Cities look at subsidized housing to stem teacher shortages
bigstory.ap.org
bigstory.ap.org
5100 staff per 100 apartments. A 2% dent in the problem for $35 million. Even if the entire $310 million were put toward housing, it would still mitigate housing costs for less than 20% of the staff.
It absolutely is.
Which means that this competition doesn't necessarily translate into higher quality of teachers, but instead into skills of navigating bureaucracy in western countries and navigating corrupt bureaucracy in others.
(Your point about the difficulty of measuring performance is a very good one though)
1) expensive areas have a proportional amount more to spend on teachers. If they actually were short teachers and needed to pay teachers more, the easily could and would.
2) teachers are generally easy to find. Open teaching positions routinely have hundreds of applicants. It is a very desirable job despite the 'low' wages. Working with kids, month long holidays, and tenure appeal to a lot of people.
3) 45% of your income on housing is not that extreme. I pay 30% and I'm in LA on a CS wage
I'm not convinced this is a problem, just your typical heart throb emotional piece.
Therefore the seemingly "expensive" rent of rentable apartments in SF is not an indicator of the actual rent being paid by most renters, much less of the taxes the owners pay to fund things like schools. So even if open apartments are rented for $4k/month, the level of service residents are able to fund could be more like that of a poorer city where apartments rent for $1.5k/month.
2. Yes, but good teachers? My impression from childhood, matched by what I could see of my son's experience, was that one can expect to have a good teacher every other year in the primary grades, and that the mix of good and bad doesn't change that much in middle and secondary schools when one has different teachers for different subjects.
3) 45% seems pretty steep to me.