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Comment by glitchc | Hacker News Reader

In North America, teachers are grossly underpaid and their ability to discipline poor performance has been entirely eviscerated. It’s not just SF, look at what’s happening in Vancouver: https://nationalpost.com/opinion/rex-murphy-cutting-honours-...

The problem is the administration: The board that sets the standards and the parents and politicians who sit on those boards.

The solution is this: Ban anyone without a minimum teaching experience of x years from participating on boards, bring all teacher salaries up to comfortable middle-class in every district and give them back their authority in the classroom. Otherwise this downward slide into illiteracy will continue until North America is dominated by an idiot majority.

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https://www.heritage.org/education/report/assessing-the-comp...

> Workers who switch from non-teaching jobs to teaching jobs receive a wage increase of roughly 9 percent. Teachers who change to non-teaching jobs, on the other hand, see their wages decrease by roughly 3 percent. This is the opposite of what one would expect if teachers were underpaid.

https://www.heritage.org/education/report/critical-issues-as...

> Our recent report, “Assessing the Compensation of Public-School Teachers,” [1] concluded that, on average, public-school teachers receive total compensation that is roughly 50 percent higher than what they would receive in private-sector employment. While salaries are at appropriate levels, fringe benefits push teacher compensation far ahead of what private-sector workers enjoy. Consequently, recruiting more effective teachers for public schools will be much more difficult than simply raising salaries.

I had one amazing high school math teacher who graduated from MIT at 18, and was teaching all the way up to diff eq in public schools. He’d made his money and then decided to teach because he was annoyed that his sons’ math teachers sucked. There’s absolutely no way teacher salary+pension was competitive with what he was making in industry. And we should want a lot more people who are like him teaching, without the needing them to be lucky enough to not need to care about money.

Not necessarily. People who are really smart and great in industry are not necessarily great teachers. Frankly, if you are talking about making the salary competitive with one that allows FIRE will have the opposite effect that you want (ideology vs money).

Are you saying that FIRE type people are ill suited for teaching because their interest is in minimising retirement age and not being good teachers? The ideology of “earning to retire” vs. “living to teach”?

I'm saying that if you pay teachers a salary consistent with an MIT grad that was able to FIRE, that you will attract people solely for the money. If we are compensating teachers at 4-5x the median salary, then I would gladly quit my job and become a teacher even though I have no real interest in it. I believe that the best teachers enjoy their jobs and are not just looking for the money.

Now we could use a performance based pay system that could pay teachers more. Some of those systems fail to capture the right metrics. All of them are opposed by the teachers union. I think a slightly below average salary (factoring in benefits which are not typically seen in industry) with the potential to make more than average based on performance would be a good system.

So why should people not go into teaching for the money. Are you saying you are not good at your job because you are motivated by money? That's a weird take, or does that only apply to teachers not other jobs? If so why?

Teaching is both hard AND hard to evaluate, at the same time. This means that money-motivated people will likely do a bad job there AND will be able to hide their poor performance for years, for the sake of accumulating money.

The main difference here is that the teachers are unionized. Their contracts generally make it extremely difficult to remove underperforming teachers or pay for results.

Higher pay under a pay for performance structure and the ability to remove ineffective teachers would be good. This would bring it more in line with industry. It can be tricky to get the right metrics. The bigger issue is that the teachers union opposes any of them.

Why is that the opposite? At the high school level, I’m not looking for martyrs, I’m looking for subject matter experts to teach my kids. At the lower levels, maybe empathy is more important, but by the time they get to microbiology or stats, you literally cannot be a good teacher without having a deep understanding.

Soft skills ate essential, more so even than a deep understanding of the material.A basic competence is important but anyone who has ever had a genius level professor that angrily mumbles while scribbling incomprehensibly on the board for an hour and then you leave will understand this.

Sure, they can't be completely uninterested in teaching, since they're high school teachers - they're not being hired primarily for their research ability. Part of offering better salaries is also being able to be more selective with who you keep.

"Part of offering better salaries is also being able to be more selective with who you keep."

If you are a private school, sure. This is not the case for unionized public schools. Did you hear of that famous case where a superintendent fired multiple teachers for abysmal performance and even abusive behavior and was forced by the courts/union to reinstate them with back pay? It's very eye opening.

Yeah, salaries competitive enough to draw talent away from other high paying opportunities is just one of many things that need to be fixed to get the public education system doing what it should.

Where's the line of what is high paying? Median salary in the US is about $50k. Many teachers in the US make more than that. Some make less. A lot depends on local cost of living. We would also have to factor in other benefits not typically seen in industry, like pensions, tenure (this is really one of the main problems), and time off.

I'm sure there are states where teachers are underpaid. My state is in the top ten and that is not an issue here. I know a teacher making more than I do as a developer. The local district spends $14k per student per year (about average for the state). Money is not a problem here. There are still districts that have poor performance and test scores.

Instead if just trying to throw money at problems, we need to change the structure. Pay for performance would be a great way encourage good teachers and discourage people who perform poorly. It can be tricky to get the right metrics. The biggest issue is that the teachers unions oppose this.

Yes, trying to apply apply industrial engineering metrics to a squishy social problem has never caused problems before at all. After all, we wouldn't want Any Child to be Left Behind.

Oddly enough, private schools can pay a fair bit less. At a private school, you get to avoid most of the disruption, have smaller class sizes, and teach brighter students on average. If you're passionate about what you're teaching, these are things you may value more than salary, so...

Private schools also have fewer hiring restrictions, which lets them lower salaries. I know a couple people who did not get the qualifications to work at a public school, and now teach at private schools. (Not for lack of ability, by the way).

Really? Our state generally just requires a state teaching certification and FBI background check. I thought that was also a requirement for K-12 private schools.

Generally the state teaching certification is not required for private schools in grades 1-12. The background check is required by most states.

I made the transition from a career in industry to education in the past couple of years. It's been an interesting path.

I'm definitely a subject matter expert. And I'm able to get pretty deep content into middle school and high school classrooms. And working with smaller subgroups of students is a lot like mentoring junior engineers.

But man, dealing with a lot of kids in the room is a challenge-- keeping the lower third of students motivated; modulating strictness up and down so that you can have exuberance but not disruption; picking up on the subtle signs that there is a problem from outside spilling over into the classroom while multitasking and doing 3 other things. And... just coping when there's an entire class period that felt like a waste and you don't know why.

It is -hard-, and I'm dealing with an unusually easy teaching environment (classes of ~18-20 of well-behaved and academically advanced private school kids). I'm also not a core teacher and so I have the benefit of leaning on other professionals to do the heavy lifting in these areas. I still have hope I'll get good at it (this past year was a difficult one for me to self-assess my performance).

I do think that being an expert/having passion for what you teach is a bonus: if you have students that are already inclined to be engaged, that spark will help a little in getting and keeping their attention. But it is not the most important thing day to day.

Actually, my best performance lately was when I was a long-term sub in science classes teaching subject matter that is not my core competence. I could geek out and learn deeper stuff than I knew about volcanoes and share my surprise with the students, and that felt really good for engagement.

Awesome, good on you for getting into teaching! And thanks for weighing in. I’m surprised that the expertise and passion was only slightly helpful for getting engagement, we found it very contagious in our classes with the teacher I described, especially in the more advanced classes.

Because knowing something and conveying that knowledge are different things. Do you want a tech lead that knows everything but doesn't work to develop the people under them, or do you want someone who acts as a force multiplier by mentoring others and transferring that knowledge?

Aristotle would disagree.

You're mostly correct though, that they are separate things. For teaching technical topics well, both are needed.

Right, being a subject matter expert is necessary but not sufficient to be a very good teacher of the subject.

> People who are really smart and great in industry are not necessarily great teachers.

Is there data on the average effectiveness there?

Regarding the first quote, it’s not the opposite of what you’d expect if teaching was a low-status profession that could only attract weaker, lower paid labourers.

Teaching doesn’t attract highly paid workers because in addition to a big pay cut those workers would be considering likely worse working conditions as well.

