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Comment by wfo | Hacker News Reader

Of course it's a money issue. We pay teachers garbage for working harder than anyone else, who wants to do that job? If you got the A-types who go into finance or law or medicine into teaching you'd see a very different scenario play out. Right now it's essentially all-volunteer. People call it "a labor of love" but a double-time job paid at part-time wages is what they mean.

Teachers don't make money or have respect. I'd challenge you to do an excellent job in that scenario.

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It's a parent issue first of all and can be solved without more money.

http://i.imgur.com/LglSapk.jpg

Parental involvement is the number one factor for student achievement. Followed by socio-economic stuff, like food, household income, zip code.

Make a ranked list of factors and teacher competency isn't even in the top ten. Which makes all this school reform chatter drive me nuts.

Neither is teacher salary. You are spot on in your factor rankings and it make me absolutely crazy every time people try to turn student failure into a teacher pay issue.

Part of that comic is referring to the parent but I think a great deal of it actually refers to the way teachers are treated. They are treated like garbage by parents and administrators alike. They don't get to make any decisions in the classroom, and they are screamed at or fired if anything goes wrong. Parent involvement is actually the root cause of this crisis: the wrong kind of parent involvement however, the parent who thinks the teacher is an idiot and goes into school to "set him/her straight". That's in fact what's happening in the comic.

Yes and the reason for this is that paren't "park" their kids in school and make it the responsibility of the school to not just educate their kids but to be responsible for their personal growth.

No matter what it's not a money problem. No amount of money will solve that problem. Only a shift back where parents are as responsible for their childrens education as they paren't will solve this.

"The BLS reports the median annual salary for high school teachers was $55,360 in 2013. The best-paid 10 percent in the field made approximately $86,720, while the bottom 10 percent made $37,230. Compensation is typically based on years of experience and educational level." [0]

This ($57k) is right around the median household income in the US. Note that is per household, which may include multiple earners.

Tough to look at teacher salaries, which are above the median, and say that's garbage.

Yes, they have a tough job, balancing between students, administrators, and (especially) parents. But lots of people do want to do the job, and get paid an OK salary, and get lots of time off during the year.

[0] http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/high-school-teache...

Teachers aren't randomly selected from the population; they more or less all have bachelors' degrees, and generally they have further qualifications in teaching. So the appropriate point of comparison would be something more like holders of masters' degrees.

According to http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_chart_001.htm the median salary for an individual with a master's degree in the US in 2014 was $1326/week or about $69k/year.

High school teachers are only a small sliver of the actual segment of teachers in the segment. What more they are not accurately documented because of unions, and vary greatly state to state. Here in my native state of Texas they barely get enough to cut it.

If you were a CEO brought in to fix a failing company, would your first instinct be to say "The employees must suck! We need to fire all the employees and replace them with higher-paid ones!"?

Or would you say "I bet these employees are poorly managed. I'm sure they can work more effectively if we change aspects of the process."

Here's an idea that doesn't cost any money: segregate students by ability so that kids can learn at their own pace.

> Here's an idea that doesn't cost any money: segregate students by ability so that kids can learn at their own pace.

1. Don't see how you can claim that is a zero cost idea.

2. In practice this just becomes the smart kids, normal kids, idiots. Good luck once you get labelled an idiot.

If you are an idiot, it's better to recieve an idiot- appropriate education. Less calculus and Shakespeare and more how to get a steady job, handle your finances, and stay away from trouble.

It would of course suck if you just had a cold on the day of the rest and wound up in the idiot school by accident, you'd need to review performance regularly. Ideally you'd have more than three levels of schooling. Maybe five, you could label them alpha through epsilon.

Next thing you know you'll be encouraging parents to drink more so that the correct ratio of alphas to epsilons happens.

I assure you we already have all the Epsilons we need.

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