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Comment by kelukelugames | Hacker News Reader

>For instance, he said, simply increasing the salaries of all teachers in a high-need school district won’t have as much of an impact as identifying high-performing teachers and increasing their salaries.

Are there studies about this? What attracts more talent:

a) Pay increase for everyone in an industry. b) Larger pay increases, but limited to the best performers.

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To solve the problem of inner city poverty, we need to take public money and give more of it to some privileged college-educated person who likely doesn’t even live in the neighborhoods plagued by poverty? We’re going to address the economic disadvantages faced by black and Hispanic children, by giving more money to teachers (80%+ of whom are white)?

Trevor Noah makes a really good point in his autobiography. He recounts the story of someone giving him a CD writer, which enabled him to go into the bootlegging business in post apartheid South Africa. He explains that what poor people need is capital, like that CD writer. You can teach a man to fish, he explains, but if you don’t give him a fishing rod you haven’t done him any good.

The teacher is the person who's supposed to show them how to get their own fishing rods.

That’s an accurate summary of how nonsensical the American approach to poverty reduction is. “Education will teach poor people to make capital from thin air.”

Both education and capital are necessary. After all, that's how it works for the privileged.

In the Trevor Noah example, it's both having the CD writer, and also knowing how to use it. The former doesn't guarantee the latter.

Schools have no obligation to end poverty- they have an obligation to provide an education to their students.

When education is billed as the solution to poverty—and in the US it is—then they do.

There's a difference between telling students that their best way out of poverty is education and promising to end poverty. Most educators believe the first, the second is wishful thinking sold by politicians.

Society has an obligation to end poverty.

To solve the problem of poor inner city education, we need to get better teachers working in the inner city. Paying them more might be a useful part of that.

While it certainly would help to get the very best teachers working with the most challenged students, there is some research saying that it's really not the best approach because teacher quality has a less of an effect on student achievement than the social conditions of students.

https://www.tucsonweekly.com/TheRange/archives/2015/07/14/wh...

> To solve the problem of inner city poverty, we need to take public money and give more of it to some privileged college-educated person who likely doesn’t even live in the neighborhoods plagued by poverty?

On the flip side, though, straight up wealth distribution to the poor has a huge waste factor, though. I work with poor people at my church, and a lot of times they have no idea where their money is even going. They see a predatory letter with scary red letters and they send money to it, even though it's not even a bill! The bills they are getting are for services they aren't even using (expensive cable plan, etc.). Yes, the poor need more money, but they also desperately need mentors and education.

It’s true that the poor are sometimes or even often poor managers of money, but that is true throughout society. Most households actually have poor control of their money, but they might have higher incomes so the impact isn’t so noticeable. Personal financial literacy is low overall.

It's easy to be paternalistic about another persons expenses. There was nothing more humiliating then going through expenses line by line when I needed help with an electricity bill. Yeah, I paid for cable, but the vast majority of expenses were housing, food, and predatory fees. Digging out of a financial hole is very hard and it's easy to lose all your progress when certain bills are due afew days before you have money. Cable was practically free because I need to buy internet for my job.

Wealth distribution is one thing, the process of wealth distribution is another.

This is a heavily unionized industry (which IMO is insane considering how much visibility and direct control the public has into how schools are run and how much reputation matters in that industry). Pay in a school system is very seniority dependent. If you put up with BS and do an ok job strategically job hopping you can put in your last decade or two in a rich district and retire with some very nice benefits. It's not attracting/retaining talent that is the issue. People don't go into teaching because they like the money and see themselves pivoting into management. It's talent that keeps it's mouth shut and does what it's told no matter how stupid because it needs to play the system without rocking the boat in order to win the favor of the people who control how quickly their resume builds that's the problem. Just look at the teacher who was arrested a week ago for questioning the superintendent at a school board meeting. You don't order someone arrested for that unless you're a senior person in a culture where seniority = unquestioned authority.

Industry culture that obstructs identifying and utilizing talent is probably a more concise way to describe the problem as I see it.

Not every state is heavily unionized, and I don't think you'd point to the states without teacher's unions as being exemplars of education. The problem is new teachers are bad, and old teachers are bad- there's maybe a decade or two in between where they have both the experience and motivation to be truly effective.

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