If teaching is low-status it is no wonder that education standards are low and thus educational achievement is low, as they note in the article. The alternative is failing most students and having a labour supply problem. In my country, Australia, you occasionally see news articles describing some shockingly bad final year high school scores (ATAR scores) being accepted into teaching degrees. Unfortunately, the fact that this happens further entrenches teaching as low status and puts downward pressure on the minimum bar for ATAR scores.

Remarkable, but unsurprising, that the Heritage foundation then suggests _lowering_ wages even further. You’ll get even worse candidates heading for teaching and they may even be able to next time show the same 9% positive bump.

> Teaching doesn’t attract highly paid workers because in addition to a big pay cut those workers would be considering likely worse working conditions as well.

You could double teacher pay and it wouldn't make a lick of difference.

As a teacher, you have no control over your classroom.

Disruptive students that destroy everybody else's learning environment? Too bad. No Child Left Behind! Wait, that's the old slogan, what's the new one? Equity Uber Alles? Equity Macht Frei?

It changes so often, I keep forgetting.

Assaulted by the kids? Suck it up, we don't want to be sued! Better to have a battered teacher -- the Unions will keep them in check -- than a lawyered-up parent.

I have seen this first-hand.

Want to actually teach kids things they need to learn to succeed? This is the wrong job for you.

I know a lot of motivated folks that went into teaching, with big salary bonuses, full scholarships for their degrees, everything. None of them lasted more than four years.

Public education in the US selects for Dolores Umbridge, and against Remis Lupin.

> You could double teacher pay and it wouldn't make a lick of difference.

I sincerely doubt that. Having a teacher who isn't struggling financially would be a huge improvement.

OP is correct. double your salary at your job, but have to take verbal abuse and berated from your 'boss' and see how that paycheck affects your life

If your salary is high enough that you can save some money then you aren’t required to put up with bullshit in order to keep eating food.

Do you mean that by saving money people can leave the profession sooner or at least move to a school with more favorable working conditions?

If so, maybe you’ve hit on a kernel of truth: we can’t risk paying teachers enough that they’d have the financial security to leave a bad work situation.

Am I the only one who thinks “we should pay teachers more so they can afford a new profession because public education is horrible” is the wrong takeaway? Like, why not fix public education (e.g., more teacher autonomy) or at least support some voucher program so more teachers can be private school teachers?

See my reply above. I didn’t think this idea would be controversial. Working conditions should improve when the workers have other options.

"Working conditions should improve when the workers have other options."

So when the workers have not other options, working conditions can stay low?

It’s not a “should” it’s just what happens.

I mean that teachers would have a credible threat of leaving and hopefully administrations and school boards would respond to the threat by improving conditions.

High salaries means more people looking to get in, so it's not like administrators would risk running out of teachers.

(I'm all for financially rewarding good teachers, but because their work is incredibly valuable. It's just ab incredibly hard context in which to separate the good and the bad without creating perverse incentives)

Investment bankers barely enjoy their jobs and take a lot of abuse from their bosses, yet there is no shortage of banker aspirants. Some even stay for the long haul, or go to even worse working conditions such as private equity, for more money.

Investment bankers also have autonomy and generally work in small teams. Not responsible for human beings, just capital. Also if a IB gets fired (but is good) they are probably employed within a week. A good teacher that gets fired (for fighting the bad administration? Good luck...

To draw parallels, an investment banker who goes against the system would likewise not be hired, but rather virtually blackballed. And good luck for whistle blowers in any financial institution.

Also investment bankers have as much autonomy as a client allows them to. And MDs and VPs are as much responsible for their subordinates and client relationships (although not in the same way as teachers are for students).

Yet public school teachers do this all the time. They take low pay and a bad work environment, and keep teaching anyway. Why? Because they are passionate about teaching.

I had several high-school teachers who weren't financially comfortable, yet still chose to spend hundreds or even thousands on their students during a school year.

Of course, those teachers would have been much more effective if they were in a financially stable position. I also would have had fewer quality teachers leave.

Although an insanely complex topic, this basically sums up my views (spouse is a 6-8 teacher). Teachers have no autonomy to teach (which discipline is apart of).

Want to actually teach kids things they need to learn to succeed? This is the wrong job for you.

I teach at a community college and for years I've told newcomers to profession that one thing this job is not about is teaching.

>and for years I've told newcomers to profession that one thing this job is not about is teaching.

So, what is about then?

High passing rate and minimal number of student complaints. No one in administration cares if the high passing rate is because standards were lowered. All they care about is that more than x% pass.

Another sad instance of Strahern's adaptation of Goodhart's law[1]:

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

Stuff like this drives the push for things like vouchers. I’m lucky to be able to send my kids to a good private school. We chose it after a tour and discussion with the headmaster about exactly how it operates.

The teachers as a group research and plan curriculum. They coordinate across grade levels and determine how to roll out changes in the most effective way possible for students and parents as well. They rolled out common core math over 5 years with great success well before it was forced on public schools.

In other words, they let the people who have studied to be professional educators make decisions about the best way to…educate. There’s no school board, no state level involvement, no federal disruption every time there’s an election.

And it’s fantastic. I see this work and my first instinct is that EVERYONE should have an option like this, not just the people who can afford it.

For that reason, I support some type of voucher program that could achieve these goals. Yet for some reason in the US this is a political hot button, which doesn’t make any sense to me. Currently, the only people who have all the options are people who can afford them out of pocket. Everybody else is stuck with either public school or home school and home school is on the rise.

Well right, because they can kick out students who are disruptive and make them the public school systems problem. When the public school system becomes insolvent, what’s your solution for those students? They just don’t get an education? We hope someone else has a solution? Vouchers are a great way to permanently cement the cradle to prison cycle.

Why should disruptive students be tolerated in public school classrooms? Does the disruptive student actually get an education simply by virtue of being in the classroom? He certainly drags his peers down, but how much is he actually educated in the process, and is that worth the harm he does his peers?

> Vouchers are a great way to permanently cement the cradle to prison cycle.

I could as easily say they are a way out of the cradle to prison cycle for many at risk youths.

Perhaps any voucher system could be calibrated to: A) allow some more students to go to private schools by providing a fraction of what would be spent on them, and B) increase remaining resources per-pupil in the public school system.

Of course, it still takes thought to make sure that the public schools improve in this scenario, because they will also be fighting an adverse-selection headwind of being stuck with students from lower classes and those that the private schools don't want. But if you can shrink classes and cater classes to similar ability levels, I'd think this would win out.

I'm not sure your math works. If the goal of vouchers is to take the total education budget, divide it by the number of students, then disperse the pot equally.

In other words is it simply a case of $10 000 per child per year, so here's a voucher for 10k, go wherever you like?

There are no extra resources here for underperforming schools - in fact there are likely fewer resources. Public shools won't get smaller though, they'll just merge together to create fewer schools, and the bad teachers will go away.

And perhaps therein lies the root of the resistance to vouchers. It starts to measure school, and by extension, teacher quality. And that's not a rabbit hole teacher unions want to go down.

> In other words is it simply a case of $10 000 per child per year, so here's a voucher for 10k, go wherever you like?

When vouchers were proposed in California in 1993, it was to be half the amount spent by the state on each child for public education. In 2000, it was to be $4000/year, when the state spent about $7000/year per student.

Of course, there's the big existing population in private schools that would also have been eligible for vouchers-- about 7%-- so these amounts probably still would drive down per-pupil spending in public schools. You'd need to roughly double private school enrollment to "break even" in per-pupil spending.

I favor something like 20-33%-- that might reasonably be expected to both make it significantly easier for parents to send their children to private schools and increase resources per student in public schools.

Vouchers are a great way to permanently cement the cradle to prison cycle.

You don't solve a problem by making it worse. Making smart and/or motivated kids stay in the same classrooms as disruptive and demotivated kids just turns the motivated kids into more disruptive and demotivated kids. Right now it looks like we can choose between some people getting educated, and almost nobody getting educated because of the disruptive environment.

