I tried teaching high school CS for the best part of two years in a private school. Everything to do with the pupils was amazing and I loved every moment. I am a natural with behaviour management and although it was stressful, every time the bad kids acted up it presented a teachable moment. You could really feel the impact on their lives and behaviour, well behind the Python and the TCP/IP and while loops.
But everything to do with working with other teachers was utter misery. Never have I met such a cantankerous downtrodden passive aggressive bunch of backstabbing political jobsworths. Actually, it was probably only one third of the staff that were the hyper negative old timers, but they had such a dismal impact on me it felt like everyone was cut from the same cliquey snobby cloth. Imagine the worst, most power hungry, little-napoleon office manager you’ve ever had and then imagine one in three of the staff have that mindset.
It drove me mad and I’m now a SWE again but also volunteering at a youth center in our most deprived part of town and loving it. I can have impact with the kids, and as a volunteer I seem to command much more respect from parents than a lowly teacher.
So now I am tainted too — if I hear you are a teacher then I will see before me someone who at best tolerates that level of crappiness in their workplace, and at worst actively takes part in it. Neither leave me with much respect for you, but I know why you do it: the kids.
My wife is a primary public school teacher in the U.S. I read to her your comment, and she said to me, "We have 21 teachers at our school, and only one of them resembles what that comment describes."
As an anecdote, I was a math major. I took an elective course on the history of mathematics, which must have been a requirement for math education majors, who were under a separate department and even college (i.e., not the math department or college of the arts and sciences). I was the only math major, and I'm pretty sure the only male in a class of about 20 or so. The professor was one of the easiest and most straightforward professors, basically giving out a study guide of homework problems that directly reflected what was to be on the exams. I am fairly certain I got 100% on all exams.
I have never witnessed more complaining and moaning from students than I did in that class. The education majors (i.e., everyone else) complained about absolutely everything, from the book to the professor to the material itself to "difficulty" of the course. It was unbelievable that these people were supposedly wanting to be math teachers but were complaining endlessly about a history of mathematics course. I experienced basically the same from the education majors in the introduction to proofs class.
My mom was a teacher, but those experiences forever tainted the picture of a modern day teacher. In fact, one of the primary reasons my mom retired early was due to her fellow teachers and requirements from the school. She was mandated to use PowerPoint and share lesson plans. But the lesson plans received from the younger teachers weren't up to her standards, so my mom usually had to redo the others' lesson plans, on top of her assigned lesson plan material. Additionally, the kids with the lowest test scores and behavioral problems were usually transferred to my mom's homeroom class for her to help turnaround, which she usually did. What an absolute nightmare.
The root problem with the US education system is the same thing with the rest of US government programs:
There is no bankruptcy mechanism for government agencies.
Bankruptcy removes poorly run private companies from the marketplace. There is no such mechanism for government agencies... so poorly run agencies remain in place a hundred years after they lost their effectiveness.
Why does a public school classroom still look the same today as it did 150 years ago? Ridiculous. Remove the education government agency and you will see hundreds of better options spring up.
Also - bring back corporal punishment. Sure, it was misused in 1% of cases, but it has led to 1000x the problems from students who have no respect for teachers.
Google it. It's a racket. Teacher's unions have negotiated automatic pay raises for certain educational attainments. Those attainments are certified by the Ed Schools. It's basically the certification program scam.
I’m sure your experience sucked, but having a bunch of crappy coworkers doesn’t mean 100s of thousands of teachers across the nation are likely to be “the worst, most power hungry, little-napoleon office manager you’ve ever had”.
Yeah, but this is Hacker news. Blaming individual teachers validates the idea that there aren't major systemic problems in the country. It's not that teachers are underpaid and class sizes are exploding, it's simply the case that the existing crop of teachers aren't egalitarian enough to handle the job
I honestly don’t follow. Doesn’t paying more money or reducing class size (by hiring more teachers) directly imply the existing crop of teachers can’t handle the job? Or are you saying we pay the exact same people more money? And reduce class sizes how? Requiring students take fewer classes?
> Doesn’t paying more money or reducing class size (by hiring more teachers) directly imply the existing crop of teachers can’t handle the job?
Yes. Then the question becomes, is the job reasonable? I think the article author, as well as the person you replied to, would say No. Not to mention tens of thousands of recently former teachers across the US.
> Or are you saying we pay the exact same people more money?
I won’t speak for the person you’re replying to, but I’m saying that, as is the article author.
Even when they can handle it as best as you can expect from someone, it's still not going to be enough.
You can reduce class sizes by hiring more teachers. Their salaries aren't actually a huge fraction of education spending (only around ~15% if you assume one teacher for every 30 fulltime students and 80k TC per fulltime teacher, both of which are deliberate overestimates).
Hire 30% more teachers, give them a 30% pay bump, and reduce unneeded spending such as excessive sports spending beyond what is useful to the students. Remove unnecessary administrative load from the teachers. Reduce school hours that are very often lengthened for babysitting reasons.
You can even cut the last year of education and tack it into community college while making it optional.
> Reduce school hours that are very often lengthened for babysitting reasons.
This babysitting is vital for many families, most of whom are low income and can’t afford alternatives. If we reduce class hours we should provide something to keep children positively occupied.
I agree, we should, but we don't necessarily need teachers to do that. At my school we had an after hours service where the monitors would have kids play outside, play/learn boardgames, watch educationalish movies, learn to cook, etc.., for an extra 3-5$ a day for up to 4 hours. The class sizes were much larger of course and there is no correction or study plan involved. I think that's a good and economical solution to this very real problem. Of course it should be free for lower income households if not for everyone.
Personally my parents just made me walk around, though ;)
We had this as well... OSHC (Out of School Hours Care). It was mostly staffed by volunteer parents with one or two school employees (since it was on school grounds and presumably needed trusted persons to lock up / have a first aid and/or fire warden available / etc.
That said, I'm curious as to what age this care would be required? Back In My Day ™ I was entrusted with a house key at a relatively young age (10? 11? it was a while ago...) and would walk myself home / prepare food / generally take care of myself until an adult came home. But these days you hear about police being called for kids playing without an adult present in a fenced-in front yard (and the fact that as I understand the USA is far less walkable than where I live) which makes me wonder what age is considered suitable over there?
I was handling all my own meals except dinner and had a house key at around the same age in the US. I'm not sure how drastically things have changed in the ensuing 20 years, but I still see kids walking and playing without adults, so I suspect it's both exaggerated and regional or class-based.
They absolutely do. I benefitted a lot from sports as a kid. You just don't need to put as much money into them as many schools do. For example many schools nowadays have their own pool, or multiple stadiums, dozens of teams with multiple long distance travel a year, and so on, while a lot of that could be using shared infrastructure or done outside of the school.
And often the vast majority of the money in sports is concentrated towards a very small fraction of the student population, often for regional pride above their self-actualisation. A lot of high school athletes are quite miserable or do it out of social pressure.
I'm not saying we need less sports, we can just do it with less money that is better allocated.
Your last paragraph reminds me of what my wife calls “one of your favorite sayings.”
“It’s difficult to respect someone that doesn’t respect themselves.”
Of course that doesn’t mean treat people in a disrespectful manner, but I don’t understand why anyone would wish to be a teacher in the US.
It’s not a pleasant experience. And the money isn’t enough for most people.
Education is a bit like healthcare. If you want to make money in healthcare, you don’t become a doctor. You become an administrator. Same goes for education.
> So now I am tainted too — if I hear you are a teacher then I will see before me someone who at best tolerates that level of crappiness in their workplace, and at worst actively takes part in it. Neither leave me with much respect for you, but I know why you do it: the kids.
I can't be sure those "jobsworths" are writing screeds online to rationalize their present (and future!) lack of respect towards teachers, based on nothing but a wild extrapolation from a personal anecdote at a private school.
However, I can be sure you are.
If you really want to get their goats, why not try this: stop doing it. Bam: taint instantly removed. What could be a more passive aggressive solution than that? :)
I taught at a code school. It was absolutely crazy. I’d never do it again, but I totally loved the teaching and mentoring aspect of it.
The business and sales aspect pushed me away. That, and a particular SJW fellow teacher. I have a fairly high tolerance for that sort of thing, but they were insufferable beyond words.
Every industry has good and bad workplaces, with good and bad cultures. Maybe 30 years ago it was a fine workplace and then two of the curmudgeons joined, drove out a lot of people who weren't curmudgeons, and 30 years later you've ended up with a bad culture filled with curmudgeons.
I don't know anything about teaching in the US, but I don't think one experience like that really says much about the industry as a whole: it just says something about that particular workplace.
I deeply resent the fact that your comment is the top comment as of this writing. Nowhere in it have you acknowledged that the reason one third of teaching staff you interacted with were bitter political players was actually the entire topic of the article: the system has made them that way.
I’m sorry I didn’t make it clearer that I couldn’t agree with you more.
No one goes into teaching to be a bad teacher. Some can deal with the negativity, some can’t. I couldn’t and while I would never have let it affect my work with the children, I could see myself becoming a shitty colleague. It was good that I got out when I did but I miss the children so much.
I think it perfectly illustrate and reinforce the article.
A supposedly passionate teacher which left the field since he could.
And at the same time it mainly read as an anecdote to allow you to hate teachers after all 30% of them are : "Never have I met such a cantankerous downtrodden passive aggressive bunch of backstabbing political jobsworths" as if it justify ignoring all the grievance of the article. Which perfectly cycle back to "Almost nobody respects teachers".
I don't think that's an accurate description nor representation of every teacher. Most of the teachers I know are in the profession because they love to teach - so much so that it outweighs all the negatives you've presented here.
My experience is only at the college level and the environment is not much better (again, anecdotal experience, not representative of all universities). There's a huge amount of infighting and drama - primarily between professors/faculty and the administration. Mostly centered around power and control.
It's quite remarkable how folks can have such ego and hubris in any job let alone in places of education.
Anecdote leading the comments that is basically labor/victim blaming. One where you admit 1/3 of the teachers were the problem in a profession that burns out and makes people cynical. I also believe private school teachers are paid less than public school teachers in general, and often its a religious school so there is that litmus test that further degrades the pool.
Teaching is a difficult job. I've never heard anyone say its easy. It doesn't seem to be well paid. It's gotten harder over the years with the steady collapse in social services and prevalence of two income households. Standards and micromanagement increase year by year as part of the war on public education by the far right, functioning exactly as designed. It's rewarding for a time but wears you down.
>>Imagine the worst, most power hungry, little-napoleon office manager you’ve ever had and then imagine one in three of the staff have that mindset.
This correlates with whatever I've seen over the years with various teachers, and then experiences with teachers outside my own case(teachers of nieces, nephews and other younger cousins). The most theme is Never outshine the master problems, the teacher's seem to be pissed that their students might win above them in life and went to actively hurt the students with whatever power they have.
Most successful teachers I've seen were also the opposite, finding their success by helping students win.
- “I’ve been there on the front lines for a whole long two years, and I’ve seen what the article is talking about! It’s even worse than you realize! If you treat these teachers like we have for a sustained period over this many years, the constant negative shit turns a sizeable amount of the teachers themselves to be crappy?”
Or is it
- “I don’t buy it. I did a stint for two years. That’s as good as those with 30 years. It’s their own fault because they’re mean and nasty.”
You didn’t make clear whether you were offering your exhibit of suffering as a commiserate symptom or an accusatory cause. Could you clarify please?
I don’t know how the negative feedback cycle started but it definitely exists — teachers are treated with contempt by both management and parents which creates a selection pressure that either favors or develops a certain kind of negative character trait in the job.
My school was very poorly funded. The shiny new facilities that everyone associated with the private sector were only ever provided as vanity projects by wealthy parents. The day to day funding for repairs, painting, food, resources, staff etc was rock bottom. Another reason to see how a bitter sentiment can accumulate over time.
So I guess the first of your two options? There is a constant influx of people who want to be good teachers. We squander it but passively knocking them down and it is very sad.
I am an early-retired EE and I thought that I could have a second career in teaching HS physics. I got the MA Teaching in Maryland, and did my one year student teaching assignment. My thoughts:
1. The degree program was decent, although a certificate program would be better for prior professionals if the law allowed it (lower cost, too much wasted time in redundant classes).
2. Teachers are sad. Very sad. They are underpaid and overworked, even at the better suburban high schools. Parents treat them poorly, even when they are veteran teachers with lots of experience.
3. In general, the public resents that teachers get “3 months off” in the summer. I believe that this is the justification for lower pay. It is silly, because teachers work more in 9 months than most professionals and they also pay for things out of their own pockets. They also counsel and tutor students after school. It’s a difficult job.
4. In my job interviews, the first and most important qualification was “classroom control.” Math, science, engineering, life experience were all distant seconds. Teachers—-even in advanced math and science classes—-are first and foremost caretakers. Think about that for a second…
5. What is the current model for education based on? There are several competing historical arguments, but the salient factors like student-teacher ratio, subjects, grades, facilities, etc. are based on economics and legal requirements. The quality of either a student’s experience or a teacher’s experience is not very high on the list. Education is about checking a box on a list of requirements that was developed 150+ years ago.
Ultimately, I decided to tutor rather than to teach in a classroom. I consider this a personal disappointment, although I learned a lot from the educational experience. I wish there could be a “town hall” type of discussion to consider ways to improve the situation.
The emphasis on "classroom control" personally doesn't surprise me. If two or three students start refusing a teacher's orders, that teacher is done for the year, and maybe forever at that school. In my middle school, discipline was all but lost in most of my classes. Play cards in class, tell the teacher to shut up. What's she going to do? We stole her phone and keys in first period, locked the doors to the room, and we disconnected the intercom weeks ago.
You can send an administrator or a police officer to sit in the class, but are they going to sit there all day, every day, until the end of the year? Are they going to do that in all twenty classes that need the treatment? The second they get called away because someone set another fire in the woods, it's game on in the classroom.
At least we almost never actually assaulted staff. Someone I grew up with became a teacher and quit after just a few years. She had a student actually beat her up.
I regret a lot about my behavior in school, and reflecting on that has led me wonder why so many students hate being in school so much, and how—if?—we could educate children without making them resent the activity.
I said it before and will say it again: the way public high schools are arranged is cruel towards both the kids and the adults. (Also counterproductive, but first of all, cruel.)
Teenagers are forced into groups of the same age, within 1 year tolerance. This is the age of learning of social structures, building social ties, learning about various forms of social status, etc. They need to be inside a rich social structure to learn all that.
Instead, they are locked up with their peers, and a lonely adult. What can they do?
Of course they try to build various social structures of themselves, but since they are all peers in most regards, the only structure they can build is a gang. The more bold (and often violent) becomes a leader, others follow.
The only way to raise in status is to join a gang, and fight for a higher rung, or to start a gang. The more violent gang leaders do everything to make actual learning seen as despicable, because they'd hate to see a competing hierarchy based on academic success. Confronting the lone adult, a dangerous but not too dangerous enterprise, becomes a way to show bravery to others.
While some students may cause more problems and be more prone to violence than others, the cause is not the presence of such students, like presence of oil is not a cause of a fire. It's the system, the way classes are formed, that ignites them.
BTW 100-150 years ago high school was elective and required certain determination to get into it. This is why it did not show these problems so much: the students joined because they valued the academic success hierarchy, and could form structures along attaining better grades at the very least. (A teacher had many more violent response options, too.) But today's public high schools receive students with different incentives, even filtered against attaining academic success, because kids who eagerly want to learn go to various competitive high schools (charter, Catholic, private).
This is very sad, both because it keeps happening, and because nobody is coming up with a better structure, it's not a topic of a wide discussion in the society.
You said exactly what I've always thought about public school but could never put into words. I've found, though, that private school avoids some of these problems by filtering out problem kids and keeping class sizes small. Kids can be made to be friends with each other(at least to some extent), but many of them don't have that guidance
I think the main difference between private and public schools (in Denmark) is that private schools can expel kids who sabotage the lessons.
Public schools cannot expel kids. They can't even make a kid move to another school.
Denmark has also closed "special classes" for disruptive kids and classes for autistic kids and put the in the normal classes. So now you have the autistic kid who can't handle noise in the same class as pupils who like to make noise.
In addition to this, the problem kids are often made into the victims. So you are not allowed to blame them or tell the parents they need to parent their kid.
So we also have an exodus of teachers. I cannot see how you can survive as a teacher in such a situation.
I think you are right. But the kids who are involved need to actually be held responsible.
In middle school I was a kind and polite person. There were a significant portion around me who were not. And more than enough who were literally underage criminals. Many abused the teachers, especially ones who were having a tough time such a chemotherapy.
Stealing by middle schoolers should result in imprisonment of middle schoolers. Same thing for locking a teacher out of her classroom.
I'm not joking. I think we need to start building more juvenile prisons. It will cut down a lot on the requirements for adult prisons. If there is any capability for reform, it is much greater when they are young.
It also needs to be clear to juveniles that they can't commit crimes and have them dismissed as "poor classroom control".
It's garbage juveniles is what it is. Take the trash out.
My understanding is that juvenile prisons have not been evidenced in decreasing the amount of crime?
Generally my understanding is that children who severely misbehave is actually an indication of neglect, abuse, or something else seriously wrong with the environment that the child cannot escape.
This confuses me because at my high school the kids who did anything like this would be sent to the principal's office, then disciplined with on campus supsension or at home suspension, then eventual expulsion where they'd land at the school for bad kids. I never saw the behavior you describe so it sounds like you and your friends / classmates were just absolute horrible people back then.
I like how you wonder how you can educate children without making them resent it like it's the systems fault for creating a boring classroom that therefore made you terrorize some poor teacher when really you were all horrible bullies to the teachers because you chose to be that way.
I hated being in school too but what I did was show up, take notes, go home do homework, repeat until I graduated. I didn't tell the teacher to shut up or play cards or steal stuff or play cruel jokes like you.
> This confuses me because at my high school the kids who did anything like this would be sent to the principal's office, then disciplined with on-campus or at-home suspension, then eventual expulsion where they'd land at the school for bad kids.
We had "crossword puzzle school", where the soon-to-be-dropouts were sent. The only work was apparently in the form of crossword puzzles, all day, every day. You usually only got sent here if you were actually arrested by the police for something like drugs or violence, preferably on school grounds.
Back in my normal school, sometimes you got sent to the principal's office. Sometimes you get in-school or home suspension. But eventually, you were back in class. I don't actually ever recall hearing of someone getting expelled from the school system—I'm not even sure that was legal. I assumed that's because, at least in my state, education was required for all students under a certain age (apparently even if that "education" was crossword puzzles, or worse, in a juvenile prison).
Anyway, you could only be punished you if you got caught. Students were very good at not getting caught. A mentality of "us against them" took hold in many cases, where "them" was the staff. For example, I once brought some contraband to school in my backpack. An administrator found out about it, dropped into my class, called me up in front of the class and asked me about it. I lied. The administrator then went to my desk and searched my backpack. To my surprise, there was no contraband inside. He suspected that I had passed it to another friend of mine, so he searched that person. Nothing. The administrator searched several more people in class, but he came up empty. No one was ever punished.
I found out afterwards that, while the administrator was interrogating me, another student removed the contraband from my backpack. Students then proceeded to quietly pass the objects around the classroom, from student to student, so that they wouldn't be found. They returned the items to me when the administrator left, and did so in full view of the teacher. Many of the people who helped me were acquaintances at best. I wasn't even very popular—some of the people who helped me frequently beat me up.
When a teacher sends one student to the office, the student is punished. I strongly suspect that, if a teacher tried to send 50% of their students to the principal, the teacher would be punished.
> I like how you wonder how you can educate children without making them resent it like it's the systems fault for creating a boring classroom that therefore made you terrorize some poor teacher when really you were all horrible bullies to the teachers because you chose to be that way.
Let me start by saying that, if I could do my school days over again knowing what I know now, I would act very differently. I often behaved like a rude idiot, squandering more opportunities and days than I care to count now. I hope I have become a better person since then.
I'll also point out that several of the people I went to school with died before graduating high school (suicide, drunk or otherwise impaired driving accidents, overdose, etc.).
I left my first reply because I think many people grew up in schools where my stories seem ludicrous, and they can't imagine why a teacher's interview would put so much emphasis on "classroom control". Having seen or heard first-hand accounts of similarly bad behavior in so many classes and schools, I thought some concrete examples of what can happen without classroom control might be illustrative. My school might have been a bit below average in terms of student behavior, but I don't even think we were the worst school in my district.
Ultimately, I think you are trying to say that it is not the school's responsibility to make students behave and accept education, but rather the students' responsibility not to misbehave and disrupt school? If so, I understand the sentiment, but I'm not seeing how it leads to any practical solutions. Some students just don't care. I'm just not sure that's a reasonable demand of a child's brain, particularly when that child might be hungry and scared.
I express a desire for educators to find ways to engage students and make schools welcoming, exciting places to be because that's what I wish my schools could have been instead of the dismal, often terrifying places they were. I wish others would have an easier time than me in school, and as a result that they come out better than I am.
Could I have behaved better? Yes, absolutely. My question is that, if you accept that some students don't see why they should behave differently, how do you change their minds?
A secondary problem is that public schools have essentially transformed into state nannys.
1. You can't send the kids home because both parents are probably working. It's more likely the kid becomes lost forever and it becomes a government problem again once that kid is now living an alternative lifestyle that consumes government resources in other ways (crime, homelessness, or health).
2. Because of the realities of (1) everyone else is now forced to asked why the kid is no longer in school and becomes a failure of the teacher that the kid is not in school. The teacher must now deal with disgruntled parents and administrators for not enduring the emotional abuse and disruption a neglected child causes while also dealing with 20 other students.
I think a lot of problems with child education and just be traced back to economic realities of many parents today. Even if you are relatively well off having your kid kicked out of school isn't financially feasible for a lot of families. Even a disruptive child might be the result of absent parents who must be at work to even afford school lunch.
> I think a lot of problems with child education and just be traced back to economic realities of many parents today.
This is it. Our framework for understanding childhood success is based entirely in “school quality”. If a child enters adulthood with a criminal record, without job skills, or without prospects for higher education, it is always blamed on either the parents or the school system. The only remedies anyone can imagine is throwing money at the school system or setting up charter schools, so when that doesn’t work, you’re left guessing.
But none of this addresses poverty! I am convinced that if children can go to sleep with food in their belly, stable housing, and proper healthcare, they’re much more likely to have good outcomes.
I agree, you have to address these things outside the school. This is the same story when it comes to policing: police can arrest people all you want, but unless you're willing to significantly increase our existing lead in incarcerations per capita, it seems like just arresting people isn't working. On the other hand, if you can give people homes, food, jobs, and healthcare, I believe the crime rate will drop.
I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I suspect there are plenty of measures by which other countries achieve better educational outcomes with lower educational spending, in which case I'd be willing to bet that they are simply spending more in "social programs" (broadly speaking) than the United States.
> Send the kid home and fail them for the year? They can try again next year. Well behaved kids are the parents' problem
You are speaking a Catholic school here. But there are a lot of other schools in 20-mile radius of my home in Silicon Valley where my wife worked.
1. Big city district with “no child left behind” policy, very stupidly executed. Never again, no matter how high the salary is.
2. A charter school chain - a commercial exercise- that has no money planned on disciplinary problems: no staff, no rooms to deal with reports and detentions. Dick drawing, chair humping - “it’s your professional responsibility to control the classroom”.
3. The Catholic school: “thank you doctor N for joining our school” - from kids! When she got all 25 answers on the first assignment- she cried. She was forced to leave the school because you can’t get California credentials in a State university in a program paid by me, not the state - while working in a Catholic school, teaching exactly the same science course.
But there is no need to brutal measures like expelling. There is say option
4. A public school in an ethnic minority suburb. Three reports - and a conference
with the teacher and administrator, who is absolutely on the teacher’s side but wants to know how to improve the situation. And that actually helps - these badly behaving kids are not necessarily cruel. “No child left behind” too, but executed properly.
When I grew up, there were different classes for the smart kids and the less smart kids. There was a bottom class where the students had all sorts of behavioural issues. Some people just won't learn, and I think it's fair to separate them from the people who do. At least that way, teachers get at least a few classes of eager students.
This was the generally accepted approach nationwide in the past, until we realized it fuels systemic transgenerational inequalities, a bit like economic, racial, residential, etc. forms of segregation.
Putting a hooligan amongst decent people works, but only of the decent people can force the hooligan to behave. Most of the time, it works by just peer pressure, even in the positive sense. But for those who don't yield, a society at large has police. And a classroom does not have police.
So a teacher has a choice: to be a saint (and do miracles), to be the police (with hands tied though), or to be a victim. Sadly, many end up with the third option :(
> teachers work more in 9 months than most professionals
I want to understand this more and think we need to measure this well.
As a software dev, I’ve always struggled with measuring the amount of work performed and usually disregard measures of intellectual output as misleading measures (eg, lines of code, story points completed, whatever).
What makes you think teachers work more in 9 months than a typical professional (engineer, attorney, healthcare worker) does in an entire year? Wouldn’t it then make sense for these teachers to change professions? Or other professionals to teach? Or is everyone just stupid? Or just really dedicated to teaching as a passion?
I only have my own experience but I’ve always had a stack of work after hours- training, mentoring, networking. And I assumed all professions have this kind of additional metawork that is unpaid. Is it harder to tutor a student than to mentor someone?
Teachers are changing professions, in large numbers, and have been for a while. TFA discusses that and how districts are resorting to desperate measures to get bodies to teach, like drafting in college kids, cutting school hours, and importing them.
You don’t have one student. You have easily dozens, maybe hundreds. There isn’t enough time to actively teach, and grade all their stuff, and figure out the next lesson plan in the eight hour day.
FWIW: as a high school English teacher in a wealthy Minneapolis suburb, I had approx. 120-150 students on my roster (depending on what classes I was teaching at the time).
My SO works in schools and she seems to work 60 hour weeks 10 months of the year for total compensation circa $60k, which is above the teacher pay scale for her years of experience. Schools seem to be undergoing a slow-motion collapse because every year the needs for specialized professionals go up, and the number of folks willing to do it goes down. Severe mental, social emotional, and behavior problems get worse every year, and even in K-5 schools people start to feel like they're just getting paid to get bit, spat on, and disrespected because there's no systemic solution to bad and crazy parents or neglected kids, let alone the fact that because nobody is willing to work in the conditions the average quality of those left is going down.
I've been working as a software dev for 20+ years,the only time I actually truly worked 60+ hours a week was when I was attempting to get my own startup off the ground.
Other than that, it's usually been 10-15 of actual work work.
Really not trying to brag, but to bring context to the conversation,I make 10 times what a teacher makes.
I think it's a real problem teachers are underpaid and undervalued. IMO schools should have very basic facilities/luxuries, and awesome very well paid teachers (150-200k) who we expect a lot out of, give a lot of liberties to. This way there will always be competition and prestige involved with being a teacher.
Might sound expensive, but I truly think it's an investment that will more than pay for itself in ~1 generation
Or... maybe reduce our defense budget nationally. We have endless funds for wars and bailing out large corporations. We don't need to raise taxes to accomplish this.
>Really not trying to brag, but to bring context to the conversation,I make 10 times what a teacher makes.
no, that lines up with my experience. I was making 60k/yr as a software engineer when I was working Part Time. That was fine for me since I had an extra 20 hours a week to do whatever I wanted and they let me work remote. I could not imagine going through that job while dealing witch a laughably disrespectful salary.
The evil American empire is controlled by very rich tyrants who train people to be corrupt dumbasses everywhere. That's why you have a mob of loud-mouthed people who care about sports more than teachers. That mob of people are not perfect for a civilization. They are perfect for making civilization collapse. Civilization is built by making education more important than sports. Teachers being looked down upon is a symptom of civilization collapsing while entertainment like a football game distracts sheep from that ugly reality. Those parents who look down on teachers are sheep. I would keep my imaginary children away from those sheep. Those sheep only care about themselves in a short-sighted way based on instant gratification bullshit.
I'm a software dev as well, coming from a family of educators (dad, mom, brother, all three have taught at some point during their career or for an extended part of their career).
The problem I think is that you're examining 'working more' in the context of 'work output'. As a developer, it is very much about 'work output', however as a teacher it is often not.
In my moms example, she had roughly 6x50 minute classes a day, with a 10 minute break between each one. So, roughly 6 hours of 'meetings', since those 10 minutes in between were really just prepping for the next class, and oftentimes speaking to students in between too. That in and of itself is draining. This is the schedule of a manager, more or less - 6 hours of meetings where you need to be "on" and can't zone out.
The problem is that teachers don't just operate on a manager schedule. They also operate on a maker schedule: designing lesson plans. My mom's other 2x50 minute blocks were designated for a 50 minute lunch break and 50 minutes of planning. But 50 minutes of planning is not nearly enough time to plan two classes that my mom teaches every day. So, no actual lunch break, the lunch break is actually eating while planning. And that's still not really enough time, so my mom would get there an hour early and stay an hour late. She worked 7am-530pm M-F, and since getting behind on lesson plans means you need to put on a movie which puts your kids behind, she often worked 3-4 hours on Sunday to prepare for the week ahead. This is not my mom being an overachiever, or being dedicated to her work, this is her being dedicated to ensuring that she is just doing her job. This is what the job requires. Sure, it does get easier over time as you get to reuse lesson plans.
The point I want to drive home is not that working 7am-530pm is "more [time] than most professionals", but rather the quality of work is so much different, and so much harder. Managing a classroom of 25-30 children, middle schoolers in her case, is draining, so much more draining than coding. It is more draining than being a manager, because your team is often 3x as big and significantly less behaved (they're children after all).
The cherry on top is that my first job out of college as a developer I was already making $30k more than my mom a year. She had a masters and 10yrs of experience at the time. I am not under the illusion that I am smarter or more qualified.
To answer your statement of "I also need to do trainings, mentorings, networking", teachers regularly need to do trainings too. For my mom, these trainings are required - she was required to do something like 20 hours of professional development a year. And they often mentor students as well, as you absolutely experienced during your own education whenever you went to a teacher during their lunch break for help. I don't think tutoring versus mentoring is that hard. Having someone come to you with questions is an easy way of educating someone. The hard part is lesson plans, to think through a year of "how can I distill this knowledge down and transfer it?", which I personally have never needed to do as a tutor.
To answer your question of "why don't they change professions?", I think that's rather naive. Not everyone is on the path of trying to optimize financial independence and minimize time spent working. Why do folks go into journalism? Or art, or music? Are those people stupid, because they aren't in software engineering where work is more lucrative and easier?
> teachers work more in 9 months than most professionals work in a year
I do think this is an overstatement, maybe a little. Maybe not. It depends on the teacher and the subject. I hope these explanations help, growing up I definitely did not realize how hard my "good" teachers worked to provide me a solid education.
> To answer your question of "why don't they change professions?", I think that's rather naive. Not everyone is on the path of trying to optimize financial independence and minimize time spent working. Why do folks go into journalism? Or art, or music? Are those people stupid, because they aren't in software engineering where work is more lucrative and easier?
You're hanging out on a website where people regularly talk about how college should be abolished/de-emphasized because it's not needed to get a good job. Yea unfortunately, a lot of people here really DO think those people who go into journalism/art/music are stupid because they're not working in more lucrative fields.
Of course they do that while listening to music and probably enjoying art. Of course.
> a lot of people here really DO think those people who go into journalism/art/music are stupid because they're not working in more lucrative fields.
I don’t think they are stupid as people have interests and there’s many reasons to pursue a career other than money.
I just think they are stupid when they complain about how they don’t make a higher income in these fields. The income potential of these fields is known, so complaining about this, once in the field, is really just an irrational thing.
> The income potential of these fields is known, so complaining about this, once in the field, is really just an irrational thing.
Are we not allowed to complain about known things? If you get a speeding ticket do you complain about it? Under that same philosophy, complaining about your ticket is irrational and stupid. Someone complaining about a hangover is irrational and stupid. Someone complaining about having back problems because you sit all day and don't exercise is irrational and stupid. I just don't think this line of reasoning makes sense at all. Our priorities change and maybe a teacher wants to do something good for the world but after 10 years they see they're not paid/respected well, and they have a family to take care of and a mortgage to pay and they're tired because they work 60 hour works. IMO that's a very rational place to start complaining.
I have the exact same experience: watching family members work in teaching, seeing them do overtime, getting a software job and beating their salary after 2 years in the job.
Why hasn't this changed through union action or lawsuits about needing to work unpaid hours?
Surely, an employee should be able to take an employer to court about the employer requiring work that's unpaid. In the courtroom, presumably there can be evidence presented about how these unpaid hours are required by examining experiences of other teachers, etc.
Teachers are, to the best of my knowledge, universally paid salary, not hourly.
The other reasons this hasn't changed are
a) This is just "how things are". It's more or less considered the "normal" way of doing education.
b) Changing it would require increasing education budgets by a fairly significant amount, and since those are all local, and based on local property taxes, they are much more likely to have a bunch of entitled rich people coming in to say "I shouldn't have to pay any taxes to support those damn kids" and voting for budget cuts. (Because the people who aren't rich don't have the time and energy to be coming in to these meetings on a regular basis.)
My guess is that this hasn't changed due to union action or lawsuits because (1) teachers are salaried, and tend to be over the limit where overtime pay is legally required; and (2) union organizers don't think they can get any more money without giving something else up.
Also, in the states where this problem is the worst, there’s usually “right to work” legislation and other rules that do their best to defang collective bargaining power.
> 5. What is the current model for education based on? [...] Education is about checking a box on a list of requirements that was developed 150+ years ago.
This is very well put. IMO nothing better illustrates how deep-rooted that model is than distance learning in 2020-2021 in the US. That was an opportunity to innovate quickly, and yet no state or district I know of took it seriously. Instead they had students on Zoom for 3-5 hours a day, including 1st-3rd graders, structured as if it was a regular classroom. It served no educational purpose except adhering to the model and requirements you mentioned.
> 1. The degree program was decent, although a certificate program would be better for prior professionals if the law allowed it (lower cost, too much wasted time in redundant classes).
There are certificate programs in Maryland. That's how I got my Maryland teacher's license. You typically have to be enrolled in an alternative certification program, like Teach For America, Baltimore City Teaching Residency, etc. But there are a bunch of them: https://www.marylandpublicschools.org/about/Documents/DEE/Pr...
As a post-secondary teacher, I spend more mental energy on babysitting than on teaching. It's definitely the harder part for me. I hesitate to imagine how bad it must be in primary or secondary education.
Though, it's not really that clear-cut a division. When I worry about how to manipulate students into doing the minimum readings (say an hour a week) for a class that they voluntarily signed up for and paid for, is that babysitting or teaching?
The problem is usually that in a very disrupted classroom, teaching is going to be impossible, so you do need to have the ability to keep things manageable.
If kids start climbing on things and throwing stuff no one is going to pay attention to math.
The thing about classroom control is that it is easier to notice early signs and stop the situation from escalating into behaviors that need to go through a whole punishment process (possible student trauma, paperwork for the teacher and administration), and so teaching how to correct things early and keep things controlled is a win-win for the student, teacher, and administration, and also the rest of the class.
How does the education most Americans get K-12 compare to other G20/OECD countries? Unless I'm wrong, we're like #15 or worse in a lot of educational benchmarks, right?
What could federal/state/local governments do (other than divert money from wealthy areas into poorer areas) to make American children receive a more "world class" K-12 public education?
A better model for public education exists:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/why-are-finlands-s...
But in the USA the federal/state separation and other political considerations are so ingrained it would be hard to do this sort of revolutionary change.
Former HS math teacher here. It was the hardest job I’ve ever had. I still have nightmares about being back in the classroom 18 years later. I was easily working 12+ hours a day doing class planning, grading, etc. not to mention the actual teaching. Returning to programming my pay doubled and my stress level dropped profoundly. Teacher pay should easily be double what it is.
(And about that summers off—with the exception of teachers who had non-teaching spouses or those in the back third of their career, everyone worked summer jobs to make ends meet.)
My mother is a teacher, and she often has to do work during the summer to prepare for the next year, even though her pay is based on her getting the summer off. Not to mention that she is required to do additional training during the summer, sometimes at her own expense.
Interesting. Every public city school system that I’ve attended and participated in gave the teachers the choice of 10 months of pay or 12. Seemed like every tenured teacher took the 12 month while the younger teachers took the 10 month. This might be because of age and financial security. The tired teachers don’t want to pick up a summer job. While the younger bunch picks up jobs as bartenders and servers and probably clear more in 2 months than the whole year as a teacher.
One Friday evening I went out with some friends and ended up running into my son’s 6 grade teacher pouring body shots on themselves for the patrons to enjoy.
They don't pay the teachers more if they opt for 12 months of pay over 10. They are still paid for 10 months of work, even if the paychecks are spread evenly.
I agree. My parents and step-parents are all [retired] teachers, too, and nothing irritated them quite like the "BuT tHeY hAvE sUmMeRs OfF!" crap from people who have no idea what they're talking about. Trust me, we never went on kickass 3 month long summer family vacations. My parents worked their asses off throughout the summer, tying up loose ends from the previous year, working on lesson plans, training, and preparing for the next year.
I will never understand why teachers both do lots of extra work and complain about it. Teachers aren't slaves. If your job requires you to work 12 hour days quit and do something else. If you like working that hard, then why complain?
