levels of these private school teachers and graph them against the performance and income level of the public school teachers.
But maybe you have a source that says otherwise.
Despite all that, those teachers choose to work in those jobs. Are manning shortfalls at public schools significantly more than in other comparable sectors of the economy?
If the education experts can't tell the difference why bother trying to find good ones? Pay low wages and scrape the bottom of the barrel, there is no measurable difference between any of them right?
And yet somehow we continue to hire and manage software developers, evaluating their performance holistically.
What is it about teaching that supposedly makes skill so uniquely opaque to administrators that it's (teach to the test) XOR (pay by seniority).
Contrast that with code that doesn't compile/link or requires way more QA. Or personality issues that are sorted quite easily by a functional team/leader.
Teachers are more like naval vessel commanders than software engineers.
I suspect that you could get away with a lower salary, if teachers are given more support and more autonomy. If you have to deal with troublesome students, parents and micromanaging politicians, then you want a lot more money.
(The pandemic kicked the shit out of those statistics, but we're not debating whether remote schooling was a good policy; it wasn't.)
Even if the statistics were true (again: looks like no), the conclusion that it's drawing is unsupported. The very best teachers in the nation would have a hard time putting up New Trier stats teaching in Lawndale or Englewood. And the very best teaching is probably what it actually takes to eke out any kind of performance from the lowest-performing schools in Chicago, which serve students locked into generational poverty by redlining.
It makes sense that if public schools hire teachers only from the most academically competent population in a country, and pay them well, those individuals will figure out how to improve the quality of public education.
Some years ago I recall seeing a study by McKinsey which found that a majority of public school teachers in the US came from the bottom of their high-school class and the bottom of their college class.[a] Quite literally the opposite of Finland.
--
[a] I found the study. Here it is: https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/industries/public%...
Please don't attack a straw man!
What do you think?
Likely will need in-person teacher facilitation as well, setting up kids alone with a laptop and an AI feels very wrong and dystopian to me.
Edit: Also getting all nations to agree will be impossible, if not then you will probably a curriculum that suffers death by committee.
I also think that AI can play a huge role in this - but for sure it needs to be improved.
Sorry, but this just reeks brutal tech-broism to me. "We have such a powerful technology that we can do everything, nevermind asking if we should."
My kids were confined to the home at the covid-19 lockdowns, and the learning over zoom not only wasn't even remotely efficient, it had profound long-term negative effects on their psychological well-being too. They actually enjoy being in the classroom with their friends and their teacher.
If this ever got made it would only be used my school administrators as a cudgel to discipline teachers unions. It would never get used to actually teach children.
Of course, the USA would have to bootstrap the first "cohort" of this.
Otherwise, the point is simple - good teachers don't get paid more, because there's nothing you can point at to justify giving them more money, because the money that comes from the municipality (to fund the school and consequently the teacher) has nothing to do with the outcome.
---
It's sad that the "privatize school", or "school voucher" discussion has become so corrupted by politics. Regardless of whether or not you agree with it, or not, it's worth critically thinking about and whether the implications of that kind of change are good or bad, and why.
Public school teachers already make more than private school teachers. Their salaries are propped up by governments and unions
E.g. statistically normalize cohort (income, etc.), measure their median outcomes, and then see how the teacher's cohort does
It'll be dirty, given the small sample size and number of variables, but it'd be a nice bonus +/- to retirement.
I'd also hazard prior student reviews, sampled when they turn 30 & 40 would be very interesting.
https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/aer.104.9.2633
If only we divided the country into geographical areas that could each be responsible for administering their own issues for the most part, so they would have a better understanding of the costs and tradeoffs, and be able to live they way they want without enforcing their way of life on people halfway across the country, and instead of the people in a few big cities and Washington DC ruling everyone from afar each regional area could be self governed.
Oh well that sounds like nonsense anyway after all the same things that are good for NJ are obviously the way things should be run in Montana .
Edit: And obviously adjust the salary to match local conditions as you point out.
[1] https://www.federalpay.org/gs/locality
The people of Vermont love him though.
https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/aer.104.9.2633
They claim replacing a bad teacher with an average teacher is worth like $250k in earnings per classroom. It's unclear what effect a blanket minimal salary would have on teacher quality. I'd be worried that it might make bad teachers stick around with good ones already making more than that.
Federal Government could help with standardize maybe software and equipment for kids... that is if they were not corrupted like they are.
It's been centuries, and probably millenias, that politics have asked for things that they did not grant once they were in a position to do so.
I demand a minimum salary of $1,000,000 for everyone, and immortality for all! Vote for me and make a news article I guess?
have kids in public america school system. government spending money in my opinion uncompetitive and wasteful. but public education must all support. it still good in america.
national minimum salary ok but need states or cities to tune to living cost. $60k only work maybe in central us.. cheaper state or city.
It'd help here in Colorado which is both a relatively HCOL area and a place that pays our teachers peanuts. I know teachers here that get less that $60k/yr as it is.