> what’s your solution for those students? They just don’t get an education?

You want the brutal truth? Yes, that's exactly the solution. Want an education? Learn to behave in class.

And note that this is the only workable answer even in public school systems that aren't insolvent. No amount of money can educate a kid who refuses to be educated.

> Learn to behave in class.

Who’s the job to teach those kids how to behave in class ? Their parents ? And what do you do if their parents don’t care (which is the common case with those kids) ? What do you do if the student has undiagnosed mental illness ? Entire generations of misbehaved children were in fact suffering ADHD. How do you manage a misbehaving children that is bullied every single morning when he comes to school ?

Not educating a kid is ruining its life and, since you speak with « brutal truth », yeah, just sentence those students to jail for life already, at least they’ll not have to struggle with hunger and homelessness during years.

The problem is keeping those kids in school ruins the education of all of the kids in that class. How is it fair to damage the potential of so many kids, because one kid is disruptive, and their parents don’t care.

The options here are not binary. There are other possibilities than keeping them ruining the class or abandoning them.

A lot of countries have dedicated schools for those children, so they damage nothing around them and can be treated individually. And in lot of cases, since it requires removing them from families where their problems comes, it’s a breadth of fresh air for them.

As an outsider, it looks to me like the options in America are binary. Either the student can be removed from the class, or they can’t. The problem as I understand it, is that in regular schools teachers are disempowered from removing trouble-making students for a number of reasons, including “equity”.

I agree, that special programs and schools are required for challenging students. But that is a different question.

Someone has to be there for that kid to say 'shut up and study'. Failing that, disruptive student is a drag on the rest.

I am sympathetic to the thought process behind it but the end results are hard to argue with.

I agree. But if their parents are not able to say « shut up and study », it should be the role of the public power to say it, even if it means transferring them into specialized schools, but letting them aside of the road should never be an acceptable option, because it will hurt them and it hurts the society (by making up future criminals and spreading wrong values)

> if their parents are not able to say « shut up and study », it should be the role of the public power to say it, even if it means transferring them into specialized schools

Who pays for the specialized schools? If it's we, the taxpayers, then we have a right to expect that those schools do their jobs. Do they? Do you have any specific references you can give?

> Who’s the job to teach those kids how to behave in class ? Their parents ?

Yes.

> what do you do if their parents don’t care

Then other family members should pitch in. Or other adults in the kid's life should pitch in. Or, if you believe the government can exercise such power with good judgment (I personally don't), you could have the parents' rights terminated and put the kids up for adoption.

What you can't do is ask schools to do the job, because that isn't what schools are for. Schools are not supposed to be rehabilitation centers for kids who can't be educated because they have bad parents. They're supposed to be places where kids who can be educated, are educated. Trying to make them into rehabilitation centers just ruins the education of all the other kids who can be educated.

> Not educating a kid is ruining its life

I entirely agree. But that doesn't change the fact that a kid who refuses to behave in class cannot be educated. Even if it's not the kid's fault, that's still the fact.

Also, if kids who can't be educated are put in schools, now you don't just have them not being educated, you have all the kids not being educated because of the constant disruptions. How is that an improvement?

[Edit: I see you mentioned specialized schools elsewhere in the thread. I'll respond to that point there.]

> just sentence those students to jail for life already

I didn't do that; the kids' parents did, by making them unable to be educated. So why aren't you all on fire to hold the parents accountable? Why are you going after me, who had nothing to do with it?

> When the public school system becomes insolvent, what’s your solution for those students? They just don’t get an education?

Are they getting an education now?

According to most metrics - including this article - more and more students are passed without meeting the requirements for their grade level.

> Yet for some reason in the US this is a political hot button, which doesn’t make any sense to me.

I share in your bafflement. Charitably, perhaps they reason that parents will pick schools that are worse on average than public schools, but I suspect it is more of a “equality demands poor schooling regardless of class” with a side of “the state gets to determine the values your child is taught”.

My understanding is that vouchers still put the most power in the parents about what school their children go to, when the parents themselves aren’t necessarily good judgements of what would make a good school. Additionally, tools that parents would use (how students are graded in standard tests) are opaque. There are even cases where private schools don’t have to disclose how well or poorly their students score, which means they can effectively present as being a great school without any proof, while public schools have to provide proof and therefore look worse as they can’t lie.

Fair enough, but my impression of lots of public schools is that they are abysmal and the few that aren’t are typically only available to rich people anyway (in practice, not principle) so the current system addresses neither overall quality of education nor inequality.

Yes, currently. But we should be looking to improve that system for everyone, not allowing a privileges few to opt out.

Wouldn’t a better system have more options with different approaches rather than a single lowest common denominator?

Just from a scientific perspective, more experiments that are able to learn from each other and adapt things they see working elsewhere into their approach should naturally lead to constantly improving schools.

A single lowest common denominator that nobody is allowed to escape from is doomed to failure by comparison.

Vouchers aren’t about letting the privileged few opt out, not more so than the current system anyway. And shooting down vouchers without a better plan for improving the current system is just prolonging a system that is bad for everyone (mostly the poor).

I taught for a few years, and I met many parents and students. The old adage is right: judge the tree by its fruit. Voucher-funded charter schools don't even have to cherry-pick students to surpass public schools: the biggest factor is that parents have to make a conscious decision to send a child to a charter school over the default public school. The worst-performing students belong to parents who will not put in the effort to choose a school instead of sending their kids to the default public school. There is a direct correlation between the parents' (or more likely parent's or grandmother's) lack of involvement in the child's education on the child's performance in school. The easiest filter to separate the bottom of the population from the average and top is to provide a choice of schools, because the lowest segments simply will not make any choice.

That’s the ultimate issue though. If parents don’t have the choice then we never really know that.

Right now, the only parents with a choice are the ones who can afford all the options, including moving to a better public school district.

The problem isn't what school the parents pick, it's that the voucher schools cherry pick high scoring kids to hold up stats and aren't accountable to the state for the education the state is paying for.

But isn't it a good thing where birds of feather flock together? Just not being dragged down from low scoring kids is worth it. Why can't they select for criteria they are looking for?

In practice this means discriminating against students who are non-native English speakers, students with learning disabilities, etc.

> Just not being dragged down from low scoring kids is worth it.

It depends on the kind of society you want to live in. I would rather live in a society that prioritizes decreasing inequality rather than exacerbating it.

https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/success-academy-charter-sc...

I could equally (and accurately) argue that in practice public school means discriminating against people by wealth, using zip code as a proxy.

And anyway, why would "discriminating based on competence" exacerbate inequality? Shouldn't competence-based discrimination lessen inequality e.g. by giving bright, poorer schools a shot at more prestigious institutions while financially-but-not-intellectually privileged kids move to more middling institutions?

Given the choice between wealth discrimination and merit discrimination, I would prefer the latter.

Forgive my ignorance, I’m from another land. What are vouchers in this context?

It’s about giving parents a voucher (like a gift card) to spend on a school. The idea is that instead of subjecting everyone to a one size fits all public school system, which can have various problems and inefficiencies, you give parents money that can only be spent on schools but let them choose which provider to spend it on (whether public or private or homeschooling or whatever). It introduces an element of competition between schools but also choice, and the ability for parents to seek out what is best for their child. For example: teacher union avoiding accountability via test scores? Switch schools. School policies not properly managing disruptive students? Switch schools. Curriculum not appropriate for your child? Switch schools.

Usually a government program to give parents fixed annual tuition voucher which they can use to enroll their child at a private school. The voucher may cover part or all of the tuition at the private school and the parent would pay the remainder if there is one. It often goes under other monikers such as School Choice. Parents usually don't have much say as to which public school their child goes to, as it is assigned by address. These programs aim to let parents who are in the district of a poorly performing school to transfer their kids to a school they think will benefit them. Wealthier parents already have this option, but private schools are too expensive for even most middle class parents.

