Hacker News Reader

Comment by neom | Hacker News Reader

One of my favourite hypotheticals to play out is what would be like if we somehow paid public school teachers and emergency services/law enforcement professionals an extreme of today, a million usd a year, and increased the difficulty to attain this work. I usually end up in a pretty good place but I'd be curious what others think/why this couldn't work?

View on HN

> I usually end up in a pretty good place but I'd be curious why this could not work?

It would be fantastically expensive. Chicago has 21,000 teachers. Paying them $1 million per year would cost $21 billion, dwarfing the city's current $3.8 billion budget. Even paying them $100,000 per year on average would cost half the city's budget.

And there is little reason to believe it would yield better results. American teachers are well paid compared to other OECD countries where students do better: https://www.businessinsider.com/teacher-salaries-by-country-....

I’m not an expert in the matter, but I can imagine it could attract individuals that desire high wages or high-status work. Regardless of how genuinely invested or enthusiastic they are about the impact of being a teacher.

Not that we shouldn’t compensate teachers well (as they deserve it) but I can imagine that a high compensation with strict requirements could introduce a “measure becoming a target and no longer a measure” situation.

A point of contention, the charts in those articles dont take into account cost of living, so its difficult to compare real salaries

If you dig into the actual report, you can see that the data is PPP (purchasing power parity) adjusted as is typical for these types of comparisons.

> And there is little reason to believe it would yield better results.

This is an important point. $100,000+ per year is not unheard of for teachers in Ontario (conveniently public sector incomes >$100,000 are required to publicly disclosed[1]), and they have problems with graduates not having even basic literacy and numeracy skills[2].

[1] https://www.ontario.ca/page/public-sector-salary-disclosure

[2] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-one-in-four-o...

It's a very recent thing for teachers to be able to reach that, usually by hitting the top of the seniority scale and qualifications scale, or having some extra paid work (e.g. being a department head).

$100,000 Canadian is $75,000 American, which is about the average teacher salary in my wealthy US city ($70,000 to be exact).

If the fully loaded headcount cost of a CPS teacher isn't north of $100,000 I'll be pretty surprised. CPS teachers are well-compensated. Their median salary is $71,000, and they get good health insurance and a defined-benefit pension plan.

I live in Oak Park, just on the outskirts of Chicago, and the median teacher cash comp at my kids' high school is something like $120,000.

I think a generally cheaper and easier way to manage it would be to require all children, rich and poor, go to the same schools. The economic factors would change pretty dramatically for being a public school teacher.

What if the rich parents disagree with the poor parents about how the school should be run?

That's what school board elections are for.

They might have to compromise, and find solutions that work for both.

Yeah, individuals should be subordinate to the state. They should do what the government tells them to, when it tells them to, how it tells them to.

Everything for the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state. Mussolini

Seems to me that private school tuition should be taxed to provide benefits to public schooling.

The rich would still afford private school. Public schools get more funding.

People paying for private schools still pay school taxes for the public district they reside in. You'd basically be double taxing which would probably fail in a court challenge.

This is only possible if school is no longer a physical place (i.e. everyone does school online). So long as school is in a physical space, it needs to be one relatively close to you, and then you're not close to giving everyone the same experience, as prosperity and educational attainment differ in granularity by more than a school bus can travel every day.

Could at least stop basing school funding off of local taxes. Children's education shouldn't be tied to their parent's wealth.

This was tried in NYC by The Equity Project - a charter school (125K base salary, very demanding qualifications). I'm sure that it works well in niche markets and test scores aren't everything, but results (test scores) were not that stellar as you might imagine when compared with similar Charter schools to suggest it could scale.

You have to pay people enough, and not much more.

Excessive pay doesn’t motivate performance.

I think a million bucks is too hyperbolic to make for a plausible thought experiment. How about just a 50% raise?

If it were done universally, then you'd have the exact same zero-sum parent game: parents would continue to pester the $1m/yr rockstar teacher about why their kid got an A- instead of an A.

Where do you usually end up with that hypothesis? Walk us through it and we might be able to explain why it couldn't work.

why would i need someone so insanely talented to teach 5th grade algebra.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com