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Comment by defertoreptar | Hacker News Reader

> From the fall of 1987 through the fall of 2015, the number of public-school students increased by 20%, but the number of public-school teachers increased by 64%. More recently, in the four years leading up to the 2015-16 school year, teacher employment grew by 400,000, even as the number of students barely changed.

The effect of supply and demand has on job markets gets mentioned too little when discussing whether salaries are fair. We can't at the same time be encouraging more students to become teachers and complain about salaries when demand for those positions don't dictate incentivizing the supply. A more productive discussion would be about nudging students toward career paths that need them. The article mentions there's a "premium" on nursing right now based on the method used to criticize teacher's pay. Maybe there's a good reason for that.

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I couldn’t find a citation in the article for those statistics, but they don’t smell right as an argument for teachers being oversupplied:

- If the argument is that teacher pop growth outpaced student pop growth, therefore there’s an oversupply of teachers, that includes an implicit assumption that the 1987 ratio was correct. There’s no reason to assume that’s the case.

- There’s been a great deal more attention paid to special ed in the past few decades. Changing special ed practices, like inclusion classrooms, also create more demand for special ed teachers to co-teach and work in the same classroom as general ed teachers. I don’t have figures but wouldn’t be surprised if that accounts for a chunk of the growth.

- > If class sizes remain at today's levels, which are themselves much smaller than in the past...

This, from the previous paragraph, is simply false. Per [1], student/teacher ratio in 1989 was 17.2, and in 2011 was 21.2 for elementary and 26.8 for secondary. Per [2] (Wikipedia, but it cites a real source), nationwide average secondary class size was 23.6 in 1992 and 23.4 in 2007.

- If class sizes aren’t shrinking, what are all these “extra” teachers doing? A few guesses: special ed, teaching smaller or specialized classes in wealthier districts, or there’s something misleading about how they’re counting teachers.

[1] https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=28 [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_size#Class_size_throug...

> If the argument is that teacher pop growth outpaced student pop growth, therefore there’s an oversupply of teachers, that includes an implicit assumption that the 1987 ratio was correct. There’s no reason to assume that’s the case.

Yes there is. Total cost in K-12 is up 180% since 1970 and results in Math, Science and Reading are basically flat. Employees are up almost 100%. If you almost triple inputs while outputs stay the same you’re probably just wasting money.

https://fee.org/thinkecon/articles/the-problem-with-educatio...

https://www.cato.org/blog/public-school-spending-achievement...

No, bringing in overall spending is a completely different conversation that’s much wider in scope than parent’s argument about supply and demand.

I believe the point is not that 1987 was an ideal ratio of teachers to students, but the relative increase in supply is limiting wage growth.

The question is, relative to what? If teachers were under supplied to begin with, that wouldn’t be the case. I’m not saying that either answer is correct, just that the quoted figures aren’t actually good evidence.

This is literally the argument: “Back in the day, there were x teachers and y students. Now there are 1.6x teachers and 1.2y students. That’s too many teachers!” See the problem?

Who is encouraging more students to become teachers?

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