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Comment by loewenskind | Hacker News Reader

>and you know this how?

And I know what how? That teachers are underpaid? Do you really think such an important job is only worth a paltry $30k year? The kind of people we actually want teaching can make 3 times that by either going into technology teaching or staying out of teaching all together. That classes are overcrowded? Because I see reports in the various papers every other week about how the classes are overcrowded?

The rest of your message seems to be against apologetics for the current system. I hate the current system, I think it's complete garbage. I was simply calling out the bizarre claim that making it better would make it cheaper.

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No matter how important teaching is, teaching 20 kids per year is worth about $30K.

If the goal of education is to produce 18 year olds with social adjustment, like and work skills, and the ability to work or get into college, let's be explicit about that! If there's a clear goal, a market, and competition, costs always go down.

Web browsers are free because both companies and non-profits can build them, benefit from providing them, and can't charge more than free. Computing used to be done by hand by humans, now you can buy millions of person-equivalents of computing for less than the cost of coffee. Why is it so cheap? Because companies wanted the dollars people would give in exchange for fast computation. Horses aren't used as transportation because someone invented cars, people fly across the ocean instead of taking ocean liners, etc because companies wanted the money people would spend on fast travel. Pens exist because companies wanted the dollars people would spend on fast, clean writing. Look at anything around you and it's there because someone outperformed other people in the competition for the dollars you spent on it. Every time, you either got the same product for less money (think Dell laptops), a better product for the same money (think of how Apple provides the best product they can at basically fixed price points), or often a better product for less money.

Schools districts spend between $5-15K/student/yr. We're doing it the same way we have for 100 years. Lack of competition or even an opt-out policy has given us a worse product for a higher cost (http://reason.com/archives/2010/09/16/money-is-not-what-scho...). It is very, very, very reasonable to expect that open competition with well-defined expectations would be both cheaper and better.

well said.

If people accept less money for teaching than they could earn elsewhere, it is because they enjoy teaching and that enjoyment is part of the compensation.

Professions that are a natural part of human life and thus simultaneously enjoyable and in demand as a career for a lot of the population will always have lower salaries. Like all careers, there is a competitive marketplace and many components to compensation.

And people are perfectly capable of judging for themselves what's right for them. And if they are not, perhaps we should not be entrusting out children to them.

Of course, none of this applies to a unionized situation. The pay is dependent on how much political pressure can be applied not on mutual benefit.

>If people accept less money for teaching than they could earn elsewhere, it is because they enjoy teaching and that enjoyment is part of the compensation.

I wish people would stop trotting this nonsense out all the time. It's not specifically a myth or a fallacy but rather an occurrence so rare as to be useless. Worse, it's usually presented by people trying to justify paying too little for a given job. There are simply not enough people willing to forgo a nice comfortable middle class lifestyle just to be able to pursue their passion of teaching children. And why would they? Most people probably have more than just one passion, so why choose the one that pays the worst (not to mention dealing with passion-killing bureaucracy day by day)? As a result, the US public school system actually gets made up of a mix of genuinely passionate teachers and people who see it as a safe government profession where they have to read silly books to stupid kids all day. In my experience, the mix heavily favors the latter.

>And people are perfectly capable of judging for themselves what's right for them.

They have. That's why the people best at teaching are usually somewhere they can be compensated for it. Are you seriously suggesting the people we should be entrusting our children to are the lowest bidders? If these people are passionate and don't care about keeping up with the Jones' then there are probably other places they could donate their time that don't have such miserable politics to deal with.

The market is not the solution to every problem. Many problems sure, maybe even most but not all.

It really seems like there are a lot of people talking about what the market will do who haven't done even cursory studies of what market theory actually is. Do you know what market elasticity is? Without it the market can't work. That's why, for example, the market can't save us with health care. Health care is fundamentally inelastic (you'd pay any price for a life saving operation because without it you, to quote a movie, lose everything you've ever had and ever will have).

I believe we have a similar situation with education. You can't just opt out if it costs too much.

EDIT:

>No matter how important teaching is, teaching 20 kids per year is worth about $30K.

How do you know this? We know that we pay $30K/year now. We know that our teaching quality is awful. Doesn't that actually demonstrate (or at the very least strongly suggest) that it is in fact worth more?

I know about the market and elasticity very well, thank you. Saying that the market doesn't solve every problem in no way implies that it can't solve a given problem. But one key ingredient is that you have to know what you're purchasing, which is one reason why health care is so messed up.

By opt-out I mean opt-out of your standard assigned school district, not out of education. You should be able to take your $X per-child that would go to the district and spend it on any educational program that meets defined standards.

Teaching 20 kids per year is worth $30K by definition, because that's what we pay people to do it. There is a high, positive return on additional money invested in better education, but we as a society are not opting for it.

> Saying that the market doesn't solve every problem in no way implies that it can't solve a given problem.

Nope, I never made such an illogical assertion.

>By opt-out I mean opt-out of your standard assigned school district, not out of education.

I was pointing out why education may be inelastic. Not assuming you didn't want your children educated.

>Teaching 20 kids per year is worth $30K by definition

Extremely bizarre logic. If we pay $30k for something and fail then it obviously something is wrong. If other systems pay more than this and don't fail (or at least not as badly) then that makes a rather strong case that the pay is too low.

