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Comment by kelvin0 | Hacker News Reader

I applaud the budding journalists persistence, and certainly having someone falsify their credentials is a really terrible start into such an important position.

However, I must mention that I been in contact with so many really bad HS staff (teachers, principals..) all with legitimate credentials, that I am starting to wonder about their significance? A principal should probably have some teaching experience, but seems to be like more of an MBA/business type of background?

Also, let me clarify I was not one to get into trouble and had very good grades in HS. I can really remember 2 really good teachers, and the rest ... quite mediocre at best. I also dated a HS teacher (as an adult,much later on) so I've seen firsthand the inner workings of teaching 'system'.

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In the US I feel like the primary education system is simply childcare for the working class. My experience with teacher quality was just like yours.

We don't pay them well so we get what we pay for. The exceptions are those that love to teach and love students. You can't run an organization via exceptions however. It's really a shame we don't value education more.

> It's really a shame we don't value education more.

This might sound nit-picky but I think we all (Americans) value education as a whole. We just don't care (as a whole) about education for others outside of our sphere.

When you have the ability to move to better school system or to pay for private school attendance, you have no need to improve public schools. Not all public school systems are bad. I image that everyone can think of one relatively close school that they can unequivocally call a good/great school system where they expect most student to exceed by some set of positive metrics

As long as the people who can fix it (no matter if its more staff, better pay, better resources or whatever change necessary) can place their children into C-Level Preparatory Academy, Dumpster Fire High School probably won't see much improvement.

> This might sound nit-picky but I think we all (Americans) value education as a whole

Everything you wrote after that sounds exactly like we don't value education as a whole. We individually value getting a good education but far too frequently ignore how education as a whole is beneficial to society.

I guess I misspoke. You understood what I mean in the end, so I guess mission accomplished?

>This might sound nit-picky but I think we all (Americans) value education as a whole.

That's a bunch of crap. If we (Americans) valued education as a whole, we wouldn't vote for leaders who continually cut education budgets. It's very simple: we as a society do not care about education. It's not a top political issue ever, unlike abortion, defense spending, guns, and who uses what bathroom. We keep school funding and administration at the local level because we don't want "our money" going to "those kids" (i.e. poor kids) in some other district, so we all end up with terrible schools and horribly inconsistent results school-to-school. Public education in this country is completely broken, and there's absolutely no political will to change it, and voters don't make it an issue because they're more worried about Planned Parenthood and terrorists.

I misspoke. The sibling comment summed up what I meant:

> We individually value getting a good education but far too frequently ignore how education as a whole is beneficial to society.

Some context in case anyone is curious:

Education is the third-biggest item of (combined) US government spending, after healthcare and pensions. Defense is fourth. It accounts for roughly 15% of total spending and 5% of GDP. I found this history of education spending informative regarding "leaders who continually cut education budgets": http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/education_spending

Perhaps Politifact can be used as a barometer of "issues" during elections. They have rated 954 statements about education, 415 about guns, 390 about the military, 377 about terrorism, 316 about abortion, 64 about sexuality (including "bathroom bills"), and 20 or so about Planned Parenthood. Even statements about the federal budget in general (which include many of the previous issues) only totaled 938 items.

The pay is not the problem in most districts. Teacher pay is enough that getting a job at all but a few problem districts is pretty competitive. It also rewards extra degrees that have little if any value in more effective teaching.

The system is setup very defensively to protect the problem teachers from responsibility.

> The pay is not the problem in most districts.

It seems like it is less of a problem than it used to be. The biggest issue is that the districts with failing schools (who need the best, most experienced teachers) tend to be the districts least able to recruit those kinds of teachers.

> The system is setup very defensively to protect the problem teachers from responsibility.

The same system also protects the good teachers from problem parents and administrators.

Teachers in the US make more than the median salary, and get a ton of perks.

The US spends more per student than any other developed world.

I'd say we're paying plenty.

Source? What are these perks like? Also, teachers are paid in highly variable ways depending on state, school district, and union (if any). Saying that teachers get paid higher than average should be expected, considering they are usually required to have a bachelor's degree, pass many rounds of background checks continually, and (in many districts) must continue taking classes and gain education (similar to a nurse).

Teacher salaries in 2013 (there's more data there than that, but whatever)[0]. Census data for the same year [1]. And lastly, per capita spending on students[2].

Perks teachers enjoy are variant as you mention, but tend to be solid. My GF is a teacher, her perks are: Contracted for 38 hours / week, 15 sick days a year that roll-over (I think there's some limit), something like 3 weeks of vacation during the school year, summer vacation, pension program, good health insurance, very difficult to be fired from the job.

Also, when looking at teacher salary vs median, realize that they are working a lot less of the year than other people. I did the math between my GF and I and once you account for all her time off, she makes slightly less than I do.

[0]: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_211.60.a... [1]: https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio... [2]: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp

High School is secondary education. Primary education is much harder and for some reason much less well rewarded. Everyone remembers the high school teachers who were phoning it in, but forgets about the elementary school teachers who taught them well enough to be able to make the distinction.

Sorry. I should have said primary and secondary.

No worries, I'm probably overly sensitive to people extrapolating the performance of their burnout Theater teacher to the profession as a whole.

> I am starting to wonder about their significance? A principal should probably have some teaching experience, but seems to be like more of an MBA/business type of background?

The important bit here isn't which particular certification this person did or didn't have; it's the fact that it was fraudulent, and that they lied about it.

At an institution that is supposed to teach the the importance of academic integrity, no less.

> However, I must mention that I been in contact with so many really bad HS staff (teachers, principals..) all with legitimate credentials, that I am starting to wonder about their significance? A principal should probably have some teaching experience, but seems to be like more of an MBA/business type of background?

Teacher raises and admin positions are all about box-ticking with the right pieces of paper. It's typical (though not universal) for admin to do the minimum time teaching (half-assing it, obviously) they need to for any kind of higher degree/cert they want (I want to say for a lot of programs it's 2 years or something like that) then move on, so yeah, many have little teaching experience—ask any teacher, nearly all teachers suck and don't know what they're doing the first couple years, that's just how it is, so you don't get good in that time, and you probably also don't get a sense of how periodic curriculum shakeups and such screw with teachers doing their jobs (not to mention their private lives, when they lose their evenings to some stupid new paperwork that you've introduced which could have been derived from other data you already have if you weren't a moron).

Education, Ed. Admin, and related higher degrees are ridiculous. You'd probably have to dig hard to find a program that's not a joke. The reason is that schools give zero shits about where your degree is from or what the program's like, just that you have one (and maybe your GPA, if it's for hiring—if it's just for a pay bump, they don't care about that, either, it's just automatic). There are lots of teachers/school admin. Consequently, many universities, even otherwise kinda-decent ones, have joke master's and PhD programs for teachers/admin, to rake in that sweet sweet teacher money, since the teachers/admin mostly just want 1) easy, 2) convenient (online or evenings/weekends, and as few hours as possible), and 3) cheap enough to justify the effort in a direct cost/benefit way (trivial to calculate from pay scales). The classes are nearly pure busy work.

If they don't just want to tick a box to get a raise or to go into admin and actually want to learn something, they get a non-education higher degree (usually in a content area of some kind—English, Mathematics, that kind of thing)

Source: am married to a teacher and, not through her, good friends with several others.

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