Teachers are leaving and few people choosing the field
cnn.com
cnn.com
The harsh reality is that the pay sucks, you need a masters degree to even be a teacher, parents view public schools as glorified daycare system, and shitty bureaucrats run it all into the ground. Combined with the general lack of discipline and culture of disrespect among kids (I fault the parents), it's a completely miserable experience that was worsened by COVID and remote learning.
I've heard so many ridiculous stories from our friends that I'm shocked any of them remain doing it. In fact, 1 of the 5 I mentioned had enough and threw in the towel for the 21-22 school year. She's doing something else now, like running a study abroad program in association with the local honors university. She only gets the smart, disciplined kids who want to be there. The house of cards that is public education is coming down.
" parents view public schools as glorified daycare system"
We shouldn't forget that it is not just for the teachers that the world is getting complicated. Almost everyone is lost with family, job, personal happiness and etc.
But then you look at the actual reasons people are homeschooling, and by and large, it's parents who are opposing some perceived "indoctrination": Fundamentalist Christians objecting to things like sex ed, biology, evolution. More and more now, it looks like it's not just being driven by religion but by political ideology. Our local "moms" group is full of people pulling their kids out to prevent them from "being indoctrinated by the liberals" and for anti-vax reasons. For every 1 parent homeschooling because they really can provide a better education at home, there are probably 100 parents who are totally unqualified, will leave huge gaps in their kids' education, and are only doing it for ideological reasons.
In theory, having a smart parent at home DIYing their kids' education sounds like a great idea, but in practice, it's all the wrong people doing it for all the wrong reasons.
If it's facts like mathematical or logical axioms, or similar such things that are virtually undisputed except by the utmost extreme fringe elements of humanity, probably we agree what a fact is. If it's "scientific consensus" well... maybe still, but it's getting hazy. If it's "lived experience" or "history as written by the victors" then we aren't agreeing on what a fact is anymore, in my opinion. And there are many levels of variability below that.
The conclusions made based on a fact are progressively more impacted by the amount of variability. The consequences arising from making decisions based on those conclusions even moreso.
If the conclusion is "my children will be treated like prisoners in public school and informed subtly through virtually every lesson plan that their skin color changes how they are supposed to behave and how they should view their positions in life" are that I vote for somebody who supports charter schools and voucher systems, the consequences might be that I end up campaigning for that single issue regardless of party or candidate.
Or maybe it's just taking my kids out of school and using one of the many pre-made self-learning curricula for a variety of topics and give them a laptop and frequent checkups to ensure they're learning. Or maybe I outsource it to my church. Or maybe I outsource it to YouTube and Wikipedia.
Or maybe I say fuck it and let them go play in the yard all day, or go to the mall, or go to their own protests all day, or join a street gang, or try to get tiktok views, or invent some thing, or write a book, or overdose, or chat on discord all day, or get a job, or join a club. Lot of options, lot of ways to "fail to educate" on any given topic.
Frankly, everyday life will do that for a lot of folks.
I also think that most history taught in US public schools has been severely rewritten to support a liberal agenda, which strays so far from the truth it borders on fantasy.
I totally get manual labor being a virtue and I agree we should all seek it out to some extent, but making it your primary profession, in my opinion, does not hold a candle to software development for life quality.
I would dispute that this is the wrong reasons. The most common complaint I hear is around racial theory/ identity politics/ or whatever you want to call it. People don't like their 1st grade child being taught that they are an oppressor by virtue of their birth and guilty and responsible for generations of injustice.
These are views that I believe are harmful and untrue. I would feel the same way if the school was was teaching the earth revolved around the sun, or God made women to be subservient to men
So what happens is parents start forming homeschool support groups, they pool resources, divide responsibilities based on expertise and knowledge, and eventually recreate the concept of a school from scratch. I guess it can then eventually undergo the same moral fracture and the cycle repeats.
Also was home schooled for 5 years. From watching others I can fairly confidently say my parents were far above average for the time and area in terms of being educators and trying to get ahead of the "socialization" curve. They had degrees and tried their best to teach to lesson plans prepared by professionals, modifying as they saw fit.
These groups tout how well-rounded they are, but many are bluntly filled with extremist nutjobs. Abusively so in many cases. My parents were utterly blind to this, and to this day like to talk about how "well rounded" socially I was.
I was not. I was exposed to the nutjobs and crackpots of society in a fairly intimate manner at a very young age, with very little supervision other than whichever adults were performing a given lesson at the time.
Not saying this to scare anyone away from home schooling. If done thoughtfully, carefully, and evidence-based it certainly can have great outcomes. I just have my hairs stand on end when I hear folks talk about these groups as some sort of fix for the problem - when in fact they are the problem to begin with in my experience.
Homeschool may be becoming more "mainstream" but I think a lot of folks just now starting out due to the pandemic are in for some very hard truths in the next couple years.
Anyone who was able to graduate high school back when that meant something can teach all of those subjects to the end of primary school if they’re willing to read and put in some work, by any reasonable standard.