Plus, my own experience in the public school system as a student tells me not all teachers are working 12, or even 8, hour days. Again, if you want to be a good teacher - why complain that it's hard? Just be the best teacher you can with eight hours of work. It's not like teachers are fired for being bad.
What happens if no one complains, nothing changes as a result, and everyone just quits instead? You get the current situation, which has not even developed fully. Most of what you take for granted is because someone at one point in time complained about how things were and tried to change them. If you are good enough, force change, just quitting it is an acceptance that you lose your battle and you go on to select another, easier battle, in the hopes you won't lose that too. Nothing wrong with quitting, but I do find it wrong to smear those who complain about wrong things.
I've been hearing teachers complain about this kind of thing my entire life. To me, it seems like complaining isn't working. If anything, the issues teachers are facing are getting worse. This is because, I imagine, administrators know they can ignore the complaints and still get the output from the teachers at the given pay. If complaints don't hurt administrators, then they won't motivate change.
I think complaints can be useful in identifying a problem, but if your complaints have been made, just continuing to complain doesn't do anything. On the other hand, quitting, does two useful things. First, it takes you out of a bad situation letting you move on to a better one faster. Second, it helps brings the problem to a head. The administration can ignore teachers complaining, they cannot ignore teachers quitting. At some point they will have to resolve the issue.
The exception tends to be at the poorest schools where the principals have trouble hiring and keeping teachers. When I was interviewing for teaching positions, I met with the principal for a school in South Central L.A. and the only question he asked me as, “do you promise not to quit before the end of the school year?”
Elsewhere bad teachers are fired, sometimes even in the middle of the school year.
I've wondered if the onerousness of lesson planning is due in part to the extremely fragmented nature of American education, where every school district formulates its own curriculum. I'd be curious to know what it's like for teachers who teach a standardized, national curriculum like France's.
I don’t know, although there are some rigidly standardized curricula in use in the US. One is in military base schools—since kids might move from virtually any school in the system to another, the curriculum has been designed so that, e.g., every Algebra I classroom covers the same material on the same day and every Freshman English class is reading the same book at the same time.
The other case is the Integrated Math curriculum which specifies lesson plans on a daily basis.
Well then there was my math teacher in HS, who made me grade the homework during her planning period while she sold Avon to random people who came into the school and met with her in the math teachers' office. Not all teachers even try to do their job.
Teacher's job is no doubt stressful. Therefore I think we must invent new ways of automating the teaching, amplify the powers of a single teacher. That way there will be enough teachers to provide for every child. Not sure how to get there.
But what about the adult population? I think large swaths of it are in need of more education. Math literacy, evidence-based evaluation of propaganda. Large portion of US population believes last election was stolen.
You, like most people, fundamentally misunderstand what teachers do.
You cannot amplify the powers of a single teacher because that's not how CHILDREN function.
The children's need for 1-on-1 human interaction to support their development is the fundamental bottleneck. The reason class sizes matter is because they directly affect the quantity of direct interaction each child receives.
We already automate things and amplify somewhat the power of a teacher... We've been trying computer stuff for decades (and books before). You still need tons of teachers.
Having been thorough some schools I think the biggest impediment was that teachers didn't really get what I didn't get, my mis-conceptions.
A recent student might be able to better understand what the obstacles in leaning might be since they have been through it themselves.
The idea of Learning-By-Teaching seems to be that students learn better when they try to express the subject matter so clearly that others can understand it too. But it might also compsensate for the lack of teachers, that students can be teachers to other students.
Or, and hear me out: we could cut our military budget (which is larger than the next ten or so countries combined, both total and per capita) and start tipping the corporate tax share back towards the ~%50 it was sixty years ago and magically be able to:
* pay teachers a fair wage
* hire enough teachers, assistants, and admins so that teachers don't have to work at least another half a workday 'off the books'
* fund schools well enough that teachers don't have to pay out of pocket for basic supplies like chalk and paper
* feed our children a proper meal at lunch by default, instead of making them pay for a crappy meal (unless their busy parents jump through hoops to prove they're poor enough)
One of the strangest things for me as a private school student coming from the public school system was being able to go into the lunch line, get what food I wanted, as much as I wanted, and not have to pay for it. No worries about losing the lunch money I'd been given, getting beat up for my lunch money, etc.
The US is usually in the top 3 spending per student (beaten only by small countries that represent statistical outliers like Norway or Luxemburg), so really, it spends the most. Yet, as many are quick to point out, all that money results in educational outcomes well below many European countries and also many Asian countries that spend far, far less.
Luckily, this is researched extensively, and schools must publish budgets. Typically, spending on 'instruction' is >60% of the expenditures, almost all of that is salaries and benefits. Capital outlay is usually around 8-10%, support services and administration around 10%, operations and maintenance around 10%, and around 5% for transportation/bussing.
Contrary to the typical claims that 'administration' or capital costs suck up all the money, the majority of the money does go to teachers' salary.
The US is just a pretty expensive country. The cost of labor (highly correlated with wages) is pretty high compared to Europe even outside the coastal cities. Maybe not 4x though.
It would also be interesting to compare educational outcomes in particular US states to particular European countries. I suppose that the quality of education may be as unevenly distributed across the US as it is across Europe.
Ah yes the ol' "Let's just cut the military budget" position.
Teachers salaries are 100% a local issue. If you want to raise their salary then vote to increase taxes in your county. Teachers are state employees. The states governments are more than capable enough to solve these issues since they are local issues.
To be fair, state and local governments would have to increase the total tax burden on their populace to increase education funding, or makes cuts to other things in their domain. The federal government could certainly cut the military budget and grant those funds to state or local education programs, without increasing anyone's tax burden.
That said, my understanding is that the military budget mostly goes to salaries, so any drastic cuts would leave us with massive unemployment. You'd have to take things really slow to make that big a change in the labor force without pretty ugly side effects.
And don't forget, military needs teachers as much as anybody. When there's no war soldiers are on stand-by. What do they do? They train, which is really a form of education. They could learn many things besides how to use weapons. They could learn how to be teachers when they are ready to leave the military. :-)
How can you say "No, it's not," when OP provided a very clear definition of how they're measuring ("both total and per capita") and you provided a completely different one ("as a percentage of GDP").
>USA's military spending in 2021 hit $801bn a year, says the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. In comparison Russia's military spending in 2021 hit only $66bn.
US population: 329.5 million, Russian population: 144.1 million,
Per capita spending US: $24,600. Russia: $458
While I’m at it: US GDP: 20.94 trillion, 1.483 trillion
US military spending as percent of GDP: 3.8%, Russia: 4.5%
And “not near the top of spending per GDP” is not really an accurate assessment. From this data https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/defense-s... we can see that the countries with higher spending per GDP fall into one or more of the following categories:
- smaller, poorer countries
- countries involved in active military conflicts or with active military conflicts near them
This is simply a math fail, or not recognizing that the combined GDP of "Russia, Israel and Saudi Arabia" doesn't even come close to the GDP of the United States.
A public school in America (but not in England) is a state run school which may or may not have free lunches (it's often income related), Private schools are ones you pay to go to and tend to charge for food or order out for food.
It’s not often income-related, it’s always income-related. All public schools offer free/reduced price lunches and even schools in high-income areas will have some small number of students who qualify:
I would have said that but for the email I recently got informing me that all students were getting free lunchs in my son's district. I think it's a covid related state program maybe?
I’m not saying you’re wrong but it surprises me that there are many countries in Europe with no (or even very few) private schools - are you thinking of Former soviet bloc countries?
Do you think you are someone who is good at setting healthy boundaries with your job and employers? Or are you someone who naturally wants to help out a lot and gets pulled into more than you can handle?
The teachers I knew who worked until old age had developed systems to make their jobs sustainable and predictable, while younger teachers tended to scramble with new programs and initiatives.
Ah, the engineer who thinks everything can be solved with software.
To automate grading you first must create a general AI, because if you just do multiple choice exams, you aren't really testing or measuring someone's ability to perform the task, you're just measuring their ability to make a good guess. And some teachers do that. But not the good ones.
As for planning, some senior teachers have filing cabinets labeled by day. They just reach into the file and pull out the lesson for "day 82". But any good teacher will realize that they have to customize the learning to that year's kids, and constantly update with new teaching methodologies, new information, etc. And sometimes the school adopts a whole new curriculum, and then you have to start all over.
Also, I will add, there is an element of good teaching that involves building a relationship with your students.
Getting personalized feedback (encouragement, small corrections, etc) can mean much more to a student than a simple green checkmark/red x somewhere. Good educators can know when to apply the right amount of pushing or backing off that can help a student succeed.
Ideally, of course. Lots of bad teachers out there…
100% agreed. On the other hand, automated grading would remove a lot of the biases. For example, it's been repeatedly proven that girls get graded higher than boys.
Maybe I'm clashing with the specific phrasing since I haven't heard of a bias in the grading itself (i.e. a bias of the teacher), but rather a bias of the system. Schooling as a whole aligns more with girls' strengths as they're more consistent in the day-to-day (ex: organization, planning, homework) whereas boys tend to test better [0]. The weighting of assignments in a particular class could tip the benefit in either direction.
I could believe girls 'get graded higher' on written assignments due to generally better handwriting. I had poor handwriting (though recall at least one girl classmate with worse) and certainly received no credit on some correct answers as a result. I imagine a frustrated teacher reading through a chicken-scratch essay might dock some points - whether directly with a note calling it out (also happened to me), discreetly, or subconsciously.
Not GP, but I frequently start comments like this if the comment I’m replying to isn’t just slightly off, but reflects a deeply unexamined prior. It’s a signal that “The thing that’s wrong with your comment isn’t even in the text of the comment, it’s in the worldview that led you to think this in the first place. Simply reacting to the text of the comment would be insufficient.”
I get the impulse, but I just think that if the goal is to correct someone--not just to be correct--starting with snark is most likely to be counterproductive. Even if the first comment is actually in bad faith, I consider my audience to be any reader, not just the one I'm replying to, and snark undermines credibility there, too.
The problem is that this type of reply reflects your own deeply unexamined prior (e.g. that software can't play a part of solving this issue, or that anyone who said X believes Y, etc.), and so sets up an antagonistic interaction with the other person where you are each arguing from atop your ladders of inference, rather than climbing down those ladders and deconstructing those priors in more detail.
It’s often a deeply examined prior. The people I know who are the most doubtful about software are the engineers with more than 20 years experience. They have spent most of their adult lives thinking about what software is, and isn’t, good for.
On the other hand, some contributions to a conversation are simply beyond the boundaries of common sense in such a way (blindingly obvious, unacceptable, dangerously naive, etc.) that ridicule is appropriate. Even if the contribution was made in good faith. Ridicule has numerous powerful social functions: it helps social groups self-govern, transmits knowledge from one generation to the next, enables social groups to circumscribe what is acceptable in a bottom-up way, and so on. Sometimes a little public skewering is exactly what's needed to give everyone something to think about. It's an online comment. Real names weren't used. There appears to be an overwhelming consensus as to the quality of the contribution (it's so light I can barely read it). No one's suffering any undue injury.
I personally don't think ridicule is ever necessary or appropriate. Even if it results in compliance or submission in the moment, it's very likely to produce resentment. In an organization, it produces a culture of fear, rather than curiosity and initiative.
Ridicule can absolutely produce resentment, no doubt about it. It can cause workplaces to become toxic, cause people to shut down (or worse: cause people to _learn_ to shut down), cause people to cope in unhealthy ways like projection, bullying, etc.
However, consider that _satire_ is, fundamentally, ridicule. And it's very public (or at least intended to be). Often satire is one of the only ways that unaccountable power can be brought to account, or institutions which have overstayed their utility can be mobilized against.
It really depends on who's the butt of the joke. On HackerNews, we're mostly anonymous as to our individual identities, but at the same time, any one of us could unwittingly end up playing the part of a public archetype, representing anything from a naive and harmless misconception all the way to a rotten, spiteful ideology that nihilistically boasts of its intent to destroy everything. Some of those ideas need to be challenged. And the people that amplify those ideas need to be challenged too. Bad faith and ill intent warrant ridicule, if not outright invective and contempt (not very often to this degree, but as a history enjoyer, I'll die on this hill). But sometimes even a genuine, bona fide contribution _ought_ to be ridiculed, if it stems from a misunderstanding which amplifies a terrible idea - especially if it's a terrible idea with actual supporters. In this case, the bad idea was _technocratic solutions to complex social problems._ The context is important too: it's HackerNews, which has some of the most brilliant minds, willing to share deep, detailed insights into complex, systemic problems, glomming onto some of the most simplistic, reductive tropes about human needs and behavior. It's a kind of paradoxical, radically individualistic groupthink, which, taken to its logical end (or even just considered half-seriously with a modicum of self-awareness), would smother the social and economic conditions for a healthy society. A small set of shallow, rote answers to complex human problems, coming from defenders of “second-order thinking.” It needs to be challenged in a way that an overclocked galaxy brain can't intellectually weasel its way out of.
I love comedy and satire for my personal enjoyment, but I'm not at all convinced they've been at all effective at stopping some of the most harmful ideas of our time.
Why was this instance a good use case for ridicule?
As you admit, the question asker might very well have been genuinely curious. The answer to their question doesn't seem blindingly obvious to me (although I can certainly speculate about good reasons that grading isn't automated). I can't tell what you mean by "unacceptable" (perhaps there is some cultural taboo you're referring to here?). And it also doesn't seem "dangerously naive", which might apply where someone asking this question had decision making power in a critical situation, but clearly doesn't apply here.
By the very criteria you lay out, this doesn't seem like an instance in which ridicule was necessary or good. To me, it feels like a weak justification for bullying someone who thinks differently about something you obviously feel very strongly about.
I don't believe this was a case of bullying at all. It was a light ribbing. It also aligned with an archetype (of being able to engineer our way out of human problems) that's especially salient for some people on here, yet totally lost on others. The contradiction is funny, too, because it's classic human folly. Whether or not the commenter is anything like that really doesn't figure into the calculus of how necessary or good this instance of another commenter's snarky side comment was: there are no material consequences, no damage to anyone's reputation (except for some votes), and no one was even the butt of a joke here - it was the idea of the smart engineer with the engineered solution to a human matter which doesn't need solving. That's what we're laughing about.
Regarding all the talk about ridicule, it was intended as a rebuttal to the idea that humor at someone's expense is _never_ appropriate. It is appropriate and even healthy for a society to be composed of individuals who can withstand a bit of a ribbing when they unwittingly find themselves representing human folly in one of its many forms, and who can stop and ask, why did that happen?, and potentially learn from it, if it came from a moment of lacking self-awareness, or if it was just bad luck (everyone - everyone - winds up in the crosshairs sometimes.)
Truly no ill will meant, just wanted to defend the social function of ridicule. It probably ended up being a lot more of a well, actually thing than I intended. Which I do get teased for sometimes.
I think the issue here is that I fundamentally disagree with the direction of this particular ribbing. I think we should be sensitive to this kind of naive questioning, which comes from a good place (wanting to make teaching easier and more effective) and can lead down productive paths where our priors are deconstructed such that we change what we think of as possible. We work in an industry where rabbits have been pulled out of hats and geese have laid golden eggs, by which I mean people have put their minds to hard problems and have come up with solutions that before seemed impossible and would have faced the ridicule that you're defending. To the extent that ridicule causes people to be less curious, we should be very careful about deploying it.
I'm certainly no fan of shutting people down for asking questions. I think we may be interpreting the context of the question differently though. The parent poster was recounting having worked as a math teacher, stressed out every day from the planning and grading demands of the job, working in excess of 12 hours per day, earning a salary low enough that colleagues without a spouse's income to help out had to work a second job - and who still has nightmares about being back in the classroom. And then moving on to a software job with double the salary and half the stress. I read it as saying teachers should be appreciated / paid more and the response as why are teachers still doing unnecessary grunt work, making lesson plans and grading papers? Isn't that dumb work that a software engineer could just solve for them?
(Also, following through on this, if such a solution - computers planning your lessons for you, so all you have to do is what the smart computer tells you to - were to become reality, the lack of teacher appreciation / salary, which was the main point of the parent comment, would not improve at all - it would likely get worse, with teachers getting paid less for fewer available jobs. The deskilling of labor would probably follow, reducing teacher roles to individual, specialized, repetitive tasks, since it saves an enormous amount of money if low-skilled workers can simply be swapped out if they don't work out.)
FWIW, as the person who raised the criticism of the snark, I also am a former math teacher. I have experienced just how much more valued I am as a software engineer. I have experienced how vastly better my work-life balance is. I, too, have observed how folks in the tech startup scene can approach complex social problems with overconfidence in tech solutions. So I have a similar claim as the OP to feeling insulted and entitled to snark back. I just don't think it's the right thing to do, from the standpoints of how I aspire to treat people and from a pragmatic standpoint of seeing the changes I want.
My comment is net -1 right now, and I don't believe I made any assumptions about the person I responded to in the feedback I tried to offer. If people don't think my feedback is useful, that's fine, but if I had started it off with something like "ah, the presumptuous teacher", I'm pretty sure it would be been received even worse.
I read the initial comment as asking a naive question, but I think that's great, as long as they are open to answers that contradict their assumptions. People should be able to do that and get earnest answers without backhanded comments. Asking naive questions is a big part of how I learn, personally.
The point, I think, is that it almost never leads to this outcome. Humans respond very poorly to [perceived] antagonism from anonymous strangers. I know I do, and it’s why I’m working on removing all my snark from internet comments.
I’ve also found that you can usually rephrase the snark (“do you really think…?”) into a straightforward question in a neutral tone.
> But any good teacher will realize that they have to customize the learning to that year's kids, and constantly update with new teaching methodologies, new information, etc.
I mean this seriously: why? High school math is not a rapidly changing field. Sure, you might have to slow down or speed up, depending on the class -- although, is even that true? Is the average student really changing all that much from year to year? -- but that means taking out the file for day 82 on day 87 or whatever. That's not a massive adjustment.
The material is unchanging. The students aren't going to be all that different from year to year. What's going on that it seems like common sense to so many people that teaching high school math requires a bunch of novel planning?
Also, as a teacher, you have to adopt the district standards, which change every few years. Certain areas are removed, others added, some things are more important, some less. Those standards are changing to meet new standardized testing requirements.
There is a lot of change happening. Just like in programming. People who learned Cobol still need to learn new languages once in a while, because things change, even though the principles stay the same. It's the same data structures, same algorithms, but yet software engineering is rapidly changing.
I always phrase it as the principles (mostly add/delete) stay the same, but the methods are almost always different. Once you learn the principle, it's always about the method of getting there.
That's still work though. You might know all you need to know on the subject you will teach, but if the standard you have to fulfill changed, that means you have to change your plans.
Most of this change is driven by something other than need. The high school mathematics curriculum is a bit of a funny beast in the US, but it is certainly not the weak point in the system.
The desired goal of high school math may not change much from year to year, but the best strategies for meeting that goal certainly do. I cannot imagine asking a student today to learn algebra the way I did 55+ years ago. Log-tables and slide rules? Probably not a good strategy.
Until one has taught something that is completely new to a student, it is difficult to imagine how challenging that can be, and how individual it is. What helps Johnny understand (or even care) is often completely different from what helps Mary. It is very difficult to teach effectively without figuring out what the student does not understand. And there are as many ways to misunderstand as there are students.
That is why teachers keep revising. They want to make the material more accessible to more of their students.
In addition to changing cohorts that others mention - What are the chances the way you taught it last year is the most effective way?
Good teachers experiment - maybe something they taught last time didn't go over too well, how can that be improved? Can they make the material even more relevant this year?
Also, it makes teaching it more interesting, rather than regurgitating lessons. Teachers are human after all.
If kids were learning high school math just fine 50 years ago (and, as far as I know, they were), then that suggests that advances in pedagogy are either not forthcoming, entirely irrelevant, or overwhelmed by other factors.
It doesn't "suggest" that at all. Perhaps changes in pedagogy were necessary in order to adapt to a changing world.
Education isn't like the naive "encoding/decoding" model of communication, where the subject matter is simply "transmitted" from teacher to students. Even if the subject matter remains stable over time, many other things do not: changes in the media of communication, signal interference (say, from the average classroom size drastically increasing over time), all kinds of changes in the teachers and students themselves, changes in society's expectations of what constitutes success or failure (e.g. rote learning is now widely seen as having many shortcomings), changes in what students actually need to move forward (a career in the trades may well require a much lower standard of understanding in the age of the pocket calculator), ... this list could go on and on. Teaching is not a "solved problem" like that.
50 years ago, high school math at most schools ended with trigonometry. Today a large fraction of college bound seniors have taken calculus, and STEM students have taken two years of calculus. And yet, 50 years ago there were lots of math-phobic kids who, today, are expected to perform at some modest level (50 years ago, they stopped with algebra I).
It is true that 50 years ago a fraction of kids were learning just fine, but more recently the goal has been to make that fraction larger, in a society that actively devalues learning.
Your day is 8 hours long and includes 5 hours of meetings, 1 hour which is composed of duties and and maybe 30 to 45 mins for lunch. You've now got 1.5 hours to make "small adjustments" to the 4 classes you teach. Also, maybe you need to do some grading, deal with unruly kids, document what you did for those kids with IEPs, field emails, and adjustments for whatever latest fad the school admin is applying to the curriculum.
The material is not so static. Finding square roots by hand is no longer taught as part of the curriculum.¹ Interpolation from data tables is also not typically taught since students are expected to have a calculator that can at least handle trig functions and logarithms. Graphing calculators enable solving problems as part of classwork that weren’t possible before the calculator. When I was in high school, the lowest-level math class offered was Basic Math which didn’t even cover fractions. Some schools (but not the one I attended) topped out with AP Calculus BC which was roughly equivalent to a Calc II college class (integration and series). Now, the lowest-level math class available at the high school level is Algebra and students cannot graduate without passing Algebra and Geometry.² Some schools offer AP Calculus CD which covers multivariate calc (e.g., Calc III) as well as AP Statistics, neither of which existed when I was in high school.
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1. I’m sure that there are occasional classrooms where this is still taught, but it’s more an enrichment topic than part of the curriculum.
2. I was in high school when Illinois raised its graduation requirement from one year of math to two years of math. The year after that happened, my high school began offering Basic Math 3/4 in addition to the Basic Math 1/2 class it had previously because too many kids were unable to do fractions.
Software is a tool that can be used effectively in education (e.g., Khan Academy). Nobody says it is the only tool that you should use.
If you are saying that 100% of grading must be manual, it implies 0% effectiveness of Khan Academy (false). In practice, even if just a half of the tests can be automated, it would free the time for teachers to do the work that can't be automated.
> If you are saying that 100% of grading must be manual
That's not what was said though; I don't think anyone has a problem with some grading being automated (e.g. multiple-choice), and software has been used for decades for this kind of thing.
But there are serious limitations to this. If I solve a math problem in the correct way but made a silly mistake in the arithmetic leading to the wrong answer, then this is still a "correct" answer in a way, worth of some points.
And grading math is easy; how would you automate the grading of a question like "describe two reasons why the American settlers declared independence"?
Planning needs to be responsive to how the prior lessons went. You can't simply pre-plan a whole year and expect those lessons to be effective. Eventually, you can get close to that point, if you are lucky enough to teach the same subject for years. But much like you can't expect a standup comedian to perform someone else's routine effectively, as a teacher, each individual has to figure out what's effective for them. Teaching is dynamic and interpersonal.
Grading is not just a matter of right/wrong, even in fields like math, where questions can be given that have one correct answer. It's providing the student feedback on where their misconceptions were that led to an incorrect response. And of course, the most meaningful schoolwork assignments don't have a single correct answer.
This is one of the many things that I find so interesting about effective teaching.
Your students are forming a mental model of how something works. Your job is to help guide them to the correct mental model.
If their mental model goes wrong, you have to debug it: you need to figure out exactly what they've misunderstood (which could be anything, and could be from years before your lessons with them started) and help them correct.
Yep, done correctly, it's a lot like debugging. Although, maybe in reverse. When I'm debugging, I'm trying to learn from the infallible machine how my assumption of how my own code works is incorrect :)
Counterpoint: the internet is full of people who want to teach. The first school of YouTube is overflowing with educational content on everything from merge sort to patching dry-wall. A large portion of my social circle hold teaching/mentorship as a career goal. I don't think this is pedantic. When I look around, I see a surplus of people that want to learn and want to teach.
What I don't see is people storming the gates for a horribly broken system that robs many humans of their best years while inflicting lifelong trauma. A position that is horribly underpaid relative to the demands of the job (so you aren't doing it for money) and isn't allowed to meaningfully improve things (so you aren't doing it to "make a difference" unless you think putting on a smile is going to substantially change the outcome, which it sometimes does.)
I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing. If you can provide a service at any standard of quality, list jobs at any standard of quality and pay, and the demand never dries up; there really is no incentive to fix things. At some point the education system in its current form needs to collapse.
This is the one. If I have to work (i.e.: not just live a life of luxury on the beach) my top pick would be to teach computers to children. So why am I not doing that job today?
1) The barrier to entry to getting that job is very high. I would probably have to go back to school and learn education, and it won't even be free! The barrier to entry for a job in the private sector is low, requiring no special certification. If you can do the job, you can get the job.
2) The teaching job comes with vastly more bureaucracy and bullshit than a private sector job. The thing I actually want to do, teach computers, is actually only a small portion of what the actual job of a teacher entails. That other stuff is absolutely not how I want to spend my brief time living on this planet.
3) Given 1 and 2, the compensation for being a teacher is orders of magnitude lower than just working in the private sector. There's no reward for putting in the extra work and tolerating the hassle.
I have indeed considered on many occasions becoming a teacher at the school of YouTube. I've been a student there longer than I have at any other institution.
This. The Internet obviates most of our current educational system. E.g., textbooks are absurd in a world where every child has a radio-networked pocket supercomputer.
The daycare aspect of schools is broken, obviously, but that's a deep societal problem far beyond the ability of teachers to fix.
The educational aspect of schools is (mostly, but not entirely) redundant to the resources available for free on the Internet.
Perhaps we should separate those aspects from each other? (I dunno. I don't have children so it's not (immediately) my problem.)
> The educational aspect of schools is (mostly, but not entirely) redundant to the resources available for free on the Internet.
I think this overestimates it. What I've found from internet 'learning', myself and others (and the students I used to teach) is that there's more often the illusion of learning than any actual learning. Let's not equate watching a YouTube video and thinking we understand it to actual learning. I've been victim to that myself when trying to learn pure math, and with kids it'll certainly be worse.
And the same issues will carry over to any online textbook too. Teachers are there to actually assess what the kids really learned, not what they think they learned, or what they can google to get past the next question on their assignment. The internet just fosters the illusion of learning (and let's not even get to critical thinking from it).
I've heard a proverb (I want to say Pacific Islands but I'm not sure of the source), "Knowledge is only rumor until it's in the muscle."
When I say "mostly, but not entirely" redundant what I mean is that the things that schools can offer over and above the information on the Internet are a small subset of what they're doing now, and the industry that supports them is largely a relic (e.g. the textbook industry.)
Schools can still offer in-person mentoring and tutoring, and lab facilities with supervision, but if you take away the daycare aspects of schools I think that's about all that's left (of the educational aspects.) The regimented scheduling, most of the buildings and school bus systems, etc. are the now-unnecessary bits.
> People with kids will tell you how well "internet education" went the last 2 years
We had a bunch of school districts with little to no experience running distance education, with a vested interest in return-to-classroom, all attempt to implement an online curriculum practically overnight. I don't consider it fair to consider that "online learning" or an earnest attempt at a successful home schooling curriculum.
To drive that point home, a family I know in Washington State had two kids in the school district during that disaster. The school district shifted a tone of responsibility onto parents and kids. The parents were fed up and switched to a for-profit homeschool program. Their kids are still home schooled - they never went back to the school district after COVID ended.
The problems aren't technology related. No amount of curriculum change will make a parent be able to WFH forever or provide enough attention for their child because they're too busy putting food on their table and working to the only metric that matters above all else for their outcomes: money.
> To drive that point home, a family I know in Washington State had two kids in the school district during that disaster. The school district shifted a tone of responsibility onto parents and kids. The parents were fed up and switched to a for-profit homeschool program. Their kids are still home schooled - they never went back to the school district after COVID ended.
Yea, we get it, some people can afford homeschooling and have time to do it. That doesn't scale nationwide.
Online school went pretty well for my kid. No doubt in my mind that she was learning way more than during in person school. The key was probably that she was next door to me the whole time and I had some time to help her with homework that I didn’t before remote. Honestly my child and I both wish they’d go back to remote.
> People with kids will tell you how well "internet education" went the last 2 years...
As I said, I don't have kids, so I don't have first-hand information, but from what I've heard we got the worst of both. I don't think we can draw too many conclusions from the hot mess of the last two years, not yet anyway. In any event, I hope it's obvious that I'm not advocating for more of that.
What I mean is that the raw material freely available on the Internet is more than enough in terms of information, so it seems to me that long hours of mostly-rote learning from approved textbooks, etc. don't make sense anymore (if they ever did.)
Instead it seems like schools (for education, not daycare) could provide direct, in-person interactions with mentors and tutors that would be an important part of any re-designed educational system, to help kids learn to teach themselves.
> Fortnite will still be more fun than doing math, whether that's on a computer or in a classroom.
Well, to me the whole concept of "battle royale" is a symptom of modern depravity, I'd never let my kids play such a messed up game.
But I reject the idea that playing video games with your friends is more fun than e.g. building a robot IRL with your friends, eh? I mean starting with magnets and wires and, like, an Arduino. You'd have to learn mathematics in the context of electronics, mechanics, software and hardware, sensors, etc. An integrated context where you're immediately applying what you learn to your robot.
Internet education can't work for the primary reason: not everyone is WFH. Most places are asking for more to come in. But many jobs require you to come in. So that right there eliminates it. For the lucky that can WFH, they need to dedicate resources to make sure their kid is paying attention or actually learning. It doesn't scale.
It's not a technology problem.
> What I mean is that the raw material freely available on the Internet is more than enough in terms of information, so it seems to me that long hours of mostly-rote learning from approved textbooks, etc. don't make sense anymore (if they ever did.)
It may seem trivial to say "why bother teaching 2+2 if they can just use a calculator." But they still need to understand the CONCEPT of adding. The point isn't just that the answer is four.
Even in something like history where you're asked to remember a date. How can any discussion of history involve not understanding the chronology of events?
> But I reject the idea that playing video games with your friends is more fun than e.g. building a robot IRL with your friends, eh? I mean starting with magnets and wires and, like, an Arduino. You'd have to learn mathematics in the context of electronics, mechanics, software and hardware, sensors, etc. An integrated context where you're immediately applying what you learn to your robot.
All of these options are available to kids with the power of the internet, as you just argued, and yet they almost all choose video games instead.
> Demoralization is what happens when you spend years becoming an expert in a subject area, and nobody cares. They’d rather hire another MBA to make all the important decisions, while they stick us on committees writing reports for ghosts. That’s when teachers start to withdraw from their jobs, when we realize it doesn’t matter what we think, and it definitely doesn’t matter how amazing we are at what we do.
This was really well put, and applies to any profession, not just teaching. Consider software security experts, who know all the ins and outs of making systems secure. They advise, the offer guidance and best practices on very complex material.
And yet at the end of the day all that work gets thrown out by some PM’s that think it only adds complexity, or worse yet users simply don’t use the more secure features of an application.
I was going to quote that very paragraph, as a professor teaching three classes this semester, in addition to my 50 hour a week job as the technical director.
I see at my university the outside consultants telling us how and when to teach. But OPs first sentence here seems to ring true a lot on my campus. Your boss, HR, some organization called "student success" which is made up of MBAs that have never taught a class, some VP of whatever division, they talk down to you. Tell you, as a professor with great student feedback and high marks all over the place, that you do not understand "how to teach" and that we should have Elvsiver, Pearson, or some other bookseller tell us how to teach, or even better, that we should just outsource teaching to them.
In fairness a lot of professors are terrible teachers and don't really care about teaching at all. My own course was full of them. I'm sure they didn't like to hear it though.
I will admit, there are those, just like the SW dev that hates coding, the Dr. that hates patients, etc. Most in the teaching profession that do not "like to teach" are people who like to do research, but are forced to teach.
I would probably argue, as another poster noted, that the really good ones quit, or their classes are perpetually full as they are the good ones. In the CS department where I teach, we generally do not have the luxury of multiple sections after the intro courses, but in say Mathematics, you really see this point driven home. The "good" Calculus I profs class fills instantly, then everyone else is left with "that researcher person" who does not like to teach.
Of course, the obvious solution: have research professors and teaching professors. Right? Nope, colleges are run by business people. "Have people just do research??" Only the well off colleges can really do that.
My friend is a professor and admits she has no interest in teaching. She is a scientist and counts herself fortunate to have enough research funding that she is rarely expected to lecture.
They may be brilliant at mentoring grad students but worthless at teaching undergrads. It all depends on the focus of the school. Small universities are more likely to focus on undergrad teaching over research or PhD numbers.
It's not that they're not paid to care, it's that they're not paid to teach. At least at research universities, tenured/tenure-track faculty's job is to do produce research and get grants. Teaching is a thing that's piled on top of it that doesn't help your career and takes a whole lot of time away from your primary job function.
A lot of professors do actually care about teaching and genuinely want to help students, but the system as designed strongly disincentivizes (or actively punishes) doing more than the bare minimum. I know a professor who was recently denied tenure at a research university that likes to describe itself as very "undergraduate teaching focused" -- he had decent but not outstanding research output, but had gotten several university-wide teaching awards and was broadly considered by students one of the best lecturers in the department. Some of the comments he had received suggest that this actively hurt him for tenure, because they felt he was too focused on teaching over research.
I think there's a point though where people are so deep in it, they can't see the forest through the trees anymore.
Security, as you mentioned, is definitely a balance with what your users will actually want to do. Security experts see doomsday scenarios everywhere, but if their solution is a hassle, your customers will just go to the less secure competitor.
I’ve worked with DBAs who were absolutely experts and knew far more than us but wanted to normalize the data to the point where actually retrieving it would have been a major hassle of JOINs. There’s a balance there that experts miss.
"Experts" in my general experience often lack the big picture. They get so honed in on their little area of expertise that they can forget that people don't value what they value to the same degree.
Id argue a DBA who doesn't understand the practical value of judicious use of denormalization isn't YET an expert. knowing when to dry your data and when to optimize for a specific usage pattern is part of being an "expert."
Any MBA or Product Manager telling a security expert what's important and what's not is absolutely doing it wrong. What they teach in an MBA is simply the larger picture of a business, it's complex systems, it's architecture. Anyone that writes code should be fairly good at it because it's essentially the same thing one does as an engineer: Determine the interfaces and contracts between the teams, understand the 'organs of the body' and the processes therein, understand the inputs and the outputs and governing systems such as cash flow and income. What often happens is prioritization and risk assessment ... the needs of the customers are many and there is only so much room in the backlog. What the security expert needs to do is to make the risks clear to the manager in business terms that they can understand, which to be honest, often comes down to probable loss of money, or customers, or brand.
Honestly there’s useful and interesting stuff in an MBA course, but it has very little to do with practical management of a business at any level. Pretty useful if your job is doing financial projections of projects with relatively predictable costs and payoffs.
Imagine if we put in charge of a tech firm the dude with the best understanding of category theory.
> it only adds complexity, or worse yet users simply don’t use the more secure features of an application.
This is true, on both counts. Adding top end security does add complexity. The business should decide if it's worth it. And users generally want whatever is simpler, and will only use MFA if it's forced upon them.
I realize this piece is more of a rant, and I won't hold it to a data accuracy standard it never pretended to have, but they pay issue is really misconstrued. Salaries in large urban districts are often well above area median, and when accounting for benefits and pension, quite impressive. In South Dakota and a number of states in the south and rural districts, yes it is another story, and it is bad. Also, teachers NEVER want to discuss pay differentials by anything but years of service. I'm sorry, but most qualified high school physics teachers have way differently valued skillsets in the labor force by alternate employers than most kindergarten teachers.
> Salaries in large urban districts are often well above area median
Is the median the correct benchmark? The median household income in NYC was $67k in 2021 [0]. Why would someone choose to be a teacher making around the median [1] when you could be a software engineer and make 3x as much?
It's not just a matter of trinkets and baubles. That difference allows you to comfortably afford a nice family sized apartment [2] in a safe area with a convenient commute.
People might want to be teachers rather than software engineers because teachers get enormous amounts of time off, have extremely high levels of job security, plus all the usual reasons that not everyone is in the very highest paying profession.
Anyone who's actually been or known a teacher knows this is false.
During the school year, in the time they're not actively teaching, teachers are
- Coaching sports
- Overseeing other student extracurricular activities
- Making/updating lesson plans
- Presiding over detention
- Tutoring students who need more 1:1 time
- Serving on school committees (especially in larger districts)
During the summer, teachers generally spend a large percentage of their time laying out the curriculum for the coming year. This is especially true for those in smaller districts, where one teacher has to teach three or four different levels of the same subject (or even multiple completely different subjects!).
I mean, I guess it's all relative. I'm a software engineer at a startup. On average I work about 50-55 hours a week. I get 3 weeks of vacation a year.
I certainly don't deny that teachers spend a lot of time working on their "time off". But that said, I've known more than a few teachers personally, and yes, they still do get enormous amounts of time off. Heck, a bunch of them will even admit it is the biggest perk of teaching (because otherwise there aren't many).