It is often related to efforts to create charter schools which are essentially private schools funded by taxes but run by a commercial or non-profit management company. These schools are usually regulated similarly to other private schools, having fewer regulations than the public schools and not under any direct authority of elected officials.

"Vouchers" are effectively tuition money for a school of a parent's choice, funded by the government. They would in theory allow parents to choose the "right" kind of schooling for their child, rather than having their child attend a school based on where they live.

This system does not exist today, but there are many who would like to see it. Lots of people are fed up with what they perceive as the failings of public schools. Very few who advocate for vouchers seem to advocate for education funding in general - most seem to simply want their kids somewhere else.

Historically, the push for vouchers is a right-wing, small-government kind of effort intended to further undermine the public school systems, and also to allow government funds to support religious education which, under the current system, is not permitted.

Vouchers add power to parents, and we've (I think) already agreed that parents are a large part of the problem. Even worse: unlike policies, standards, regulations, boards, administrations, and rules, you can't change parents. Even worst: you can manipulate parents, and perverse incentives all but guarantee that evil people will be attracted to this opportunity.

>we've (I think) already agreed that parents are a large part of the problem

I'd be interested in seeing data showing this.

> we've (I think) already agreed that parents are a large part of the problem.

No.

> Even worst: you can manipulate parents, and perverse incentives all but guarantee that evil people will be attracted to this opportunity.

Of course, those evil people would never think of becoming teachers or professors in order to brainwash thousands of students over their careers.

Because that would be, what, wrong and stuff?

And ultimately, the teacher doesn't get to choose what they teach either. Somebody else decides that and gives teachers a long list of things that the students have to know.

I am curious whether there are any systems that let parents choose teachers within a school — and let teachers admit students they will take. So they can make more if they are in demand — and that students that are "problems" will result in greater income for the teachers that take them.

A kind of "choice-based" market system within a school.

"Consequently, recruiting more effective teachers for public schools will be much more difficult than simply raising salaries."

I agree. I have a friend that took a lower paying job because he could not stand the handcuffs that the administration placed on teachers. Stuff like you have to give people a 50% if they put their name on the paper, you can't discipline students effectively, etc. I also know many teachers at private schools that make less than the public school counterparts but would not switch due to similar reasons.

The analysis is harder than that.

I would imagine education degrees are not particularly versatile: they’re meant to train you to become a teacher, more or less. Given that, it is not particularly surprising that teaching is one of the better-paying options once you commit to that pathway. However, there are plenty of other, career tracks: potential teachers might become accountants or engineers instead.

Zooming in a bit…the big “fringe benefit” is obviously summer vacation. Valuing that correctly is tricky, and the assumption used in that report is that it’s linear in the amount of time off: one week off is worth $X, so the summer vacation must be worth $15X. I would bet that’s not really true and it has declining marginal value like everything else.

> I would imagine education degrees are not particularly versatile: they’re meant to train you to become a teacher, more or less.

This would imply that education degrees make their recipients better educators. There is no strong evidence of that.

https://www.brookings.edu/research/who-profits-from-the-mast...

> The fact that teachers with master’s degrees are no more effective in the classroom, on average, than their colleagues without advanced degrees is one of the most consistent findings in education research. In a study published in 2011, Paul Peterson and I confirmed this finding by comparing the student achievement of the same teachers before and after they earned master’s degrees, and found no impact.[1]

> This finding may be non-controversial among researchers, but it has largely been ignored by policymakers.

[1] It's easier to pick a good teacher than to train one: Familiar and new results on the correlates of teacher effectiveness

Neither holding a college major in education nor acquiring a master's degree is correlated with elementary and middle school teaching effectiveness, regardless of the university at which the degree was earned. Teachers generally do become more effective with a few years of teaching experience, but we also find evidence that teachers may become less effective with experience, particularly later in their careers. These and other findings with respect to the correlates of teacher effectiveness are obtained from estimations using value-added models that control for student characteristics as well as school and (where appropriate teacher) fixed effects in order to measure teacher effectiveness in reading and math for Florida students in fourth through eighth grades for eight school years, 2001–2002 through 2008–2009.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02727...

> This would imply that education degrees make their recipients better educators. There is no strong evidence of that.

This is orthogonal to what he is discussing; he's just discussing the relative pay picture (in-profession vs. out of profession) for one who holds such a degree.

> > The fact that teachers with master’s degrees are no more effective in the classroom, on average, than their colleagues without advanced degrees

This is -further- orthogonal and off-topic, because we're not talking about the relative merits of graduate education for teachers compared to bachelors degrees.

> This would imply that education degrees make their recipients better educators.

Not necessarily. It might just be an artifact of mandatory certifications. Suppose that teacher training were completely useless (debatable), but nevertheless legally required (mostly true, esp. for public schools) and expensive in terms of time or money (definitely true). I think you’d still expect increased earnings in those who obtained the certification, if only because they are now eligible for jobs where the supply of potential employees is limited. If they leave the industry, however, that certification often counts for very little, and the pay bump disappears. None of this, of course, tells you anything about conditions across industries.

The quotes in your comment are missing some important context. As §2.1 of the linked paper says, nearly all teachers in the US are somehow licensed, but this can be part of an education degree or an “alternative certification” for those with other degrees. Those two types of training are what the paper compares, not trained vs totally untrained. Critically, both take time and money.

The advanced degree data is also hard to interpret. It could be that a masters is totally worthless. However, selection effects also seem possible: teachers with more training could be given more challenging students or courses, or, as the paper proposes, underperforming teachers could preferentially do a masters to shore up their skills. They could also have more out-of-classroom responsibilities (e.g., curriculum development or admin), which would be consistent with how advanced degrees work in many other fields.

Anyway, all this is to say that “haha teachers are overpaid dummies” is, IMO, too simplistic and not supported by the data either.

I would say it’s the opposite. Vacation time has more incremental value the longer it goes on. Even a 2 week vacation I’d have trouble fully unwinding from. An entire summer, you can truly have some quality time to yourself to recharge, focus on a hobby, travel a lot, etc. I would say those summers off are easily worth $100k.

Too bad it's vacation time when everyone else is having vacation, so everything is crowded.

The saving grace is that it’s synchro with your kids’ vacations.

It’s tricky.

Taking things to an obviously absurd extreme, being unemployed is clearly not worth $400k/year: people work for far, far less.

As you say, longer blocks of vacation time definitely open up new possibilities, but perhaps there’s an inflection point: an 11-week trip seems like it’d be very nearly the same as a 10 week one.

Things get weird when much of the total comp is in benefits. For example, if your cash salary is $50k, that limits what you can do with your $100k “worth” of vacation.

From the same report, the bullet point above your first quote:

> The wage gap between teachers and non-teachers disappears when both groups are matched on an objective measure of cognitive ability rather than on years of education.

That “objective measure” is based on human capital model of wages, and it seems to me pretty biased to apply to such a specialized profession.

Being wonderful at making a group of 6 years old engaged in your teaching and making them progress seems pretty hard to directly transfer to any other non teaching job.

I feel it’s like asking a pro sax player to transfer skills in another domain and ponder they lose a lot of market value.

Which is also part of the other quote you bring in. If I were to move to a teaching position, I’d look damn hard to be better paid or I wouldn’t move. And it’s not like an Amazon factory worker could just move into teaching tomorrow when he can’t take it anymore. So the pool going into teaching is extremely self selected and also biased.

heritage really isn't going to be a good source on this kind of thing fwiw

Yes as soon as I saw Heritage I knew that they would be pushing a agenda that would make Ayn Rand blush.

>heritage really isn't going to be a good source on this kind of thing fwiw

There is no good source on "this kind of thing"!

This is a type of "Wicked Problem"[1] and also a political darling of every political group.

And since every social scientist is just a person, with political, personal, and moral beliefs, any papers that they are willing to release typically reflect that. Further, any "peers" that review those papers will have similar beliefs because they know which places they would like that info published.

If you have pretty progressive beliefs, you will "know" that more money, in combination with identity awareness and additional help to those that match historically oppressed identities, is the answer.

