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Comment by leetrout | Hacker News Reader

But she gets her summers off! /s

It's crazy how underpaid teachers are.

Tenured positions, strong unions, pensions, benefits the average blue collared worker can dream of, and no accountability or pressures to ensure students make their marks. I can support raises once merit pay is instituted and they start doing something about the bad teachers, of which young me would say is the majority.

Tenured? We are talking kindergarten here. Also, are you seriously comparing an advanced-degree career to blue-collar workers?

How is it you'd institute a merit system? By the volume-of-students-per-hour, or what, exactly? The least complaining parents? Test scores that depend on parental involvement to be any good? How are disinterested or absentee parents or those parents who have it in for teachers accounted for in such a system?

>Also, are you seriously comparing an advanced-degree career to blue-collar workers?

Like capital class could tell the difference

The teachers union where I am is strong, but it doesn't preclude the administration from playing tricks similar to the exactly 39-hour "part time" employee. Specifically, the teachers get "fired" on the last day of the school year, and turn hired back in the fall, in some sort of adminstration-union rule avoiding shell game.

It's a wonder anyone wants to do the job at all, knowing all this in advance. I almost became a teacher once. Figured all the abuse would be a degrading waste of my efforts.

In a lot of cases, they don't want to do the job. There are teacher shortages in a lot of the United States, especially in states that are infamous for mistreating teachers, like Texas.

There is no teacher shortage. There is a shortage of people willing to teach for peanuts.

Maybe not everyone's motivated by money?

Yea - but maybe for such an important role for society we can actually put up the cash to make it a worthwhile career choice. I've heard the "we don't want teachers who are only in it for the cash" line enough that I want to puke. If you paid enough to attract the leeches legitimate teachers would get them sacked right quick.

> maybe for such an important role for society we can actually put up the cash to make it a worthwhile career choice

The point was what makes it worthwhile isn't cash.

Cool. But people need to eat and our society (at least in the US) is completely run via cash - you can appeal to higher ideals all you want, but if you're starving out teachers you're going to lose a lot of the good ones that can go into other fields of education and communication.

I think a lot of teachers do value the experience of teaching enough that they'll stick with it through thick and thin - but a lot of folks never even consider teaching due to just how poor the wages are.

If they were entirely not motivated by money, we could just have them do it for free. I think clearly teachers expect at least a little money, and perhaps many potential teachers would expect even more.

I think if we removed the need to earn money to get a decent living, we would have a lot of people teaching for free.

Most people are not motivated by money, they reluctantly accept that they need to earn a living, but it is not a big driver per se in most people I know.

It's not just about money. Ultimately, it's about respect. Considering the clearing price in a free market is good and all, but you have to consider there's a buyer representing real people, who determines the working condition of this group. And also a seller whose life will be made easier and more dignified if they're properly paid, which will in turn attract better and less desperate teachers.

When I say paid, I obviously also mean in intangible ways, such as having enough time to go to the toilet between classes. Or being insulated from being yelled at by parents and meekly saying sorry for telling off their particularly concentration-destroying kid.

My son’s kindergarten teacher (at a public school in suburban Chicago) makes $76,000 per year. He has 16 classmates and it’s an all-day program.

Not in Canada

That really surprised me when I moved up here - suddenly I lost a whole class of jokes about how underpaid teacher are. It shows too, you can look at things like IP creation (comedians, musicians, writers, performers) and even vaccination rates to see the benefits investing in education can get you.

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