Teachers have plenty of real, valid complaints about the environment of teaching, and more importantly, it's clear with the current teacher shortage that something is really broken. Still, I don't think it wins them any supporters when teachers try to deny that most of them have vastly more time off than other professionals.
When I was teaching I worked a 7am to 6pm job, 5 days a week. That was actually in the school building, so that's 55 hours right there. The two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon, when I wasn't looking after 35 teenagers in a small, hot and unventilated classroom, were spent marking, planning lessons and writing reports. Have you ever had a job where you literally have to plan how much you drink, so that you don't have a full bladder in the middle of a double Science lesson?
Most weekends I'd dedicate around 5 or 6 hours to work, so that puts me up to about 61 hours a week. Of course we got those amazing holidays. Holidays when you were still expected to answer emails, mark work, write reports, plan assessments and lessons. One year, I remember working from September through to August, and my total time off was Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. In August the exam results come through, so I was expected to be in school to coach children on their options, and then write a 15 page report on the reasons my department had performed or under-performed.
I appreciate that this has turned into a rant, but don't ever think that your job is harder than a teacher, if you are a software engineer. It's not. I can testify to that. Teaching involves understanding your subject, understanding pedagogy, being a parent, councilor and sometimes prison warden to children who are often going through the most difficult times of their lives. You have to do all of that, while basically performing on stage for 5 hours a day, and your lunch break is spent ramming food down your throat so you can get out to the playground on time to supervise the kids out there.
An ex-colleague of mine has asked me to go back into teaching in his school. My response was "okay" can you pay me 150K, because I wouldn't do it for anything less.
I feel that this scales largely based on subject mater, experience, and past history teaching a particular course. I know a number of teachers and there are a lot of differences. Expectations vary by district, school, and parents. There have been many top down changes over time, mostly for the worse increasing workload.
When I was in HS, it was not uncommon to have lecture most days and a graded assignment once a week or even less. This is obviously a lot less work for teachers. In the best cases it can be a 7—4 job with summers completely off.
Why? Are they really better than khan academy at doing a lesson plan? Isn’t this like a software engineer complaining they have to write their own database driver in their spare time after work?
In general, it is a good idea to personalize lesson plans based on how well people did or didn’t react to the last one, and khan academy certainly doesn’t do anything like that, nor does it work for everyone.
The entire point of khan academy is that it is individually tailored to the student and can decide what lessons need additional practice vs those that can be skipped. It sounds like you aren’t at all awqre of how khan academy works.
Are you claiming teachers can personalize a lesson plan for each individual student in a class? To a granularity finer than what Khan Academy can do?
Unless you are suggesting a teacher can clone themselves to however big their class size there is, the individualization is not a realistic prospect given that you have to teach a few dozen kids in a 30-45 minute period. And given that current funding levels are having a hard time keeping teacher retention even at these levels, significantly increasing teacher numbers to make real individualization possible is not within the realm of reality.
Also, individual teaching methods don’t work well in certain subjects; as an example, you need a few people to put on a theatrical production, perform ensemble music, or have Socratic discussions.
Teachers aren't paid to personalize lessons though, if you work overtime to do that then you can only blame yourself. Teachers are paid to hold standardized lessons and answer questions help students with problems.
You could argue it would be better if teachers were paid to personalize lectures, but they aren't. Maybe some document somewhere says they should, but in practice nothing will happen to you if you just use standardized lectures so that is what most will do and that is what the expectations of the job is built around.
You say this because you don't know better, but its very common in schools for kids with learning or other disabilities to be in the same classes as other students - called 'mainstreaming' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainstreaming_(education)
Teachers are 100% supposed to teach the standardized kids, the kids with disabilities, and the kids who are a little faster than everyone else. It's simply not possible to do with one standardized lecture without individual attention to those with special needs.
It's not some document, its literally a major movement decades old in education.
Lesson plans are not standardized down to the day and order.
Sometimes, a group of students might need to speed up, slow down, or go in a wholly different direction depending on what happened with the previous lesson. There’s a lot of variation between one class of students and another, and teachers are not some kind of omniscient perfect predictor of behavior. And ultimately, you need to cover a whole curriculum.
There is a whole spectrum between teaching centrally dictated lesson plans and individually crafted tutoring, and one of the requirements of teaching is to be able to adjust lesson plans according to reality. We don’t expect software engineers to waterfall every last character in code down to the wire, but teachers are supposed to do this with unpredictable human children?
> Why would someone choose to be a teacher making around the median when you could be a software engineer and make 3x as much?
Is that a serious question?
Why indeed? Maybe because a union job with a state pension (yes, defined benefit pension) that starts at 62K and has an advancing pay scale based only on education level and seniority (yes - job performance unrelated to pay) and very high job security ain’t bad place to be if you can get it.
(And also I suspect that a lot of the people getting those teaching jobs simply would not be able to get 200K software development jobs.)
You jest, but this is my suggestion to anyone who wants a career change. You can study and get a PMP or Scrum certificate and get an entry level job fairly easily. And, if successful, can be making 100k within a few years.
Of course you have to be a PM, so there’s that. I’d rather literally herd cats or manage a kindergarten class.
"I call people and ask them to do the things they said they would do, on time. Then we have meetings about it for 4-6 hours a day. Technically I'm in charge."
I’ve met some too, but I’d say that most are incapable. Or they are the same proportion of the population that is capable. I don’t think teachers are any more or less likely than a typical person.
I’d guess I’ve met and spend significant time with 100 teachers. And a handful were capable of being a professional programmer.
I think a more diverse student body, likely one with a wide range of parental income and possibly including some kids who are members or gangs or is just more likely to have a few actually violent (,mentally ill, narcissistic, borderline personality disorder, etc.) kids, with a higher student to teacher ratio, will be much more challenging than a small high-school with 400 kids that more or less fall into "middle class and above with a spattering of low income."
EDIT: found an interesting "day in the life" article by a self-labeled urban teacher.
The parent comment answers itself. They would choose it because they actually don't have the alternative choice. In fact, aside from the transient young Teach for America type affluent idealists, most (not "all") urban public school teachers are gloried babysitters making good babysitting wages. If they teach kids anything it's usually something that should be untaught asap. By and large, the long hauler, professional urban public school teachers are not the type of people who have a ton of useful skills. In fact, the social skills useful for dealing with adults usually atrophy so even being a Software Project Manager is off the table. They become prisoners as much as the students, who at least have a definite term to serve and can get out early for bad behavior. For most kids, urban public schools are a policy solution to the social problem of young, unattended kids causing havoc, not a viable educational tool. Considered in that light they work pretty well.
Yes, for obvious reasons. Classroom size and the relative economic factors of urban schools make the job less desirable than non-urban schools. Urban kids are typically rich or poor. Rich kids end up in non-public schools. Non-urban schools are more often serving the middle class, who have cultural advantages over the poor when it comes to learning outcomes. Why do you think urban parents move to suburban school districts after having kids?
I’ve never heard of ”urban” being a code word for “black”. Is that a thing? I assume they mean “urban” as in “city” where you’re likely to have many other forms of opportunity vs “podunk” where you’re kinda stuck in one career because there’s nothing else around.
> Why would someone choose to be a teacher making around the median [1] when you could be a software engineer and make 3x as much?
Isn’t the answer to this quite obvious? It’s harder to be a software engineer. And there’s more risk to the profession.
Programming is interesting as you can be self-taught and be great. And it doesn’t require any formal training. I started as a college dropout (from a different major nothing to do with programming) and there’s lots of boot camps.
Anyone with the inclination can do what you suggest. But I think programming is hard so many are incapable.
Many teachers work very long hours. Ones I've dated did a minimum of 60 hours. They would work their day shift and then go home and work more, and work on weekends, and then do tutoring for extra cash.
Do you know how frustrating and exhausting teaching is? Very. They also don't get hazard pay for working in dangerous schools. One teacher I knew literally stopped teaching and became a kind of official bouncer (I don't know what it's called); when kids would get violent his job was to restrain them. The reason he switched was the kids' disrespect and his own desire to see them improve was crushing his soul.
Many teachers use their own money to buy their students' class materials.
If you're a teacher in New Jersey, you have to also live in New Jersey, a state with a ridiculously high tax rate.
The years of service thing is a fair yardstick because it's comparing apples to apples. We are not paying them based on what a different job would pay them, we pay them based on the job we want them to do.
In general, the hours spent teaching diminish over time. At the beginning of a teacher's career, they spend a lot of time outside of class building lesson plans and creating tests and homework assignments. These legitimately take a lot of time. And they aren't perfect, so the teacher often sees that they need to make big changes after those lesson plans and tests and homework assignments hit the students.
But after a few iterations, they have those tools, and at that point things settle down a lot. The material only needs to be updated infrequently. Most of that time that in the first few years was spent building those things is freed back up, and it's not replaced by anything.
I know three teachers well (Chicago area; two quite senior, the other recently retired). Hours might have once diminished over time as you suggest, but their experience as told to me contradicts this trend: curricula have been changing so quickly in response to administrative decree that every few years everything gets thrown out and rebuilt. When you add to that decreasing resources for classrooms and increasing student-to-teacher ratios, it is not surprising to me that they work more hours than anybody else I know.
The teacher in that example had 13 years of service and worked in one of the better paying public schools in New Jersey. She said she was paid pretty highly at around $60K (iirc). I do remember there was a kind of pecking order where more entry level teachers would make lesson plans, but the senior teachers still had to help the younger teachers learn how to do it, and sometimes do it themselves when nobody else could (teachers might trade between each other what extra work they needed).
Starting salaries for many districts for jobs that require a masters is pathetic.
Many suburban schools pay decent, but often urban centers pay poorly.
I know one person who was offered under $30k for teaching young special Ed folks. This is someone who has a masters and extra certs on tops of that.
Your argument about physics teachers being more sought after is interesting but misses the point. As a society we want our children to have the best outcomes, providing them with the best education at early ages provides that.
To have the best education you want to pay well and attract the best candidates. Not have those teachers splitting their time with Uber so they can afford rent.
There was a study that showed the value of great kindergarten teachers and it’s over $300k a year.
100% false, special Ed is a spectrum from high functioning to low functioning. Some kids need extra attention and support to find their element and become successful.
The diaper-changing-babysitting end of things is probably the most difficult job in the school. Think about it, it's one step away from working in a mental institution.
The whole USA teaching system exploits nice salt-of-the-earth types, chews them up, then spits them out. The system makes it difficult to even stay in it as a teacher, the job is littered with madness compared to many other government and private sector jobs.
Do software engineers just spontaneously come into existence? Or do they begin their education with kindergarten teachers, and progress though to the professors that teach them at college?
If a software engineer is contributing millions of dollars in value each year, they are doing it on the backs of the giants that taught and coached them to get to where they are today.
If you want to follow the value chain all the way down, why not attribute the value of that software engineer to the professors who taught those kindergarten teachers to be good teachers? Or the kindergarten teachers who taught those professors?
The truth of where the value to society comes from is somewhere between the "shoulders of giants" myth (that everything is obvious in light of what came before, and nobody really creates any value) and the "lone genius" myth (that value is created solely by bright individuals).
Some component of the value that we attribute to a person likely comes from their teachers, but it may be 0 (or negative - lots of teachers demoralize their students too). However, a significant portion comes from them.
A lot of the people who espouse the "shoulders of giants" myth use it to discredit the idea of the "lone genius" (without thinking about who the giants are). They believe that the giants represent societal knowledge, not individuals who made great contributions.
You totally missed the point though. The value you create has almost nothing to do with how much you’re paid. That’s just the most you could possibly be paid. You’re paid the amount your employer thinks it would cost to replace you.
I think markets are generally good, yes. If someone wants to do your job for cheaper and they’re just as good they should get the job. Either way, I don’t think it makes sense to talk about things like this as good or bad, they just are the way the are unless you’re talking about a complete revolution.
Comparing teacher pay to the median wage isn’t an apples to apples comparison because the average teacher has between a bachelor’s degree and a master’s, a state certification with regular training and renewal requirements, and a good amount of professional experience. I was a high school teacher and when I left my salary went up by 50% on day one, passed 100% increase within 2 years, and tripled within 5 years. The median wage earner in a large city is probably paid hourly for service work.
I do agree that the single pay scale across all public school teachers is an issue. You will never get someone to teach high school math, science, or tech if salary is a significant consideration.
It's pretty close to the median worker having a bachelor's degree so that doesn't really skew the comparison
Ultimately teaching salaries are fine. The median teacher makes about the median salary. But it comes with great job security, benefits, and significantly more time off than the median job. The benefits are high enough to attract enough teachers.
The problem are parents and administration. And more recently kids missed a couple years of school due to Covid and went feral. It's gotten to be a significantly worse job. Solution is to cut the bullshit. Not pay more to incentivize people to put up with the bullshit.
> Ultimately teaching salaries are fine. The median teacher makes about the median salary. But it comes with great job security, benefits, and significantly more time off than the median job.
I know 3 public school teachers, in CA/NYC/NJ. Their 6 to 8 weeks off in the summer (if that, due to ongoing training), is nowhere near enough to offset the low pay per hour and most importantly, having to deal with garbage parents and their misbehaving kids.
They also work many extra hours at home during the school year doing grading or prepping exercises or whatever. If we have a get together, the teachers will pretty much guaranteed to be working all or some portion of the evening.
> The benefits are high enough to attract enough teachers
Only if you think 30+ kids per class is acceptable. I would want no more than 20 kids per class.
Average teacher salary in California is $84,000. Official working days total out to about 12 weeks of vacation. Realistically less than that but still much more than your typical worker.
The question of if teachers are sufficiently paid is answered by asking if current classroom sizes are sufficiently small and staffed by sufficient quality teachers. Whatever price that makes that happen is the appropriate price, regardless of what people in other jobs are earning.
>The question of if teachers are sufficiently paid is answered by asking if current classroom sizes are sufficiently small and staffed by sufficient quality teachers. Whatever price that makes that happen is the appropriate price, regardless of what people in other jobs are earning
Like I said before the solution is to cut the bullshit. Not pay more for people to tolerate it.
For the purposes of determining appropriate prices, why is it necessary to compare their price to anyone? Supply and demand determine appropriate pricing.
The thing to compare to is the jobs the teachers could do if they weren't teachers. All of them have college degrees, many have masters degrees. The comparison point should be generic white collar office jobs, which are pretty much all easier (and especially, less annoying), higher paying, and more respected.
However much they're paying teachers, it's clearly not enough, because not enough people are willing to do the job for that amount of money.
Assuming you had all the skills required to be an effective teacher, would YOU put up with everything they put up with for that salary? Because I sure as hell wouldn't.
(As an aside, it's different depending on where you are but in Australia, comparing teacher salary can be difficult because "they get 12 weeks of holiday a year" and "they only work 6 hours a day" but also they do 3+ hours of unpaid marking and lesson planning a day, they're expected to show up at the end of those 'holidays' prepared for whatever courses they've been assigned for the next term, etc. A close relative is a teacher and it's insane what they have to deal with.)
> However much they're paying teachers, it's clearly not enough, because not enough people are willing to do the job for that amount of money.
The problem is that the scope of the job has changed and you can't pay people enough to do it. Here are some issues, straight from teachers I was talking to last week:
* Admin who constantly wants teachers to do more with no additional resources so they can get credit for it and advance their career. They were very frustrated by this.
* Teaching evaluation based on absolute standardized scores rather than relative. So you can have a bad class, lift them a lot, but still be viewed poorly because on absolute terms, they are still weak. You might say that evens out over time, but it doesn't because some teachers are better with difficult students, so they get more than their share of these issues.
* Special needs students mainstreamed - kids with emotional issues that flip desks and yell out constantly, physical issues such as seizures if they bump their head, but parents will not let them wear protective gear because they will stand out, elementary school kids who are constantly in physical altercations with other kids.
* Kids come to school not having eaten since the day before, cloths that haven't been washed in days, etc.
* Unable to give accurate grades because parents fight back and so teachers are forced to pass kids even though they know they are just pushing a big problem on the next teacher.
* Zero support from parents and in many cases, outright hostility.
* The classroom is a minefield regarding what can be discussed and cannot be discussed. Everyone has an opinion on how it should be done, but almost none of them have ever actually taught.
It's still not worth the money. Ive spent time in the classroom in a large urban district and the job was twice as hard as my current software engineering job (for me) for literally half the pay
> Salaries in large urban districts are often well above area median, and when accounting for benefits and pension, quite impressive.
I'd disagree. Some anecdotal evidence - I'm from a HCOL suburban area with a nationally ranked public school system. Teachers here are generally considered "well-paid" by teacher salary standards. Many of the teachers in my area literally cannot afford to live here, and have to commute 30-40 minutes in.
My mom was a teacher there. She was making about $80k a year at the end of her career, with 2 masters degree and 20 years of experience teaching (so she was pretty much maxed out on her salary). Her pension is something like $20k a year (also maxed out due to her YOE). My dad was in between jobs for some time in there, and my parents, who are frugal people, struggled to make ends meet on just my moms salary, borrowing against their mortgage for the year while my dad was unemployed.
I went to Chicago public schools. Most of my teachers had graduate degrees from degree mill schools, some even had phds that they loved to talk about even though I doubt they spent more than a few days to get them. That ended up meaning they all made around 110-120, with full pension after I believe 30 years. Certainly not an amazing salary, and they all worked much harder than I ever have, but nothing to laugh at I’d say.
Very good point, that's a salary you can live very comfortably on. Seems like it just depends on the school district, but I'd say the authors main point, that salaries across the board for teachers are lower than they should be given how hard the job is and how qualified most teachers are, still holds true.
Are our public school teachers unfit to be teachers and low-quality workers because not high enough wage is offered for quality people? Or is it that the salary attracts competent people but other factors are broken?
The interesting thing to me is I see people almost universally praise our teachers, and comment on how great and caring they are. The money seems to be attracting the raw talent, so I'm leaning towards something else is much more broken in our system.
That many teacher’s pensions require one to give up social security benefits makes the decision to teach more difficult, I would think, especially for those who are later in their working lives.
Most people in their 20s and 30s today aren't getting social security anyway, so maybe this is decreasing in importance?
Personally, I don't have much faith in pension systems either. The growth ponzi scheme for US stocks can only go on for so long, and many pensions have gone belly-up in the last decade or two even though the market has been incredibly good for most of that time. If we enter a recession that lasts more than 1 or 2 years, those pensions are going to end up in worrying places for anyone who isn't already cashing out.
There are many ways to compensate teachers [1], but in general, you really shouldn't make categorical statements on matters you are completely unfamiliar with. I help manage the finances of someone who is in the position of being unable to collect any social security benefits from the relatively brief time she had a regular job which paid into social security prior to becoming a teacher, and is also unable to collect her spouse's Social Security survivor benefits (she literally receives zero dollars from Social Security, though if she had never worked a day in her life, she's be able to collect her spouse's survivor's benefits). You've made quite a few comments in this thread: how many of them are as badly informed as this?
"Windfall Elimination Prevention" and "Government Pension Offset" are things you can google if you're interested in learning a bit about this stuff.
[1] States whose teachers participate in their own pension plans instead of Social Security include California and Texas, so it's not like these are rare concerns
This is not the case for NY, and not in WI and PA as I have heard from teachers there.
In cases where they don't receive it though, they're not paying into it either. I can't comment as to whether that is a good or bad thing, because I don't know those cases. Maybe the union membership by in large doesn't want to?
> In cases where they don't receive it though, they're not paying into it either.
If the "it" you're referring to is social security, this is, to use your phrase from above, "patently untrue." It would be comforting if that were the case, but there are cases where a person who has paid into social security will not receive anything from it, and will not receive their spouse's Social Security survivor's benefits, under WEP and GPO rules. As I explained above, I know one of these people and help her manage her money.
To the original point in my grandparent post: just having to do the math on this stuff could be deterrent to someone trying to make a decision about whether teaching is a smart career move.
> Maybe the union membership by in large doesn't want to?
WEP and GPO are a matter of federal law, although "maybe the unions want this thing that is obviously hostile to their members" is certainly... a thought a person could have. As it happens the American Federation of Teachers is lobbying to eliminate WEP and GPO, and I assume there are other unions who are acting similarly:
(some potential disinformation in the second link, but the point is, this is a pretty active debate)
edit: It occurs to me that maybe you meant "maybe they do not want to pay into Social Security," which is probably true. To keep this in perspective, these teacher pensions which were considered an alternative/supplement to Social Security are a lot older than the WEP and GPO, which came along to kick those with these pensions in the nuts in the late seventies and early eighties. The teachers and their unions were already committed to the path they were on when the federal government changed the rules on them.
Not disagreeing with what you just wrote above,but do you have a source for
> If the "it" you're referring to is social security, this is, to use your phrase from above, "patently untrue."
? Because everything I am reading suggests those states whose teachers whose work years only go to pension and not SS eligibility are not having their teachers pay into SS.
That part is right! The problem comes at the end of a career when the SSA needs, under the WPA rules, to weigh what the teacher in question is going to be paid by the teacher’s pension (which by design was paid into instead of social security) against what the teacher paid into social security via payroll taxes before or after their career as a teacher, or during summer work during their career as a teacher. The SSA then reduce the social security benefits according to their formula. The reduction can be pretty extreme, all the way towards a person who paid into the social security trust not receiving any benefit from it.
I’m not fully familiar with the stated justification for these laws, or why you’d want to treat a pension as a ”windfall,” (or maybe they’re trying to keep social security benefits from being a “windfall?”) but I guess my main thought on that as a non-teaching, non-union professional is that we are all very lucky these rules were drafted a year or two before 401ks came into wide use, such that we avoided someone in congress getting the bright idea of treating our tax deferred retirement savings as a “windfall” to be factored into the SSA’s payment calculations as well.
I believe the problem of losing a spouse’s survivor’s benefits happens under the GPO rules, and that is similarly unpopular.
This is the best reply so far. In the US, things (good and bad) vary dramatically between school districts, but everyone talks about “teachers” as this monolithic group.
In the Boston area it’s absolutely possible to exceed $100,000 salary. The pay scales are public, look it up yourself. I’m willing to believe many teachers are underpaid, and that those in Boston have legitimate gripes too, but we need to be clear about which context we’re discussing.
My anecdata- friend last year just crossed $100K in about her 15th year teaching in Boston suburbs. She didn't have to do any of the "add-ons" like sports team coaching, curriculum work, tutoring, etc. to get to that number.
It's always been my opinion that market value aside, Kindergarden teachers probably deserve the HIGHEST pay because they lay the foundations, and without sound foundations, the building is unstable.
Apologies for extended metaphorical language, but the underlying point is really what I think: Pay the ones at the front the most. They do the groundwork.
> most qualified high school physics teachers have way differently valued skillsets in the labor force by alternate employers than most kindergarten teachers.
Do they? I read that as implying that physics teachers could potentially get some stem jobs. But is that actually true? If you can do math, you can teach yourself enough physics to teach in high school. But that gets you nowhere near the knowledge necessary for applying non-trivial physics at work.
"If you can do math, you can teach yourself enough physics to teach in high school."
No, you can't. Even at the high school level there is jargon, historical methodology, and domain-specific nuance that isn't accessible to the self-taught. That's true for almost any subject one might think of, in fact.
What prevents anyone from learning all they need about any subject on their own? If someone is capable of reading, it seems to me they could teach themselves any subject using books. Of course, having a good teacher to guide them in which sources to read, etc, would greatly speed up the process of learning. However, I don’t see any reason someone cannot learn any subject on their own.
Books provide the basics required to understand the field. They don't help develop intuition, methodology, collaboration, and other skills necessary to truly understand the field or teach it to others.
To be clear, I didn't write "be an exceptional physics teacher with knowledge of history, nuance, etc." - I agree that's not a trivial thing and a very desirable one. But if you need "just a physics teacher" for a given spot, I stand by my opinion.
I mean, if you’re talking about the happy path where every student understands the material on the first pass or can work out issues on their own then maybe. But that’s not how teaching or learning works for anyone, including super geniuses.
Whether you could or couldn't self study to be a competent physics teacher is besides the point if you need a physics or very closely related STEM degree plus test of content competency as a condition of getting the job by the regulations if most US states. That limits the pool of applicants to people who can command better salaries elsewhere over their whole career arc for arguably a lot less stress. Thus an exceptional shortage within that specialty is more prone to happen. Lowering the standards of qualification is an option, but the author doesn't seem thrilled with that idea. So we are pretty much left with discussing a pay differential within the profession, which is a third rail topic among most teacher unions.
The US has always experienced relentless political activism against public education. This creates a climate where teachers, and the institution they work in, are actively hated by a wide swath of the public. This is due in no small part to proponents of religious education.
It's true that teachers receive an above-average salary, but that can be both a blessing and a curse. The curse is that your wages are a matter of public record, and more than half of voters earn less then you, though teaching their precious children should be a privilege.
A second thing is that schools are the repository of social problems that they can't solve, including poverty, racism, the proliferation of firearms, and rise of violent rhetoric.
My state outlawed the teachers' union several years ago, and a lot of senior teachers took early retirement or went into other jobs. Most were old enough that they had settled into their lifestyle, and weren't going to get rich by changing careers. The word they used the most was "respect." My neighbor, one of the best teachers in the district, is now working as an engineer. His spouse is a mid six figure executive.
> The US has always experienced relentless political activism against public education.
Lol we spend almost 3x more on k-12 public education now (inflation adjusted) than we did in 1960. I really doubt the relentless political activism was on the side against public education. Really, the cost to educate a child should have gone down substantially relative to inflation given new technologies that make teaching easier and faster.
> Really, the cost to educate a child should have gone down substantially relative to inflation given new technologies that make teaching easier and faster.
None of the technologies solved any problems, really. Math is still math. Reading still requires reading. Technology hasn't done anything but perhaps provide more access and information - if you're motivated, you have great options, but most children are not motivated like this.
"I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won't have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them." -- Jerry Falwell
Please describe in detail the technologies that have made teaching easier and faster, and how you've implemented then to make teaching easier and faster, and the before and after results that show "teaching successfully completed easier and faster".
The proper socialization of children is always going to generate controversy. Fundamentally, most parents view teachers as public employees hired to teach kids what the community agrees kids should learn. But teachers often see themselves as part of a profession that has an obligation to socialize children in (little-l) liberal values or outright (big-l) Liberal values. Of course this generates backlash.
And it’s not just from “proponents of religious education.” The most recent iteration is often coming from moderate liberals who oppose increasingly progressive teachers unions. Progressive teaching became a flash point in Loudoun County VA, right next to where I grew up. International migration to that region flipped Virginia blue in the earth 2000. A lot of Google employees live there. A great way to get an Indian Biden voter worked up is to tell them “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/578885-education-blunde...
See the federal government in general. People like my dad elect politicians who actively want the federal government to fail, and then use the government’s failures to justify that: “see, they were right all along!”
This. It's all about the money. I left the classroom and literally shed a tear in front of my principal. She asked what she could do for me to stay and I said "I need more money. I have bills to pay." You can't pay a mortgage with thank you notes, certificates of appreciation, and hugs.
I taught high school Computer Science, a needed subject area with countless CS training initiatives and resources, but the pay still wasn't (and still isn't) there. I have a family and can't afford to stay in the classroom if I want to stay in my house, own a car, have a cell phone and internet, and pay off student loans.
I clicked the article because it says nobody wants to teach; I want to teach, I just can't afford to.
1. This is not about America. I'm from Eastern Europe and we have the very same problems.
2. This is not about money. Yes, being underpaid is part of a problem how teachers feel, but no money compensates humiliation and bullying teachers are experiencing.
3. It's not a rant. This EXACTLY how I feel after spending three years at school. I was a math teacher in classes of my kids because a school couldn't find any. Yes, nobody wants to teach any more.
This is a better argument to cut CEO pay by 90% than anything else.
The problem for teachers (and lots of other people in the care sector who struggle to take effective industrial action) isn't that the pay doesn't attract good people.
The problem is it isn't enough to live on, especially given all the training they have to do (plus associated loans) and unpaid work.
Coincidentally just yesterday there was a big news article in the largest daily newspaper about the problems teachers have with uncooperative parents. One memorable case was of the parents calling the teacher and informing them that the parents have agreed with their kid is exempt from reading books. In another, during a disagreement with a teacher, kid called their parent, put the parent on speaker, who then proceeded disparage the teacher in very low language in front of the rest of class.
This isn't entirely a criticism of the parent post, but praise of entirely different education systems comes across as Finland ex machina: just do what they do and our problems are solved. Aside from the parenting component which is a huge part of student success, there's also the question of replacing school boards, administration staff, hiring better teachers of course and reforming local laws. And of course the teachers unions and the financial issues with pensions. There's no easy way to transition out of our existing problems and parents with the means just hit the eject button, sending their kids to private schools.
I wouldn't consider 7.9% of the population as "a lot" of immigrants when compared to the United States being 26%. And immigrants aren't the only issue. There's a lot of racial diversity in the US that just doesn't exist in Finland.
And the educational record for immigrants in Finland is not great:
It still is small. Also Finland's education results have been slipping, likely because of said immigration: "Finland has been displaced from the very top. In the 2012 study, Finland ranked sixth in reading, twelfth in mathematics and fifth in science, while back in the 2003 study Finland was first in both science and reading and second in mathematics."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Finland
Nordic countries do all much better than others in my experience. I'm sure that they have their own problems, but such level of bullshit and disrespect is not one of them indeed.
In most of Eastern Europe countries teachers had lower salaries than average as far as we remember - ie at least since WWII. It's expected for most of us here. But that wasn't my point.
The point was that you can't compensate all this bullshit with money. OK, you might find some people who can do anything for money, but not so many you can fill all positions in public education system.
Teaching/training is quite difficult. I've done quite a bit of training (but not true teaching -there's a difference), over the years.
My family is full of teachers. I have many friends that are teachers.
It's amazing how "solutions" never seem to actually get around to simply paying teachers more, and maybe not expecting them to be child-rearers, in lieu of parents.
> It's amazing how "solutions" never seem to actually get around to simply paying teachers more, and maybe not expecting them to be child-rearers, in lieu of parents.
In a neighboring town parents tried to set up a "hotline" where teachers would have to be available at night to intervene on google chat related social incidents. They just don't seem to get that at 3:15, the kid is your fucking problem again. Leave these poor teachers alone.
As long as we have tenure and the seniority system we aren’t going to see significantly higher pay.
Virtually everyone else has a boss that judges his or her performance. Sometimes those judgments are wrong or unfair. Almost every institution has determined that’s still better than nothing. But somehow not schools.
paying teachers more is not going to solve the problem that most people do not appreciate teachers whether its kids or parents. It is certainly not a job for those who cannot stand being criticized the whole time.
My wife is (ex)teacher. Parents would flat-out say that they can't respect her because of her salary. Along the lines of, if you're smart and can do stuff, why the hell are you working for such a low pay? Ergo teachers are dumb and parents (along with their kids) feel free to make fun of dumbasses who work in schools.
On top of that, paying more would help with self-respect. It's damn hard to be an authority to kids when you live paycheck-to-paycheck. Especially in teens' world where appearance matters a lot.
> Parents would flat-out say that they can't respect her because of her salary. Along the lines of, if you're smart and can do stuff, why the hell are you working for such a low pay?
Damn, that is so gut wrenching to read. It's so short sighted that society does not value teachers more highly. The next generation is the ultimate investment.
True. We needs massive propaganda campaign to highlight teachers. And, of course, show respect by paying them accordingly.
Another semi-related issue is school system used for virtue signalling first. For example „special needs“ kids integration. It sounds nice on paper, but in reality one kids holds up whole class. And then smarter kids riot because they get bored. But hey, that's teacher's fault..
IMO that will be the crucial piece for West decline. This is reverting the best bit in post-industrial-revolution welfare states. Teach the masses to fish out the brilliant mind from the whole pool. But now we're reducing the pool to those who can afford private schools. And loosing lots of talent in the rest of society. If that trend continues, soon we'll be back in nobility-peasants split with little social mobility. Which a loss not onlh for the society as a whole, but for neo-nobility as well. At first it may be cool to be richer-than-thou, but over time „richest in the room“ will turn out to be poor at global scale.
It actually makes sense to deprecate teachers if you are one of the christian fascists in the republican party. We need only look at the recent string of laws, book bannings and similar to get an idea of what religious fascism does.
Attacking the teachers have been a long term goal. School funds already are now allowed to be directed to parochial (religious) schools from the state school coffers. This starves the public school systems one by one.
No Child Left Behind guaranteed that bad schools get less money, and get worse. This all but guarantees that low income areas have terrible school systems that are more just juvenile delinquency prevention and babysitting services.
Book bans are pushed by the "right" (which they rarely, if ever, are), with obvious canards like "Harry potter is evil occult and should be burned". Naturally, with the exception of https://www.vice.com/en/article/epzv9j/texas-school-bans-the... , most of the bans are done explicitly by the christian fascists forcing their beliefs on others.
Or, instead of more money and resources, we see Texas state legislature forcing schools to hang banners of "In god we trust." https://www.texastribune.org/2022/08/18/texas-schools-in-god... . Again, it's the forcing of one myopic direction of religion on the masses. It brings the parochial school into the public piece at a time.
All of these different directions have the ultimate effect - deprecate the "godless" education to something with their variant of religion in it. And naturally, we get pablum like "Noah and dinosaurs lived together", and other completely non-science garbage taught as fact.
Globally, the root cause is definitely not „christian fascists“. For example in my country it's woke neoliberals pushing the notion of schooling freemarketisation. At the same time claiming that teachers' salary increase won't help with terrible students' performance at exams :)
I’m sorry to hear that, but to counter-anecdote: Four of my family members are teachers at various levels. They all have strong frustrations but money (either in terms of perception or paying the bills) has never been one.
Are any of them under 40 and completely self-supporting? Most of the coworkers I had when teaching who weren’t bothered by the money had an external source of financial support. It took me a long time to realize it because those who are supported by others don’t like to admit it. I referred to them as hobbyist teachers, and they were much much more likely to stay longer than 5 years compared to those who were doing it as a career.
Legitimate question, thanks. Two married to each other. One over 40. Last living in a nicer part of town than otherwise due to husband, but actually looked for non-teaching jobs and couldn’t find higher salaries so stayed.
Money will not overcome the "those who can't, teach" sentiment that runs quite strongly in the US. There is a very strong anti-intelligence (not merely anti-intellectual) sentiment in this country.
It will help, and we should certainly pay teachers more, but it isn't the whole solution.
"Those who can't do, teach" is almost exclusively about money, the idea being that in almost every industry you would be paid more to do than to teach. Thus, if you are teaching it's likely because you failed to be a doer. This isn't anti-intelligence, it's actually a fairly logical stance.
It does miss that a person's desire to educate can far exceed their desire to ply the trade and they are willing to sacrifice their pay at that particular altar. But given most teachers do not seem irrationally excited about teaching or being teachers that line of thought is quite diminished.
Being a teacher (as opposed to a trainer, like me) is really difficult, and a great many people who are excellent engineers and scientists, are horrendously bad teachers.
The best teachers that I ever had, were ones that were trained as teachers, and were not necessarily content matter experts.
The worst teachers that I ever had, were content matter experts. Almost universally, they had no patience for folks that had a hard time coming up to speed, or that weren't already at a level beyond the class they were teaching.
They would ridicule you for asking "stupid" questions (that's me -I ask questions that have the whole class in stitches, but by the end of the semester, I'm coaching my classmates). They would start from a baseline that actually assumed the student had already completed and passed the class they were taking.
I would sign up for a class, because of the bona fides of the teacher, but would end up regretting my decision.
More money will encourage more of “those who can” to switch to teaching, which will help to undermine the stereotype.
There are already many “who can” who already teach, but they’re almost exclusively the ones who also intrinsically value teaching highly. A higher pay will help bring the ones who would be good teachers but are in a situation where they need to prioritize money.
> More money will encourage more of “those who can” to switch to teaching,
No, it won't, because in the private sector you can have a growing career. If you are teaching it's very likely to be the very same job until you retire.
I know some people “who can” who cared a lot about teaching and decided to be a teacher. I also know some people in industry who were on the edge of being a teacher but decided it didn’t pay enough. More pay absolutely would draw in the people on the edge.
“Those who can’t teach” is a direct result of the low pay. A software developer might semi retire and start teaching, but it’s a hobby at that point not a viable alternative.
It’s more complicated than paying more money automatically means better workers, but higher pay does let an industry be more selective.
"Those who can't, teach" is the result of systematically underpaid teachers. There are two groups who go into teaching: those who like it so much they're willing to take less pay, and those who are drawn to the profession because the pay is competitive with the other jobs they're capable of.
Money is not sufficient to overcome the problem on its own, but it is necessary, and not having enough of it caused the problem.
If there was salary parity between teachers and workers, I think that sentiment would vanish. With the current disparity, the implication is teaching is a "final resort" for people who "couldn't cut it" in their industry.
Yes it will. Because if you pay teachers more, in fact, pay them well, then more people will want to move into the field.
If teaching was like a FANNG tech job, with limited availability due to demand and salary, then it would be "discovered" to be prestigious and valuable and important.
And moreover, everyone would be free to come up with their own performance management BS because you'd actually have the glut of incoming talent that supports failures removing people from the industry (or screw it up so bad that despite the money no one bothers - also a FANNG phenomenan).