If you have pretty conservative beliefs, you will "know" that it is the environment, "brainwashed" and "lazy" teachers and students (but not your kids, of course!) that are the blame. Vouchers and private schools (letting the market work) are the answer.

And there are people with beliefs everywhere on that spectrum. And not matter your beliefs, you can find research to back it up.

Education is just something that will forever be argued about and there is no clear-cut solution, even though nearly everyone thinks that there is, if only everyone else could just understand their point of view!.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem

True. I guess it is worth watching what people are doing regardless of their political beliefs. Have you noticed for example that in US people target specific locations for their kids? Hell, my wife was pushing hard to get a house in a 'good' district and we didn't even have kids yet. Social proof and all that, but there is a reason it exists to begin with.

Is there a rule against this?

If you have better facts, please provide them. Disparaging a source of information adds nothing to the conversation.

In my experience, teachers are strong communicators, highly self-organized, aware of organizations, able to work with others, and able to create and follow a plan. They have a demonstrated history of continued learning - and know a lot about how to learn. Teachers, when I've been lucky enough to hire them, have been excellent additions.

> specialized profession.

Color me skeptical that it's a specialized profession. It does not appear to me that decades of education majors have done any better than those who didn't possess such a degree, or that there are any special skills involved beyond knowing the subject and good interpersonal skills. When I think back to my best teachers, none of them had any special skills. They were just passionate. It doesn't help that when you delve into it, all this 'specialized knowledge' about how to learn turns out to be junk science: cf. 'learning styles' or 'three cueing', which destroyed the ability of millions of kids to actually read. [1]

Let's try a model where yes, we pay teachers more - much more. But instead of hiring "teachers", we hire experts who are passionate about their subject and want others to learn about it. Let's do this from middle school onward.

In elementary school, we can focus on getting kids to read and do basic arithmetic, and otherwise let it basically be daycare. A lot of underperformance at that age goes away if you simply give the kid more time to mature - for some mad reason at least in my school district, kindergarteners are expected to already know their letters and numbers and be able to read a few words.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20790600

I believe teaching is a somewhat specialized profession, or at least a very separate skill from knowing the subject. I am just getting into teaching now, at a college level, and finding it is a completely different beast than everything else, even though I know the subject very well. I mean, we've all had teachers that sucked, or professors who cared more about research than teaching; it's not something that people can 'just do'.

> none of them had any special skills

Great teachers make it look easy. What you don't see is the preparation and the previous iterations of their ideas. It's like acting - good actors make it look like an easy profession. But try "acting naturally" in front of a camera sometime. For most people, even walking becomes awkward.

Or programming. Behind most great programmers is a trail of terrible code that they have written over the years.

>They were just passionate. It doesn't help that when you delve into it, all this 'specialized knowledge' about how to learn turns out to be junk science: cf. 'learning styles' or 'three cueing', which destroyed the ability of millions of kids to actually read.

There are quite a few people who can read, even at a high level. But how do you teach it, and teach it in a scalable way? It's not as easy as you think.

Also, what field doesn't have fashion and missteps? Doesn't HN regularly complain about how various programming paradigms and languages were terrible ideas? What makes you think that anyone can do something complex by going from zero to the best implementation in one iteration?

I read down the rest of the thread after commenting, and another commenter posted a link to a study showing teachers with education degrees perform no better than teachers without them.

I see this happen a lot, where we need to make some kind of practical decision in politics (how much to pay teachers, how to set water rates), and it inevitably descends into an ideology-driven discussion of fairness, the meaning of life, and other similarly non-answerable questions.

We have to reframe this for what it is, a person being paid to do a job.

The overall issue here is that when you let values guide decision-making, there's no "right" answer. There is no "right" answer to how much the US should spend on health insurance. Likewise there is no "right" answer to what to pay teachers.

The only way I see to solve this is to peg it to something set by a market. Markets operate under constraints. Maybe set pay (all-in including vacation, pension, benefits, etc) relative to a local private school that sets wages competitively based on what teachers can get vs what the school can afford to pay from fees. Modulate +/- 10% based on overall funding levels if you want to split hairs.

The alternative is much worse: a big slugging match between taxpayers and well-organized special interests (e.g. teacher unions), and news flash, the special interests usually win, because it matters much more for them than for the average taxpayer, and they're better at playing the long game (e.g. organizing member rolls, getting members to show up to meetings/vote, knowing relevant laws, developing relationships with city management/school board members). This is a big part of why secondary education in the US sucks. In any other business, software development, architecture, law, manufacturing, the management has discretion to manage -- set wages and salaries, hire, fire, supervise, and hand out bonuses. School managers (administrators) are absolutely handcuffed by collective bargaining agreements that restrict how they hire, fire, and promote.

You think I'm being hyperbolic? Tell me one other job, apart from a competitive process at a university, that gives people firing-proof "tenure". That's insane.

> Workers who switch from non-teaching jobs to teaching jobs receive a wage increase of roughly 9 percent. Teachers who change to non-teaching jobs, on the other hand, see their wages decrease by roughly 3 percent. This is the opposite of what one would expect if teachers were underpaid.

Its exactly what I'd expect if tecahers were underpaid but most switches from other jobs into teaching were from jobs taken as a student pre-qualification for entry-level teaching jobs and most switches out were post-retirement-from teaching “have something productive to do” jobs.

Teaching (in Australia, but the pattern in the US is similar although lower[0]) is known to have okay starting pay that doesn't scale with experience. I'd expect some interesting effects around tenure, because those who leave or enter teaching probably do so when they're at the start of their career, when their pay is most competitive.

[0] As per https://theconversation.com/three-charts-on-teachers-pay-in-..., the US starts out below the bar for tertiary-educated workers and gets even lower

> that doesn't scale with experience

Is this true? I have several friends who are teachers in the US and they say they get pay raises for experience and for any extra accreditation they pursue. Which isn’t to remark on whether the pay is satisfactory, but I get the impression that the pay does increase and can do so pretty significantly.

As per the linked article, it doesn't scale as well as other tertiary-educated workers.

Call me surprised that a foundation that wants to kill public schooling says public school teachers are overpaid.

Meanwhile my anecdotal rebuttal is I graduated with 6 folks who went into teaching. All 6 left to do other things and within 5 years were making more than they would have at the end of a 30 year teaching career.

Linking a heritage foundation study unironically. Is this the standard of this forum now?

"I'm going to quit this middle class job and go be a teacher, easy money" said literally no one ever including the OP here.

"We just need better teachers" says a group composed of people who are entirely sure the profession is beneath them.

"There is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong." -- H. L. Mencken

Its refreshing that there is somewhere left on the internet where someone can point out that a problem might have nuance and not get immediately down voted to oblivion. HN is great.

"HN is great."

In nuances ...

You say “until we are dominated by idiot majority” as if it hasn’t happened. Just look at the platforms of the peoples vote to represent Americans. Rarely are they platform that would actually matter to the people and most of the time it is identity politics, nationalism, gun rights, and religion. We can’t even have a nuanced conversation about anything in politics that doesn’t devolve into an ideological/tribal argument. I think the US is already dominated by idiots in every state.

I fear I am feeding a political tangent here, but I think most of the problems you mentioned could be fixed in the US by recognizing (admittedly this would be a timely process) an official third electoral party. It's a lot easier for nuance to prevail when the system isn't designed to be binary.

Recognizing a third party does little with the spoiler effect. Not sure if you are referring to this in your final sentence, but the voting system has to change first to some sort of runoff model so people can express their primary choice without fear of the spoiler.

The spoiler effect is basically a non-issue with ranked choice voting. Some states are already adopting ranked choice.

The spoiler effect is a problem for tribal voters and for politicians but I don't think it matters for the actual outcomes of laws passed. If a minor party steals votes from a major one, that major party has an incentive to win them back by offering those voters what they want.

