> 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.
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.