Money does not come from the skies, it's about what the market agrees the value actually is (when it comes to private education) or what the government decides (for public education). Public education is a problem because in many western countries it's already the largest budget and it's still a shitshow so you are going to have a hard time to convince everyone that injecting more money is going to make it better.
Public schools are not a market economy. Even in the most capitalist country in the world, there will be obligatory free public schools, and they will be government-financed.
The level of demand, however, can vary. Do Americans even want good public education? Or it is an afterthought?
Market forces for schools are reflected in real estate prices. Houses in good school districts can go for 4x the cost of similar housing a few miles away if the schools are bad.
That’s right, but the schools themselves are not participating in the market feedback forces, their quality distribution is random (or worse).
This very observation is telling us that the entire system is outside the market (why, for example, people from other locations cannot choose this particular school if it is better than others?)
If our goal is to shovel new people into the system as quickly as others are quitting, I suppose lawyers are a good aspirational example. But if we assume that the best teachers are ones who like their jobs and have been around for a while, we might want to try a different model.
Nah I think most people like "the idea" of being a lawyer (or a doctor). But to actually be one it's much harder, and that's when they get a reality check
Lawyers will mostly attest how divorce/family practice has nothing on actual criminal practice, and it might be even harder. Most people don't know about the long hours, the case studies, etc. They think it's the romantic view of what they see on TV
Doctors have to know how to deal with bodly fluids. Of various kinds. They have to learn how to tell a family a dear person died. They have to literally survive residency.
> Nah I think most people like "the idea" of being a lawyer (or a doctor). But to actually be one it's much harder, and that's when they get a reality check
Same with writing software. I get rather tired of running into people that obviously took it up for the money, then found they weren't particularly good at it. Being a good engineer (software, or otherwise) is hard.
In my experience, these folks tend to be quite concerned about the "culture," as opposed to the actual art of the field. They look and sound great, but don't rely on them to actually ship anything.
Delivering software is really difficult. I've been doing it for my entire adult life, so it's become pretty much habit. It's always shocking to encounter folks that aren't able to deliver software, yet have been in the field for a very long time.
Why not ? I would argue that most teachers provide a more valuable service than most lawyers (For my definition of value atleast). Lawyers have strict licensing requirements while teachers don't, which would be one of the major differences
Teachers have strict licensing requirements in literally every state.
Although the bar exam specifically is probably harder than any single component of teacher licensure, overall they are comparable, as teachers have more components.
In NY, teachers have to pass exams, and get certified. I could ask my friends for details, but I know they need to do it, because I hear them bitch about it.
It’s education as a whole that isn’t valued very highly. People just don’t want to put in the work and it’s easy to blame teachers on the front line doling out the work.
But money is at least a big factor: even those who keep up with self-motivation and co-worker’s appreciation can’t go on if money isn’t there. Paying them fairer prices is the first step in any attempt to make teachers come back.
I don't actually think the money is main problem. You can keep giving them more money and it wont change anything in long run. Unless they are grossly underpaid compared to cost of living.
It is all about giving them tools to solve issues with those children that cause issues. And maybe cultural change back to state where it is most of the time kids fault. Not teachers... And lessening the work load where possible. Maybe increasing number of assistants available and resources of special education.
> I don't actually think the money is main problem.
Most of the teachers that I know, personally, mention this as the first problem to solve. I don’t think any of them believe that it’s the only problem to address, but there’s not even a tiny doubt that the great majority of teachers believe it to be something that needs to be dealt with, before tackling the rest of the pile.
But looking at this very conversation, shows that the idea of paying teachers more, is quite unpopular. The verbal and mental gymnastics that people go through, to avoid coming to the conclusion that teachers simply need to be paid more, are kind of astonishing. We have no problem at all, coming to that conclusion for many other vocations (especially the one we happen to be in).
I guess, because of my own family/friend situation, I find this stance puzzling.
I assume, then, that a good place to start, is to find out why people don’t want to pay teachers more, and address that.
As a European, it has always been perplexing to me how little the US invests in teachers and schools, given that we know how huge the benefits are down the road (educational attainment, income, pro-social behavior, life satisfaction).
Watching how large parts of the political spectrum embrace hardship as a societal teaching tool, I begin to understand that the expectation may always have been that kids ought to figure it out by themselves. It's almost as if our "invention of childhood" (as a protected phase in life) is being rolled back.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't believe kids can until they are quite old. On the contrary, I expect the emotional and psychological scars to demand a significant toll in the future.
[edit] PS: There have been quite a few very heated recent discussions where dang sternly warned against incisive political scorn. I agree, and my comment is intentionally worded carefully and as objectively as possible.
For comparison - we currently pay more per year to keep our 1 year old child in daycare (roughly ~15,000/yr) and for daycare we literally only expect them to keep him alive & clean. And this is considered a "cheap" daycare. Most places in our area (the much cheaper south-west side of Atlanta) still charge more than 1600/m or almost 20k/yr.
We certainly don't expect them to be significantly enriching his education experience (although the simple exposure to other kids will likely do that at this age). We also don't expect the employees to have any sort of educational/vocational training to excel at teaching, or expect them to perform any sort of off-the-clock work (ex: grading, class prep, parent-teacher meetings, etc). I expect them to be mostly high-school graduates with a background check.
So I look at that number, and while it's certainly a large number if you're making 1 teacher manage 30 kids, I don't really know that it's a number that results in viable conditions to truly "educate" children.
I strongly suspect that education is highly dependent on the family at home, and that's becoming harder to meaningful do as more and more families are forced to have both parents work full time.
>I strongly suspect that education is highly dependent on the family at home, and that's becoming harder to meaningful do as more and more families are forced to have both parents work full time.
This is a big part of it. Education doesn't stop when the school bell rings.
But I was told by HN the state is responsible for providing an education for children. If the parent is responsible instead, then I'd like to be able to opt out of paying taxes for schools and instead send my kid to a private school.
>For comparison - we currently pay more per year to keep our 1 year old child in daycare (roughly ~15,000/yr) and for daycare we literally only expect them to keep him alive & clean
You cannot compare the per child costs of taking care of a kid who cannot go to the toilet themselves or eat by themself with a kid who is much more self sufficient.
The person taking care of a baby (or 4 babies) might need to be much less qualified than an AP physics teacher in high school, but the labor (and liability) costs do not necessarily scale exactly with the minimum qualifications needed to be an AP physics teacher versus a daycare teacher.
I think comparing the costs between the 5 year olds in our daycare and the 6 year olds entering first grade is entirely fair.
Our daycare gets more expensive as the child ages - not less.
> The person taking care of a baby (or 4 babies) might need to be much less qualified than an AP physics teacher in high school, but the labor (and liability) costs do not necessarily scale exactly with the minimum qualifications needed to be an AP physics teacher versus a daycare teacher.
And this - this is exactly what I'm contesting. Why is it we're ok paying someone who should be able to teach complex and technical skills to children (high school physics) barely more than a high school grad who is only qualified to tend to infants? Worse - why do we let class sizes balloon to the point where one-on-one interactions are incredibly hard?
One requires considerably more skills, considerably more education, and frankly much more work (and I'm not talking about the one tending the infants). Yet they're expected to effectively teach class sizes of between 25 and 32 (which is the technical max for the state - but I've frequently seen this balloon as high as 45)
Yet the daycare worker is making almost the rate of an intro physics teacher (17/h vs 19/h). And the very top most earners are making only 30/h. Being a manager at a McDonalds is FAR more lucrative (avg of 98k vs the avg physics teacher in GA at 43k). That should be a giant fucking red flag.
The numbers aren't even that far off - There are ~500 McDonalds locations in GA, and ~525 public high schools. Each McDonalds location has ~3 managers (shift manager, assistant manager, store manager) And they all make more than intro physics teachers. (from 50k to ~100k)
When flipping burgers is literally more lucrative... I fail to be compelled by your argument.
>Our daycare gets more expensive as the child ages - not less.
I have shopped around daycares on east and west coast, and I have never encountered this type of pricing. Infants have always been more expensive than toddlers and pre K in at least 10 to 15 daycares I have priced.
I also do not see the purpose of comparing prices for different prices of labor for justifying the prices.
Physics teachers may very well need to be paid more to attract enough people to meet the desired teacher student ratios and quality of teacher , but it has nothing to do with how much daycare teachers are paid. It just depends on supply and demand of that particular type of labor or service, hence the futility of comparing per student costs of daycare and high schools.
> I also do not see the purpose of comparing prices for different prices of labor for justifying the prices.
Then you're unable to see that market forces are making it incredibly unattractive to be a teacher.
The comparison is to point out the following: Why bother to take loans for college, then complete the additional certifications required for teaching, only to spend more effort at a career that will pay you considerably less well than simply working as a McDonalds manager? And seriously, my mom taught for 48 years - McDonalds manager is an easy job compared to handling 32 kids a class, for 5 classes, and their ~320 some parents (seriously - the parents are usually the pain).
You could have instead spent 4 years generating income roughly equivalent of the same job, spent no money on school, and end up making far more by just going the corporate McDonald's route - not even discussing the "buy your own class decorations bullshit", or the hours lesson planning and grading, or the certification required once every three years to stay current.
This has EVERYTHING to do with how much other professions are getting paid - it's just become incredibly clear we don't value or respect teaching - so why fucking do it?
And that's my point with the daycare workers - it's objectively an easier job, with less education and certification requirements, that also lets you work with kids, and pays almost the same as intro physics teacher. Why wouldn't people choose that instead? Love of physics is bullshit - that's not enough, it has to be genuine respect and the compensation that follows. And that clearly isn't happening.
So we can argue about why that isn't happening, but "nobody wants to teach anymore" is because teaching has become a fucking terrible, shite, job. No fucking duh no one wants to teach anymore.
So 13k per kid clearly isn't getting enough money to the people we need. You can claim that's due to inefficiencies in the system, but given that we pay more for a daycare that pays roughly the same... I suspect we're just genuinely not paying enough - although at least we could have a fair discussion around how that money for each child is allocated.
For comparison - the well known private schools in our area (Paideia, Woodward, Lovett, Galloway, Westminster, etc) all charge at least 22k per student, and many go as high as 36k for high school.
And that's with an expectation that parents are more available and involved.
>Then you're unable to see that market forces are making it incredibly unattractive to be a teacher.
Note that I agree with your statement of teachers not getting sufficient pay relative to quality of life at work. I even think this is true up and down, from daycare to physics high school.
I disagree with the chain of reasoning to support this view, however. You cannot derive this conclusion by looking at the price of daycare.
My claim is that the only thing you need to claim the price is too low for a product or service, is the lack of existence of said product or service given that it is not technologically impossible or such a rare talent or otherwise subject to forces of nature that affect its supply/demand. Which teachers generally are not.
And it is not just price that is too low, it is always price relative to quality of the product/service, or in this case, wages relative to quality of life at work (like having to deal with cumbersome admin, rude children, and entitled parents).
>For comparison - the well known private schools in our area (Paideia, Woodward, Lovett, Galloway, Westminster, etc) all charge at least 22k per student, and many go as high as 36k for high school.
But what are teachers getting paid? The point of my initial response to you was that you cannot compare annual tuition for daycare or private high schools and determine which are appropriate prices. Staffing ratios, liability insurance costs, there are a myriad factors that render this line of thinking erroneous.
> The point of my initial response to you was that you cannot compare annual tuition for daycare or private high schools and determine which are appropriate prices. Staffing ratios, liability insurance costs, there are a myriad factors that render this line of thinking erroneous.
So I guess turn the question on its head - What makes you believe 13k is enough?
When the only viable comparisons we have in my area strongly hint that this is underpaying - both daycare and private schools are relatively close in terms of services provided, and they both cost more.
You've made a claim - I'm saying I don't really believe it. I've pointed to plenty of examples of why I don't believe it, but you've done nothing but attack those methods.
So, genuinely, what makes you think 13k/yr per kid is enough, what's the reasoning behind your argument?
>What makes you believe 13k is enough?
>You've made a claim
I have not made a claim about which cost is "enough" or appropriate. My only claim was that comparing the price for different products/services is not sufficient to conclude whether the price should be raised or lowered.
If anything, I wrote that I agree with your premise:
>Note that I agree with your statement of teachers not getting sufficient pay relative to quality of life at work.
Are current class sizes small enough? Are the teachers for the current classes sufficiently qualified? Can anything be done to increase quality of life for teachers? These are questions that would answer whether or not the cost is sufficient or not.
How much is enough? People can barely afford to pay rent right now, and in most places property taxes (and thus rent) are a major source of funding of the schools. We need to make schools more efficient with their funding rather than making people homeless via raising their rent. If part of that is eliminating administrators and a football stadium to pay teachers more have at it.
>For comparison - we currently pay more per year to keep our 1 year old child in daycare (roughly ~15,000/yr)
>I think comparing the costs between the 5 year olds in our daycare and the 6 year olds entering first grade is entirely fair.
Which is it, you're paying for a 1 year old or a 5 year old? What daycare do you go to that 5 year olds pay the same rate as an infant?
What would be "fair" is to not lie, and be truthful and say your original comment was comparing an infant (or 1 y/o) to school child, and not play switch-a-roo to now say we're talking about 5 year olds which in most states requires something like 1/3 the number of caregivers per child as a 1 year old.
I'm paying for a 1 year old - I have access to the full payment info as they age... Tuition is covered in the new parent hand book by year, and communicated yearly as it updates (the most recent was just this month - as they mirror the back to school dates for our county).
I really don't know what it is you think you're pulling with this bullshit:
> "What would be "fair" is to not lie".
I think it would be fair to tell you to bugger off.
I'd argue $13K per student is quite low relative to the services expected. I mean, compare that to the price of college tuition.
Now, college is too expensive and I certainly wouldn't want to replicate that problem in K-12 schools. But... well, in some ways colleges have it easier, because the students are older and can be expected to be more independent. You can't have a 100-person lecture in a K-12 setting (not that I love classes like that at the college level either).
Yup. $13k/year works out to about $10 per pupil-hour, and even less once you include costs like the building and work done out-of-hours (grading, lesson planning). I’m pretty sure I made something like that babysitting in junior high!
The amount of work/responsibility definitely scales with the number of kids, and it's not exactly linear either: one will color quietly, two might play together--or fight, and three or more...yikes.
I mentioned the rate because it surprised me it was so close. I'd expect that it costs more to actually educate a kid, and of course, the parents provided the house (and often ice cream and HBO), whereas that rate includes everything.
Fine, compare it to portion of GDP. Like healthcare, we spend a lot and get poor return if you measure objectively by things like standardized tests, unemployment, imprisonment, etc.
I don’t think it’s fair to assume the money is evenly split. Public schooling must also support students who need much more support, ranging from ESL to a variety of disabilities with a variety of severity.
If you think of specialized needs students the 13k number looks ridiculous. 13k is an alarmingly low amount of support for dyslexia, or autism, or diabetes.
> If you think of specialized needs students the 13k number looks ridiculous.
You’re comparing an average per student spend to a high needs minority. Average spend should be compared to the average student who does not have dyslexia etc. A larger than average portion will be spent on kids with special needs due to special facilities, smaller class sizes, and specialist teachers etc.
But I think the $13K number includes those outliers, no? If I understand GP, they're arguing the average for 90% of students is probably significantly lower.
By what standard is that actually "plenty"? Is that $13185 enough to properly fund all the services a child needs for a proper education? And if it's not, why not? How much do you believe we should be spending per student?
You can point at a big number and say 'that's enough' but we spend large amounts of money on all sorts of things, the number being large doesn't mean it's sufficient. There are tons of children in need of an education out there and they're frequently crammed into overcrowded schools in buildings badly needing maintenance, while teachers have to buy supplies out of pocket. Maybe the answer is that all that money is being siphoned away and we would be fine if we redistributed it correctly, but the premise that we're already investing enough seems pretty questionable to me without proof.
I mean, if you have a class of 20 students (which seems on the smaller end), that would be a "revenue" of over a quarter million per teacher, right? I feel like we should be able to do a pretty good job with that while paying a teacher a decent salary.
That class of twenty needs a building to take place, which in turn needs upkeep. It needs supplies and equipment (workbooks, computers, dodgeballs), and it needs some level of administration[0]. The teachers presumably want benefits too.
At a university, the “overhead” costs of research [1] are on the order of 50%: doing $100k worth of research require another $50k to keep the lights on, the building clean, and the library stocked. A fully-loaded salary with benefits is also about 30-50 percent higher than the take-home amount. Similar math gets you to about $100k, which would be a massive improvement but nowhere near the quarter-mil you might expect.
However, the average also hides the fact that student spending usually isn’t uniform: it’s not the case that each student costs $13k; it might be more like 9k for 19/20 students and a lot more for the one student with special needs (who might require a FTE on their own). This doesn’t scale nearly as well, but it’s important if you want to give everyone a fair shot at success.
[0] The right amount of admin is obviously debatable, but you clearly need some level of management and organization: somebody needs to make class schedules, run payroll, etc.
[1] These rates are negotiated with the federal government, and so theoretically reflect the actual costs pretty well. It’s not obvious how well they translate to a K-12 environment: researchers need more specialized services…but also are a lot less likely to draw on the walls.
I did use the word revenue in scare quotes for a reason - I don't expect that all that money could be given directly to the teacher. On the other hand, the state should be able to achieve quite high economies of scale on administration and purchasing (whether they actually do is something else), and there's no profit to make at the end of the day.
I was actually thinking 50% would make the math easy but probably be a bit unrealistic, but I arrive at about the same place as you I think. Also I'd imagine that most classes are larger than 20, but hopefully smaller than 30.
The figure in the Netherlands is about €6.7k for an elementary school pupil (until age ~12, not sure how that compares to K-12 exactly).
So that's a little over half of what the US spends, and I think it's fair to say that Dutch elementary education is at least roughly comparable to US education (maybe one is a little bit better than the other, but I'd be surprised if the US one was twice as good).
I don't know about other countries, but this is one metric to give an approximation about what is "plenty", although there's the caveat that you can't compare this directly: I've heard about "school lunches" and "school nurses" in the US, and those kind of things are virtually unheard of over here.
Yeah, we spend money to operate school police departments here too. I totally believe you that the Netherlands' spending is adequate given costs and services, though.
I assume you don't have private health insurance plans in the Netherlands either? Those will raise the cost per teacher in the US.
By the standard that we're systematically mismanaging the funds we are spending. The bussing system is absurdly inefficient and wholly unnecessary. Neighborhood schools used to be a thing. Some school systems offer 'gold plated' healthcare plans where they include cosmetic surgery as a benefit to a school system that needs more money spent towards actual education.
I'm not advocating doing away with the public education system, but we're being swindled. It's not the teachers' fault (obviously), but the system as a whole. Every little town has its own school system, administrative overhead, etc.
> Some school systems offer 'gold plated' healthcare plans
So? If you want good teachers--or at, some point, any teachers--you need to offer working conditions that are good enough to attract them, just like any other job.
Spending on benefits "instead of" education is a false dichotomy; in fact, I'd say that's the central thesis of the article.
> As a European, it has always been perplexing to me how little the US invests in teachers and schools, given that we know how huge the benefits are down the road (educational attainment, income, pro-social behavior, life satisfaction).
1) European perspectives on a lot of American problems miss one of the biggest differences between us: you have a lot more of a homogeneous population. There's numerous differences between designing a school system for basically all Hungarian or all Norwegian kids, for example, and figuring out what the hell you can do with a school mixed with Latinos, Asians, Blacks, and Whites with all different levels of interests, drive, and ability.
2) You've made a few statements of objective fact here without backing them up. Does the US actually invest little in education? I suspect that a lot of the money is of course wasted, but they do spend a crapload of money, and I'd bet dramatically more than many other countries. As another thing, does increasing spending (as the only variable that changes) lead to dramatic differences in educational outcomes? To a point, I'm sure it helps, but at some point, I think it doesn't. As an example, a young Forest Gump might be able to pass Basic Arithmetic in his elementary school if given a private tutor who gave him their full attention and effort, but there's no universe in which Forrest Gump gets an A+ in Advanced Calculus even if he's given 1,000 of the best teachers in the world to personally tutor him 24/7.
3) There's an age old debate about Nature vs. Nurture, which of course will not be settled here today. But I'd like to point out that if "Nature" is generally the most important variable in success, then beyond a certain point, there's a level of diminishing returns with education spending and simply throwing money at schools is not a wise course. Just throwing more money at a problem is, I suspect, the path we've taken up until now.
> There's numerous differences between designing a school system for basically all Hungarian or all Norwegian kids, for example, and figuring out what the hell you can do with a school mixed with Latinos, Asians, Blacks, and Whites with all different levels of interests, drive, and ability.
Why would Latinos, Asians, Blacks, and Whites all require a radically different education? It seems to me that math is math, your country's history is your country's history, biology is biology, etc.
I understand there are cultural differences between different population groups, but that's hardly unique to the US; Europe has differences and minority groups, too.
> Why would Latinos, Asians, Blacks, and Whites all require a radically different education?
We can't completely discuss the reasons for different educational outcomes between population groups in America in a civilized forum such as HN, so let's only mention that different educational outcomes between groups exist.
Since different population groups have different educational outcomes in a multicultural society, the groups that are left behind will always feel slighted and resentful and the educational system would have to be continuously redesigned to accommodate the least common denominator, IMO in a fashion resembling the famous Harrison Bergeron short story.
In basically every city with a substantial multicultural society in America in recent years, you can find articles similar to this.
Europe doesn't have to account for this kind of thing anywhere near the level that America does. Their educational systems can largely focus on what's best for education.
It is hard to teach math to someone who doesn't speak your language.
This is one of the biggest challenges in many US states. For example, 20% of students in California do not have basic proficiency with English and 40% of students do not speak it at home. This puts a huge burden on teachers and school systems.
1) Do those really have that big difference? Should they? I could see a point if we were discussing first or second generation immigrants. Specially not those from highly educated parents.
Coming from Finland which did rather well with much less hours spend it might as well be systematic issue. Maybe process of the teaching itself has something wrong.
Are Finland's schools like my city? 30% of its children descendants of slaves? + 10% illegal immigrants? A good few percent homeless, parents in jail and/or hard drug addicts. 20% with both parents working 100 hours between them. Some bring guns to school. Teaching isn't all about teaching.
30% descendants of slaves? You mean their parents were slaves? I really recommend you moving out of such third world society. If they had slavery this millennia they can not be saved.
Not parents, descendants. Yes its been 150 years, but the scars still haven't healed.
> I really recommend you moving out of such third world society.
Well this is the challenge in America and why Finland's education system has it easy. The teaching in Finland doesn't have to be good to beat an average US student.
It's not about money. Avg salaries are plenty above the OECD average. The U.S. has a strong tendency to just throw money at a problem. There are many urban school districts that have trouble getting 50% attendance rates ON THE FIRST DAY. And that's with going door to door to remind parents the day before. How can you even address it when the people don't even believe in the institution anymore?
Let parents have some real choice of different school to attend. This will allow some experimentation from the ground up to happen organically. Parents who are the most invested in their child's success can have real agency in their future. This will also give teachers more flexibility in the kind of environment they want to work in. They could even start their own homeschooling pods and take in a set number of students from the area.
Once again, the teachers union stands in the way of real progress.
Do you mean cost of living-adjusted salaries are about OECD average? And do you think above-average salaries are required for above-average returns? Just curious.
The stats on the page are from 2018, before inflation became problematic. It also does not include the pandemic-related problems that have made things worse. However, the main point about comparable funding still stands. We are not getting above average returns. The question should be where is all that money going.
"as european"... Just like teachers/teaching situations in federal US is hard to generalize so is in confederal Europe. You should probably read about the yearly teachers strikes in many southern European countries.
Teaching is a precarious job - particularly in early career in public sector schools. And just like many comments already mentioned: There's a global social trend expecting teachers to be some kind of social workers. And older teachers in many countries public sectors are basically grandfathered into previledged conditions that Young professionals will never attain.
That would assume the educational capabilities are relatively equal. The US has large demographic segments that have historically been difficult to educate.
I wonder what the comparison would look like if limited to native born with two parent households?
For example, US spending on education includes a bunch of healthcare costs, as the employers are paying something (as a benefit) and employee salaries need to cover the rest. Somewhere with single-payer healthcare will directly allocate the money to healthcare instead.
Especially the teacher-pupil relationship, which has been transformed into a teacher-parent relationship where the teacher is seen as a service-worker and the parent sees him/herself as a client/customer. I've heard this first-hand from a close friend of hours who works in the education system for French expats' kids.
One of the issues in my country is „student's money“ where public schools get paid per-student. „2nd year“ if student performs very poorly vanished as a result. 3 decades ago it was pretty common for kids to repeat the curriculum. Now parents just threaten to transfer the kid to another school. Administration lets the kid move on to the next grade for the sake of €€€. At the end of the day, kid never catches up academically..
When you're actually from the US as a Millennial or Gen Z'er, it's not hard to see what happened. The previous two generations taught us nothing, but expected us to know everything they did, as though by virtue of being a living human this knowledge is just granted. Our parents never had the time to show us how to budget, care for a home, etc, so we had to learn from the Internet.
But why?
I posit that Boomers and Gen X had such an easy go of it, they assumed we would, too. Born to an economy that was thriving, they had to know relatively little themselves because there was always someone else who could do it. In short, that translates, over time, to less value placed on teaching the next generation to thrive and looking at things like school milages as "my tax dollars not benefiting me directly."
These previous generations also operate under the illusion that they somehow had it harder than we do now. This is perpetuated by the "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" attitude that most of them seem to have adopted while having to ask for help operating a smart fridge or iPhone. It's really a failure of self-awareness, if we remove all the fictional swagger they've built their lives around, and it has left us a nation that is crumbling under its own ignorance and stupidity.
Now people my age (late 30's - early 40's) are living paycheck to paycheck, trying to figure out how we can afford to fix the problem so our children can do better than us, and we are utterly failing to find a solution because we are operating in a system that was designed to cater only to the selfishness of our parents and grandparents.
Did this happen because the kids didn’t listen or because the parents were overly protective or some combination of the two? Helicopter parents denied their children the chance to fail safely and so calibrate the good and bad portions of life. By scheduling their kids time and removing all risk they prevented growth.
You never did chores for your spending money? Had to help out with minor repairs or maintenance of a domicile? Never had a part time job? I suspect not, again, as the now revealed as misguided effort to give their kids the best (“better than we had it”) was crippling. It’s not hard to do what is mentioned in the first paragraph.
Look up the shit that went down in 1968 before you repeat that previous generations had it easier. There’s no draft, although the Cold War and risk of nukes are coming back. You have computer and communication resources that exceed st:tos (damn near), uni has toys that were inconceivable in the 70’s, …. Google what opscan forms and #2 pencils were - that’s years of organizing courses and drop/add.
The only thing that really sucks now is that std’s can kill.
> When you're actually from the US as a Millennial or Gen Z'er, it's not hard to see what happened. The previous two generations taught us nothing
> Gen X had such an easy go of it
I was still in college when the dot com bust happened, followed a few years later by the Great Recession. Please tell me more how Gen X had it so much easier than Millenials. Also in a previous comment you claim to be 44. Since I turned 45 this year we’re basically the same age. We both, by most definitions, are Gen X. That being the case maybe you’re making a subtle point that your life was really easy as a result of that fact (not that the generation this and that crap means much anyway though you seem to put some stock in it hence my comment).
> As a European, it has always been perplexing to me how little the US invests in teachers and schools, given that we know how huge the benefits are down the road (educational attainment, income, pro-social behavior, life satisfaction).
You may or may but know this, but the funding of K-12 education varies by locality and has quite a bit of variability (typically paid for by local taxes).
If you go to the upper-middle class neighborhoods in the US, and certainly in the nicer private schools, you will see a high or very high level of investment in teachers and facilities. These investments typically have good to great returns. There is also often quite a bit of structured parental involvement (which is usually a good thing).
There are a lot of interesting levels of inquiry into this phenomenon:
- Do we need high quality mass education as it is found in these higher quality upper middle class schools? As in, if you magically made these types of schools appear in low SES neighborhoods, would the outcomes/benefits be similar? If not, how would they differ?
- If you take a few low SES students and place them into these better schools, do they get the same benefits as the locals?
- To what extent do better schools and school districts get better results due to the schools, due to the inputs, and/or due to the values of the local community?
People who are looking for good K-12 education in the US can find it, but it’s not universal. Imho, this is due to the fact that the value of education in the US is not perceived similarly across communities.
The article mentions that many parents see schools as child care while the adults do “real work”, and I think that that is the dominant perspective in most communities (note, not most HN communities, not most upper middle class communities — statistically most communities are low or mid-low SES where people are living paycheck to paycheck). As such, the community is sort of getting what it wants when it gets mediocre education results. I think that many people like the idea of a having a better school or school district, but they are not able or willing to do what it takes to make that happen on an individual or community level to make that happen (e.g., through parental involvement in schools, school boards, creating a good learning environment in the home, etc.).
If you ever need a good litmus test for how this looks different across communities and across different SES levels, ask the parents if they read books with their children, and if they did/do, at what age. In most communities, they don’t at all or very little. In the communities with better schools, it’s almost always early and often. There are obviously exceptions (both positive and negative), but this heuristic is extremely telling in aggregate.
The same problem is happening in NL, it's a downwards spiral really that concerns me a lot.
The government is trying to improve the situation by increasing pay a little, but with the current inflation it is probably too little, too late.
A relative of mine became a teacher after a career switch, and while she likes the work, there are many frustrations:
- Parents have a 'the customer is always right'-attitude, and complain about everything, but their kids are perfect of course.
- Some years ago NL decided to cut down on schools for kids with special needs, so every class now has a few very disruptive kids who have nowhere else to go. This is a very frustrating situation for everyone: the disruptive kids don't get proper guidance, the 'normal' kids get lower quality classes, and teachers have to deal with problematic behaviour.
- The shortage of teachers makes it hard to find replacements when calling in sick, plenty of teachers feel pressure to work when sick. This is of course a bad combo with the whole Corona situation.
- Teachers spend a lot of (unpaid) time grading and other administrative BS.
- Management is out of touch, they don't listen to their staff and think up time-consuming plans that are doomed to fail. (well, this is not specific to education)
- Management is very unstable. The schools my kids go to had a different director pretty much each year.
This is compounded by making it quite hard to actually get in to teaching, especially later in life. You have to go to school for 4 years and pay for this yourself (no student financing), which essentially no one does for obvious reasons. There is a special path for adults (zij-instroomtraject) which means you "only" get paid minimum wage for two years and the entry requirements (IMHO needlessly) excludes quite a few people.
Inflexibility in how we treat education in general is a big problem; I was sent to MAVO back in the day only because I hated doing French and was pretty awful at it, and bad French grade of course means you can't possibly be good at anything else :-/ There were quite a few people in my MAVO class like that. There's been shortages of technically educated people for decades, which is not a surprise if you judge technical people on their ability to do French when they're 13 and then close off all avenues for further education based on that...
Or, as one of my foreign friends said, "you need a diploma to clean a rat's arse here".
I always respected Dutch teachers as they did the core work and didn't do extra work like after school sports or clubs. Is that correct? I feel US teachers are expected to do too much non-teaching work.
It sounds like there are a great many people who want to teach.
The real headline should be, "Nobody wants to teach in public schools anymore."
And do you blame them? The people (politicians, mostly, in dialogue with union leaders) who make the big decisions about public schools are so many levels removed from the students or the teachers that the best-case scenario for these decisions is to be woefully out of touch.
At this point, it seems like the entire world recognizes the American public school system is messed up beyond repair. So why are we spending so much time, energy, and effort trying to save it instead of trying to reimagine the whole thing?
Who's successfully teaching these days? As in, who are the examples of people who are actually being successful at putting ideas into other people's heads?
If what you want is to teach, learn from them.
(If you have a hundred other goals, like providing childcare and increasing character through athletic competition and whatever else you want to do, those are fine things too, but quit trying to lump it all together and do it at once. Find the people who are succeeding at those goals and learn from them as well.)
There are plenty successful public schools out there, why not find out what is making them work instead of giving into those (GOP mostly) who want only the rich to get an education because they can afford private school?
I know a few teachers who have quit or want to quit. It isn't a money issue, at least for them.
My high-school computer science teacher (many moons ago) taught advanced high-school math. He quit because the administrative requirements became too burdensome. He loved teaching, but every year the administrivia got worse until he finally quit.
Another teacher was a special-ed reading instructor; that's what she was trained for. But the school lost their funding for her category, so they made her a kindergarten teacher. As if that wasn't bad enough, the principal scheduled so many meetings that the teachers effectively lost their planning period and had to do that at home. Parents had direct access to teachers via email, and parents' complaints had to be addressed by the teachers every day - also outside of school hours.
Another teacher was in a poorer school district (elementary) and quit because the teaching environment was just too difficult.
I work at a school that improved during my time. We've enjoyed some changes that brought the school significantly more funding, and it has allowed us to attract better applicants, and hire additional staff members that help take some of that load off the teachers.
Also, simply having more adults per student makes a big difference, provided they are the right adults for the job.
Your friend was forced into the wrong category because of a funding problem.
The problem with teaching is that the role has expanded way beyond what it used to be and teachers are expected to do FAR too much in the classroom and they get minimal support from admin who are more worried about their careers than supporting teachers.
I just had this conversation last week with a couple teachers. If this matters to you, I suggest you find some older teachers who have been around long enough to actually see how the job has changed and ask them what they think.
It has become an impossible job for any amount of money.
Colorado has enjoyed a 15 percent increase in spending per student from 1992 to 2014 when adjusted for inflation. Put another way, in 2014 Colorado public school students had 15 percent more real resources spent on their education compared to students in 1992. During that same period, however, the average Colorado teacher’s salary has gone down by 11 percent when adjusted for inflation
This is fairly universal, I'd surmise. Most commenters seem to assume that if we wanted to spend, let's say, $100M more on teachers' salaries, we'd have to increase the public education budget by $100M. More like $300M, I'd guess.
My wife teaches elementary school ESL and Spanish as needed.
The school day is 8 hours of solid work, plus 2 hours of grading and two hours of planning. The minimum number of hours for most teachers is 60 hours, plus extra time for maybe coaching, or being and advisor for an extra-curricular (which are a dying bread of program in many schools). This is for doing the same thing you do year after year. Changes in academic guidelines, school policies, textbooks, academic fashion, technology and student aptitude variance from year to year force you to re-invent everything, every year.
It's a horrible job not because teaching is horrible, but because we've turned our schools into the intersection of social engineering and politics. For every child there's at least one highly protective parent, with some political hot button. It's just a nightmare. For example, my wife teaches ESL and Spanish and had to go to meetings with a parent that thought her class was part of a "critical race theory" conspiracy. Another parent wanted my wife to teach Spanish without gender in the language. Still another was upset about having first graders sing, because the kinds might be "too judgey."
This article is basically a long rant, and this kind of teacher is exactly what contributed to the burning out of my wife as a teacher. She wanted to teach math, but was being asked to teach social justice math.
> I mean, they’re letting anyone in the classroom now. I’m surprised they haven’t started recruiting the homeless.
Is this a dig at the latest Desantis bill to fast track veterans into teaching roles?
Another complaint, my wife went to one of the highest ranked schools in the country, and was just shy of the minimum gpa requirement to go into the public school system right out of college. Instead she went and taught at charter schools, and her students regularly outperformed other schools in the network with math scores. But she wasn't qualified to teach math until she did a graduate program that had nothing to do with math. She quit the graduate school program because she was being graded on her ability to be inclusive in the classroom and it was a rubric designed for pushing equity and social justice, when again...she was trying to teach math. She would have been just "anyone" being allowed to teach in a classroom.
And there's no evidence that these graduate degree requirements are needed or beneficial for quality teaching. They're just as baseless as requiring people - many of them poor and marginalized - to spend tens of thousands of dollars and do months of coursework before they're "licensed" to cut hair.
Well-intentioned rank-and-file teachers must realize that their union superiors advocate for some of the reasons their profession burns them out.
> Is this a dig at the latest Desantis bill to fast track veterans into teaching roles
Her comparison of veterans to homeless people speaks volumes about where she is coming from. As I understand it, the DeSantis bill allows veterans who have 60 credits and pass a subject exam to get a provisional teaching certificate while they complete their degree: https://flgov.com/2022/08/17/governor-ron-desantis-highlight.... That sounds like a great idea.
What would "social justice math" look like? Serious question, I can't even imagine. Here in Europe math education hasn't changed a ton in the past decades at all.
Presumably things like California's proposed new math standards documents[1]. In chapter 7 (for 11-13 year olds) there are examples like this:
> BLUE Family: 2 adults; 2 children You are a Latinx family with two children under the age of five. Mom stays home to take care of the children. Dad works 40 hours per week at a construction company that pays two times minimum wage for nontipped employees.
> YELLOW Family: 1 adult You are a young, single Black woman who is going to school part time and working full time (40 hours per week). You work at the same construction company as the dad of the BLUE family, but most Black women (including you) make 64 percent of what men at the company make.
i.e. the government encouraging flamebaiting over race/sex. The example goes on to have children conclude the minimum wage is unfair and encourage them to write letters to their representatives about raising it based a comparison of wages to cost of rentals in Chicago.