>but we as a society are not opting for it.

That doesn't mean it's worth less, that means you're not paying enough and it shows. This furthers the argument that education may not be an elastic market. If people are simply incapable of acting in their own best interest (given the choice, always picking the crappy cheap education for their kids) then there must be intervention.

The only reason I'm not convinced that this is indeed the case are grandalf's posts.

Here is my argument that making it better would make it cheaper:

- Consider what percentage of class time is productive vs babysitting. Not sure where you went to school but in my jr high and high school years, 60% of the classes were 80% babysitting and 20% teaching.

- Now imagine that a school hour could be structured with a 20 minute lecture followed by 40 minutes of supervised study (supervision not necessarily provided by someone capable of teaching the material). Suddenly you have a >100% efficiency improvement for that hour, since the teacher could be teaching another group and the supervisors can be relatively low skilled.

Surely there are some classes/students that would benefit from longer lectures or hour long discussions; the point is intended simply to illustrate that there is substantial waste and inefficiency today.

- Why does the school day operate during the typical school hours? Largely because of the school's dual role as daycare... expensive daycare. Why not have school hours be 8-noon every day and then make the rest of the day a daycare / study hall staffed by non-teachers? This could be done without sacrificing any academic quality.

- Pay distribution. Teachers are paid based on seniority. Switching to merit pay would cut staffing costs significantly while allowing the good ones to be paid a salary competitive with other fields.

- Why are classes overcrowded? Do all classes need to contain 20-30 students? Why not make some classes contain 150 students and others 10-15 students like in college? The problem of overcrowding is due to the unrealistic notion that there should be 20-30 bodies in every room during every period. That doesn't match the distribution of talent and interests, and does not optimize teacher effectiveness.

These are just a few ideas. There are probably many more.

Ok, very good points. I was too hastily with suggesting that there could be no savings here. I came up with some myself after pressing submit. I was more striking out against this horrible but prevalent idea (at least in the US) that the market is the solution to all problems (I go into more detail in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1715465).

You're right that the kids don't need to be there for learning. We could e.g. have the really good teachers create a pod cast series of their subject material (imagine a series from SPJ!) that kids could watch at their leisure and separately give kids the amount of human guidance/support that they require (the amount required will differ between different kids and even the phase of learning between the same kid).

The babysitting aspect is also important. Accepting that these are two separate things that the school is doing would allow us to no longer combine them. We could merge several of today's schools into one babysitting facility if we wanted, or we could make lots of little babysitting facilities that are closer to where the kids live. There are a lot of possibilities here. Hrm, this sounds like a business opportunity.

>Switching to merit pay would cut staffing costs significantly while allowing the good ones to be paid a salary competitive with other fields.

I don't like the idea of merit pay. If you dangle a carrot people aren't going to go "oh I'll just do everything the right way and get the carrot if I deserve it". Some will, but a lot will take whatever short cuts they need to to get that carrot (e.g. teach kids to memorize useless facts to get artificially high numbers on the important test scores). I've worked in enough big companies to know that the one who gets those big promotions aren't always better, often they're just good at finding out what reports to skew to make it look that way.

Interesting thoughts. I think if done right the daycare aspect could be really fun and socially/academically valuable time for the kids.

I actually do think it's a business opportunity but haven't pursued it yet (though I'd like to in the next year or two).

As for merit pay, the pay plan I came up with for my hypothetical school would simply be a partnership model. You "make partner" when your colleagues decide they trust you, value your contribution, and would like to keep you on board by sharing profits with you. Then, everyone is paid a base salary but partners get profit sharing.

This solves the main problem of tenure while keeping the spirit and benefits of it.

Another idea I had for pay plans is to incentivize teachers to create curriculum materials (this would save huge money on textbooks). Ideally there would be a network of schools so that if a teacher crated an amazing lesson or book chapter he/she would be paid a bit extra every time it was chosen/used. Enough that a moderately prolific teacher could earn a 20-40% bonus simply via curriculum creation. Maybe one decides to teach acoustical physics by analyzing a lady gaga song, and the lesson is a huge hit across a thousand schools.

In my opinion the ideal teachers are the sort of people capable of creating top quality curriculum... curriculum creation is a natural biproduct of energetic, creative teaching, and a large chunk of the way schools currently allocate money goes into paying textbook firms rather than cultivating a valuable skill in their employees.

That sounds very interesting. If someone could solve this, it could be the most important startup in our time. What I would say, though is please put your ideas through the "Satan's computer" and/or game theory test. That is, if you assume every actor will act in their own personal best (best being defined as "optimal short term rewarding") interest at the exclusion or detriment of everyone else but your system still functions then it's a good idea. For example, in your incentive example above it strikes me that some teachers would purposely not use material from other schools because they want that incentive money for themselves (game theory).

I would also mention that there will be a potential resource problem. In every field there is a small subset that are the pinnacle of that field. If your system will only pick that pinnacle then you'll be understaffed. Imagine if software development were staffed this way. The software that actually was produced would be much better today, indeed much less would be needed. But we wouldn't have enough.

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