Comment by randyrand | Hacker News Reader

Comment by randyrand | Hacker News Reader

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This article makes a fundamental error, and its sad they never even acknowledge it.

You can't talk about the value of a good teacher without mentioning supply or demand. Yes, I know, here we go again. But this is basic economics. If the United States decided to train 100,000,000 good teachers, you can bet that the 100,000,000th teacher will not add the same value to the country as the first. There likely won't even be anyone for the 100,000,000 teacher to teach! Yet this is what the author here assumes. That the value add of a good teacher is constant. No mention of supply or demand whatsoever.

Fortunately, there's a clever trick we use to incorporate supply and demand into value-determination. It's called the market.

Unfortunately for students, teachers unions have done their best to destroy a free market for teachers, school are usually not even allowed to pay better (in the schools eyes) teacher more as per union contracts. And this country has no doubt suffered for it. All for a few extra thousand in the average teacher's pockets, its sickening.

If this was the case, then why do private school teachers get paid less? Private schools are the free-market and are ununionized.

In case you're curious, the reason is that teaching at a private school is easier, so people who love teaching are willing to take the pay cut.

Your reasoning about why private teachers make less is completely wrong, im afraid.

First, realize that if teachers were not unionized, their salaries would without a doubt go down. Unions function very similar to monopolies in that regard.

So just intuitively we would expect in a freeer market that teachers salaries would go down. That said, even in the private sector teachers are still unionized --its hardly a free market -- so why haven't private teachers been able to negotiate as high of a pay as public sector teachers?

> why do private school teachers get paid less?

Because public sector unions have much more negotiating power. It's really that simple.

Unions don't have infinite power, the can only negotiate as much as the 'pot' allows. In the public sector, the pot size is all tax revenue. There are almost no limits on how much public sector teachers can ask for.

This is exactly why FDR opposed public sector unions.

In the private sector, schools have to deal with remaining solvent. Teachers can only ask for at most -- the whole pot of revenue. And that pot is smaller in the private sector. The national average private school tuition is approximately $9,518 in 2015. Way less than the public sector at $12,922 per pupil in 2008.

As such, private sector teachers cannot demand as high wages as the public sector teachers can.

I agree with most of this. However, teachers' unions have done their best to prevent schools from paying teachers with less common skill sets (like STEM) more than teachers with more common skill sets (like PE). It's this aspect of lack of free market and supply and demand dynamics that prevented me from staying in the classroom.

Eh, nowadays a good teacher can film his lecture and reach millions? So, school teaching doesent scale.

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