Mind you, when this proposal was making the rounds a couple years ago, I looked up rentals in Chicago and found plenty at a fraction of the quoted numbers for the exercise, but the point of the exercise is to teach children the virtues of activism, not to teach them to use math to understand their world.
It’s an effort by teachers unions to use their presence in schools to socialize minority children into viewing themselves as victims of pervasive racism and to cultivate activist leanings that will lead them to vote democrat (the party tightly aligned with teachers unions): https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/teaching-math-throu...
The rallying cry seems to be that "2+2=4 is racist".
Expanded a bit, it seems to be that insisting that some answers are "wrong" disregards students' differing backgrounds and diverse avenues to solve problems.
Which is distilled down to "teachers teach math in a way that is topical to the current environment, such as BLM protests which is really nothing new. You might disagree with it, sure, but to say that this is "the wokes" teaching 2+2=fish, that's frankly ridiculous.
In fact, the only thing I can find reporting on "2+2=racist" is this Washington Examiner article deriding a math teacher from NYC for her tweets (article here: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/math-professor-claim...) which sounds _awful_ but it's a single person tweeting, and it seems to be in relation to using "math is pure and objective so it always must be neutral" as a defense for situations where data/statistics/algorithms presented show a clear bias. Which I think generally is an agreed upon phenomenon-- depending on the sampling and interpretation of the data, folks can come to _wildly_ different conclusions, especially if data was accidentally omitted.
> For one-to-one matching, the team saw higher rates of false positives for Asian and African American faces relative to images of Caucasians. The differentials often ranged from a factor of 10 to 100 times, depending on the individual algorithm. False positives might present a security concern to the system owner, as they may allow access to impostors.
...
> However, a notable exception was for some algorithms developed in Asian countries. There was no such dramatic difference in false positives in one-to-one matching between Asian and Caucasian faces for algorithms developed in Asia. While Grother reiterated that the NIST study does not explore the relationship between cause and effect, one possible connection, and area for research, is the relationship between an algorithm’s performance and the data used to train it. “These results are an encouraging sign that more diverse training data may produce more equitable outcomes, should it be possible for developers to use such data,” he said.
All the other sources I found on google were either think tanks, facebook posts, or spam sites.
ETA: even in the most pessimistic reading of those tweets, I'm personally hard pressed to find that one person tweeting means that all math teachers everywhere are trying to take math down to "2+2=racist"
I'd have to agree with OP, it does seem to be bad faith, because the entire time, instead of discussing the proposed changes at face value, they seem to try and ridicule it as if someone says that 2+2=4 is racist, yet they don't quote anyone actually saying that or anything.
I've read the whole article you linked, and I'm no smarter in understanding what the problem is, and the suggested changes are which they're making fun of.
I apologize, that was a knee jerk reaction because I've never seen the assertion that 2+2=4 is racist before, only that math can be used inaccurately (purposefully or by accident) in racial contexts. I was a bit taken aback by the assertion and should have engaged differently.
> Funny how you build up a straw man. I never claimed any of that.
This isn't a straw man, I'm not building up some contrived argument here; the original comment was that "2+2=4 is racist" is a rallying cry for [some not insignificant number of math teachers].
> For example the Wall Street Journal. And hundreds of similar articles.
I did find this Opinion while googling, and read the parent Op-Ed (https://www.wsj.com/articles/california-leftists-try-to-canc...) and then followed through to the framework but I just don't see anything about the manual they were talking about in that Op-Ed in the works cited (seems like all references to the manual have since been removed). So I dug up the wayback machine on the page to see the context in which they were using the "A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction" manual.
> A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction (https://equitablemath.org/) is an integrated approach to mathematics that centers Black, Latinx, and linguistically diverse students in grades 6–8, addresses barriers to mathematics equity, and aligns instruction to grade-level priority standards. The Pathway offers guidance and resources for immediate use in planning their curriculum, while also offering opportunities for ongoing self-reflection as they seek to develop an anti-racist mathematics practice. The toolkit “strides” (above) serve as multiple on-ramps for educators as they navigate the individual and collective journey from equity to anti-racism. It is a collection of resources to help grades 6–8 Black, LatinX, and linguistically diverse students thrive in mathematics education.
Ok so generally seems like they're recommending the usage in primarily POC or mixed classrooms where the considerations for teaching might be a bit different due to a multitude of factors.
• Teach rich, thoughtful, complex mathematics.
• Teach rigorous mathematics, understanding that rigor is characterized as thorough, exhaustive, and
interdisciplinary.
• Use mistakes as opportunities for learning.
• Recognize mistakes as miscommunicated knowledge.
• Allow for engagement in productive struggle
• Teach students of color about the career and financial opportunities in math and STEM fields.
• Encourage them to disrupt the disproportionate push-out of people of color in those fields.
• Invite leaders and innovators of color working in STEAM fields to meet your students.
• Rely on teamwork and collaboration as much as possible.
• Teach mathematics through project-based learning and other engaging approaches.
• Provide multiple opportunities for students to learn from and teach each other.
• Intentionally include mathematicians of color.
• Expose students to mathematicians of color, particularly women of color and queer mathematicians of color, both
through historical examples and by inviting community guest speakers.
• Teach students of color about their mathematical legacy and ancestral connection and mastery of math.
• Honor and acknowledge the mathematical knowledge of students of color, even if it shows up unconventionally.
• Give rightful credit to the discovery of math concepts by mathematicians of color. Reclaim concepts attributed to
white mathematicians that should be attributed to mathematicians of color.
Which all seems fairly reasonable here to my eyes. I will 100% agree with any assertions that the titles are very standoffish and even straight up accusatory but the content of the manual really seems like something good teachers should strive for. So to conclude I don't think that 2+2=4 is racist is really a rallying cry, the literature cited everywhere seems to talk mainly towards the teaching methodologies employed.
All of these things take away the very limited classroom time that should be spent on skills rather than non math topics. She would regularly bemoan lost days, because at the end of the year the kids had to take a math test, not a history of math test.
All of this stuff has nothing to do with math, and doesn't actually help them learn math skills. Students of color aren't struggling with math because they don't have role models in the field. It's a universal language. They struggled with math due to lack of literal time spent studying, practicing, and drilling these concepts. They struggle because someone white tells them that they need role models in the field instead of simply letting them be capable and giving them the tools to learn.
And as someone of color, when you constantly push it in my face that I'm underrepresented, that math is primarily for white people, which you ultimately are doing by trying to bring race into everything, it then gives me an excuse for failure. It simply feeds into the victim mentality and kids will give up before they begin. Success is born from work, not hero worship. When you are inspired by someone, if you find inspiration from the color of their skin, and not the actual blood, sweat, and years they put into success, you are setting yourself up for failure.
Looking at the opportunities available to you from the lens of race is like shooting yourself in the foot. If I had done that- I would have assumed that my most likely path to success was going to be with a ball in my hands. And if I don't see a black man in a specific field...then how could I ever be successful in that field myself?
The vast majority of this does not belong in a math classroom. Math classrooms do not primarily cover the history or sociology of mathematics; they cover (or, at least, should cover) how to do algebra.
Perhaps those things could enrich curricula once students were actually being taught math, but schools fail at that. And some districts (e.g. SFUSD) have taken to banning the teaching of algebra in middle school because it's "inequitable."
Many students aren't going to learn by rote memorization of completing homework. It it helpful to support different learning styles.
A big problem with math education is that it's too abstract. It's hard to relate mathematical concepts to real life. "When are we going to use this?", people ask. Phrasing your questions in terms of real problems with a narrative can help students learn.
Homework usually isn't rote learning (unless we're talking foreign language vocabulary – and there rote learning is important!), but practice.
Students get to practice what the teacher (tried to) showed them with different problems, so both they and the teacher can see if they mastered the topic.
IIRC most of the evidence shows homework isn’t very useful for learning.
(And, unfortunately, that almost no skills generally transfer over to other skills, ie that practicing math doesn’t improve anything other than that specific math.)
What about algebra? Which I consider the field of math that actually carries over to many many other things. Like physics and chemistry. And certain skill level in it is required to be able manipulate expressions in other fields.
I’d pay a premium to access teachers like your wife. I’m not against my children having whatever politics they come to through their experiences, but am very weary of biased presentation and indoctrination.
In Canada each province has a fairly strong teacher union. In Manitoba for example a teacher with 10 years experience will earn approximately $95K CAD (more than most software developers here). This with strong pension benefits that can be collected at 55. I know teachers that retired in their late 50s, and will continuing making 70% of their inflation adjust salaries until they die.
Relatively speaking this salary/benefits has higher expected lifetime earnings than a software developer.
One negative is that the unions are also strong enough that teachers can't be fired/replaced for performance (this is similar to Police...etc). As with any profession the worst of the bunch is very bad, and unfortunately they keep doing it until their fifties at the cost of the children.
It varies significantly by state. Five states explicitly outlaw collective bargaining by teachers and 32 states require it with various limitations on the scope of items that can be negotiated. Some states also have restrictions on striking.
Some of the worst educational outcomes in the US are in deep blue states and deep blue cities. Meanwhile, suburban communities in the US tend to vote more "red" and are also the places people go to raise families because of the better public schools.
in the USNews ranking, 8/10 of the best states Pre-K-12 are blue, while 10/10 worst are red.[1]
When you evaluate things beyond the partisan lens, poverty is a massive predictor in education outcomes which is why many deep blue cities do poorly and why many deep red states do poorly as well.
Separately, the suburbs in the US are about as purple as it gets. Suburbs also have the lowest rate of poverty compared to urban and rural. [2]
Poverty is a better analysis than political lines.
Most of the best school districts are in purple districts. The worst ones are in heavily red or heavily blue districts, largely correlating with poverty.
The problem/solution is YouTube. There is prestige in being a YouTube super-teacher like 3B1B, teaching millions of people. There is no prestige in teaching kids at a local high school who don't even want to learn.
The smart people who once might have found their vocation in teaching, now prefer to set up YouTube channels.
The role of teacher is splitting into content makers and babysitters.
Believe it or not, YouTube is not good pedagogy. A YouTube video doesn't help you to fill in the gaps of your understanding by re-working a difficult concept with you. A YouTube video, nor an app, doesn't go through the steps of solving a problem with you, and watch how you do it to give you constructive criticism.
Educational content is amazing, but it's not teaching. It's a resource. It's like saying that the existence of books negates the need for teaching and that all the clever people are now writing books.
"A YouTube video, nor an app, doesn't go through the steps of solving a problem with you, and watch how you do it to give you constructive criticism."—neither will 99.9% of teachers. Most of them out of sheer incompetence, impatience, and general inadequacy to be around children, some due to the fact that there are 30+ children in the classroom and they literally don't have the time and energy for that kind of effort. I am not speaking about American schools with 25K+/year tuition fee in NYC, I am speaking about teachers in a general classroom in Punta Arenas, Chile or a general classroom in Kruševac, Serbia.
> A YouTube video doesn't help you to fill in the gaps of your understanding by re-working a difficult concept with you. A YouTube video, nor an app, doesn't go through the steps of solving a problem with you, and watch how you do it to give you constructive criticism.
Video is a replacement for teacher-centered lectures, that don't do these things either. Of course the tutoring part of education is also important.
It’s a great improvement over older videos in the classroom though, since there’s feedback from the actual viewers.
(I vaguely remember being shown some educational video in class that was over half old wireframey CGI transitions with what an old person thought technobabble looked like all over it. It was supposed to be about the environment.)
I agree with the core idea of this, but have you personally watched 3B1B? It feels to me like a largely isolated case, and I hope “remote learning” does not become the norm, but … it is really amazing.
YouTube teaching is inherently one sided. There is significantly more to teaching than that. Tailoring the lesson to the individual, being able to immediately respond to questions, knowing when someone doesn't understand. These things are super important for great teaching. YouTube and online one sided teaching courses are never going to be able to beat that.
One thing I wonder is if teachers are in such high demand, why do they put up with crap from their administrators and politicians saying that this is what they have to teach and how they have to teach it. Why don’t they just teach whatever they want to teach and do it however they want to do it? The worst that can happen is they will be fired, but they can probably find a new teaching position easily since there is such a high demand.
- If they quit/are fired, and have to find a new job that may reset their steps (i.e. they take a pay cut, but not just for one year but for their career). Inter-district transfers can be blocked or have the same problems at the receiving school.
Plus there are some fields that are more in-demand than others (e.g. maths/science Vs. art/social studies).
>”The worst that can happen is they will be fired, but they can probably find a new teaching position easily since there is such a high demand.”
Just like any career, the next institution looking to hire someone is going to ask about why that person left their last job. Regardless of whether or not the next school is public or private, they’re going to want to hire a teacher that is compliant rather than defiant. Even in the face of a teachers shortage, these schools are still obligated to teach a curriculum and won’t want to hire someone who they will likely have to replace in short order.
> the next institution looking to hire someone is going to ask about why that person left their last job
Indeed, schools aren't as isolated as businesses are, either. If you go rogue and make a huge stink at one school, you can bet no nearby district will hire you. On the other hand, if you play ball and do a decent job, other districts will look out for you when an opening happens. It happened to me, right before I left teaching.
Another thing to consider is that outside of large cities, you're geographically constrained. If you own a house and mess things up with your school, you're looking at having to add 30+ minutes to your commute to get to the next school. (Who will probably have heard of your escapades.)
Seniority is another factor to consider. It's very difficult for teachers in their first five years to get a job. (On average, it takes five years for teachers to become proficient in classroom management, so schools tend to prefer more experienced teachers). Anyway, that means there's a huge block of teachers who will have a difficult time despite shortages. Like in tech, it's primarily a shortage of qualified teachers. At least, when I was teaching ~5 years ago.
My local school district is so desperate they are letting anyone substitute teach (they used to require a masters degree before you could be a substitute!) and have some substitutes basically teaching full time. I’m pretty sure they would be delighted to have an actually qualified teacher, no matter what problems they had before.
People do want to teach and get paid to do it. It’s called private schools. They charge what the market will bear for their quality and location, and they pay what the market rate is for teachers of the requisite quality that let them charge the rates they need.
What confuddles people in education is the same thing that causes endless articles about housing, healthcare, inflation… it’s called “basic economics”. Just because education is heavily regulated by the government and full of people ideologically predisposed to pretending economic rules don’t apply, doesn’t mean supply and demand is false and the normal rules of gravity are suspended.
I myself have children and live in Boston, Massachusetts. The per-student funding here is $25,000 per year. Yet excluding a few meritocratic public schools that you have to test into (which they are making ever harder for my Asian children to get into as they reduce the seats allocated to tests and give away to “underprivileged” races, aka not Asians or whites) the schools are dog shit and anyone with a few bucks avoids them like the plague. So money is not the problem in Boston, it’s the horrible nature of the public school system.
I partially agree with you, but private school teachers often get paid less than their public school counterparts. Private schools get a flood of applications from humanities PHDs who don't have the certifications required to teach in public schools, so it's very much a race to the bottom in terms of salary. Private school's biggest advantage for teachers is that the parents treat education seriously, so they are less likely to treat teachers like babysitters.
That is another vector on the spectrum of decisions for why quality teachers choose to work at private schools. No one takes a job purely on salary - a decision like that is based on many things.
Isn’t it obvious that good teachers want to teach children with parents that want them to learn? And punish their children when they are disruptive? And the school can kick out bad kids?
The current vogue of reducing everything in education to the lowest common denominator - eliminating gifted programs, enabling disruptive kids to ruin classes, removing suspensions and expulsions - is exactly why private schools are growing. I don’t want education to optimize for the worst kids who won’t go to college and into intellectual pursuits anyway. I want to optimize education for the kids who will actually get value out of it.
“Isn’t it obvious that good teachers want to teach children with parents that want them to learn? And punish their children when they are disruptive? And the school can kick out bad kids?”
Perhaps, but that kind of school is doing a different “job” than one tasked with ensuring a base level of education for all young people.
There is a place in society for schools that will treat you like cattle and babysit you all day. There is also a place for academically challenging schools that provide a strong education. I don’t want to ban the latter in order to improve the former.
Please, put your children in terrible schools out of some sense of social justice or whatever. I myself will do what is actually good for my family. Given the school down the street from me had its Vice Principal of Gang Violence execute a student he recruited to deal drugs for him, our local high school my children would be automatically zoned into is sadly not an option despite my tax dollars paying for it. https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2015/03/05/former-bos...
That’s a societal decision we have to make. Should all children have access to good education - i.e. should we invest in public schooling? Or should it be dependent on your parents ability to pay in which case lets go all in on private.
In my opinion, the voucher system is correct - keep funding public school through tax dollars, but give the parents a voucher for the amount to spend where they wish. If every parent in Boston received a $25,000 voucher to spend at the school they wished, competition would force public schools to improve or shut down as every school vied for the vouchers.
Unlike many on the left, who despise monopolies in business and ruthlessly hunt them down, yet worship monopolies the government has (like in public education), I think public dollars should be allocated to the parents to make decisions they feel are best for their children. Saying “just move if you don’t like your public school” betrays the reality of how difficult it is to relocate for the non-tech elite who can’t just work from anywhere.
> competition would force public schools to improve or shut down as every school vied for the vouchers.
I don't know how to fairly evaluate a school's performance. I guess we could ask if the students perform better in the job market 10-20 years later, but that's not obviously not helpful or useful information on which to make a decision now.
I get why the voucher system is appealing on first glance. After all, you often can evaluate the quality of goods and services. You can, say, estimate that a shirt you find at the mall will last a few years or that it will fall apart in a month. I just don't think you can do the same for schools. I have a feeling most people will evaluate education based on their beliefs (religious, etc) and the grades their kids "earn".
You don’t seem to know how to evaluate them, yet everyone agrees Harvard is better than your local community college, and there is literally a private school half a mile from my house that charges $60,000 per year. So clearly some people know how to distinguish a bad school from a good school and allocate their money appropriately.
College is pretty different than grade school. It's a lot easier for adults to understand whether or not they're learning well and to see where people end up following graduation. You'd have a hard time convincing me that the way an 8 year old is taught today will lead to better results in better outcomes decades later (after those that ran the schools have retired and have thus left the market).
Further, how many Harvard-level grade schools do you think we can run as a society? Given that private school pay is substantially worse than public school pay on average, how could one say that private schools, again on average, would outperform public schools?
Most importantly, everyone knows a very bad performing school when they see one. The role of vouchers is first and foremost to reward schools that don't screw things up too badly. Quality can then be a secondary factor.
There's an unspoken benefit of private schools though: kids of teachers get to attend for free or at a hugely discounted rate. When I was at one, just about every teacher left after their kids graduated. The ones who stayed either had some nice admin role, or their spouse was the main breadwinner.
That depends on where you live. In the Midwest, most (if not all) parochial private schools pay teachers substantially less than the public schools pay teachers. And it isn’t like the public school teachers are making enough either. But to say private school teachers get paid well is very incorrect for the large midwestern cities
Do you feel that the private system is taking all of the good educators and administrators? America isn't the only country with a private/public school ecosystem, yet other countries are able to maintain quality public schooling while it seems America struggles.
A lot of Western non-US countries honestly don’t have a lot of attractive private sector businesses. Small nations with strong public education are very unique. For example Norway only has 5 million citizens, extremely low immigration, a mono-culture and mono-ethnicity, and earns a huge amount of money from selling fossil fuels which are then funneled to public use. Yet the left in America pretends the Nordic model can apply here.
America is unique. A lot of our public services are quite expensive and quite low quality. Our system is organized around the private sector and the more we embrace the private sector the better things are.
The environment Rebekah describes seems like a modern US tech business. Everyone is expected to be where they're needed, treat each other with respect and focus on their work. Sometimes I wonder why successful businesses can create the environment schools can't and then remind myself that businesses (and private schools) can easily exclude troublemakers, malcontents and people who don't fit in for whatever reason. Also some of the things you mention (e.g. mono-culture) make it easier to create an environment suitable for learning.
It shouldn't be a priori to honor the private sector and shit on the public sector but as long as we do we shouldn't be surprised at the results. Teaching and education simply needs to be valued more than it is. We shouldn't have to beg people to do the job. Instead we should reward and honor the profession so well that we can set high standards for teachers and still have a surplus of applicants.
Perhaps if we compensated teachers more like police or firefighters and required advanced credentials as more successful countries do our schools would be better.
Or perhaps if we had the demographics of Norway our schools would be vastly better in every single category except “diversity”.
Like it or not students are not born genetically equal. Throw in poverty and lack of effective parenting and there’s no hope that endless funding will somehow fix that situation.
I think you would benefit from approaching the situation with a bit more understanding. Also forget Norway, America is a big a diverse country so that is your problem to solve. You are not competing with Norway, you are trying to solve your own problems and failing.
America is big and diverse, but it is not a special snowflake. You are choosing to provide public schooling but failing to do so well. There is a myriad of reasons why and I am sure it is different per location but the fact remains. In your ideal private focused system, are kids not provided a good education when their parent's income can't keep up with the worsening class divide? If so, do you think that will result in a positive situation for America long term?
I do appreciate your perspective by the way, thanks for engaging.
I want to take the same public dollars that are funneled directly the monopolistic, corrupt, badly run system and instead give the money directly to parents to use as a voucher. If they like their current public school, wonderful, they can give them the voucher. If they want to go someplace else, the money is there for them.
Problem is two things: one, Americans strongly believe that every child should have access to an education. Two, not every family can afford 25k per child. Hell many cannot afford one child at that rate.
You’ve got a point - quality schooling does exist, if schools can pay well and offer sensible class loads. However to apply that to the current public school system requires significant dollars long term, and a lot of people don’t want to pay for that - think retired people whose children are out of school, or couples who have no children.
I don’t agree with that, but I’m simply stating some different positions from people whom I’ve talked to about this topic.
I disagree. Private schools self select their student population. Most private schools do not take students with special needs or students with really difficult home lives - and those students deserve education. Once private schools have to accept every student regardless of need, will their quality remain? I doubt it.
I'd like to introduce a sensitive subject as neutrally as possible.
For root causes, the morale environment is largely politically induced in a coordinated attack on public education that goes back to the 80's. For some examples...
Exactly. They want to replace public education with a for-profit system.
Once that transition is in place, the vouchers will become harder for certain people to get, then eventually vouchers will go away and people will be solely responsible for their children's education. This means, yet again, the poor and middle class get the shaft.
This blog post touches on a lot of topics. I'm laying in bed and groggy, so I'm just going to highlight one thing:
>They’re lucky if they have air conditioning.
LKY: "Air conditioning was a most important invention for us, perhaps one of the signal inventions of history. It changed the nature of civilization by making development possible in the tropics. Without air conditioning you can work only in the cool early-morning hours or at dusk. The first thing I did upon becoming prime minister was to install air conditioners in buildings where the civil service worked. This was key to public efficiency."
You can't think properly if you're hot. This isn't my opinion, it's measurable. E.g.
"Findings indicate that academic achievement is linked to building condition mediated by the social climate and student attendance. The model accounted for 70 percent of the variance in the outcome measures."
Teaching is complicated. Politics is complicated. Parent-school interactions are very complicated. Air conditioning, by comparison, is drop-dead simple. The inability of school districts to do the simplest and most obvious thing to address the problem underscores the degree to which meaningful information is driven out of the education dialogue by pet-issue squabbling.
Cut the administrative overhead, cut a lot of the federal requirements that drive up costs and put that money into classrooms directly.
This is the stuff that advocates for vouchers and private schools have been saying for years. It’s impossible to change things in public schools due to the channels involved.
Private schools, on the other hand, can operate and adapt much more efficiently. My kids go to one. They love it, we love it, their teachers are happy and well respected. Because by sending our kids to that school we made a choice. We evaluated our options and decided this was the best place for them.
When kids are forced into a school due to zoning or because their parents can’t afford either a private or home school option, or moving to a house with different options, the parents have no recourse but to grumble about everything that they don’t like. It wasn’t their decision.
Is money part of the problem? Sure. But it’s not just the teacher pay it’s the money for options that parents can choose.
So much of this goes away if a school can simply tell an unhappy parent, “Maybe this isn’t the best school for your family?”
When parents make a choice themselves, they own it.
This person is all over the map--it's the kind of rambling for which the awful five paragraph essay was designed to correct.
Anyway, I am assuming that she is a public teacher and her job is to some extent supported by that fact (with respect to working conditions, salary, etc) as well as by a union. Many private schools, especially religious schools, actually do pay a "pittance" which probably more closely reflects the market rate. Such teachers often do depend on a spouse's salary, or live in real poverty. Public teachers benefits are usually much, much better.
Of course, the big disadvantage of a public school: You get what you get. Only the very, very worst students are expelled so classroom behavior can be wretched, with correspondingly wretched parents (if any). The administration is politically motivated and the teachers get the short end there, too.
Good districts have no trouble getting teachers, and never have.
I think it depends upon what US State the teachers are in.
Some states, if a teacher says some phrases they could, get fined, loose their job or maybe in rare cases face jail time. This may even spread across the Teacher's life style. Not to mention in many places the pay is not worth it.
Forgot to mention, some states also require a Masters Degree even to teach very young children, the expense of getting that degree is not worth it.
This is the real issue. Most states require a master’s or credit hour equivalent to retain your teaching credentials, but the pay is bad, laughably bad in some areas. So bad that someone who has been teaching 10 years will make more doing almost anything else at an entry level position elsewhere. A lot of teachers are being recruited to do sales because they can speak well extemporaneously.
Should I get paid less and get kicked, bit, and punched all day and then be told it is my fault for not properly simulating their angel child? Or should I just get a job where I can work from home and make more money?
Can you point to an area where a teacher with 10 years of experience, working full-time, earns less than an entry-level position? Teacher contracts are mostly public and you can use $15/hr for entry level, shouldn’t be hard to find and example if it exists.
Many entry-level sales jobs, which often require no specific college degree, though typically a college degree is preferred, earn 50-70k /year. Entry level sales, specifically, can easily net over 100k a year if you are good at what you do as you work at least partially on commission.
Teachers, companies are discovering, are desirable sales reps because they are experienced at being high energy, talking extemporaneously, and may have some domain specific knowledge that is valuable, such as a chemistry teacher going into pharmaceutical sales.
Most teachers will never make 100k in their entire career. Some districts pay well in high COL areas, but this is the exception not the rule. Entry level pay for teachers is actually pretty good, but your salary does not scale as it does in most other careers. It typically takes 20+ years to get to six figures if you can at all.
Many admistrators have no education experience or credentials. The 'experience' of my superintendent was being a colonel in the military. Spent much of his time getting a return on the district's investment funds.
> "It's about the money."
Yep, you get what you pay for.
If only full-time teachers were paid be the hour, like substitude teachers.
I didn't get paid enough to get home at 7pm tired-out with a stack of papers to grade, eat supper and fall asleep instead. "Oh, and we need you to take admissions at the football game Friday night, and to stay afterwards to help count the money."
I've always found the media coverage around this topic strange. You will hear almost nothing about it for months, then a huge wave of Unhappy Teachers articles, videos, news items, etc. will rise up, then it all evaporates away into nothing as quickly as it began.
And little ever gets done. I feel like very few politicians want to touch the education beast out of fear, perhaps because last time they did ('member Common Core?) it went nuclear-FUBAR.
While I don’t necessarily disagree with many of her points, the overly dramatic and staccato style made this irritating to read. She succeeded in having me walk away from the article frustrated, not with the problem, but with her article.
Here in NJ we invest a lot in education. Most school districts spend 20-30k per student. Senior teachers earn over 100k. The results are good, low income students have far higher grades that most of the country. It is expensive though, both our income taxes and property taxes are famously high. Lots of people leave the state because of this.
Pay them more. Then while you're at it, pay police more as well. The two pillars that should keep our systems together are disgustingly underpaid...
High School Teachers earned an average salary of $67,340 in 2020. Comparable jobs earned the following average salary in 2020: Elementary School Teachers made $65,420, Middle School Teachers made $64,990, School Counselors made $62,320, and Sports Coaches made $47,100.
Then we haven't even mentioned the massive debt students rake up to be able to pay for their education and sustain their lives while studying. It's one big mess.
That's double what I'm paid now, but I used to be a high school teacher and it was twice as much work (as measured by mental and emotional strain, not hours) as my job now.
> Americans think it’s great that some dude like Joe Rogan or Elon Musk can make a fortune off being an asshole.
Could've done without this pathetic personal attack on two of the most successful people in their domains. Joe Rogan bringing an outstanding format, guests, and great conversation that people are willing to pay for, and Musk bringing intelligence and obsessive drive and courage to bear on multiple industries, resulting in world changing improvements. But sure, just call them assholes and somehow attribute their financial success to that. If that's all it took, there would be a lot more people with a net worth of nine or ten figures.
"Every single teacher I know has a second or third source of income, even professors. They’re either married to a banker, or they work a conventional second job. They have side hustles."
My anecdote: My sister is a professor and my partner a 3rd grade teacher. Neither ever worked summer jobs but it sounds like they're outliers.
I will say that having a classroom full of kids whose parents want to apply their individual moral philosophy on everyone is a challenge.
Do you and your partner live together? Do you pay some their rent, or food, or for travel? You're basically their subsidy. Nothing wrong with that, but just pointing it out, that maybe they don't need a second job because they have you.
And are you sure your sister doesn't have a side hustle? Writing books? Tutoring? Expert witness? Consulting? Professors get a lot of opportunity for short term work, and many have to take it.
Good points. My partner lived solo for a few years. I moved into her apartment so she's able to save whatever I offset. She got a big pay raise for doing a masters, 35% I think. She also gets pay increases for each year she works. "Teachers" is a massive generalization in this letter. There are teaching assistants, special ed, teachers with masters and PhDs and teachers with 20 years experience that will all make vastly different amounts of money. I think my partners district tops out at $130K after 20 years with a masters which is comparable to what I make as a developer. I think her job is harder in some ways and easier in others. As with most topics, there's a bit more nuance that you can't capture in a short and opinionated piece.
My sister has 2 kids. Partner attending law school. $80K salary between both. They live in Albany. Mortgage was $250K. They don't have money for daycare or babysitters but university schedule is flexible enough that they can always be with their kids. I'm sure they'd love some alone time but it is what it is. They do take advantage of work perks like sabbaticals and free tuition for law school to avoid large expenses they would otherwise incur.
Hope this provides some more context for more original comment.
Part of it definitely has to deal with the country where you're teaching, the kind of school (public vs private), surrounding socioeconomic conditions, age group, etc.
I taught ESL overseas in elementary and junior high school in Taiwan for years. Compared to my experiences teaching in the United States, the children are just empirically better behaved. There is an ingrained culture of respect for teachers and it shows.
Our kids attend a hybrid school. Home 2/3 days at school 2/3 days. It’s technically a private school but it leans way more classical.
During orientation we learned a LOT of our new co-teachers were actually ex public school teachers. They were tired of the direction of the schools and didn’t want to subject their kids to the conditions they saw.
They want to teach. They love teaching. Just not in the public schools.
> They think schools exist in order to warehouse children while their parents do the real work,
Full disclosure: I'm not a teacher.
Three thoughts:
1) I wish I had $20 for everytime I've seen a social media meme along the lines of "kids should be taught _____ in school. Like/share if you agree" and 90% of the time it's something parents can and should be doing at home.
2) Ironically, anecdotally, it seems it's "too busy for their kids" parents who insist on outsourcing more and more to school systems. Some of this seems cultural (i.e., that belief has become normalized) but it also exist in the context of systemic issues (e.g., wages continue to lose ground to inflation...everyone needs to own more than they can afford).
3) The last couple of years there has been a lot of chatter about "threats to our democracy" imho most of it misguided hyperbolic media narrative. On the other hand, The Fourth Estate has erroded to become a toothless stuff animal. That's a legit threat. All that's needed now are less educated less thought-able masses.
It's clear everything is falling and people are trying to jack up the wages to compensate. Yet nobody mentions how to fix the horrific management that allowed this to happen in the first place and won't solve the crisis.
My last job wanted me to replace the existing management. They tried to sell this to me by complaining about all the different bosses they had to report to, how difficult the job was and how they want to retire and stop doing the job. Combined with all the other structural issues and tribalism within the workplace, having a management team that is happy to spell out their own doom is criminally incompetent.
You can pretty up the teacher or management role with money and pride, but it's still going to fall apart if you're hellbent on overworking your staff and killing the golden goose. Everyday the terrible management continues, the more and more relatable Anakin looks. Disappointment is a weekly reality.
Can confirm - my wife is a teacher and it seems every year is getting more difficult. I guess it's too soon to say how much of this is pandemic-related, either directly or indirectly, but it seems like testing, bureaucracy and parent madness (e.g. perception that the curriculum is too "woke" or not woke enough, etc.) have certainly been getting worse too.
But I'm also hearing (and experiencing) increased BS in other industries. Remote work spyware (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/08/14/business/work...) and flawed metrics-based performance measurement. So I don't know how much of it is teacher-specific and how much of it is general nonsense.
I’m frankly surprised schools haven’t collapsed. It seems like borderline abuse of teachers - low pay, undisciplined kids, have to buy your own supplies. Then this article also points out all the rules and people who think they know better than you.
When I have kids, I plan myself to be lead with
respect of the teachers when I meet them
Anecdote time: In June, I left my position teaching high school English after about ten years. Within weeks, I have increased my TC from ~50k to ~80k. Admittedly, I will have fewer vacation days, but I will work fewer hours with no additional labor or responsibilities in the evening/weekends.
Most teachers are incredibly incompetent at their job. I am all up in rising the wages of teachers if they can keep up with their task. Wages and seniority should be based on data on teacher performance not in years.
Education is one of the most important things for human and economic development, yet teachers are severely underpaid. Quality and availability of education would improve dramatically if salaries were higher.
My son just started his second year teaching kindergarten. I agree teaching is underappreciated and under paid.
I'm from South Dakota, I have a different view of the event she described. In my view, teachers were able to volunteer to score donated dollars by taking part in a light-hearted fund raiser. Accusing the organizers of being monsters assures there will be no further donated-money galas.
My wife also acts as a substitute teacher. From what I can gather, unruly kids who do not understand discipline are perhaps the biggest cause of unnecessary stress.
Increase the child tax credit and let schools compete on strategy. Having multiple strategies is actually super useful for preventing monocultures and increasing diversity of thought.
It's called "class warfare." America isn't one nation: it's a hierarchy of classes. The managerial/administrative class is superior to the proletarian educator class in the hierarchy. They don't want to listen to what teachers have to say just like a baron didn't want to listen to what his peasants think. They are seen as a highly redundant exploitable resource, thus they are disposable.
The author feels all these things, but she can't properly interpret them because she's still under the spell that there's good faith at the top, that we are one nation trying to work together the best we can. She would have to believe this to maintain her self-worth as a pillar of the system. If she didn't, she would lose faith in the significance of her job. She would see herself as a conditioner of slaves, not as one who enlightens the lives of others with knowledge. Once she loses this faith, she'll either become a dead, dispirited teacher, or she'll quit. Right now, she's in the twilight zone between idealism and jaded realism.
The inequality and unfairness is not a bug: it's a feature of the class system. In order for the high to live like demigods, we must be trodden under foot to level the field for their opulent lives. They can't live as they live if we aren't forced to live as we live. It we weren't constantly in fear of losing our jobs and ending up on the street, to openly die as passersby mock us, reaffirming the value of compliance in their minds, we wouldn't endure the hardships we suffer. We wouldn't work for minimum wage. We wouldn't consent to clearly unfair exploitation. But since utter ruin and death is the consequence of refusal, we keep running along and comfort ourselves with a whole host of delusions and distractions that make us feel better about our servitude.
There will be no empathy from those who build their dreams upon our nightmares.
I am considering how the demografic development shapes this.
In the span of 40 years or so, we will from 6 / 1 working to non working to 2 / 1 conclusing in the mid 2030s.
I mean, indifferent to what means of redistribution schema we use, we simply won't get more labor, and issues might need to be solved along other axis. Not expecting the same level of service, etc.
If you want to help teach computer science to high schoolers for two hours a week (before your day job), look into TEALS [1]. It's a rewarding way to teach the next generation of technologists/citizens/people. I've been a TEALS volunteer for five years while working at Google in NYC. The students are fantastic - curious, hilarious, and wonderful to be around. It's the best part of my day. You assist students with their projects and lecture if you wish. You work with the teacher to improve assignments/projects and help them be better teachers; so you're teaching them to fish. Going in to school stabilizes my schedule and gets me into the office earlier than I would on my own. Absolutely recommend it. They also have remote teaching opportunities.
One core issue with modern education is that people DO want to teach. They want it so badly they will accept shit wages and spend their own money subsidising schools. The result is ever dwindling resources as teachers are viewed as sheep to be sheered and all cuts as tacitly excused as "they'll just have to make it work"...
Great, let's move forward with some real online learning initiatives. The current system is antiquated and no longer makes sense from a purely educational perspective. For too long the US has used the school system as a baby-sitting service while both parents (or single parents) are at work.
Increase salaries, which will transitively increase the respect and prestige that teachers get in an actionable manner. Thanking them isn’t enough.
An alternative is to automate the teacher away. But I think most people would agree that there’s still immense value in having a human being in the picture here.
The title makes it sound like the fault or some problem lies with teachers, and that doesn't help in spreading the issue. Similar to "nobody wants to work anymore" sounds like a fault with workers, but actually is a symptom.
Title should be, nobody wants to support teachers anymore.
