Whole school board resigns in shame after forgetting their WebEx call was public | Hacker News Reader

Whole school board resigns in shame after forgetting their WebEx call was public

theverge.com

As funny as this is, I think it highlights a common problem with computers.

Very important details about privacy and security are hidden or hard to comprehend. In the real world it’s very easy to know the context of your conversation and how private it is. Online these mistakes are trivial.

A burned out teacher friend of mine once told me: “Primary education, at least in the USA, is a daytime prison where we send our children so we can go to work.”

It is prison-like conditions indeed. I can't think of any explanation for waking teenagers up at 6am for early school starts than child abuse. They have those wake up calls in prison. Except it's worse because they're still developing.

All schools here in the UK start at 9.

Why would you start your schools at 6am, I wouldn't take a job that made me start at 6am every day? I would just slowly get tired and less effective.

Not true, we certainly have those that start at 8. Consider a ~45m commute and time to get ready, and waking up at 6 something is not unheard of. (I personally had to wake up at 5:45 to catch a bus to a school over an hour away).

What is not true? I'm just going off of what the gpp mentioned.

Now I don't quite understand what you have written here because you just say "we", but assuming you mean work colleagues then I think there is a bit of a difference between someone starting at 8, and making kids catch a bus at 5:45 so that they can start school an hour later at 6:45? That's not waking up at 6, that is out of the house before 6, and while you survived, it really shouldn't be necessary in a 1st world country.

While you did it, there is plenty of evidence that you could have done even better if you weren't subjected to it.

My k-8 years started at 06:42, 9-12 started at 07:30. I guess the logic was that we got older we didnt need our parents to dress us. I made a deal with most of my 9-12 teachers: I wouldn’t show up and make their lives hell but I would get A’s on all of the tests.

My parents trusted me so they accepted this. I sort of stayed out of trouble, my teachers’ average test scores weren’t impacted negatively and I spent my days coding and hacking (so I got arrested twice .. sue me).

I wonder if that applies to public schools only or includes private as well.

Is private school (in general) worth the cost?

You pay for the other students and for their families. At public schools, you pay in property tax and mortgage. In private schools, you pay tuition.

In the Washington, DC, area, there are very good private schools. I doubt that any of them are better than Wootton or Churchill in Montgomery County, Maryland, or such magnet programs as Thomas Jefferson in Fairfax County.

Whatever they pay teachers, it isn't close to enough. The amount of trouble they have to deal with is insane. In addition they are probably one of the more important jobs in the United States. Their working days are usually 12 hours long and those are FULL work hours. They rarely get a break longer than 15 minutes.

The amount of stress teachers undergo is another thing again. They are under constant close scrutiny from administrators and have to deal with witnessing abused, neglected, and starving children come through their classroom. They have mentally ill, nearly blind, deaf, sick, and exhausted children with no hope of health care. They are designated reporters for CPS and spend time reporting these issues and seeing nothing of substance come of it. They are often named in lawsuits against the school as well.

Unless you teach in an affluent area, teachers are first hand witnesses to the abject poverty and evil underbelly of our country and how it affects children. They are constant targets of legislators and districts with almost no autonomy and often blamed for things completely out of their control.

School board members only get paid a couple thousand dollars per year, and they're the elected officials who serve that role in order to represent the interests of the public. Teachers get paid so much more than them. In California it costs more to send kids to public school than it would to send them to private school, because of how much teachers unions get paid.

Very true! Most school boards seem to be just retired people that ran for that position and barely get paid. You can see some of these pay levels in California.

It seems that School Administrators/Superintendents/Principals make the most money in these districts. As much as a quarter million.

https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?a=school-...

Glorified babysitters require their glory.

The more I get that this seems to be how the US seems to be viewing and paying their teachers, the more I start to understand about the last two elections.

US teacher pay is significantly above the OECD average: https://www.chalk.com/resources/most-least-paid-teachers-in-...

Then you need to compare their performance to the OECD average and not, say, Korea.

Pay average salaries, get average results.

Certainly, this forum should get that.

Interesting.

The statutory salaries presented do not include bonuses, vacation pay, sick-leave pay, or other additional work-related payments.

US time off is significantly worse than the OECD average, so that seems like an odd thing to ignore.

Also, It is important to note that this is number of hours spent teaching, and does not include additional teaching duties such as prep time, extracurriculars, or additional student aid time. yet they still make time comparisons The other end of the scale however is more interesting, showing that teachers in Colombia, Chile, Mexico, and the United States spend more time teaching than any other country.

It’s an oddly biased way of looking at things not in terms of total compensation, hourly wage, or even lifetime earnings but a hybrid chosen to presumably make some specific point. I wonder how else you could slice this up and how much it would change. Aka median vs average salaries etc.

PS: Plenty of ways to play with the number percentage of a medan salaries in each country is arguably the most relevant as it shows what kind of talent you attract and how important it is in each country.

Most teachers in the USA are protected by _very_ strong unions, which are rivaled in power only by police unions. They have incredibly high levels of job security, strong health care etc. Pay is often based on seniority, and there is a feature/bug in unions where higher pay for senior staff tends to be a self-renewing problem.

All in all, being a (unionized) teacher in the USA is a pretty good gig for most people. You won't be rich, but you are secure and protected.

Now non-union/daycare/preschool teachers are a whole different story and they get the short end of the stick. For example, day care centers in the USA have generally been open throughout the pandemic, while schools are (in major cities) still shut.

No one has more time off than teachers, who don't work all Summer. The teachers I know personally all state that as a major reason for their career choice.

Teachers are only paid for the time they work. The summer is not PTO. A teacher might elect to have their salary split into 12 monthly payments, but by no means are they being paid for summer vacation.

Dice up their pay any way you want, I get 15 days off a year above and beyond statutory holidays. Teachers get ... over 50? That’s a lot of time to live that most people dont get

The difference comes in when a teacher gets sick, has to move, or gets fired on day X of the school year. Also, most school systems have mandatory training that eats into that time and is uncompensated.

A lot is said about teacher pay due to seniority, but only 1/3 make it even 5 years. It’s a vastly worse job than most assume.

> Teachers are only paid for the time they work. The summer is not PTO. A teacher might elect to have their salary split into 12 monthly payments, but by no means are they being paid for summer vacation.

In that case, people should be consistent. E.g., people point out that average teacher pay (about $60,000/year) is less than the average pay of college graduates as a whole (about $65,000/year). But if you adjust that for 10 versus 12 months, the average teacher pay is equivalent to $72,000/year. Teacher pay is either higher than public sector pay, on a per month basis, or its lower than public sector pay but offers a long summer vacation. It can't be both situationally.

Using pay as a single data point - especially an OECD based average - for comparison is enormously bad practice/praxis.

The OECD includes Germany, France, Denmark as well as Mexico and Colombia - the US is most definitely unlike those countries.

On the one end, countries like Mexico and Colombia will have significantly lower salaries because cost of living differences.

Germany, France and the others will bring up the average, but the cost of living in those countries is impacted by the existence of a safety net and the structure of their school systems.

Could they have just not resigned? I thought the weed joke was funny

Reply on news.ycombinator.com