Nice comment but I think this is a bit wide of the mark. Schools are a state and local issue in the US where party is less significant. Look at the difference between a "republican" in, say, California's central valley vs. the same in Alabama. In most other places, that'd be two different parties.

Though I agree we'd be better off with something more like Germany or the UK, with coalitions.

The issue is not that we need n+1 political parties. Its that people don’t have time or much motivation to read actual policy.

> We can’t even have a nuanced conversation about anything in politics that doesn’t devolve into an ideological/tribal argument. I think the US is already dominated by idiots in every state.

Gotta appreciate the irony of this statement. The Idiot Tribe are victims of The System, not driving it. They are not my enemy.

Agreed. If we're using education and related achievements as a barometer for "not idiots", the American ruling class are hardly uneducated dimwits. Those at the highest rungs of power in politics, academia and the mass media are almost without exception highly educated graduates of top institutes. If they fail, that's clearly on them, and not the "idiot tribe".

> highly educated graduates of top institutes

Sorry, have you seen the educational record of the guy at the top right now?

Have you seen the university pool of your congress? Hell, even Bush was a Yale and harvard grad.

They are all victims. Nonetheless, the unfortunate reality is that the state persists precisely because this idiocy broadly holds.

Teachers (or their unions) often lead the charge for the very policies that hinder performance. Some of these are done in the name of equity (local metro school districts are a prime example).

Ultimately, teachers alone can't solve the problem. As seen in both poor white rural schools and poor non-white urban schools alike, if the parents don't care about schooling or enforcing any discipline at home, there will be significant problems at school.

Average salary for teachers is $63k, across all states. In NY or CA, it is about $85k [1]. This does not include benefits (e.g., health care or a ~$50k/y pension for retirement at age 60 [2])

And there are 2.5 months in the summer for r&r or for working additional jobs [3]. You need two wage earners to be solidly middle class, but this is not a "grossly underpaid" profession. For comparison, a university engineering professor salary in Netherlands starts at 65k euros ($77k).

Bottomline: teaching is not going to make you rich but you aren't grossly underpaid.

[1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d20/tables/dt20_211.60.a... [2] https://www.teacherpensions.org/states [3] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/education/2019/07/11/tea...

This. I keep hearing about undepaid teachers, but in my immediate social circle this is simply not true from avg. hh US perspective.

Naturally, statement like that usually then gets attacked as 'but not enough'. Based on results alone, CPS teachers are actually paid too much.

Not in Canada.

Teachers are well paid in Canada, and in many Canadian mid sized cities a teacher with 10 years experience will make more than a software developer with similar years experience. Additionally they have a strong pension, and incredible job stability.

e.g. A teacher in Saskatoon would make about $92K with 10 years experience with a defined benefit pension, and 2 months off in the summer.

It is tougher for teachers in high COL cities like Toronto and Vancouver as they make roughly the same as they do in the rest of the country. (But similarly a Vancouver software developer doesn't get a USA west coast salary)

Source: My wife teaches, and I write software!

Is that a location thing? Like, do places like Saskatoon have problems attracting people (weather)?

Nope. Teachers salaries would be similar to that across Canada. Software dev salaries would be very close, with some exceptions. Winnipeg/Calgary/Edmonton are all very similar to Saskatoon.

There would be some higher paying opportunities in Van/Tor/Mtl. But an $200K individual contributor software dev is a truly a Unicorn in Canada.

Lots of reasons, but the biggest is that simply don't have the ultra profitable FAANGs that drive up salaries.

Hey look at that, another Winnipeger. Winnipeg, as well as the other small prairie cities I'd imagine, also have the disadvantage of just not that much competition and not that much in terms of newer rentals. When I moved to Vancouver 6 years ago, I doubled my salary from ~42k to ~80k. Most of the well paying jobs from that time were for Java devs at the big 3 or 4 insurance companies. If I wanted to work there, there weren't really many nice apartments nearby. Some were built way out in burbs, and now there's a few downtown and in Osbourne, but it's slow going.

Canadian software engineering salaries are bizarre though. I was making more in Africa than the average SDE in Vancouver

Eh, I know a teacher in my state that is paid more than I am as a software dev, and that's not too unusual (I know other states might be different as we are in the top 10 for teacher salary). We also spend $14k per student per year at my district. The education is ok.

I feel that the main issue is that the wrong things are being taught. How about things like personal finance, basic mechanical and electrical skills (like for DIY repairs), and logic or philosophy of argument classes? It would also be good to teach the basics of civics since a substantial portion of the population can't pass the citizenship test.

Most states in the US require a civics class in high school (normally called us government). Several states require personal financial literacy class. DIY is not one I know anywhere requiring.

But something being required and something being preserved is very different. It's very normal to lose a lot of that knowledge after a couple years so if your goal is they pass a civics test/know basic finance it'll probably continue to fail even with all states requiring it.

Yeah, but most of the civics classes are a joke compared to the citizenship test.

The used to have shop or home economics as required classes.

I do agree that it is up to the student to maintain proficiency. I just feel like many of the tests and classes are ridiculously easy, like to the point of being geared to passing people rather than teaching. But I do also acknowledge that I forget about stuff I don't use, like complex fractions and fraction multiplication.

Have you taken the citizenship test? I am an immigrant and my dad had to take it. I was a bit under age requirement but did look over it. One example it doesn't even ask for the 3 branches of government, just name a single one. A lot of the questions are nice like that and will let you give a partial answer. You can see questions here,

https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/questions...

The test is longer than many classroom tests but also only needs a 60% to pass. The topics covered are already ones that US government classes cover so new requirements won't help here. You could add a state standardized test for this although still doubtful it would be remembered even a year or two later. I'd also guess it's a toss up on whether current government classes are easier/harder than that.

I get that they standards are pretty low. I remember an article showing that most TX citizens couldn't pass the test. Here is a similar article that shows over a third of US citizens would fail.

https://www.vox.com/2014/4/26/5654020/awkward-americans-cant...

My biggest issue is how can we improve the knowledge of the citizens since this sort of knowledge is necessary for a strong democracy? I'm not sure what the best answer would be, but teaching/testing in school seems like a good start. Looking at the format and rigor would be good, especially if it is already supposed to be taught and we are seeing such low retention.

You could require passing the test in order to vote; but that would be a pretty unpopular suggestion right now.

> The test is longer than many classroom tests but also only needs a 60% to pass.

The test itself isn't even very long - 10 of the 100 possible questions.

I hope school civics classes are more than just rote memorization in the US...

I'd add statistical reasoning and basic market economics to that list.

Are they grossly underpaid? I don't think that's necessarily true. I think it's true in rural areas, but Chicago Public School teachers are paid above-average, and suburban Chicago teachers make as much as Chicago-area software developers do. And that's without taking into account defined-benefit pension plans and huge amounts of vacation time.

I think the meme about teachers being underpaid is mostly unuseful in conversations like these.

There are several subtleties when comparing teacher’s pay. First it’s 10 months not twelve so you need to adjust for that.

Second the pay also usually includes retirement benefits that can pay you 100% off your salary after 30 years. This is hard to compare to private industry since 401ks have replaced pensions. This is probably worth 2-5m when mature, and is accounted for in their pay. I think this is the biggest issue, since private employers pay higher expecting you to invest in your retirement.

Benefits are also usually good with small if any employee contribution. Probably worth a few hundred dollars a month.

It’s almost impossible to lose your job teaching. It has a factor of security that does not exist in private industry.

Pay raises are automatic. Primarily it’s based on years of service and level of education.

I’ve run the numbers previously and it starts seeming fairer, but due to the retirement impact it makes buying a home in the Bay Area almost impossible.

The 10 month thing gets brought up in these discussions, but I'm looking at annual comp numbers, so the fact that it's 10 months makes the deal more attractive, not less.

Buying a home in the Bay Area is almost impossible. Full stop.

It has basically become a political talking point. My aunt is in rural Ohio making 80k per year as a HS history teacher. She is tenured but money wasn’t ever a struggle for her.