As a father of 3 kids, one thing that gets lost in these discussions is the fact that some teachers are great and some are bad, like really bad. We need to give the good ones more money and freedom and the bad ones means and incentive to improve or find a new profession.
I wonder if this also relates to police officers. One of the problems seems to be that society doesn't have the right leverage over their behavior. Some are heroic and some give the profession a bad name.
Nobody should want to teach at the current pay rate offered and the lack of f*cks given for their mental and physical health, workload, student counts and support. My wife taught for 12-13 years and now coordinates for special education kids in her district, but her pay is tied to the teachers pay scale. Her district gave out 2% raises this year, in a record inflation year, she's making less than she did 3 years ago at this rate. I'm on the side of letting our education system collapse and get rebooted, teachers need to be treated better, way better. Kids should value education, and if they don't want to be there, kick them out. Teachers are not day care.
The same could be said about the UK. Anecdotally, every single teacher I know has either quit or moved into the private sector, with the exception of those with partners in a better paid profession. I'm genuinely surprised that anyone will do the job.
Lot of sympathy here for teachers, which is very understandable. I am sure many of them, especially those early in their career, have a very miserable existence. But on the flip side I know several teachers that “stuck it out” and are making well over 100k annually working 9 months a year in low cost of living Ohio. In fact two of them are married, so they have a household income approaching 250k per year in an area where median household income is well under 100k. Teachers are very good at “putting on the poor mouth”, but many of them are living very comfortable lifestyles. And the administrators even more so. Their salaries would make some engineers blush.
The problem is lack of perceived benefit. You drop off and pick up kids for 10 years, at inconvenient times that do not really solve the problem of childcare while you work. After all that they often end up as obnoxious teenagers with no marketable skills.
Imagine if we had schools that at younger age emphasized good manners, being respectful and helpful to parents and allowing for full work days in 2 job households. And then at some point shifted towards practical skills best suited for each individual child - someone is a budding nuclear scientist, someone is better of training as an electrician. I bet parents would love those teachers and not begrudge them good pay.
Superb article. Perhaps covid has let people learn that they could survive without doing something they didn’t like just to get some money. There’s many ways to make or get money, and the hassle level is quite variable. But when people choose, say, an Amazon warehouse over their former position ya gotta wonder about what they gave up.
If they know stem at all, why teach? If they can handle foreign languages or wield words, why teach? If they can work with their hands, there are trades and the like dying for people…. The buzz from a success has to be balanced against all of the issues discussed here in, and now the risk of physical harm is quite high.
The very same problem exists in other countries. We have been having an outrageously similar situation in France for years already, so much that this article does a really good job at depainting the situation here in France too.
FTA: "When you call someone burned out, it implies a personal moral failing on their part. The phrase shifts the conversation away from work conditions to a teacher’s individual personal choices."
Great opinion piece. Much agree. My wife works as a middle and high school substitute teacher across 6 districts in a large metro. All schools need subs so badly. But only 1 even raised their sub pay rate this year. Some try to offer higher rates for working more days in their district. But when one district pays $25 more a day than the others, they still don’t increase it. Teachers deserve more money. Also boggles my mind that the teachers unions are supposedly so powerful in this country, but if so then why are they paid so poorly?
Why would they? Super hard job, terrible pay, horrible disrespect by parents and politicians. It's an awful situation that makes me very worried about my kids' ability to get an education.
Situation is similar in France. Teachers are underpaid and in some fields (e.g. maths), it gets hard to fill open positions. The gvt tries to improve slightly the entry level salary to make the job more attractive, while betting that senior teachers are stuck there with no other job alternatives. And they compensate by hiring under qualified, short term, teachers. To some extent, it's similar in higher education.
The relative freedom enjoyed in academic jobs isn't enough to compensate an increasing salary gap between public/private sectors. In expensive cities, it can even be hard to live decently with a teacher/lecturer salary, and certainly not possible to save for your retirement. If you can't rely on external sources of income, I think it's not reasonable to engage in these activities if more lucrative alternatives exist.
And considering France increasing public debt, I don't see how the situation is going to improve.
yep, but I guess most people are ok with this, we have a lot of people saying that teachers are priviliged people having too much vacations and not working enough per week. It's a strong common belief.
And with current government politics, it looks like we are witnessing the end of a public education in France, the unqualified contractuals teachers hired after a quick interview is more interesting financially than an official.
As the husband of a college teacher who has been perpetually on the tenure track, it really is true that they’re not paid enough. My wife has put in more hours than anyone I know, is more qualified than almost everyone I know. And yet I made way more than her in a single year than she did in a decade because I happened to venture into a field VCs love (and which has zero positive impact on society - web3).
Its cruel and a gross symptom late stage capitalism and its completely misaligned capital allocation.
I'm not fond of public schools in my district which is rural and poorer. I wrote a response in which I believe teachers don't deserve its students as opposed to the article's "America doesn't deserve its teachers": https://abovenorm.co/a-personal-anecdote-on-public-school-te...
As a former high school teacher, it is also no mystery to me why people are leaving the profession. It's by far the hardest job I've ever done. I journaled my experience here, for anyone who cares to read: https://acjay.com/a-former-teachers-story/
Counterpoint:
someone I know went from practicing medicine ("part time", meaning actually more than 40hrs/wk) to teaching (in a unionized system) HS, and only makes a little less, works less, and has way more job satisfaction.
This is probably more of an indictment of the state of some corners of american medicine than a paean to the public teaching system though
I wanted to be a teacher when I was in high school (and I still do; I like teaching people new things). Then I found out brand new engineering graduates made more than any adult employed by the school district except for the superintendent and high school head principal.
I still want to teach, but taking the 70% pay cut required to do it does not make sense.
Currently turnover is high for many jobs with great working conditions, so it shouldn't be news that people don't want a stressful job with relatively mediocre pay.
I don't have the data to back it up, but I would expect a few European countries to be the only exception, and only those that have moved on from older educational models.
>Not just mediocre pay, but nowadays unlivable pay with the current rent trends in suburban and city environments.
Not just "nowadays." I recall (I've looked around, but can't find it archived) an article from 2000 in the San Jose Mercury News about full-time public school teachers living in homeless shelters because they couldn't afford housing in San Jose.
So, no. Not new. Still a big problem, but not a new one.
But that’s San Jose - I think we’re seeing the problem spread to more reaches of the US. For example, Savannah, GA is a mostly stagnant area with only 4,000 population growth since 2017 and not much job growth. Meanwhile, the average rent for a 2 bedroom was stuck under $1100 until 2018, and after Covid the expiration of the CDC moratorium enabled a rent boom to $1500. I can guarantee you income has not risen to match that, so anyone already in an apartment is simply dedicating more of their income to paying the rent.
>But that’s San Jose - I think we’re seeing the problem spread to more reaches of the US. For example, Savannah, GA is a mostly stagnant area with only 4,000 population growth since 2017 and not much job growth. Meanwhile, the average rent for a 2 bedroom was stuck under $1100 until 2018, and after Covid the expiration of the CDC moratorium enabled a rent boom to $1500. I can guarantee you income has not risen to match that, so anyone already in an apartment is simply dedicating more of their income to paying the rent.
You won't get an argument about that from me. I wasn't trying to deride or minimize the issues you mentioned. At all.
Rather, I was pointing out that low pay for K-12 teachers isn't a new phenomenon.
I wholeheartedly agree that this is a pressing issue right now, and in lots more places than Silicon Valley.
Lack of autonomy and abysmal pay is why I don't teach. I would love to do so, but it literally requires you to sacrifice your lifetime and lifestyle.
It's pretty simple: increase taxes on the wealthy and megacorps and pay teachers more. Also, get rid of the bureaucrats who infest education administration.
Change a few details and this is what it's like being a doctor too (at least in Sweden) from what I've heard.
Autonomy. That's the thing. We have to let people do their damn jobs. Don't micro manage, don't second guess, don't interfere. Let people do their job.
The United States seems hellbent on sabotaging education. This is not going to help future generations, and is going to put the likelihood of ongoing hegemony into question - over time, how can that compete with nations that continually invest in their population?
I mean, yes in general, but there is simply no mystery here. US already competes by accepting immigrants, and US will be able to compete in the future as long as it is attractive to immigrants and keeps accepting more immigrants than anyone else. US definitely should invest in education, but US hegemony can be secure without doing so.
s/to Teach/to be treated like shit for crap wages/g
Not exactly news, these days.
In much of America, local school districts still have quite a bit of autonomy. As thing keep getting worse, there might be a district or few, here & there, where a different approach gets an honest try.
Let’s just go with crap wages == whatever isn’t sufficient to keep enough people in the profession, such that you need to start recruiting wildly unqualified people just to fill the spot.
You almost had me at "whatever isn’t sufficient to keep enough people" but then dammit, you lost at "wildly unqualified people"
If you mean "having an education degree" or "getting a grossly irrelevant teacher's certificate" then no, those are not "qualifications." Those are just the teacher's union contract provisions.
There are some problems with the system you're objecting to, but the "veterans and random college students" qualification some places are moving to is... worse.
Is there any evidence that teachers are experiencing a labor shortage out of line with any other industry? My kids' teachers are awesome, and they're quite good at their jobs. My district also pays quite a bit more than the state average in Texas.
I think I'd be a great teacher. Multiple of my co-workers have asked me if I've ever considered being a teacher, because apparently I'm really good at explaining things and taking on mentoring responsibilities.
But the median pay for a teacher is a fraction of what I make. And for a vastly harder job. I don't think I've worked a truly 40 hour week in years. I at least feel that the software I'm working on can do some good in the world. But the old quote "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads" seems apropos, and they make a whole lot more than even I do.
73k seems a pittance for those entrusted for ensuring there are humans ready to perpetuate the society in the next generation.
Writing from South Korea. My father was a teacher and I am very proud of that and basically everyone around me reinforced that pride by showing respect. Everything I read about US teachers is so alien.
Pay teachers more and more people will teach. On a website so dedicated to discussion of free market principles, the amount of rationalization people put themselves through to avoid this simple conclusion is both funny and tragic.
Why isn't education highly automated? Why do teachers across the country teach the same way we did before we had high-powered computers and information networks?
Your comment made me think of the scene in the first Star Trek movie where all the little Spock children are in an emotionless hole being programmed with math and philosophy.
Not saying you are wrong or right, but for many kids having an adult who simply cares is worth infinitely more than any amount of efficiencies or base material.
Lol, you have no idea. Prove me wrong... What do you think should be automated about the teaching profession?
Taking care? Motivating? Observing listening analysing what is happening in that temporary microsociety you manage? Prepare lessons, research extend your own knowledge? React to what is Happening changing the course of your lessons to react to what actually happens in the classroom? Have conbersations with kids and parents? Judge if the production of these little ones shows progression? Figure out what potential problems might be (structurally socially psychologically). Have humor, and dedicate some time to just simply forming a bond? Damn I cant think of a lot that could be automated besides the officework where the same tools are used as everywhere for scheduling, dicumentation communication etc...
That is why the Nuremberg funnel was never really invented. Technology as a teacher substitute has never proven itself in practice (i.e. outside of laboratory environments). There are a few students that are exceptionally driven, but even they learn socially.
That we have tried to get better schools by economy of scale and standardized testing is reason for some of the problems and therefore cannot be solved with more of the same.
* Social learning is more enjoyable and motivating. We learn from people, with people and because of people.
* Interaction with others gives meaning to ideas. Ideas mean little without a social context. This has been proven again and again.
* Discussing ideas increases understanding and retention of those ideas.
Teachers having second jobs is nothing new. Most of my teachers from the 60s-70s had second jobs in the summer - the canning factory, retail clerks, you name it.
The entirety of the edifice of public education is rotten. Nobody likes building software for clueless business types, running deathmarch after deathmarch. I don't blame teachers for seeing problems.
Time to rework the system. More likely, blow it up and start over as it's politically impossible to make the structural changes required. Just like since companies can't be salvaged, this one is done.
Crony-capitalism is a zero-sum game. It literally rewards value extraction at the expense of value creation. Teaching creates value and it's terrible at capturing value because it offers very little negotiating power; teachers are fully reliant on big, powerful institutions for employment.
Why would the big corporations with market monopolies (which control our governments) want to educate the masses? The big corporations don't want their competitors to be educated and they certainly don't want more free thinkers in society who can learn about our dysfunctional monetary system.
Elite colleges churn out just enough graduates to keep the big corporate monopolies running. Graduates of all other schools and colleges are just fuel for the competition; they're a nuisance for big corporations; these individuals need to be kept incompetent so that they do not pose a threat to the existing order. Financially, it makes sense to dumb down the masses, pack them into tiny living spaces, feed them crickets, connect them to virtual reality and make sure that they don't have any children.
Our monetary system ensures that our economy always caters to capital and the sources of capital (reserve bank money printers), not to people. It doesn't even allow for parallel economies to form when people can't afford to participate in the mainstream economy. It keeps everyone hooked until death.
>Everywhere you look, states have banned almost every aspect of education that’s worth teaching. States banned math books for being too woke. They’re passing bills that don’t let you teach history.
Critical race/gender theory =/= history. The 1619 project book is also not history, but a reinterpretation of it to empower today's neo-Marxist race grifters (i.e. Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DeAngelo, Nikole Hanna Jones, among others).
I sometimes wonder if I would make a good teacher. Teaching others is something I enjoy, I've worked with kids a few different times in my life and it seemed positive for everyone, and a college professor I admired said multiple times that I would make a good teacher.
I have several teachers in my family, and while they feel fulfilled teaching children (and I envy that fulfillment) , the pay is disrespectful. Furthermore, the administration above them seems like a special kind of hell that could only be spawned by public-private partnerships that neoliberalism loves. The past few years have been particularly rough, as bizarre alt-right politics from parents has to be constantly addressed (ranging anger about masks to anger about CRT to anger). Mix in the lingering anxiety of school shootings (and the its constant reminder by the presence of SROs, aka cops), and it really seems miserable.
I think teaching is one of the most important vocations in constructing and maintaining a healthy and vibrant society. But the invisible hand of the market has determined that I will make more money and have less stress by answering customer support emails. Seems whack
Unrelated, but when did Medium become broken in Reader mode in Safari? Reader only shows the first paragraph now, with an ellipsis after, which seems intentional on Medium’s part.
It’s unfortunate because this seems like an interesting article but I don’t want to subject myself to their website in order to read it.
It's not money. Everyone is afraid to say the quiet part out loud. 90% of the kids in urban schools simply don't want to be there and make life hell for teachers, administration, and the other 10% with actual potential. Half measures dont work!
Nobody in their right mind would become a teacher today. John Q. Public, just because he's paying "some taxes" that's "contributing to your pay" think he's your boss and can order you around like they're Donald Trump acting on The Apprentice. Everyone feels entitled to tell you why education sucks so much today and why it was so wonderful 50 years ago. Why would anyone of sound mind go into the profession? I've thought about it from time to time, but there's simply no way I'm subjecting myself to that crap! It's not so much as "nobody wants to teach anymore" as it is the general public simply sucks and having to interact with them, with them thinking they're your boss, is more of a soul-suck than spending a weekend with a Dementor!
I'm sympathetic to what I guess are these issues but the article was like WAT?
> The shortages have started hitting colleges
> They’ve never paid us a living wage
Google's average college teacher's salary. Looks like a living wage to me. I see $73k to $250k
I guess the author meant public K-12 schools in which case it's probably right? Though the first Google says average in California is $82k (not sure that is or is not a living wage)
> When I tell someone I’m a teacher, they don’t say anything along the lines of “thank you for your service.” No, they usually talk about how much they hated school. They complain about your summers off.
Really? I've never heard anyone disparage teachers but maybe I'm out of the loop
> Most Americans don’t think teaching is a real job. They think schools exist in order to warehouse children while their parents do the real work, and to keep them out of trouble.
I've never heard this. I've heard people complain that's all they're allowed to do in some schools because discipline is disallowed but I've never heard anyone say teaching wasn't a real job. In fact I've only ever heard the opposite. It's one of the toughest jobs there is, in part because it's more than 40hrs a week
> Burnout is just victim blaming.
I've never heard that ever
Am I supposed to read between the lines of the hyperbole?
> Every single teacher I know has a second or third source of income,
This I do know. Even long decades ago my teachers all had second jobs.
> what really drives teachers out of the profession... is lack of autonomy.
Yes, i've heard that at least
I guess I'm just ranting that the post seems kind of incoherent. I don't have a solution. Move to Norway or some other place where they value teachers. The USA seem over in so many ways and I see no possible way it's going to get better.
I don’t want teachers anymore either because I see them as an institution of racially motivated anti-white hate. From CRT to the Minneapolis teachers’ union all I see is hate.
From growing up watching my mother struggling with the daft administration she dealt with as a teacher, I pretty much agree with the overall thrust of this article.
I personally enjoy teaching and have discussed many times with my wife that I should teach in my retirement from tech, but we both understand the pay is so little it doesn’t provide a realistic career option until after we’ve hit FIRE.
We truly do treat teachers horribly in this country. That said, I think this article would have been better without irrelevant jabs at favored left-wing punching bags who have nothing to do with the main point.
This title is absolutely false, at least where I live. My wife and many of my friends and family are teachers. There is a ton of competition and all of them have had a hard time getting a stable job teaching something they don't hate. Most of them have either moved across the country, feigned religious practice, or accepted positions nobody else would take with little opportunity for advancement just to get their feet in the door.
My wife went the "positions nobody else would take with little opportunity for advancement" route and even amidst the so-called "shortages" she has been struggling and failing at finding a normal teaching position - both in her current district and nearby metro districts - even though she has a stunning reputation and 6 years of in-classroom teaching experience.
There is no shortage. Teaching is an overcrowded job market and has been for a while, despite the poor pay and miserable conditions. I blame the education system itself for giving would-be teachers such unrealistic expectations for occupational outlook and work environment. The author said "Everyone secretly thinks they can teach because they watched Mr. Holland’s Opus" and she's right, but one of my biggest frustrations is how the post-secondary education system does nothing to address that mentality.
But there's more to this than just the title, so let's take a look at the other headers.
> Almost nobody respects teachers.
Also false. The majority of people respect teachers. When my wife wears anything indicating she's a teacher outside of work, she often gets compliments on her position, words of encouragement, and general appreciation from random passerbys. I've never once heard anyone make a snide remark about teachers to her.
The difficulty my wife seems to have is with parents and admins. The admins love to micromanage and usually end up wasting time and making things worse. Most parents are fine (some are even great), but there's always a few that have unreasonable expectations and would rather blame teachers for their child's misbehavior than hold their child responsible. Those are the ones she talks about, but she admits they are a minority.
> Teachers are beyond burned out.
Absolutely.
> Americans think it’s “not about the money.”
Is that really true though? I've never met anyone who has outwardly expressed that. You have to have some passion for teaching to bear with it, but I think most Americans realize that money is pretty important for getting by in life and teachers are no exception.
> Teaching has become truly miserable.
Yup.
> It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I don't really understand this one. The author talks about how schools are accepting worse and worse teachers, but she doesn't really elaborate on how that is a "self-fulfilling prophecy".
> America doesn’t deserve its teachers.
Don't we, though? I think we deserve exactly what the monstrous system we've created has given us - both the good and bad.
I think there's a lot that can be done to fix the US education system. I think funding is part of it, but I also think starting there is a grave mistake. Putting more money into a bad system just produces more bad results. Fix the system, then invest more into it. I have lots of ideas on how to "fix" it, but this comment has gone on long enough.
Some professions simply can't do capitalism. I always joke with people at work that a hundred years ago doctors could charge whatever they wanted and sexually harass their patients.
The fix for this by the way is to pay for school with federal funds instead of state and local. That way rich and poor children receive the same funding.
This is also the reason to ban private school vouchers. That way rich children get taught alongside poor children, which prevents disparities in education quality. It also allows people with the means to afford private schooling to pay for an underprivileged child to still get an education via those tax dollars.
If what I'm saying doesn't sound right to you, then we have an opportunity for a teachable moment. Don't feel bad, I just learned this yesterday. Let me introduce you to horizontal and vertical philosophy:
Horizontal ethics/politics/philosophy is concerned with the overall well being of the whole. It tends to focus on stuff like justice.
Vertical ethics/politics/philosophy is concerned with doing right within a hierarchy. It tends to focus on stuff like liberty.
Both are required for a society to function. But the US has experienced mostly vertical politics since before the Reagan revolution. So quite candidly, the problems we experience today will most likely be solved through horizontal policies.
HN and most major news sources tend to track with vertical philosophies IMHO. So I tend to have the minority viewpoint here. But that appears to be changing, and I suspect that the world will go more horizontal over the next 10-20 years. A related concept is how generations tend to oppose the policies of their parents, as covered in the book The Fourth Turning:
I wish I could say that I've read it, but I hear good things.
Gen Z is coming online now as we enter what I like to think will be a new progressive era. It's facing tremendous opposition from entrenched interests on both the left and right though. So there will likely be deadlock for the next election or two until the last of the Baby Boomers finally retire and relinquish control.
1. For as much as we spend on education, teachers seem to be grossly underpaid - to be getting robbed of their share of the budget. Where does that money go?
2. It seems that education degrees are seen as easier to achieve than others.
3. Teachers frequently complain about how they are unappreciated, yet children spend _12 years_ in their care. Why do people come up to them and say they hated school rather than “thank you”?
4. Many school problems are caused by disruptive children.
Disruptive children are caused by parents who frankly just don’t give a shit. Throwing more money into schools won’t ever fix this problem.
5. Schools are just too darn big. Thousands of kids in a big prison-shaped building and we wonder why everyone is alienated, miserable and dehumanized?
> 1. For as much as we spend on education, teachers seem to be grossly underpaid - to be getting robbed of their share of the budget. Where does that money go?
Counterpoint: teachers' pay is great, it's just backloaded in pension plans.
> 2. It seems that education degrees are seen as easier to achieve than others.
Yeah, but cost is the same and cost is what's important.
> 4. Many school problems are caused by disruptive children.
Bingo. Half the success of 4-year colleges is that it's the first time the bottom 50% of the students are filtered out.
Story time. I was an ESL teacher for 5 years in Asia and planned on coming home to the USA and getting my teacher's license in Math to teach at international schools. I am not currently a teacher, I'm a quant at a big bank.
Why didn't I end up in teaching? The licensing requirements in Minnesota are insane. Counselor's straight up told me I'd have to borrow ~$50k from the UMN for a MS in Curriculum and Instruction before I could teach.
The labor unions along with politicians have built a structure in which there is artificial scarcity of teachers. Not only is the profession filled with disrespect, but it's outrageously expensive and bureaucratic.
Lastly, the Economics of Education field is wild. Clearly there's value to basic reading/math/science education, but it's not clear at all whether teachers are schools matter than much (wealthy communities/parents matter a lot).
Edit: feel obligated to add that k12 education is financed and administrated at the local level, which means our experiences with this likely vary a lot. Mine are specific to trying to move back to the USA and become licensed in MN.
> Counterpoint: teachers' pay is great, it's just backloaded in pension plans.
Counter-points to that:
You still have to pay the bills before retirement.
And this even assumes they get a good pensions, because a lot of states don't bother funding their public employee pensions properly (using current-year tax income for splashy announcements instead, kicking the liability down the road for the next politician):
> You still have to pay the bills before retirement.
That's a valid point, but choices need to be made. Go to the teachers union and ask if they'd be willing to drop future pensions (and cap current ones to the benefits payed in so far) in exchange for a higher salary (based on the amount saved by not longer having pensions). My guess would be that they wouldn't even be willing to discuss it.
You're talking as if "choices need to be made" doesn't extend to the question of whether or not they get enough tax dollars total, regardless of split between income and pensions.
But actually, you're the only commenter I've so far seen in the thread who claims that their pensions are enough to make up for their salaries. Personally I think both salaries and pensions for (most) teachers should increase, in most countries including the US, and I have no problem with teachers' unions not being willing to have a discuss boxed into your opinion that they already get as much as they deserve.
> you're the only commenter I've so far seen in the thread who claims that their pensions are enough to make up for their salaries
That is not true, given that I was replying to you, and you were replying to the person that said _this_.
> Counterpoint: teachers' pay is great, it's just backloaded in pension plans.
That being said, in some places the teachers make good money when you include their pension; in other places they do not. It's not consistent across the country.
> You're talking as if "choices need to be made" doesn't extend to the question of whether or not they get enough tax dollars total
That was not my intent. My intent was to indicate...
If you think that teachers make enough when you include their pension, you can't complain that their pension causes a hardship early in their career; because the choice of a pension is likely not something they'd be willing to give up". If you think the pension causes a hardship earlier in the career and that that needs to be changed, then either 1) You do _not_ believe teachers make enough including their pensions, OR 2) You think pensions should be done away with (which I doubt will be supported by the teachers/union).
> That is not true, given that I was replying to you, and you were replying to the person that said _this_.
a) Oops! Not sure why I thought that diognesofsinope's comment and your comment were written by the same person, my bad.
b) You've either made the same mistake I did or you've excellently satirised my mistake, as you were replying not to me but to somebody else :P
So fair enough, sorry I thought your comment that I replied to was the owner of the original belief that salaries + pensions = enough currently, and then expanding on that belief.
Teachers in the US get decent salaries and good pensions. It may be different from from state to state, but in California you can work for 25 years and retire without ever having to work again by the age of 50.
You'll have to learn to live on a low salary for the first 5-10 years of your career. But pensions are paid based on your terminal salary, not your average salary. For elementary school teachers in my district the terminal salary was in excess of $100k as of 2017.
> without ever having to work again by the age of 50.
While that may be true, it's important to note that the pension is only salary (and usually only 80% of your terminal salary) and not benefits.
So you'd spend a significant part of that money on getting health insurance.
Most teachers who have earned full pensions wait to retire until 67 anyway so they can get Medicare (and not Social Security, because they don't qualify for it since they have their pension unless they worked another job as well).
Unless you're married and your partner continues to work and covers benefits for you.
My aunt did exactly above, and felt it was a moral duty to let new younger teachers have the spot (nevermind it meant that she was going to draw a pension from the system for more years than she'd actually worked).
Plenty of other teachers feel the same way, though obviously not all.
Sure, if you're married and have a second income, then that second income is basically subsidizing education. My wife was a teacher and retired when our kid was born, because we could. Some time in her 50s she'll be able to draw her pension.
But basically the only reason we can afford to live in the Silicon Valley is because I'm an engineer with a decent salary. A lot of her paycheck went right back into her classroom, and with the hours she worked, she was basically make $3/hr, despite getting some of the highest teacher pay in the country.
And all of her coworkers were in the same boat -- almost every one of them, even the senior teachers, were married to engineers. The few that weren't either had family money or at least had parents who bought them a condo or house. Or a good friend. We let one of her young teacher friends live with us for a couple years until she managed to save up enough for a down payment on a small condo, and then got married and got a second job.
It is basically impossible to be a teacher in Silicon Valley without a highly paid spouse or multiple side hustles.
> But basically the only reason we can afford to live in the Silicon Valley is because I'm an engineer with a decent salary
The existence of California -- and San Francisco, in particular -- makes discussions like this one difficult, because yes, sure, San Francisco is too weird to exist and is therefore basically irrelevant in national policy discussions.
I live in Rhode Island. East Coast. An hour from Boston. Expensive real estate, high-COL (top 10 or 15, depending on which numbers you trust), etc, etc -- and yet, we are just absolutely nothing at all like California, which is its own very weird outlier that has nothing to do with the experiences of the almost 300 million Americans who aren't Californians.
> San Francisco is too weird to exist and is therefore basically irrelevant in national policy discussions.
Not SF, but more people live in LA County than in the ten least popular states. If only we could ignore them and their 20 senators as completely irrelevant when it came to national policy discussions...
I don't actually want to ignore San Francisco's problems. [0] I would just say that its existence makes national conversations more difficult.
[0] I would tell California that they need to permit about 10x as much housing if they want any more federal help. The U.S. Government should not take on the role of dealing with the consequences of such an obvious self-own. "Our teachers can't find places to live and also it's illegal to build apartments on practically every single lot in the state -- what should we do?" is a question that answers itself.
If you want to be in the Union, then one thing you have to do is allow internal migration, and by that I mean actually allow it, which means you have to allow newcomers to build housing. If you're not allowing newcomers to build housing, then you are not actually in any real sense fulfilling your obligations to the rest of the country.
You're right. Outlier is a poor word choice. I just mean to say that increasingly we need separate discussions for the 10% of people who live in CA and the 90% who don't, because the experiences are really quite different.
I think you're right in that discussions need to be different for different parts of the country, but I think the split is urban and not-urban. A lot of California is urban, but so is a lot of New York, Massachusetts, Washington, Oregon, Illinois, etc etc. as far as where the population lives. And all have similar problems when it comes to education.
When it comes to education pensions, CA is not an outlier. The precise terms vary, but I think most public educators have access to similar pension programs.
If the general population were numerate enough, and there was enough transparency, there were would be riots in the streets over the NPV of retirement packages for public sector employees, these people are getting packages that are worth $2m,$5m,$10m at retirement (which could be 50ish!)
So...you're suggesting people should riot so they can get that, too, right? Not so they can tear other people down to only get the same pittance they do?
The public sector employees getting generous retirement packages are not the enemy. They are not the reason the rest of us are getting pissed on and told it's raining. That's the very wealthy and the politicians they've bought.
> Counterpoint: teachers' pay is great, it's just backloaded in pension plans.
25% of teachers in Minnesota leave the profession within three years [1] so they see no pension. This sort of weed out is common in a lot of professions and it's probably for the best, but weed out careers often combine high starting pay to attract a large pool of candidates. Public sector jobs exchange low pay for a pension and stability. Teaching doesn't offer the latter.
I expect attrition is priced into the pension at some level, or worse, it needs these contributions to function at all. This is perhaps best for the profession, but it is systematic theft from another point of view.
Even if you don’t contribute to the pension with cash, capital is still allocated on your behalf into the fund that could have been paid to you directly.
>capital is still allocated on your behalf into the fund that could have been paid to you directly.
For taxpayer funded pensions, it is more like future taxpayers’ capital is allocated on your behalf.
Meaning, the actuary will calculate the government needs to set aside $2 today, the government leaders will say change that to $1 so the taxes are low today, and will end up actually contributing $0.50 because some of the funds were needed to make up for yesterday’s shortfall.
I suspect that almost all of the success of private schools can be ascribed to being able to kick students out and not requiring fifty billion dollars in degrees to teach.
I taught computing for 13 years at a public charter high-school. It doesn't charge tuition (it's a public school), but does have a dress code, and a commitment to a curriculum based on E. D. Hirsch's core knowledge program in grade school and on classical, liberal arts great books in high school.
Admission is by lottery if there are more applicants than places, not by cherry-picking applicants. They hire teachers with subject-matter degrees and experience: they have some PhDs and a couple ABDs (all but dissertation). Half-jokingly they said they didn't look to hire people with teaching certificates, but wouldn't hold that against them. I had a master's degree in computer science and worked summers to get another master's.
The school was smaller (maybe 700 total students K-12; the class of 2022 graduated 26), which right there, I think, made for fewer behavior problems. There was a well-thought-out discipline policy which was enforced by the administration and backed up by the board and most parents. After all, parents had made a choice to not go to the regular district schools but enroll in this school instead.
I agree that the odds are much better for school success with smaller sizes, a focused curriculum (whether it's International Baccalaureate, Core Knowledge, STEM, arts, or whatever), highly qualified teachers, and supportive parents.
Yes, it's a big step for parents to leave the default neighborhood school, look over the various options, even staying in the same city, let alone moving to a different district. I agree with you there.
The admissions people take some time to represent the whole story or big picture to prospective parents, because the school is not for everybody. I don't think it's cherry-picking to encourage parents to find the best school for their children, even if it isn't yours.
The school accepted applications from parents who had had unsatisfactory experiences at former schools, who were willing to go through the extra steps to try to get better outcomes for their students. The school had its share of free-and-reduced-lunch students and students with individual education plans and such.
I heard parents give heartfelt thanks to everyone at the school who had helped their child overcome what other schools termed learning disabilities. Is it the opposite of cherry-picking to accept a student other schools have, in effect, given up on? I believe the small size of the school and individualized attention helped many students in similar situations.
> I don't think it's cherry-picking to encourage parents to find the best school for their children, even if it isn't yours.
Why? Because "cherry-picking" is bad and the best things for children are good?
It's, of course, exactly cherry-picking to find the children with the most interested and motivated parents, then filter them down to the ones that you like best. Fuck the kids with bad or no parents.
If I'm a parent who is typically interested and motivated, am I committing a sin against social justice if I am interested and motivated in my children's education and work to provide opportunities for them to learn?
You're not sinning, you're just reacting to incentives.
This isn't a moral condemnation of you, it's just the fact-based explanation for why schools that you have to apply to produce better academic outcomes than default public schooling. If those public schools could just drop the cohort of students whose parents couldn't be arsed to apply to a special school, their quality would also go up.
It still sounds like cherry picking. Is there bus service from all poor neighborhoods to and from the charter school? Or is it only wealthy families that are not working multiple jobs and can afford to drive their kids to and from the school everyday that can consider sending their children there?
Pointing out that a bias exists is not always a call to eliminate that bias. The fact that merely requiring an application rather than being the default option improves average outcomes isn't a problem that needs to be solved. It's just something that should be kept in mind when comparing schools.
At some point, some school is going to have to take the kids who don’t bother applying, since we can’t put 100% of schools behind an application and preserve its benefits, and we should not be surprised that such schools do worse, if the ones who do apply happen to be better.
Open lottery admission isn't the same as universal retention. Some charters and even magnets later "counsel out" admitted kids who act up, perform poorly on tests, or need expensive extra services, saying the school isn't the right fit for them. Traditional district public schools don't have this option and usually wind up taking back the kids who wash out of the choice schools.
I have certainly heard this from some teachers in non-charter schools, and I've seen one student asked not to return to the charter school where I teach part-time.
To a degree. There's some sampling bias as well because the kind of parent that would choose a non-default education option probably cares more to begin with.
what about a child/family's socioeconomic situation? would that not be a factor? seems like a rich kid is already setup for success regardless of public school or private school. most of the rich kids from my public school are doing fine.
“Why didn't I end up in teaching? The licensing requirements in Minnesota are insane. Counselor's straight up told me I'd have to borrow ~$50k from the UMN for a MS in Curriculum and Instruction before I could teach.”
I received my teaching license in Wisconsin and transferred to Minnesota by doing little more than passing the licensure exam. I did not have an MS at that time or when I started teaching in the Minneapolis suburbs.
I don't have a BS in Education (BA in Philosophy), which means you have to go through their M. Ed. program with licensure. You must take Educational Theory/Pedagogy core courses along with required courses in your field -- I had saved money and already taken the calc sequence, linear algebra and differential equations.
Grad school at the UMN is ~$10k a semester (https://onestop.umn.edu/finances/costs/tuition). Would have been ~30 years old, $40k in debt as a beginning teacher in MN. Amazingly, none of that includes actual experience teaching lol.
The teachers union has been waging a war against future teachers to benefit current teachers for 30 years and this is what that looks like after 30 years.
Similar to housing and zoning, education is a government racket.
> The philosophy of mathematics is the branch of philosophy that studies the assumptions, foundations, and implications of mathematics. It aims to understand the nature and methods of mathematics, and find out the place of mathematics in people's lives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_mathematics
Considering that the primary complaint 10th grade math students have about math is often "How is this relevant to me and my life?", wouldn't studying the philosophy of mathematics help a teacher in addressing this concern?
> Counterpoint: teachers' pay is great, it's just backloaded in pension plans.
This is no longer true in most places, and was never a good enough reason to justify paying starting teachers poverty wages.
New York State, which I think most will agree is a state with a strong teachers' union and all that goes with it, has been phasing out defined-benefit pension plans over the past few decades. My mother-in-law, who retired about 10 years ago, was among the last wave to get the "Tier I" full-salary pensions; if you become a teacher in NYS now, you get a much less generous package (I don't know offhand whether it's still defined-benefit, just less, or if they've switched to defined-contribution plans now).
> Counterpoint: teachers' pay is great, it's just backloaded in pension plans.
Yet another counter counterpoint - there are still companies and government jobs with defined pension plans that pay far more than teachers. Even without those, there are still many, many jobs requiring a comparative amount of education, far fewer hours worked, and pay more even once you subtract maximizing 401k contributions yearly (let alone considering the added costs of buying school supplies).
Half the reason to be a teacher is because half the job is having fun. Most curricula is set in stone and requirements are nationally standardized (US and Asia). You more or less get summers off (there are conferences and summer school) and there are almost no jobs where you can take ~1.5 months off every year. Teaching is also one of the few steady jobs in rural America.
I feel like most people haven't been in an actual ~5th grade classroom in a long time -- literally half of it is playing games/trying to have fun.
And Youtube, good god has the educational content on Youtube evolved in the last decade.
5th grade education for my children has one 45-minute “play” recess (which doesn’t involve direct teacher instruction) and one 1-hour Physical Education class lead by a gym teacher.
The rest of their day 8:30 AM - 3:30 PM is composed of maths, language, science, history, and technology education all done on paper or at purpose-designated computers. Next year they will receive their own devices.
The playing with blocks and Lincoln logs ended in kindergarten, with the introduction of spelling test and arithmetic quizzes in first grade, so I’m not sure if I’d characterize the work my childrens’ teachers do as “literally half of it is playing games/trying to have fun” or that “[h]alf the reason to be a teacher is because half the job is having fun.”
Seems like it is hard work, with both practical instruction directed toward 20-30 children with varying levels of discipline, interest, and abilities, and management of just as many if not more parents with similarly varying levels of discipline, interest, and abilities.
This is a public school in one of the largest state systems in the country (United States) so perhaps your experience is informed by something more niche.
Being around kids all day isn’t fun. It’s stressful. Part of the job is appearing to be calm and approachable to the children and it absolutely wears out most people.
It’s just like thinking enjoying having a pet means you’d love working with dozens of dogs all day. If you’re lucky to have well behaved dogs, it’s okay. But you’re most likely going to have some barking all day, one’s going to vomit, some are going to fight, and any time anything happens the owners completely blame you and will threaten you in every way they can imagine.
Professional sports. If you work in professional sports there is a baked in 1 to 2 month vacation for all players, coaching staff, and assorted player personnel.
Teaching is work. I have the feeling you haven't been in a 5th grade classroom in a long time. Or any grade. People get into teaching because they want to help others. Especially if they get into special education.
You know, having known and being related to multiple teachers, I've not heard any of them express it as -fun-. Meaningful, important, challenging, yes, but not 'fun'. The two college professors I know have expressed it a such, but that's it. Of the teachers I had, I could see some of the advanced placement ('gifted') teachers viewing it as fun, because we were generally well behaved and smaller class sizes, but even there a common through line was taking advantage of the class' temperament and offloading the curriculum back onto us (i.e., "pick a topic in (X) to teach to everyone").
There is a tradeoff in lesson planning; there are resources around the proscribed curriculum (i.e., teach to the book), but that is decidedly not fun or interesting and the kids -will- misbehave more; the alternative for most classes (the advanced placement as mentioned above notwithstanding) is to prep something more interesting, but that requires using more time outside the classroom for 'work'.
Outside of the workday, which runs from 7-3:30 or so (and sometimes both before and after, if there are faculty meetings and things, or if they recruit from the teaching pool to help with kid drop off/pick up), there is grading, so it is not uncommon for a teacher's workday to run close to 12 hours.
You do, as you say, get summers off, but again, nearly all the teachers I know use that time to look for summer jobs, because the pay is so poor. Sometimes it's summer school or just independent tutoring, sometimes it's service industry work; nothing quite like running into your students from the prior year while handing their mom their McDonald's from the drive through. The only teacher I know who didn't (recently retired) do that had inherited their house, so had no rent/house payment to make, and -could- live, frugally, on a teachers' salary.
The average teacher's pay in the US is essentially the median pay for all college graduates. Many engineering disciplines pay only $10k/year more, without the benefits.
>Counterpoint: teachers' pay is great, it's just backloaded in pension plans.
Pensions are cheap. I have a much better pension plan than the teachers in my state and the long term cost is about 16% of payroll - 8% from my employer and 8% from me. Hardly unreasonable cost, and yet I'll be able to comfortably retire around 55 and never worry about money again. That's not insignificant but it's not what is causing public schools to be underfunded.
> Counterpoint: teachers' pay is great, it's just backloaded in pension plans.
Nonsense. Even the most basic look at the numbers shows you this is absolutely false.
Let's take a rich liberal state first. MA. Average teacher salary: $60k. Average pension $43k. Teachers contribute 9.78% of their salary in order to get this pension! The state contributes 18.17% This is not all that different from a 401k.
You're confusing teachers with police officers, where the average pension is twice as high.
> Why didn't I end up in teaching? The licensing requirements in Minnesota are insane. Counselor's straight up told me I'd have to borrow ~$50k from the UMN for a MS in Curriculum and Instruction before I could teach.
Pensions are typically not paid based on average teacher salary, but paid based on terminal teacher salary. Defined benefit pensions are quite different from a 401k.
In our district, once you qualify for a pension you get 2% of your terminal salary per year you work. If you work for 40 years, you will be paid 80% of your last year's salary.
Teachers pay into the system, quite substantially, at rates that are similar to what you would pay for a 401k. And their average pensions are quite low.
1. Administrators. We have insane administrative bloat, especially in higher ed. In some institutions there is nearly a 1:1 count of administrators to faculty.
Ironically, given the social politics implied by the author, a significant amount of administration bloat is specifically tied to DEI.
2. Well, they are. A teaching certification used to only require two years of higher learning compared to typical 4 for other things. That said, most teachers are actually more highly educated than the average person because schools use educational attainment as direct basis for pay. My mother has a Master’s and is shy only a few hours and a dissertation from being a Ph.D. This was relatively common, especially for special ed teachers or those who focus on a specific subject like Math or English.
3. Partly because school in the US is boring and designed to grind out individuality in favor of making good industrial cogs. We no longer have an economy that rewards industrial cogs so students resent their school experience in adulthood as they discover how illy prepared they are for the world. That and parents/social fabric encourages and allows anti-social behavior and viewpoints.
4. Yes, and parents not giving a shit isn’t even a cause, it’s a symptom of larger and more intractable social and cultural problems in parts of America. Fixing this is nearly impossible because those most motivated to fix it are even more heavily motivated to ignore significant amounts of critical data about the causal factors.
5. Yes. Scaling is hard, and we’ve roughly tripled the population since we built the institutionalization of education in the US. It’s obvious a breakpoint exists somewhere and we failed to pivot.
Re #1) I was a school board member and did exhaustive analysis of our budget. For primary education through high school, admin is NOT the root cause.
If you take any school budget, and strip away everything that is not an actual classroom teacher, you will find that ~1/3 or less goes to "frontline" teaching costs.
Another 1/3 goes to special ed and all that is attendant with that. I mean, my district BOUGHT a car and hired a FULLTIME driver for one student who had to be taken to special programs. You have 1:1 class aids for many kids. Special ed is < 10% of kids, and even then the huge costs add up for the 1%. This is a massively subscale operation where every school is legally obligated to deliver services.
Then you have the last 1/3 which is everything else. Food, facilities, sports, admin, transportation, etc. Admin is actually a leaner slice than most unless you are getting into really small schools where you have a principal on top of the teachers and that adds significant salary. In bigger schools this fades away with scale.
Wife often gets kids who need to be in special Ed. Takes a few weeks or more.
Basically most of her time is spent dealing with the one kid. Or the aftermath. Not fun calling parents telling them that Susan is bleeding from a thrown chair. Of John was assaulted in the bathroom.
Lots of time spent chasing kid when he runs away.
Never mind her own wounds.
These are kindergartners.
This year She’s currently has 2 full time aids for basically 2 kids. She only got the aids because she threatened to quit on the spot.
That and the special ed kids get a high allotment of cash vs regular student. In effect, the normal kid is robbed by the special ed kid who gets disproportional budget per capita.
A lot of time and talk gets spent about equity between poor and rich kids, or white and black kids, but you rarely see talk of normalizing the spending differential between special and gen pop.
Somehow, in the US government it's only "benefits" that are considered. "Cost" never is.
As I said elsewhere, I defy anyone to claim that Finland doesn't care about kids' special needs. They have the best education in the world. What percent do they spend on it?
Why don't you find out and share with us rather than just asking questions and having others do the work for you. If Finland is really significant to this debate then share some data.
I can find their total spending & their general policies on special ed (which I did share), but not that. On the other hand, we do have some Finnish people on HN, so maybe they know.
> If Finland is really significant to this debate
If? They have what's generally considered the best education in the world.
I read a book a while back whose main argument was that we spend so much on the bottom 1% (special ed), why aren't we spending an equal amount on the top 1%? Why don't the smartest kids get one on one instruction and special resources that no one else gets?
To be fair the author was fairly balanced and presented the arguments against, such as that they tend to come from wealthier families that can provide that support, that they will be fine on their own without it whereas the bottom 1% need the support, and so on.
But it was an interesting thought experiment none the less. What would our society look like if we spent as much on the top 1% of students as the bottom? Or do we already via college education?
Some of it may be crab mentality. No matter how much you spend on some (but not all) special ed kids, there's no worry they will academically surpass the majority of students. So there's no fear from parents that the spending will mean their own kid gets dragged further down the pecking order.
Spending for gifted children means putting other kids even higher up the pecking order than their own average kid. Who wants to spend a bunch of money to watch their kid get left further behind the front of the pack?
I taught in Oakland, CA thirty years ago as a substitute, so I saw a variety of schools.
I saw the corrupt administrators in certain schools effectively diverting funds for things like special education by hiring their friends for the well-paid jobs like special ed and resource specialist and then calling a substitute (me) to actually do the job.
And that isn't saying this always happens (I imagine the smaller suburban schools with people involved would have less of this). But the existence of these special programs present a great opportunity for graft and so there's incentive to avoid making special education at all efficient.
There's a finite amount of tax money available, so disproportionately allotment to a few special children effectively robs the other children of resources.
Yes, disabilities are expensive to accommodate. That’s why we have laws like the ADA. Because when given the option to disregard the disabled, many will choose do so.
This in turn leads to building a society in which the disabled are discarded as an inconvenience to society, rather than as people with equal rights to public accommodation.
"expensive" but everything has a limit. Even losing a limb or an eye has a dollar cost associated with it, if you look in the right tables. Pretending that there is no limit, or that the choice is a binary "no limit" vs. "don't give a shit" is just not responsible.
If I give Johnny, Jimmy, and Karen an equal investment of $20 and 20 hours of labor each for their education, I haven't "discarded" Karen, even if she needs more money and more time to get the same equality of outcome. In the same vein, I don't at all want to "discard" special ed children, I just want any public funds provided to the other children to be a nearly equal monetary investment.
>That’s why we have laws like the ADA
The period after passing of the ADA was associated with sharp drops in employment inclusion of the disabled [0]. The ADA may have actually been one of the biggest drivers of the discarding of the disabled. Not only that, the ADA encouraged racketeering against business owners for disingenuous accommodation complaints (someone off the street runs up, asked to use your bathroom, you allow the public to use it just this once and bam ADA complaint as they were secretly working for a lawyer checking for the "right" kind of grab bar) where businesses sometimes end up closing accommodations to the public. Personally I am heavily against the ADA as I believe eliminating these "protections" helps protect the disabled's inclusion within society.
An equal monetary investment for disabled children would mean they don’t have a teacher. You might be able to teach 50 non-disabled children with 2 teachers that costs $100K each to employ.
An equal $4000/student/year is not enough to hire anyone for a special needs student, who 1) won’t be able to benefit from the economy of scale in a normal classroom and 2) has needs that require a larger portion of a person’s time to attend to.
You need many multiple times the investment to accommodate kids with special needs because they have special needs.
If the school can't or won't educate the student with his/her equal allotment, then the school needs to return the monetary allotment to the parents for parental discretion on how to educate the child. If the state fails to provide the service with the allotment available, you don't just start taking from the other kids' pie.
>An equal $4000/student/year
You're off by almost 4x the average if you live in the US. For reference, for the $~16k spent per year, I was able to (privately) hire someone to take care of my infant over 40 hours a week (and all 12 months), an infant that needed around the clock care and couldn't be counted on to go unwatched for even a few seconds and who constantly irritated others with utterly mind-shattering screaming colic.
I like this, because it would probably be better both for society and for the kids.
Let's say the state spends $15K per student with no disabilities. The state says to the parent, "OK, we'll give you $25K to take care of your kid."
The parents grumble, but they find a school that caters to those kids and will take that voucher. Would it be much worse than they're getting now? I doubt it. If it is, the state can subsidize that school, and probably still end up spending less than they are now.
Now it's a question of money, as it should be for a state-wide program. Would the state say "we'll give you $150K to take care of your kid?" Probably not. Really extreme cases that need that much money could be handled by other public & private organizations, but the state gains a measure of reasonableness for the school budget.
The $4000/student/year wasn’t a real figure, nor was it a reference to total costs per student (obviously schools have more than payroll costs)… it is the result of the two hypothetical numbers I gave when divided. Use whatever numbers you want, caring for special needs groups always costs way more per student than for others.
I disagree with the rest. Universal schooling is an important part of a health society. It is up to the government to provide adequate funding for its obligations. Systematically discriminating to ease budget constraints is not an ethical solution.
You see systematic discrimination as spending roughly the same amount on each child. I see systematic discrimination as spending disproportionately much more public money on some children at the cost of others. We both find systematic discrimination of public education funds as unethical, but draw different conclusions on who is being discriminated against. I don't see our difference of opinion as an ethical deficiency in either of our persons.
This data is REALLY hard to get. For me to do it, I had to go line by line through the budget.
For example, all the classroom aids are typically assigned as teaching costs. But the reality is that they are assigned to individual students with IEPs (individual education plans), ergo, they should be categorized as special ed.
Same thing in pulling out transportation. Or tuition to other districts. Admin dealing with special ed grants and recordkeeping. It goes on and on...
Education and social services are one of the areas where we really shouldn't be leaning that hard on ROI. The return is a well taken care of populace. Yes, it may cost, but we pay that cost because we're not assholes.
I would argue that ROI is extremely important in education. It's just that the "return" on our investment is not purely financial. Producing students who will be competent to effectively participate in and wisely run the society of tomorrow is a large part of the return that we seek. So, to that extent it may be that high special needs costs are worth it if they demonstrably help students become self-sufficient instead of dependent wards of the state. I can't say for sure that they are worth it, I'm saying that the mere fact that they're expensive doesn't mean they aren't cost-effective in the greater sense.
Those are still returns, just not monetary ones. You can get plenty of buy in that educational outcomes are good in themselves, but schools fail at that basic metric.
On the other hand, as a way to provide social services to underprivileged children they are pretty decent. But that's not what they're advertised as (school isn't known as an acronym for Social Care and Health Out Of a Location), and people end up pissed.
Are you saying "whatever it costs, it doesn't matter"? Because I can't agree with that. Nor is it good public policy to just be "not assholes."
The absolute dollar amount does matter, and it has nothing to do with being assholes or not. There are different ways to meet children's needs and spending an infinite amount of money is just not sustainable.
You say that like we’re overspending on spending ed. I don’t understand that position. Of course they require more resources than the average student - they’re special cases, literally! To take that away would be devastating for society’s most vulnerable, as most parents aren’t equipped with the skills or resources to be able to do any different with their children. Some cases are extreme. Should we just let them either fail regular classes many years over or become extremely disruptive? How is that good for anyone?
It’s easy to say X is expensive or Y takes up Z part of the budget. We saw a lot of that with the whole defund the police movement. But no one asks what should X cost? Maybe it’s already at the required level, or even less, despite it being such a large percentage of the budget?
It's said without (much) judgement. In the abstract, it seems exactly right to spend on it.
But the reality is it a) very expensive and b) very disruptive. As some siblings mention, you will often have a class with 3-4 adults, only one of which is a teacher. And then several students who (through no fault of their own) can barely hold it together. For the 90% of kids in class, this is not helpful. And distributing it amongst many classes vs a more centralized special ed delivery system compounds the cost.
We have aggressively used the school system as a distribution point of social services. Again, this seems logical. But this takes focus away from what the main intent is for the school system.
There are pros and cons to this approach. I don't exactly know the answer, but instead of blaming administrators or teachers, we should be looking at what else we are asking schools to do besides educate. I know personally that the principals and superintendents spent less than 20% of their time thinking about how to make education better for the 90%.
I do think that the special ed model is completely broken. I think public schools overspend on special ed, and a lot of that funding is about getting special ed kids into the same classrooms as other kids and reducing the disruptions that they cause.
Instead, all students would be better served (and served more efficiently) if schools would admit that people learn at different rates, and segregated the children based on that. The disruptive special ed kids, who are often years behind, should have very small classes with other kids of the same level and lots of attention from teachers. Conversely, the kids who are good at math or reading should be put in accelerated classes.
Unfortunately, this kind of separation makes parents unhappy: they want their kids to all be in the "super special" classes despite the fact that on average, their kids are average. Parents are the ones who vote for school board, so school boards are unlikely to do anything that makes parents unhappy.
I think you are assuming special ed kids are academically slower and I have to push back on that. Special Ed encompasses students of all types. Some are mentally handicap, some have physical disabilities. One of my friends was wheelchair bound and had to leave class 5 minutes before the bell in order not to get stuck in the hallway. Others have respiratory issues that require classrooms with special equipment, special buses, etc. And then you have the deaf and blind students, hardly slower than anyone else, but they still require additional help that has nothing to do with being disruptive. Most of them weren't disruptive, just students trying to get a solid education like everyone else, and as guaranteed by the Supreme Court.
My understanding is that special ed money is distributed according to a power law: most kids classified as "special ed" actually need very little help (and very little money), and don't disrupt things for other students. I had a friend in my middle school Latin classes who was blind, and while he needed special written materials and some private tutoring, he didn't need any other help. The same is true of people with dyslexia, people who are wheelchair-bound, etc. They need some accommodations, but they are not where most of the money is spent.
Conversely, the kids who do need tons of resources are usually kids with severe mental or developmental disabilities. These kids usually have a 1:1 aide telling them what to do and trying to help them either understand the lesson or work through a totally different lesson (which also must be a humiliating experience - I would never want that for my child). I have seen both of these cases in public schools. These kids would certainly be better served by having a teacher who can pay attention to their needs instead of a teacher who can't and an aide who tries to keep up.
I think your response reveals how accustomed you have become to the luxury of having plentiful resources. You ask how it is good for anyone to not spend substantially more on students with special needs, but in many of the poorer countries of the world this attitude would be baffling. In many cases these students will never be able to contribute enough to society to recover what was invested in them. Hard choices have to be made that cause sadness, but unfortunately that's the way it is. If your country becomes less anomalously wealthy in the future, you may also have to make such decisions.
The article was about the US. My response is about the US. I believe in a more just American society that takes care of the most vulnerable, not just those that contribute the most.
Speculation: Maybe they aren't funded from a distinct resource pool and are instead assumed to be a percentage of the whole that is too small to care about. However over the years the number or cost of providing service has gone up to the point where the current expectations are an undue burden on the rest of the group. If that is the case then the funding should be split off at the source into it's own portion and receive clearer representation in funding deciding bodies.
Administration seems to be entirely manually based and has lots of positions that should be consolidated or automated.
For example, each school in my county has at least one person dedicated to managing iPads and tech equipment. This isn’t the networking and server support or even desktop support, that’s done centrally. This is just a human who hands them out, collects them, and processes warranty claims. The person knows nothing about the equipment and is basically just an asset manager.
That’s one of many examples of people who don’t perform much value add and take resources from higher priorities. Why not hire a dedicated librarian who also manages devices but can help with organizing information, research, etc.
In many schools, the librarian is also the ad hoc asset manager. But that's yet another symptom of the problem the article talks about. Managing tech equiment takes a lot of time, and foisting that problem onto the librarian means they either do a shittier job being a librarian (recommending books to kids, etc.) or they work longer hours for no additional pay.
You might argue that managing inventory should be automated but... that's just not how systems involving lots of random people work. The reason it's a full-time job to keep track of iPads and laptops is because the people using those things are kids and distracted parents. Stuff gets lost, power adapters get yanked and broken, etc. A parent stuffs an iPad in a random bin in the teacher's classroom. They think they "returned" it, but no one knows it's in there. Someone has to do actual communication and legwork to sort all that out. It's a real job.
My point wasn’t that asset management was easy. It does take time.
My point is that hiring an iPad manager as a 100% human is a bad idea. I suggested hiring an additional librarian, not adding extra work to the existing librarian.
Librarians aren't just people who like books. They have specialized skills, and usually have a master's degree. Librarians in many school districts have a teaching credential in addition to a Masters. The idea of hiring a person as specialized as a librarian to manage iPads shows an extraordinary misunderstanding of librarians.
My kids have gone through about 9 schools. None of the librarians had masters degrees.
The librarians in my city manage computers in the library and manage short term loaners of tablets and laptops.
I work with librarians who have masters and phd and I don’t work in education. It’s an interesting job.
I think I have enough of an understanding that it’s fair that a librarian could manage the iPad distribution for a school. It’s busy two times of the year and other times they could do more productive tasks.
The current iPad wrangler is there all year and does nothing beyond hand out and collect iPads and coordinate the repairs (<5%/year).
I don't get why kids have such things. Other than typing there really isn't anything kids need to learn that is better done with a computer until high school. (Even then everything could be done with paper, but word processors are useful for writing)
There’s value to technology in the classroom beyond “it’s better than [x]”
A difference in learning format that can be beneficial to some. It is helpful just to introduce children to technology as well. And for some it may spark interests that paper does not.
> That and parents/social fabric encourages and allows anti-social behavior and viewpoints.
This is under-appreciated. I don’t know about other 1990s kids, but a lot of my teachers growing up pushed a “question authority” attitude. Like, painting the Tinker anti-Vietnam War protestors in a positive light, etc. “Follow social norms without questioning them” definitely wasn’t a thing we were taught. Is it really surprising then that you ended up with a generation who thinks Joe Rogen is a smart guy they should listen to?
Same experience here going to school in the 90s, but I have the exact opposite take. I was taught to question authority and think this was one of the few really important lessons I received from school. I think that's why I was instinctively able to see through all the flag waving conformism after 9-11 and the current MAGA death cult. The lack of critical thinking I see from so many of my peers didn't arise from being taught to question authority, it's because many of these people are just dumb as hell and didn't learn jack shit at all.
The "MAGA death cult" is literally the product of questioning authority. It's a situation where the establishment has lost control, leaving a vacuum of authority filled by TV personalities, conspiracy theorists, and complete randos.
I disagree. From what I can see, it looks like they just replaced the old boss with the new boss. They still follow Trump just as slavishly as they used to follow the old elite, they even show their fealty by playing russian roulette with covid, and losing at a predictable rate, hence the "death" part of the cult. I see no evidence the anti-authoritarian nature of the movement is real at all, they just have a new boot to lick.
I agree with some of your points but I'd take exception to: "Partly because school in the US is boring and designed to grind out individuality in favor of making good industrial cogs."
If by industrial cog, you mean someone who's suited for work in manufacturing, the US certainly isn't producing those at even the level it's reduced manufacturing base needs. It's hard to say what the exact aim of the US education system is though it does produce some amount of people sort-of competent for the jobs that are out. It's one of X many bureaucracy/industries that both produce stuff, that once produced stuff quite efficiently but become more and more characterized by an interlocked combination of administrators/pseudo-entrepreneurs who use their connections and framework of capital investment to soak a large portion of the funds going into the industry. I mean, aside from education, you have health care, the police/judicial/prison complex, the construction industry (note recent mention of $4 billion planning in the creation of high speed rail) and etc. You could say the special product of the US education system is people appropriate to be either petty bureaucrat such as social workers or people appropriate to be client of the petty bureaucrats. But of course, the education still does, to some extent, teach people ordinary skills for more ordinary jobs but in fashion abusive to both teachers and children and profitably to those in the rackets.
Special Ed is as stupid as doing open heart surgeries on 85 year olds to give them 3 extra years. They’re an enormous burden on the system and are ruining everything for almost all of us. Why do severely mentally handicapped kids even need to be educated. Just provide them with an amount of money to live their lives and make their time here as happy as possible. There is going to be a reckoning.
I suspect you haven't met too many people in these programs.
I had a student in one of my university programs who was handicapped and could barely see 3ft in front of him. Guy had to ride in a motorized chair, get guided around campus, and use a super-zoom lens and a laptop screen that made everything 10x-50x its size to be able to read the whiteboard/presentations. I'm sure none of that stuff was cheap.
But that guy was awesome, fun, and super clever. His lowest score was an A-, and he had a great character.
I'm sure he had to work ten times harder than I ever did just to get into that position, but I never heard him complain.
Personally, I think keeping a mind as great as his in some sort of hedonic trance instead of letting him learn and contribute would have been a great loss, and possibly quite cruel.
He probably hasn't, but we have to look at total numbers, not anecdotes.
What do countries with education systems that are superior to the US in almost every metric do with these kids? We need to look at the best way to handle it, not just how much we care in the abstract.
>Guy had to ride in a motorized chair, get guided around campus, and use a super-zoom lens and a laptop screen that made everything 10x-50x its size to be able to read the whiteboard/presentations. I'm sure none of that stuff was cheap.
Did the University pay for that? Or did that student / his family carry pretty much all those costs, except maybe the campus being built to ADA requirements? If a parent wants to spend 10x on their kid verse the 'average' kid I have no problem with that at all.
Yeah but is it worth the hundreds of thousands or possibly millions that the tax payers had to pay for that to be possible for him? My answer is a firm no. It’s not cruel, you have to draw the line somewhere. I could say it’s cruel I can’t live wherever I want and spend my days as I please but we can all agree it isn’t.
Special Ed spending is not just severely handicapped kids. Some of them have minor issues that require assistance or an IEP. My daughter for example had a stutter that required the help of a speech pathologist. After a year of help, she no longer stuttered, and graduated with an A average. Yet you see this type of thing as an enormous burden, where I see it as no different than a teacher tutoring a student struggling with a subject.
Yes, I realize there are varying degrees and in many if not most cases it makes sense. There are a very small number of cases that are an unbearable burden on the entire system and if not checked it will bring the whole house down for everyone. There has to be some sort of actuarial science involved with this sort of thing when it comes to government spending on accommodating the handicapped and in terminal hospice care.
I'd also be against disproportionately spending on "gifted" children. I also doubt "gifted" are much of a drain. I was in all the honors classes and basically spent my entire day reading whatever I liked, ignoring my teachers and basically demanding no time from anyone. Teachers finally learned to leave me completely alone except to grade the test because I always passed with flying colors and had zero interest in interacting with anyone but the lunch lady. I'm not asking for extra spending at all for "gifted" children, only that spending amongst all children be normalized to be nearly the same.
Meanwhile I saw nearly daily the math teacher spend 20 minutes trying to console the girl in the previous period who would beat the chair I was going to sit in senseless.
Personally I would have been much happier in 'gen pop' anyways and then there would have been even easier bullshit tests while I spent my public school time reading college CS and chemistry books.
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>You were in "gen pop". Honors classes are just that, honors classes. Gifted classes are another thing altogether.
My school was a country school, we didn't have anything beyond 'honors' classes. If you want to call yourself gifted and the people in my country school's honor class not, that's fine, I don't think we were particularly gifted. In my experience the student:teacher ratio were significantly tighter in these classes. I realize some people only consider 'gifted' as the very most challenging class in a large school system (not including 'honors' even if that is the highest available in the school) whereas others may call the gifted classes anything more challenging than the 'normal' core (I call gen-pop) curriculum.
>If you agree with the guy I responded to, in that you wouldn't mind removing the mentally challenged from the school system entirely, boy, that's not a good look for you.
I would think someone so eager to call themselves 'gifted' and the people they are speaking with 'not' would understand this is what's called a straw-man. I'm only asking for the gen-pop kids to be given roughly equal financial per-capita investment as special-ed.
>ifted classes are like 5 to 10 students.
Lower ratios to the extent you spend significantly disproportionately more than the average student are exactly the kind of special treatment I'm against when using public funds. If you want a private school for that where the student or their family pays for it, have at it.
You were in "gen pop". Honors classes are just that, honors classes. Gifted classes are another thing altogether.
If you agree with the guy I responded to, in that you wouldn't mind removing the mentally challenged from the school system entirely, boy, that's not a good look for you.
Because the difference between the average student to those with severe learning disabilities is the same as the difference between truly gifted students and even the honors students. And here's how you can tell the difference. Honors classes are always a full class. I've not been in a single honors class that wasn't the average class size. Gifted classes are like 5 to 10 students. I personally knew every other gifted student in my high school. Grades 9 - 12, knew them all. There were not that many, roughly 30 any given year. Across all four grades.
School funding has accounted for a majority of the outsized tax levy in the suburb of Chicago I live in, for decades, predating the movement towards formalized DEI (in fact, we're only recently beginning to hire dedicated DEI people). DEI is not the reason schools are so expensive.
(That's not to say DEI is necessarily benign or useful; the jury is still out for me.)
> 2. Well, they are. A teaching certification used to only require two years of higher learning compared to typical 4 for other things. That said, most teachers are actually more highly educated than the average person because schools use educational attainment as direct basis for pay.
Incorrect: it depends on the state, the subject, and the grade level. For secondary education of a core subject, in Michigan, for example, I had to take all of the classes for a normal 4-year degree in the subject, plus taking the equivalent of two years of education classes. Taking 18-20 credit hours per semester, it took me five years to graduate. So the requirements can actually be much more difficult than a normal degree.
When I taught Title I, there was an additional requirement that you had to be "highly qualified". That typically meant a 4-year degree out equivalent experience, no matter the subject or grade level.
Many teachers have a master's not due to pay, as you claim, but because states essentially mandate it. In Michigan you're required to get continuing education credits. I believe the requirement drops off once you have a master's. So it doesn't make a lot of sense not to get one.
The U.S. spent $90.5 billion for "Elementary, Secondary, and Vocational Education" in 2021* (a subset of "Education, Training, Employment, and Social Services"), which is 1.3% of $6.82 trillion in total 2021 government expenditures. Compare to $696.5B for Medicare, $754.8B for National Defense, etc.
If anything, this illustrates how relatively unimportant a base level of education is in the U.S.
The US government spends significantly more on education than the military, ~$800B on K-12 education alone. On a per student basis, the US spends more than almost any other country in the world. If US education is poor, it isn't for lack of government spending.
Per the US Department of Education[0], the US spends 34% more per student than the OECD average. At the post-secondary level, the US spends double the OECD average.
That looks like ~28% of the state budget, and per-student spending appears to very high (the 4th highest in the U.S.). Washington is spending 1.5X per student as compared to California, and is apparently not seeing commensurate improvements. I wonder if there are folks working on debugging the apparent inefficiencies of state education systems.
It's often not even state budget in the US. In the case of my town, while I believe some money comes from the state in the form of grants etc., about 60% of my town's property taxes go to funding the elementary school and a split (with two other towns) of the regional high school district.
“Total expenditures for public elementary and secondary schools in the United States were $800 billion in 2018–19 (in constant 2020–21 dollars). This amounts to $15,621 per public school pupil enrolled in the fall of that year.”
Yeah except 1) discretionary spending (including defense is like 25% of total spending (with defense ~1/2 of that), so the 90b is a meaningful part of discretionary spending. 2) as others have pointed out, the vast majority of (80%-90%+?) is funded by state and local government.
As explained below your numbers are off by an order of magnitude. But I’m shocked to see such a basic misconception about how our government works on HN of all places.
Education is the opposite of a money pit, education is an investment. Even if it is managed poorly,you are better off than the country with a people that can't read.
> Disruptive children are caused by parents who frankly just don’t give a shit. Throwing more money into schools won’t ever fix this problem.
I was a disruptive child and my parents were the opposite of people who didn’t give a shit. Both of them highly valued education and spent plenty of time with me. they just had to contend with a child who wasn’t well behaved at school and it was genetics more than anything they did. They spent thousands of dollars on therapists and medicines and it didn’t help that much. Luckily for me, puberty seemed to turn things around and I ended up doing well in high school and very well in college (at a good school). Now I’ve got two little trouble makers of my own and it’s pretty obvious to me where they got those genes from.
I agree that dealing with problematic kids is a pain in the ass for teachers and I do try to thank them when I see them, and I even agree that parenting is often the issue, but a lot of it is genetics and luck.
That’s valid, there are different kinds of disruptive kids.
A good friend of mine at high school was very bright, kind of a troublemaker, diagnosed with ADHD, took prescription Ritalin, was a bit of a pain in the ass with his teachers, but had parents who cared and he ended up graduating and doing fine.
I never formed good habits and I really wish my parent prioritized that (Ritalin) over growing big and tall for a minuscule chance of making it in pro sports.
I’ve asked this question of some acquaintances that prioritize sports above all else. Their kids play different sports all year around and are on all these traveling teams. I’ve asked them if they seriously think their kids will be good enough to get a college scholarship or play pro sports (I’ve seen them, they won’t be). They just shrug. I have to presume this is how they were raised and so they are doing it to their own kids.
"The sieve" is insane. And it begins early. While there are plenty of people who get to play professional sports who weren't in peewee, who didn't do travel ball, etc. It does not hurt.
Because in order to even get a shot to play professionally, you have to play well in college, preferably at a notable school. In order to get a shot to play well in a notable college, you have to play well in high school. That means you have to make varsity, play on the team, be a starter. And that usually means you have to be ready to play when you get to high school. And the best way to do that is to play peewee, travel ball, etc.
You'll find out if the kid is coachable, if he can be made coachable, if he's got aptitude, etc.
I volunteer with kids, and I see parents who prioritize sports where they have to pay a lot of money for fees over more scholastic and much cheaper programs for the smaller chance of getting a sports scholarship/career than more plentiful academic scholarships.
I don't know if they think their children just aren't capable intellectually or what.
At least in my case, sports was my parent’s opportunity to socialize. It was never really about my interests or well being, they didn’t want to lose their contextual friends and contacts. It was so bad I was disallowed from doing speech and debate in high school.
There are some parents with delusions about their kids being pro athletes, but many are just providing their kid the opportunity to do something he likes, and can afford to do it.
There is a whole industry around youth sports that is designed to extract money from parents. That doesn't mean that the kids don't enjoy it though.
Dude, are you me? I'm the same way. Highly educated parents, very supportive. I was a major disruptive shithead all through school - in retrospect probably because I was bored. I was not any better as a teenager, but calmed down post university graduation.
Now I have a highly disruptive 2-year old that Preschool calls "behavioural issues" and wants psychologists involved. And I'm like "yes, we're willing to have those conversations", but secretly I think "He'll have the same journey as me - I will need to make sure he's sufficiently physically and intellectually stimulated for the next 20 years, and everything will turn out fine." Of course it's not fair to place that burden on others - his peers, or educators - and I will do as much as I can in extracurricular time, BUT, there's only so much my partner and I can do.
I thought it was well known that disruptive kids are often unrecognised creative/smart kids who are challenging the authority/leadership of the teacher.
There has been some research on this in the UK, look into some of the work by David Price around creative test answers.
> 2. It seems that education degrees are seen as easier to achieve than others.
Here is the problem. Teachers in America compare themselves to professionals, but their test scores are below the average for college educated people generally: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2017/.... Now 40% of college graduates don’t even get a job that requires a college degree. Disproportionately, those are people with lower aptitude scores. Teachers as a group are right on the borderline above those folks.
Teacher salaries are not low compared to jobs typically held by people with similar test scores—especially when you account for degree-required jobs that pay a premium for mathematical aptitude (accounting, engineering), or dealing with blood and body parts (nursing).
That's not what that link says. In fact the source explicitly states that they are not looking at SAT scores by major, they are just looking at average SAT scores for a given college and weighting those scores by the percentage of education majors at that college. That led to their conclusion that: "Graduates with education majors are disproportionately found at schools where students have lower SAT scores." That doesn't mean the graduates with education majors themselves have lower scores unless you make some unsupported assumptions about distribution of SAT scores at any given college.
But even if education major SAT scores are lower on average, it it seems like backwards thinking when talking about pay. The point isn't that all current individual teachers deserve to be paid more; it's that teaching as a profession should pay more to attract talented people who otherwise pursue more lucrative fields, just like any other profession. If you paid doctors and engineers low wages, you'd probably fail to attract some top talent as well. But that doesn't then become a justification for those low wages since the low wages caused the issue in the first place.
> That led to their conclusion that: "Graduates with education majors are disproportionately found at schools where students have lower SAT scores." That doesn't mean the graduates with education majors themselves have lower scores unless you make some unsupported assumptions about distribution of SAT scores at any given college.
It assumes that education majors have similar SAT scores to other majors in a given school. That’s an assumption, sure, but I think a pretty reasonable one.
Teaching pays nothing compared to CS, finance, basically most things you need a degree for. Those brilliant individuals who would like to teach have to decide if their passion is worth making less money than some warehouses are paying around here. Those who don't have the grades or abilities to reach for the higher-paid fields have less of a dilemma. We're actively selecting against the candidates who have more lucrative options. This is where the issue comes in where people start saying they should do it for the joy of teaching. That's easy to say when you're drawing a comfortable salary. Being tight on money sucks and passion doesn't pay the bills.
I work in tech and would likely teach if it paid the same. My plan has always been to front load my retirement savings early in my career through tech so that I can take a lower paying teaching job when I'm older.
I’m in the exact same boat. One thing I enjoy doing is guest lecturing at local colleges in CS classes, around topics I have professional expertise in. If that sounds like something you’d like to do as well, I’d recommend getting involved in your local ACM chapter, as most college CS programs have an ACM tie-in.
It depends on where you're teaching; teaching is a terrible deal in rural school districts and in some states, but teaching in urban and especially wealthy suburban school districts is a pretty fantastic deal: it's a white collar salary (every single teacher at the public high school my kids went to makes over $100k) with a defined-benefit pension plan, ironclad job security, and more vacation days than any other profession.
It's not at all the case that teaching isn't competitive with other degree-requiring white-collar professions; depending on where you are in the CS/IT food chain, it's quite competitive with tech.
Defined-benefit pensions have become so alien to private market jobs that it's easy to overlook how valuable they are, or to forget that a lot of people are very happy to work towards a strong retirement.
My school district is in a middle sized city with a dominant land grant university. A starting teacher makes $40k. Requires both a BA and a teaching credential. Hours are long, and teachers spend a decent amount of money for out of pocket supplies, especially at some of the schools that despite level funding seem to get the short end of the stick.