Would someone just starting their career in 2021 in the Chicago area get defined-benefit pension plans? Also, does a new teacher get as much as a new software developer? The $80k/year numbers that I keep seeing thrown around often apply to teachers with 20 or more years of experience, but software developers that level of experience make a lot more.

In my state, older teachers get these, but newer teachers including some of my friends have been cut out of them and need to invest in a 401k like other job. Their wages are also much lower, around 35k/year to start with, peanuts when you consider that they take work home every night and weekend (correcting homework and lesson planning are mostly done on their own time).

> teacher

> software developers

Those are very different jobs, with very different skill sets.

I'm not sure how much you can infer about one from the other.

Nothing, except that nobody reasonable believes that software developers are grossly underpaid.

> I'm not sure how much you can infer about one from the other.

You can certainly infer how much a largely capitalist society values each skill set at this point in time. The GP is claiming that "suburban Chicago teachers make as much as Chicago-area software developers do", presumably implying that capitalist society in the suburban Chicago area values the labor of teachers and software developers equally.

This is a claim that I want to understand better, since I don't think it reflects the statistical reality. Typically, such claims cherry-pick tenured teachers with 15+ years of experience, and compare their wage with the average software developer wage, which is itself a very unclear number – for example, a lot of developers go on to be managers in 15+ years whereas teachers largely remain teachers.

Glad to be wrong on this though, and might consider moving to an egalitarian society like suburban Chicago.

> Ban anyone without a minimum teaching experience of x years from participating on boards

Why do you think you need to be a teacher to direct how our schools are run?

Seems technocratic and anti-democratic.

The same way we have civilian control of the military, we should have civilian control of our schools.

Did you know in the UK there is actually a structure called governors to ensure that schools are being directed by the community, not by education insiders?

In the military, there are civilians at the top. Right below them, it's career military. Having these standards set by involving parents at a local level is ripe for disaster. As is having local sheriffs, without proper training, elected but I digress. Curriculums should be as standardized as possible. That makes everything comparable.

It would be enough to have have the top brass of education elected. You can even make the curriculum part of election campaigns.

I can understand your point of view and to be honest I somewhat agree with it...

But at the same time it sounds technocratic and anti-democratic, right? The teachers' job is to teach as the people want. It's not their job to set policy. It's to get on and teach as directed.

Do you have a way you square that in your mind, as I'm struggling myself?

Well, you have elected government that sets curriculums. And the way school systems are set up. Either at state level (Germany) or federal level (France). Then it is up to teachers to teach that curriculum, find someone ambitious enough to become a school principal to run a particular school. All while coping with the stuff the ministry comes up with.

Sure, some teachers go on to set policies ay the ministry. Those are actively teaching anymore. Of course there is so much more nuance to it, but in a nutshell that's it.

You have an elected government setting policies. You have public servants acting on those. Democratic and surely somewhat technocratic. But it works.

If a majority of parents in your town think it should be done differently, what moral explanation do you have for denying them that?

(Again, I don't necessarily agree with devolving as far as possible, but isn't it philosophically hard to argue against?)

Through state elections. Vote for a government that changes policies. Like every other parent in every other community. I think the main difference is, that Europeans i. general are less individualistic than Americans. Usually, we just accept that kind of things. Except for a small minority.

Philosophically, I would say that a country or nation can only be successful if some common things are equal for everyone. Letting individual groups opt out and in of stuff as they want, just destroys the overall community. And you end up with "haves" picking the cherries while the "have-nots" are left with crap. And nothing in between.

But why is the state the right level for decision making?

Why is decision making at a lower level wrong? And why is decision making at a higher level not better? Why did you pick 'state' level and go with that?

State or federal doesn't matter. County is too small, when town A has a different curriculum than town B 29 km away things break down. Maybe town B is richer, then town B might not want to fund schools in town A, leaving those desolate. But maybe town As curriculum is better suited for higher education, then what? There ia no silver bullet, but going with stuff that works it would be centralised at a certain level. Se goes for law enforcement, emergency services, military, health care... Otherwise there wont be any social fairness left.

> Maybe town B is richer, then town B might not want to fund schools in town A, leaving those desolate.

Ok but I can say 'maybe country B is richer, then country B might not want to fund schools in country A, leaving those desolate'.

Why's that not the same?

Going down that road you have the EU, to a certain extent. It's a spectrum, don't go to granular but neither go too large, you still want to be able to handle things. E.g. a lot of education issues in Germany come, IMHO, from the fact education is done on the state level and not the federal one. And why stoping at nation level? Culture and history.

FYI there is an entire book at deals with this topic called "10% less democracy". Basic idea is that the US has become too democratic.

Places like Singapore have a different attitude toward this that's worth understanding (not saying it's right, just different and worth understanding, like comparing OSX to Windows). There are parts of the US government that operate this way, like the Federal Reserve.

One interesting proposal from the book is having congress pass a tax law that's very simple, something like "the top 10% of income-earners should pay 15% of all revenue" and giving the IRS (career tax experts) much more leeway to write the tax code, in a way that complies with the stated (democratically accountable) objectives, but maximizes simplicity and ease of enforcement. I think there's something to that.

There's a place for technocrats. But in today's extremely "power to the people" moment that gives us Trump and Sanders, it seems like a harder sell.

The US seem to be very undemocratic on the one hand, and way too democratic on the other. I guess that makes for a dangerous mixture. Examples: The election system makes it intentionally hard to vote, e.g. election day isn't on weekends nor is it a public holiday. Limited number of voting places. And then you have elected law enforcement and elected judges.

The problem with civilian control of schools is that it leads to asinine arguments over things like whether to teach sex ed at all or whether creationism belongs in the science classroom. Even in less extreme examples, it will lead to parents pushing for counterproductive and unnecessary reforms that make sense to the layman.

Ultimately the schools are there to serve the people, so if the people want arguments over things like whether to teach sex ed then isn't that their prerogative?

I know it's a problem and I don't agree with some sides of that argument myself... but in a democracy aren't these issues supposed to be devolved to the demos? Isn't that the whole point? Do the teachers 'know better'? Who's determining who knows better?

"it will lead to parents pushing for counterproductive and unnecessary reforms that make sense to the layman."

This is basically what happens in all areas when practicing democracy, right? For example, the president is only elected because a substantial portion of the population agree with their positions, or more likely the positions/identity of their party, from their prospectives as a laymans.

Teacher salaries are public in my state (every state?) so I just looked up my local school. For the record, this is a rural location in Minnesota - each grade has a little over 100 students. My wife’s sister is 33 years old and has worked there for a few years. Her yearly salary is $47,000, and has been rapidly increasing each year - nearly 10% a year. It looks like teachers that I would guess are in their 40s and 50s are capped out at about $74,000 a year.

That’s roughly what my 32 year old accountant wife gets, and they get nearly 3 months vacation a year and much better benefits and retirement stuff than she does. Considering I know more people that have gone in to the teaching profession than anything else, that seems more than fair.

Also, a lot of those older teachers that I looked up would have been fired from any other job if their performance was the same. I’d only be ok with a massive increase in teacher pay if teacher’s unions were abolished. The only firings that have happened to tenured teachers here in the past 20 years have been for sexual misconduct.

My understanding is that salaries depend on location of the workplace and the surrounding housing market (aka. rich district = above-average-pay teachers).

Just get rid of school boards altogether. Here in Canada we only have 5 ballot questions across our 3 elections:

Federal representative

Provincial representative

Municipal representative

Mayor

School board trustee.

The PM? Head of the party with the most seats. Same with provincial premiere. Judges, crown attorneys, controllers, senators, the governor general, etc? Those are all appointed by our elected representatives.

A central ethos of Canadian governance is that our representatives are there to make decisions and bouncing questions to the public is a tool of last resort.

With that on mind, why the hell do we have elected school boards? We have a provincial ministry that runs education. We have municipalities that manage land-use.

Voters are basically flying blind in trustee elections. There are no debates, no media coverage, no political parties, just a list of names. If they don't happen by your doorstep, you don't get to know who these people are... And even if they do, you've only got their word to go on.