IT in my area pays anyone with a pulse and basic computer skills $40k. A rookie developer from our land grant university can easily start at $60K with no experience. And that same developer can earn $100k with two years of good experience. Show me a 3rd year teacher pulling in $100k in my school district. No such unicorn exists.
The city doesn't have a DB pension, just a 403k.
Granted, the newbie teacher gets 1.5 months off in the summer, compared to 2 weeks PTO for the developer.
After 10 years, even assuming the teacher gets a Masters, the pay differential is huge.
I don't deny that there are teachers getting shafted all over the US; I'd just want people to know that the deal in many (most? all?) major urban school districts is surprisingly strong.
One suburban school district that you know of. I'm sure there are others. I'm not sure how you're extrapolating to many or all major urban school districts.
I've looked at a bunch of them (I have this argument somewhat frequently). But, sure: let's find some examples. What's a major metro where you think teachers probably get a raw deal? This is easy data to pull up.
I know OPS in Omaha doesn't pay crap. Last year's pay schedule started at $43k with a bachelor's, 47k with a master's, and 51k with a doctorate. Maxes at $71,400 with a doctorate. 2022-23 starts at $44k with a bachelor's and maxes at 75k with a doctorate.
I'm not at all surprised if teachers in Nebraska get a shittier deal than teachers in California or Illinois, but if you click around the financials for the DC West school district, teachers in suburban Omaha are routinely making 85k+. These teachers do not have doctorates. Note that the base salary of a teacher is just the floor on their compensation; they make substantial additional money from extracurriculars and in-school mentoring work.
Valley is not suburban Omaha. They're in the same county, but Valley is distinctly a separate city and not a suburb. Even with how far West Omaha has expanded, there's no one in the area that's going to call it a suburb without laughing a little. Is that the best you could find?
How about you look at the number of teachers employed by OPS vs DC West? They have one elementary school, one middle school, and one high school in that district vs OPS serving an area encompassing hundreds of thousands of residents.
You were excited about 100k/year in California? Please tell me that's not the Bay area where that still leaves them unable to purchase a home anywhere near the area.
You also understand extracurriculars are a lot of extra time and work for a bit of extra pay, right? One of the biggest complaints I've heard is that teachers are being forced into running extracurriculars because they already work way too many hours for the pay and for any kind of work/life balance.
I found DC West by looking at a list of Omaha suburbs, finding Waterloo, and looking up its school district. It's significantly closer to Omaha than Naperville is to Chicago, so yeah, I'm sticking with that being a suburb. If it wasn't a suburb, if it was its own city, that would make my argument stronger, not weaker.
I don't know what "excited" means. By national standards, I've been extraordinarily lucky; a $100k/yr comp package wouldn't excite me right now. But I can compare what teachers make to what other white collar professionals make, and I understand how to account for the rest of the compensation package --- a defined-benefit pension in many major districts (actually, a defined-benefit pension would light me up right now) and an enormous allotment of vacation days.
Speaking only to my local school district, which breaks comp out, extracurriculars are not a "bit" of extra money; it's as much as a 20% pay boost. My real point though is simply that the base salary is where most teacher comp packages start, and there's other things that go into it.
I'm not saying "teacher" is the best deal in the whole economy, but in major metro school districts, it's not a bad deal.
And, just to be ultra clear: obviously there are a lot of school districts, especially rural districts, where this isn't the case at all.
Alright, you pick the data you want to pay attention to and ignore the fact that the majority of teachers in the Omaha Metro are on the first pay scale I showed you. And go ahead and tell me that you know the lay of the land of an area you've never stepped foot in. Nice talking to you.
Is there any evidence to show that these people make good teachers?
You don't need to be a genious to teach. You need to have good social skills with kids, care about doing a good job, and a mastery of the subject matter (which not very demanding for even average-intelligence adults, at least until the latter part of high school).
So instead of putting in the work and weighing out the different qualities of an effective educator, you pick out the most arbitrary of criteria out there and want to make that the gold standard for evaluating teachers.
I'm not a betting man, but I'd feel comfortable wagering that you are a STEM grad with solid SAT scores.
I am, and I'd make an awful teacher. Engineers are generally horrible teachers, I think because they've become so immersed in their subject that everything that is entirely alien to the learner seems obvious to them. I'm so impatient. I just want people to repeat after me, do the thing exactly like I said, and to show no initiative.
They don’t want higher standards that are essentially arbitrary and capricious and imposed by boards, committees and other groups composed of individuals who have little or no expertise in teaching.
There's very little that I know of on an SAT that would demonstrate the skills to teach a 10 year-old math. Somebody who teaches a 10 year-old math doesn't even have to be very good at math.
So the problem I have with this argument is that it implies that virtually all of the essential skills (as I see it) that are required to be a good teacher shouldn't be compensated. Instead, teachers should be compensated for the skills that make them a good engineer or historian.
I'm sure that (1) anyone can come up with counter-anecdotes, and (2) there are different kinds of intelligence, and most of us couldn't begin to cope with a class full of kids.
That said: practically every college student knows that the Education majors are the dumbest people on campus.
I don't put much weight in the judgements college-age people make of others. They're still in the mindset of the high school status game they just left.
>At some point along the way I stopped trying to rank people by intelligence.
I agree. Some of the nicest, kindest and best people I've ever met aren't very bright, and some of the nastiest, stab-you-in-the-back jerks are quite intelligent.
That's not to say the converse isn't true for many folks, but "intelligence" isn't a proxy for the quality of a human, IMHO.
1. Curriculum. Instructional tools and all the things that for profit publishers can convince politicians, bureaucrats, and administrators they need.
2. They are, and there is a useless but direct correlation to pay and degree attainment. Having more degrees will get you more money, but rarely has any correlation to the quality of teacher.
3. As in most industries where the customer isn't the payer compensation does not correlate to performance. The worst teachers make the same as the best, or more if they have the degrees.
4. Equality, no child left behind and related concepts dictate that the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Any efforts at exclusion are met with resistance, typically by unaffected / uninvolved parties.
5. The idea here is that consolidation of services will save money. The trend away from neighborhood schools to mega-schools / school complexes looks good from a burecratic view.
2. Depending on the state you may not even need one
3. It's the parents, not the kids that make them feel this way. Kids typically love their teachers
4. 100%
5. Building a new school is 10-100s of millions typically. Why it costs so much is worthy of debate, but plunking down new schools these days is far more costly than in the past.
Anything to do with the general public costs a lot because of legal liability, especially when dealing with kids.
Any loss that occurs, no matter how low probability it is, get litigated and once litigated gets incorporated into expected losses by insurance companies and mitigations for it get stipulated into the insurance coverage.
Fire, handicap accessibilities, school shootings, tornado, earthquake, trip and falls, sports equipment injury, etc.
If an entity does not cover its ass head to toe on “known” risks, and lets a loss happen due to negligence, then it is on them. The response to this is lots of protocols and code requirements, and lots of additional bureaucracy to continuously check if those protocols and code requirements are being followed.
1. Automation. Teaching in its rawest form has been automated away, leaving it to be a valueless human endeavour. “Teaching” in the context of children survives because it has become a childcare service. But babysitting is not able to charge much as its cost must remain under the income potential of parents, else parents will take the responsibility themselves.
1) Has it really? I'm sure the potential exists for video lectures or whatever, but I think the teachers still ostensibly at least teach.
2) How little do you pay babysitters? At, say, $5 per kid per hour, a teacher of 20 would be doing pretty well, and that's on the low side of class sizes these days I think.
> Has it really? I'm sure the potential exists for video lectures or whatever, but I think the teachers still ostensibly at least teach.
Yes. Gone are the days that you would hire a teacher to teach you something. These days you turn to automated teaching services. The fact that the word teacher is now synonymous with the K-12 school teacher further emphasizes that the career in general has effectively disappeared. As before, "teaching" has survived as a career where childcare is the actual service offered.
> How little do you pay babysitters?
In my case it is $3 per hour for a daycare provider that cares for no more than five children at a time. If the babysitter cared for more children I would expect to pay less as I would get much less value for my dollar. The quality of care and attention declines as the number of children increases.
Large class sizes are accepted because we are going for bang for our buck over quality of care. If teachers were charging on the same order per child as other daycare providers providing higher quality care, indeed it would be good money, but there would be a shift to putting children into those better care facilities and so it wouldn't last. Why pay the same amount for lesser care?
$1 per student in a 25-student classroom for 30 hrs/week for 36 weeks is like 27k, the base salary isn't much higher than that. So that's assuming a worthless teacher with 0 added value. The added value is probably at least 3x even for a subpar teacher up to 10-20x for a top performer and the actual time variables are all probably higher than listed above.
I would imagine the 10-20x value-adders aren't incentivized and are probably actively de-incentivized in the faculty senate/union dynamic unless they literally love the job that much which is debunked in the OP post.
Teaching as a career basically doesn't exist anymore outside of schools for children. It is not that teachers are using automated tools, but students are using automated teachers instead of hiring human teachers. When was the last time you hired a human teacher instead of consulting an automated teacher when you wanted/needed to learn something new?
Like I said before, we don't even recognize the existence of general teachers anymore, with the word under typical use now only referring to those who work at schools for children.
Books provide a primitive form of automated teaching, although we've expanded on the concept considerably since the advent of the book.
You have not heard of automated teaching as a thing because we invent names for automation. The automated kitchen servant isn't called an automated kitchen servant, it's called a dishwasher (among others).
Likewise, automated teachers are not called automated teachers. They are given names, depending on the teaching method at play. Automated teacher is used here as a generalization as the specific automation is immaterial.
Of what relevance are kids? We're talking about adults. When was the last time you hired a teacher instead of turning to YouTube (or whatever)? That's where teaching is effectively dead, lost to automation.
Children require care. Again, "teaching" survives when children are present because childcare is the functional service offered. There is no impetus to move to automation here as childcare is not easily automated, necessitating a warm body anyway. However, the value of a teacher is constrained by the value of childcare as there is no longer market value in teaching alone.
Like I said in the other comment, teaching outside of schools for children isn't even recognized in the word teacher anymore because the career, as a general one, effectively no longer exists. You've proven my point.
"...men continued to make up most of the high-school teaching force until the late 1970s"
Humans are still largely primal and male presence tends to instill respect and behavior changes in younger people; I suspect the absence of it has not helped the current situation in many schools.
Yep. I'm biracial, black and Indian. My mother is Indian. She raised me alone, with no financial support from my father.
My father is a black American who never went to college. He doesn't understand the point of education. He wanted me to a be a movie director or singer or otherwise "famous". He didn't give a crap about school and let me do whatever I wanted when I stayed with him a couple weekends a month.
My mother, an Indian immigrant, sat me down every night and made me do my homework even though she worked three jobs. She paid for twelve years of private schooling. She told me every single day that my education was the only thing I would ever have that would let me survive in this world.
Thanks to her obsession with education, I completed college and never stopped educating myself. I now work as a front-end dev and make six figures. I'm currently preparing to apply for master's programs. I live a happy and comfortable life. I have some savings in the bank. I am constantly working to educate myself. I don't have vague fantasies about becoming "famous" or winning the lottery to support myself.
Education is truly the only guarantee for people of color to achieve a comfortable life in the US. I would never have understood this without my Indian mother's cultural drive towards education.
Same, to be completely honest. Generally, if the parents care about education and are involved the kids will do fine. This is complicated when mom wants her kids to do well but has to work two jobs and older brother watches younger sister after school, but in general it's an easily predicted trend.
The main problem with teachers is that the price for them is not controlled by quality. A teacher who performs better than other teachers (e.g. a 10x teacher) will not be worth more in the current system. And with the quality/price relation missing, there is nothing a teacher can do about the price, and consequently their wages will be as low as possible.
Quality is hard to prove. Everyone thinks they're "quality."
The fact is most people are average. We freak ourselves out about these very few super teachers or super devs but most are not these people and they still need jobs and perform valid functions.
Even at the high level, teacher salaries aren’t very high compared to industry.
Couple that with high licensing requirements and bad working conditions, neither of which are secret, and of course the best and brightest do not consider it a real option.
Is this true? It seems like teachers in the US [0] make the 7th highest in the world on average. Of course the US is big and has lots of diversity so there may be pockets that aren’t paid more. But I think they are paid more than other countries.
I think the issue isn’t pay as they are paid more than the US median and mean for annual salary (since they aren’t paid for their two summer months off). And they have more vacation days than any other profession with their 40-60 days of leave.
It’s an important profession, but it’s pretty well paid and stable.
> 2. It seems that education degrees are seen as easier to achieve than others.
They absolutely are. I taught math as a university lecturer while I was finishing my PhD. I taught one Algebra course and one Geometry course to education majors. These were both literally just high school math courses and the people I taught were mostly not able to do the work. Yes, literally high school math and over half flunked the courses outright. That is just pathetic. I was told to pass 85% of the class, so most got curved right into a classroom anyway, against my wishes. This is what teaches your kids. I can also anecdotally report that they were clearly the dumbest people I ever ran into teaching. Bad English, can't think in a straight line, and ready to argue at the first sign that you might enforce standards and fail their pitiful "work". They were perfect for a bureaucratic job that rewards idiots.
On 4:
I disagree that more resources cannot help with this problem.
Some disruptive children have undiagnosed learning disabilities. Having more money for screening and special education can help get them the support they need.
Class sizes are also going to matter. Many disruptive children are just seeking attention. With smaller classes teachers can spend more time with each student, which will help with behavior management.
I don’t know what the right level of investment here is, but from speaking with friends who are teachers it sure seems like classes are too big and special Ed is stretched incredibly thin.
We know what percentage of children typically need these extra services. If we funded school special education based on how many they should statistically have. And incentivised them to find that many, then they would. If they miss some early amd are full that will be counterbalances by the number of parents who insist on "normal" education despite evidence that isn't what is best. Letting educators give feedback about the effects of medication levelsbwould also help I think.
> 3. Teachers frequently complain about how they are unappreciated, yet children spend _12 years_ in their care. Why do people come up to them and say they hated school rather than “thank you”?
Well many students hated school, it is what it is. If you get beat up on a daily basis or are bored out of your mind (because let's face it, most of the material IS boring) I don't see why you should feel obligated to thank your teachers. It's not their fault but they also don't really deserve a thank you.
Yes most teacher do what they can but it doesn't change the fact so many students are generally unhappy in school.
I agree that there are reasons someone would hate school, but it doesn't make sense for it to be a cultural norm to say that to teachers. No one ever says "wow you murder people for Uncle Sam for money?" to someone who was in the military, they say "thank you for your service". I think that's what the author was getting at. It's not just low pay; teaching is thankless, even looked down upon.
Bet the victims of the US military aren’t saying thank you for your service. It doesn’t even matter if the person isn’t directly responsible, they still dedicated their time and energy to the system. That’s the difference. It’s thankless because it’s awful. It’s the exception rather than the rule to have a teacher that made a real difference, and the most common difference teachers make is protecting kids from harm they wouldn’t be experiencing if not for school.
Exceptional teachers help kids survive, not thrive.
It's a chicken and egg kinda problem. People who on average don't have lots of motivation or other options go to teaching. They then get burned out by the chaotic classes, low pay and thanklass routine. In turn they on average do a mediocre job (or less) of educating and teaching, which causes the students to pay even less attention and show less respect...which causes the teachers to get more burned out...anyway I think you see where I'm getting at.
> 5. Schools are just too darn big. Thousands of kids in a big prison-shaped building and we wonder why everyone is alienated, miserable and dehumanized?
Personal anecdotal: I started programming on my own freshmen year of High School and I wrote and self published a book sophomore year. When I showed my computer programs and a physical copy of my self-published book to my teachers, they basically gave me a pat on the back. I did not receive 1 point of extra credit. I was told to take my seat and learn about Microsoft Word (by my computer teacher) and to write a 3 page story like everybody else (by my English teacher). As I’m sitting in my desk, I’m thinking “Why waste my time with Word, clearly I’m beyond it? Why am I writing a 3 page paper, I already wrote a book!”
What I concluded from this experience was that the education system is not designed for self starters. It’s designed for the lowest common denominator. I don’t dislike my teachers, rather I dislike the education system for being inflexible. I can only hope technology will allow students in the future to customize their educations to a degree beyond what I was offered. Another commenter mentioned schools being about churning out cogs. I don't disagree.
Not every kid should be going to high school. They and/or their families are not capable of supporting them through it. We need public vocational and alternative high schools.
A good time for 'think of the children' rather than their parents. Maybe combined with better access to free contraception so that every child is a desired child. If the environment isn't good for the child change that child's environment (family). Yes, those systems probably also need more love.
6. Teachers are often completely out of touch with technology.
Math teachers could be using Jupyter notebooks and decent plots. Instead they are using their poor drawing skills.
Everyone should do what 3b1b is doing.
They could be using cool physics simulations, but instead everything are lame poorly drawn arrows.
Technology that exists for education often has developer art level UX and bad usability.
7. Art used in school material is cringy as fuck. What artists think kids like and what kids actually like has nothing to do with each other.
8. There could be a github or reddit of class material that teachers could use, saving teachers' time and improving the learning experience.
9. People in the department of education are fucking bozos and should all be fired. Their job is to neglect education so that politicians can keep using better education as vote bait.
> 1. For as much as we spend on education, teachers seem to be grossly underpaid - to be getting robbed of their share of the budget. Where does that money go?
There are over 8 million people employed in primary and secondary education, which is about 5% of the workforce. Public spending on primary and secondary education is 3.2% of GDP and private spending is 0.3%. By the latest numbers, that's about $800 billion/year. If we assume that 2/3 of the costs are personnel and 1/3 are facilities and other expenses, that leaves just $65k for the wages and benefits of the average employee.
As a former teacher from the States (and maybe will go back to it one day, either internationally, or in another country permanently, depending on how life works out), I'd live to give my answers to some of this.
Note, I'm biased. My undergraduate degree was not in teaching but in physics. I did a masters programme in teaching to transition to becoming a teacher. I enjoyed teaching, but just ended up finding it boring teaching the same thing six times a day, so when an opportunity to do a new masters came along, I took it. I didn't leave because I got burnt out or hated it, I just wanted something a bit more challenging.
2) They are. The masters I did for teaching was a joke. I've seen high schoolers with better writing abilities than half my professors. And these are people with 'educational doctorates'. Also, this might be different at better universities, but at least in my state several are propped up by their online teaching masters (the state requires a masters) and they exist just to pump them out. If you don't get a 4.0 something is wrong. I've heard similar issues with the undergraduate programmes in the state.
3. Kids don't want to be at school. They want to be out doing kid things, which we are limiting more and more in school. They also don't want to necessarily sit and learn the stuff they're supposed to learn. It's a complex issue, but that's my take on it a lot.
4. Yep. This is, in my opinion, the number one issue facing American schools, and why private/charter (sometimes) do so much better. They can be picky about the students they take -- thus they only take those who are well behaved and who want to be there and have active parent involvement. Parent involvement is a huge predictor of school success. Until we fix that -- including the issues of poverty and not social safety net -- some schools won't improve. Kids need a safe place at home and at school if they're to truly learn and achieve what they can. Sadly, nobody talks about this issue, nor are any steps taken to change it or the culture around education. I'm from a rural area, there's people proud they dropped out and didn't get a degree and even more proud they didn't get a college one. It gets passed on.
5. Absolutely. It's incredibly difficult to teach 30+ kids at once, of various levels. Especially when they refuse to create differentiated classes. I had some classes that ran the gamut from kids who needed extra assistance and had learning disabilities to kids who would literally be in the running for valedictorian and had all accelerated classes in the subjects that had it. If I spend time on one subset of those kids, it immediately hurts the other. Now, this is a school-specific problem and lazy guidance counselors and a principal who just didn't give a shit about academically gifted students, but I had a cousin leave the school just this year because they don't care about academics because they're too worried about passing the weaker ones (not catching them up, but just making sure they can squeak by with the bare minimum). Not entirely the dehumanisation and alienation you mentioned, but I think it leads to it when the classes can't be catered towards them.
This is the one thing where I think more money could help -- get more teachers and get smaller class sizes. It'd also be nice I think to have a teacher go all four years with the students in high school, unless there's major issues, so the students get to truly know the teacher and feel like they can trust them. It could work in my state, except for science because each subject has its own certification as opposed to just one for 'math'.
I feel like a more trades-oriented approach with kids who don’t have the desire, motivation or aptitude for college would lead to more engagement and give those kids a better chance at success.
For my case, it was very school specific. Basically, our counselors were lazy and didn't want to deal with the scheduling headache of adding accelerated classes for science. We also had a good attached vocational school, which did wonders for a lot of kids; I had some graduate as fully certified welders and go make more money than me right out of high school. But there were still the issues in their other classes, sadly.
But, to answer the question more broadly, it's the 'equality' bit I think. I'm all for giving everyone equal opportunity, and the ability to move into accelerated pathways if you can prove you have the requisite knowledge to do so. But if you stick students with learning disabilities with accelerated students nobody is going to have a good time. It doesn't help either group and just harms them.
And, again, I say this as someone who didn't think California's math updates were all that terrible. Pushing kids to do stats as opposed to just the whole "everyone needs to aim towards calculus" attitude is a great thing and I stand behind that. But if we can differentiate classes, we can serve all groups of kids better and provide better outcomes for all. But the whole class needs to be differentiated; differentiation within a set of 30 kids is nigh impossible, especially when there's such a gap between abilities. For a personal story, the smartest kid I ever taught was in my last year teaching. He worked hard, if there was something he didn't understand he asked for more help and practice problems. The lowest kid I ever taught was in the same class. The kid was a freshman in high school and couldn't add single digit numbers without a calculator. There's no way that should ever be happening.
> But if you stick students with learning disabilities with accelerated students nobody is going to have a good time. It doesn't help either group and just harms them.
This was explicitly the operating philosophy of my middle school. It was terrible.
The concern is that they become a self-fulfilling prophecy. You get sorted into the lower grade, perhaps because of maturing more slowly in the early years, or a home environment non-conducive to study due to two working parents, or just economic disadvantages like having to live further away from the school and therefore spending time commuting that other kids are spending on study. (and in the US there's a correlation with race for the structural disadvantages because of more outright historical racism).
So students end up in a lower grade of class, don't get taught as complex versions of their subjects, and finish school with a lesser educational attainment, thereby setting the seeds for their next generation to be in the same place.
Even without seperated classes, this does happen to some level between schools.
> The concern is that they become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
An effective education is ultimately the student's responsibility. If we could somehow teach that at an early age, lot of these problems become irrelevant.
As a freshman I was placed in a geometry class in high school that included several seniors that obviously came to class high and some that spoke 0 English. I asked for more difficult problems in class, unaware that an advanced geometry class even existed at the school.
After taking a precalc class as a junior (which was after I took a precalc summer class at a local university), I was told I would be placed in AP calc AB.
I literally had to accost the teacher after class and say that was unacceptable. He said if I could convince the Calc teacher I should be in BC calc, I could take it. As luck would have it, the calc teacher was my former geometry teacher. I finished AP calc BC with an A and a 5/5 on the AP exam, but what if I hadn't been so lucky (knew the teacher) or so pissed off with my education up to that point that I had respected the precalc teacher's decision?
This was basically my experience as well. I had to fight against our idiotic guidance counselor to do so. This lady told, and is still telling (she's still there and is the one I've complained about in my other posts) to take whatever class is easiest, there's no need to push yourself, etc. She also actively discourages AP for dual credit, which is beyond useless if you actually want to study a subject in university; she also told 17 year old me that taking out 250k in debt is worth it for my dream school...Like wtf! There were three things that saved me, and pushed me more in high school
(1) My mom was a teacher there, so she knew what classes were offered better than I did, and was able to help me plan stuff early on without the counselor.
(2) The curriculum director used to teach beside my mom and got hired the same year (and they retired the same year even), and had known me my entire life. She often just went over the counselor's head to make sure my schedule lined up like I needed it to
(3) I had an uncle who worked over at the central administration for the school. He got sent lots of information about summer camps, etc, and passed them on both to my mom and the curriculum director to advocate for them.
All three of them are, sadly, retired now (though my mom keeps coming out of retirement because they can't find biology teachers) and there's not many at the school who advocate for the kids in the same way. The old principal (left at the end of the 2021 school year) was horrible too. I've heard the new one is better, and is slowly trying to re-rigourise the curriculum, but he's fighting against a lot of lazy teachers and our guidance office. It's a mess, but I truly hope he succeeds. It's almost made me want to go back to help push for that and for academically gifted kids, so they actually realise what's available.
Help me understand the proud dropout concept. I cannot wrap my mind around it.
My single mom worked three jobs to put me through private school and pay for my college. I grew up thinking that no college == bag groceries for the rest of your life.
How could anyone be proud of depriving themselves of the tools to succeed in life? It's like being proud of gouging out your own eyes and walking around blind.
Where I'm from, it's because of coal mines. They saw their parents and grandparents do reasonably well (financially; health is a-whole-nother story) in the mines without a degree or with only a basic degree and they accepted that school wasn't necessary. Now you have people telling them it is, and doing better because they had more education. It gets to the point where they see that as not trying to screw them over but as elitism, so they blame those people that the options of the past aren't there anymore, and look to try to make themselves feel better.
Though lots of America is fundamentally based in anti-intellectualism. Anti-Intellectualism in American Life was an eye-opening read and helped explain a lot of what I saw around me in the rural Bible Belt.
> Disruptive children are caused by parents who frankly just don’t give a shit.
This isn’t necessarily true; sometimes the parents simply don’t have the proper info or education themselves. Example: parent of a kid with ADHD who has no understanding of what ADHD is or how it presents, and thus that their kid even has it.
On the flip side of that coin, you sometimes have the parents who do know all about their child's ADHD and how to (help their child) manage it effectively, and then you get these meddling teachers or principals who genuinely believe they know better than everyone else about how "problem children" should be dealt with (all while utterly ignoring the actual problem children, like bullies for example). They hear that a child has "a diagnosis" and it's like painting a target on that child for some screwed up teachers/principals, no matter how actually well behaved that child is in practice. Sometimes those vile people even go beyond "too far" and ruin lives with their meddling.
This goes back to the parents who aren't taking their child to doctors for health checkups for any myriad of reasons. Early and often checkups should catch these issues. In your example I wouldn't say parents don't give a shit. But as someone who had ADHD but didn't cut up in school or wasn't a class clown, I had discipline at home. Sure I would talk during class and my mind would wander. But I wasn't being so disruptive class couldn't be taught.
Almost always in the examples of why teachers don't want to teach anymore. The focus is always on pay, testing, and administration. But who wants to come to work and teach children that are so disrespectful and so disruptive that class can't be taught. My salary wouldn't be the deciding factor here.
As a parent, you can be well very well informed on the issue, and still not be able to solve it in your kid. I'd venture that this kind of futility is more prevalent than ignorance.
"Disruptive children" are arguably dusruptive because the system is soul sucking and one size fits all. Its just not going to work for everyone. Forest schools all the way
> 4. Many school problems are caused by disruptive children.
> Disruptive children are caused by parents who frankly just don’t give a shit. Throwing more money into schools won’t ever fix this problem.
Some. Most children I believe require an approach that the education system cannot adequately provide (for numerous reasons). Children are relatively malleable and in the right environment will thrive.
The bend is an while for every kid there is an educational environment that will work for them, there isn’t an educational environment that will work for every kid.
Could you support #1, it’s my understanding that teachers are actually quite well compensated when you adjust for pension/LT benefits and three months of vacation. Points 2-5 seem spot on.
1) healthcare.
2) education degrees are a problem. They make becoming a teacher financially very risky. They also don’t seem to actually improve teacher quality
At this point, I think people who can say 1. with a straight face are either intellectually dishonest or just repeat things others say.
The majority of teachers make a median US wage fairly early into their career and plenty make a multiple of it later on, on top of great benefits. Their job is no more challenging than nearly all other professions. “But they have to”… yes, everyone else has shit they have to deal with. The fact that the Waltons, crypto lottery winners, etc. exist is a separate problem that doesn’t mean teachers are underpaid.
Education majors are easier.The sky is blue. If we even remotely believe in a meritocracy (liberals often really don’t when you dig into their beliefs, granted) starting teachers should not make as much as a starting EE major. Nobody in their right mind would or should pursue an engineering career if teaching paid equivalently.
Judging from this thread, my opinion on this is not going to be popular, please don't massacre me for it, just discuss it with me if you want, I won't be mean (unless you are) but I will be candid.
Good. I'm glad nobody wants to teach anymore. The less teachers we have the better. That's for everyone, including the teachers. A surefire way to get paid more is a shortage of professionals. If you are so important as to be indispensable to society, maybe prove it by withholding your services. If you're so indispensable they'll pay you to get you to come back, and if they don't, fine, they'll find out just how indispensable you are.
Teachers, at least in the US, are in fact glorified babysitters. The amount of stuff a kid in public school learns in 13 years that they actually use could be taught in 5. Public school is subsidized daycare so that the US could double it's labor force. This is not how I want it to be, I want kids to actually learn things, and only go to school to learn and not to be herded. I want overworked teachers to work less, much, much less.
I have no doubt many of them are overworked, treated badly, and go into it at least because they care about children learning. But maybe it's like that because it's the only way an economy and society can justify the expense. Maybe the role they play is not worth as much as they think it is. Maybe they should stop teaching.
I think most teachers have an overinflated sense of their contribution. Ask yourself, if they'll hire anyone off the street, that means anyone off the street wants to teach. That should tell you something about teaching, and if they really wouldn't last a week then don't sweat it, they're no threat to you, they'll be gone in a week.
My big problem with education is not the teachers, it's the giant all encompassing bureaucracy that teachers and students have to constantly navigate. It seems to me like teachers by and large aren't that interested in simplifying that bureaucracy, even though from their complaints it's the largest source of their problems. I wonder why they don't attack it directly? I'm curious why they haven't all quit too. I want most of them to quit.
Put your money where your mouth is. Show us what we all stand to lose without you. Don't tolerate this bullshit anymore. Quit. Find a profession where you're treated better. If you're right, we will beg you to come back. Make us beg. Make us grovel. Show us what it feels like. Rub our faces in it.
I don't think teachers are "essential workers." I think that they don't quit because if they did, we (and they) would find out that we don't actually need them as much as they tell us we do.
Maybe I don't know what I'm talking about, it wouldn't be the first time. You're wrong until you learn, right? Educate me.
Education is a public good. It’s precisely the kind of thing markets are not great at on their own.
That doesn’t mean that education as we have it now is perfect, but you also don’t need to throw the baby out with the bathwater and return to the middle ages in order to try solving some of its problems.
I disagree. I find it funny, when libertarians and free-market advocates say "if you classify something a public good you turn the workers in it into slaves" that the same people who disagree with that often complain that essential workers in those fields aren't paid enough. I think markets could sort this out beautifully: if it's really so essential they'd get paid more.
The teachers are essentially saying "treat us better and pay us adequately or you're going back to the middle ages, like it or not, it's not our doing, it will be your doing and your undoing." They don't like that some of us don't believe that. Well, if it's true, show us. Quit.
i have always said it: teachers don't know how to teach, students don't know how to learn, school admin don't know how to manage. Append a "most" for each (I love Ruby).
The fundamental problem is one of teacher education and an understanding of what it means to impart knowledge. Nobody knows anything about this anymore, certainly not even edu psychologists (50% of their papers are statistically invalid, the other 50% are too lab-centric to have any classroom value).
A good solution is to produce a highly-paid, highly-autonomous batch of properly-trained and highly-educated teachers who should have the biggest say in how they do their job--don't do that and pretty soon you won't have an educated class.
"old system in modern day doesn't work, in other news water is wet.".
Teachers leave overwhelmingly because of the school office politics. Admins want things to stay the same forever, pushing classes that we don't need for people that don't want them.
High schools are prisons. Universities are scams. The good teachers recognize this and left. If we want to fix it, we need to wipe the system and create a new one that focuses upon what's necessary and not what ivy league people think is needed.
Schools are just a place for warehousing kids; even people who take no interest in education know this from personal experience back from when they were a kid.
Exactly 0 of 627 college students can answer simple questions like 'What is the name of the mountain range that separates Europe from Asia?' or 'What is the last name of the author of The Brothers Karamazov?'.
The striking thing is that the dismal career prospects hasn't stopped bright ambitious people trying to get into academia. Whereas In Australia you can just look at entry-scores for teaching degrees to see that only people who did poorly in school go into teaching nowadays.
So sure, pay and conditions have some influence but it's not a sufficient condition to explain what's happened in teaching. Pretty sure if researchers could get the job security and entitlements of teachers we'd have no problem finding bright people trying to get into research. But that's because research is more intrinsically rewarding and higher status.
Child-minding just fundamentally isn't a job which requires much talent, the job is steadily degrading to the status and pay which one would expect for a semi-skilled occupation. The teachers' unions are doing a valiant job fighting a rear-guard action to prevent that decline, through rampant credentialism to buttress the 'professional' status of the job. But it's an uphill fight, politicians aren't going to push for tax hikes to fund teacher salaries when every voter knows full-well that regardless they're still going to have to teach their kids themselves or get tutoring if they want their kid to actually learn anything.
> Exactly 0 of 627 college students can answer simple questions like 'What is the name of the mountain range that separates Europe from Asia?' or 'What is the last name of the author of The Brothers Karamazov?'.
These simple questions that are just recitation of facts are worthless. I don’t even know the answers to these.
The only questions that measure anything useful are critical thinking type questions, consider simple things any CS student should be able to answer such as “Describe the design for a roles based authentication system” or “Describe an implementation of a communications bus between multiple systems in a micro services architecture”
Critical thinking is such a nebulous term there's not even an agreed-upon way of measuring it, much less old tests of it to compare against. It's largely been used by the educational establishment to justify why students come out of 13 years of compulsory schooling functionally innumerate and illiterate. Oh sure they don't know anything, but their critical thinking skills are off the charts!
If we use the slightly better-defined term of problem solving skills, there's no worse way of teaching that than putting a teacher up in front of 20 students teaching a standardised curriculum and giving out standardised tests. In the CS context, most students first learn how to think through a problem when they learn to code. What were they doing in school? Certainly not thinking through problems.
Edit: Also you completely misunderstood the import of those two questions. Anyone with a passing familiarity with world literature can answer the Dostoyevsky question, and anyone with a passing familiarity with geography or Russian history can answer the Urals question. You're note supposed to memorise the answer, the answer comes naturally if you're not pig-ignorant about the world. I wouldn't expect most students to know them, I sure as hell would expect more than 0.00% to know them. Kids know nothing because schools imbed extreme anti-intellectualism into even the brightest of kids.
That's a great thing happening. No one knows how to teach anyway anyhow. It's a lost art, a forgotten knowledge, which have given way to formatting, somewhere in the last Century. Preparing young souls for Life: _teaching_ is very different from telling people how to do things and stuff: _formatting_.
We are forced to go full circle now. Throwing out garbage, as we can't keep up. That's a good thing.
The garbage is education system, not teachers. The art is not lost. But people who want to be Teachers get forced out of the system. Too much paperwork, too strict rules, too much content, too many students... No place left for performing the art of teaching.
Some private schools (many focus on making parents happy in short term..) and tutoring is the last refuge of the art of Teaching.
I'd like to offer a contrarian view. Note I'm a former tech enterpreneur, switched late in life to teaching CS in college 5 years ago, several members in my family are HS teachers.
1. Teacher aren't respected any more. True. The main reason: outcome quality is dropping. Reading/math proficiency has been dropping for tens of years. The general public knows this.
2. Disorderly classrooms. Due to changing norms and morals, setups where kids don't face the teacher but each other or even the back of the back wall it's become impossible to keep everyone focused. Everybody suffers.
3. Endless new teaching methods, experiments. Misconceptions like: 'kids nowadays need 21st century skills', 'knowledge can be acquired from the internet', 'almost nobody needs algebra later on in life', 'kids can decide for themselves what they need to learn'. No.
4. Smaller families lead to more attention per child, princes and princesses, helicopter parents. School admin also bend the knee towards this.
5. Kids with special needs get way more attention, which is a time sink. More and more kids are getting a label.
6. Most contentious opinion: men teach differently from women. We need more men in the classroom. Women try to treat boys like girls. But boys have more energy and need more playtime outside. After they get rid of that energy they'll pay more attention in class. All this leads to boys dropping out way more often.
7. Education standards for becoming a teacher are too low. Many teachers can't even to math properly, or can't spell themselves.
I deliberately have been blunt while writing the above list. Take that into account.
But everything to do with working with other teachers was utter misery. Never have I met such a cantankerous downtrodden passive aggressive bunch of backstabbing political jobsworths. Actually, it was probably only one third of the staff that were the hyper negative old timers, but they had such a dismal impact on me it felt like everyone was cut from the same cliquey snobby cloth. Imagine the worst, most power hungry, little-napoleon office manager you’ve ever had and then imagine one in three of the staff have that mindset.
It drove me mad and I’m now a SWE again but also volunteering at a youth center in our most deprived part of town and loving it. I can have impact with the kids, and as a volunteer I seem to command much more respect from parents than a lowly teacher.
So now I am tainted too — if I hear you are a teacher then I will see before me someone who at best tolerates that level of crappiness in their workplace, and at worst actively takes part in it. Neither leave me with much respect for you, but I know why you do it: the kids.