Ax this anachronistic institution and let the education policy professionals within the state/provincial government and school boards do their jobs.

In Australia the only elections regarding school are for the parent representatives on school council, which is local to an individual school, and sets some amount of strategic direction, but overall, doesn't do a lot. Curriculum & testing decisions are made by politicians and bureaucrats at the state or federal level. We also don't elect judges, DAs, etc. We just elect politicians; they are ultimately responsible for making sure their respective public servants are doing the will of the people. You could argue the US system is more democratic, and yet most such systems in the US seem to be broken (from an outside perspective), while here they are not (there are certainly problems mind you).

Any perspective how these things work in countries that have a well-regarded, high performing education system, like Finland (apart from having well-trained, highly regarded, and highly trained teachers with a large degree of autonomy)?

How about attach the money spent on a school to the child, and let the teachers/administrators compete just like everything else. You can create specialized roles, pay more, focus on X, whatever you want.

The school system is a failing monopoly that should be broken up.

This has been used successfully in long-term care. The concept is called "Money Follows the Person."

Money Follows the Person (MFP) Rebalancing Demonstration is part of a comprehensive, coordinated strategy to assist U.S. states, in collaboration with stakeholders, to make widespread changes to their long-term care support systems. This initiative will assist states in their efforts to reduce their reliance on institutional care, while developing community-based long-term care opportunities, enabling the elderly and people with disabilities to fully participate in their communities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_Follows_the_Person

> The solution is this: Ban anyone...

The solution is to get rid of the monopolistic education system which is prone to imbalances and subpar results.

Charter schools/private school/school choice. Recruit the best teacher, pay the best salaries, achieve the best educational outcomes.

No wonder the educational system looks like it does given the incentives at play.

You're describing the Baltimore school system. I don't think you're arguing for the outcome you think you're arguing for.

On the contrary, https://www.baltimoresun.com/opinion/op-ed/bs-ed-op-op-0813-...

It seems education in most first world countries is heading the same way, teacher authority being undermined by weak administration. It should be the case that education standards are protected by strong administration, bothnto hold teachers accountable, and to let them do the job without pandering to helicopter parents.

School choice would go a long way and breakup the teachers unions (through school choice).

School choice effectively allows increased wages for good teachers and yes there's competition so you'll have lower end schools as well. However, it'll be a rising ship, which raises all boats IMO. You can also audit the schools and shutdown poorly run ones, etc.

> School choice effectively allows increased wages for good teachers and yes there's competition so you'll have lower end schools as well.

How does school choice allow for increased teacher wages? Presumably they get the same per-student funding.

When the school gets more applicants than places, how does it decide who to let in?

> You can also audit the schools and shutdown poorly run ones, etc.

Shutting down schools is highly disruptive for students currently attending that school. Seems preferable to intervene and improve failing schools before it gets to the point of shutting them down.

I'm not convinced school choice improves results for students overall. The easiest way for a school to improve its results are by attracting parents who are highly invested in their child's education. Those whose parents don't have the knowledge to work the system or the time to transport their children across town for school every day are less likely to apply.

> How does school choice allow for increased teacher wages? Presumably they get the same per-student funding.

The raw number of dollars per pupil isn't the only variable here, if it were the US would already have the best schools pretty much everywhere (the US spends WAY more than the average in this category).

There's also what percentage is spent on administrators instead of teachers (frees up money for teacher salaries), various QoL improvements that could be made such as less paperwork, more latitude in how they teach, hiring a few full-time graders to take some of the load off teachers (generally a big time-sink and a source of a lot of overtime for teachers).

> When the school gets more applicants than places, how does it decide who to let in?

Presumably either entrance exam or lottery depending on the philosophy of the school.

> Seems preferable to intervene and improve failing schools before it gets to the point of shutting them down.

Do we know how to do this in practice? I haven't heard of any tactics that reliably improve a school that has started going downhill, but if you have some examples, I'd definitely be willing to consider them.

You know what would go a long way towards increasing the effectiveness of schools?

...funding them, equitably. Simple as that. Public school funding is derived from local property taxes, so rich areas have good schools and poor areas are just boned.

Invest in schools and good education results. Look at the States in the 60s and 70s! California was #1 in the nation. Prop 13 passes, capping property taxes (and thus school funding), and now it's at the bottom of the heap. It's not hard to draw the line between inputs and outputs here.

Vouchers will only further weaken our already-starved public education system.

I don't even know what comfortable middle class in Vancouver is.

Comfortable Vancouver middle class is pre-2005. Middle class is now owning a condo in new westminster.

> The solution is this: Ban anyone without a minimum teaching experience of x years from participating on boards, bring all teacher salaries up to comfortable middle-class in every district and give them back their authority in the classroom. Otherwise this downward slide into illiteracy will continue until North America is dominated by an idiot majority.

The problem with this solution is that there is barely enough interest in most places to fill a board when almost everybody is eligible. I've been married to a school board-er. It's a thankless job, far more thankless than being a teacher, which is a job with an actual salary and very good job safety.

> The problem is the administration: The board that sets the standards and the parents and politicians who sit on those boards.

Most typically administration != board. An elected or appointed board will be made up of politicians, who can also class members of parents, teachers, community members, all of the aforementioned, etc.

Expecting a board to be entirely made up of people who have served in the organization's service delivery doesn't make sense. Would you expect a police board to be entirely made up of cops? There is an inherent conflict of interest.

I love the solution you propose. There are certainly other ways in which the whole school system can improve in this and other directions. The most-direct (and sensible!) reform I've come across is: distribute education funding equally, without tying school income to local taxes paid. You end up with richer schools receiving a lot of funding, while the poorer neighborhoods (already disadvantaged as it is) receiving unacceptably low funding - exacerbating the inequities currently engrained in the current system.

Canadian teachers are not underpaid though

Given that I'm reading pretty much the same articles about teaching experience for decades now, how sure we are it isn't dominated by an idiot majority yet? I mean, looking around and reading the news, I can't really name a lot of things that tell me it couldn't be the case...

FYI Vancouver is still keeping advance placement classes which is the typical way for smart students to excel. The program being cut was only at two schools in the super rich part of town and kinda seemed like a “free private school program in public school”

Why do school boards need to be elected at all?

Like electing judges and sheriffs, this seems to be a peculiarly American thing. Most other countries appoint professionals to manage their education systems, and for good reason.

Not so long time ago it was illegal to teach slaves. I guess the current social system is heading towards that stance again. History repeats itself.

That’s a solution without a buyer in a market that’s about control and indoctrination, or childcare at best. But not education.

IMO, this sort of thing is just as dangerous as any other type of radicalism. Take anything too far, and you cause immense damage to society.

The formative years age just that. Disrupt that significantly, and the individual is forever lacking. Society needs people in all roles, we'd die of plagues, and disease from vermin, without garbage pickup. Incredibly vital, that job is.

Yet who will create new vaccines, new tech to clean up the planet, get mining and resource production into space, and more? Only those with certain genetic gifts, but the "feel goods" want to believe everyone is identical.

Equality is not this. Equality comes from things like providing access ramps for those who cannot climb stairs, providing tools for those to make the best of what they have.

You don't "pull down" people to make equality, you lift up people. And this means that you see who needs help, and give it.

And you can't do that of you pretend everyone is the same.

As a side note, plumbers, electricians, those working in construction, arborists, on and on, there are many very comfortable, well paying jobs open to those without advanced science, math, language skills.

In my public school, both at grade and high school levels, we had shop class, and in high school, auto, electrical wiring, art, A/V, environmental science (farming), and more. There was something for everyone to excel in, and I took most of these, on top of advanced sciences/math, for fun, for the sheer sake of knowledge.

Don't remove potential, instead, seek how to enable every child's capabilities.

Lift up, don't pull down.

The board in sf is mostly former teachers.

The problem is the existence of mandatory education, propped up by government.

Let me fix that for you - get rid of government schools, let anyone teach.

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