I generally agree that forgoing basic education is not a solution. Most parents I know readily admit that they don't have the bandwidth for homeschooling and choose private schools as a solution.
I'm not to interested in tilting at individual facts, so hopefully we can skip that part, and agree that different world views are instilled in children as part of their education (by whatever means).
I often hear it parroted that certain people are oppressors by virtue of their birth and guilty and responsible for generations of injustice. I do not want my children to internalize this message.
With that context, perhaps we can agree that all parents are opposed to teaching children ideologies they don't personally agree with.
I would further suggest that many parents currently pulling their children from schools are doing so based on the message above.
I often hear the same strawman from right-wing sources. Usually the actual content is benign, like GP mentioned (topics like the US Civil War was fought over slavery). I've never heard any teacher or curriculum say the things being alleged or seen any evidence that they were said, which returns to the bulk of GP's comment: people are having degraded education over falsely perceived indoctrination.
Do you deny that people hold this belief? Do you believe it yourself?
P. S. Why do people keep bringing up the civil war? Did I miss something?
If they believe that racial guilt exists or is deserved is relevant to the conversation of if it is or should be taught in schools.
I don't think that you and I can have a discussion unless we agree on the subject we are even talking about.
Uh, the earth does revolve around the sun
This has a whole satanic panic feel about it from people who should know better.
You response beggs a really interesting question: where do new ideas come from and how do they spread in society. It is clear that there are generational difference in opinion that change over time, so kids get new ideas somewhere. Clearly their friends and the media are a big part of it too, but where do those opinions come from?
I think education is a big part of this, even if it isn't always overt (sometimes it is). If most of your teachers buy into a specific ideology, that certainly colors what they teach. If you are teaching soft subjects like literature, history, ect, there is a lot of subjectivity in how to interpret things and frame them.
For the overt stuff, my friends 2nd grader recently became obsessed with climate change. Their teacher had them making protest signs and marching around the elementary school, and now they ridicule gifts that aren't eco friendly and think the world is doomed. While I believe in climate change, I think it is a complex topic that most adults fail to comprehend, let alone a 2nd grader.
The “DIY vs professional” mental model is not as helpful as other perspectives when evaluating homeschooling. Homeschooling is an extension of parenting, something we do not outsource outside of extreme situations, often involving criminal behavior. The ideal child-curriculum-pedagogy fit for each stage of growth for each child varies so much that understanding the child is a valuable educational skill. Parents are in a unique position to exercise this skill.
Where teachers do outperform parents as professionals is in leading a group of students to achieve standards in tandem within a large bureaucracy. The skill of deep per-child customization and response becomes less important than skills like public speaking, organizational psychology, reporting and forming rapport with strangers. Trained teachers outperform any particular child’s parent in these tasks.
In what capacity do you blame the parents?
I was successful in raising a respectful child. However, I also pulled him out of two very negative school environments (one public, one private).
Regardless of what lessons I taught him, I am sure it would not have been easy to encourage that respect if he had remained in an environment where he was not respected and where he saw adults and children alike treated with disrespect without consequence.
My state has good teacher pay. I know someone working as a secondary ed biology teacher making a little more than I do as a dev (about $90k; both of us have masters).
Seems like the location of teachers would match the location of workers and children. It seems reasonable to compare the average worker salary to the average teacher's (or public teacher if that is your main interest)
Now there could be localized areas that have pay problems, like the bay area. But are these widespread? Or is this a symptom of some underlying problem like locale specific policies or preferences (property taxes, housing prices/zoning/preferences, and the largest income inequality in the country)? Using other anecdotes, like in my area, there doesn't seem to be a problem.
So basically, if we can't use averages, what quantitative evidence is there that teacher pay being low is a widespread problem? Or is it possible that the audience on this forum is used to pay which falls in the top 5-10%, and thus skews the perception of what is "good" pay?
"Teacher salaries generally don't do a good job of tracking the cost of living."
You make this claim, but is there evidence to back that up? Because I don't see it in the article nor the comments.
[1] https://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/fed/10facts/index.html#ch... [2] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/tables/dt19_236.55.a...
Edit: it's also the case that the population has grown by 50 million people since 1990, which would bring an expected increase of 15-20% in expenditure. Accounting for both, I'm surprised we don't spend more.
Next question to me is: what actually needs funding? Teacher salaries, sure, easy argument. But then what? What supplies? Books, laptops, projectors, software licenses, crayons, play-doh, stencils, rulers, graph paper, craft paper, what? And how often?
I find the use of so many single use materials surprising. Most of the subjects won't have a textbook in the traditional sense, they've a 'math program' that includes a workbook, any number of handouts, worksheets, and often an application or website. Most of my textbooks were from the 60's, we made brown grocery bag bookcovers for them and were expected to return them with minimal wear. While this generates increased reoccurring revenue for the publisher, I'm unconvinced it's an improvement.
What are the lifetime cost differences on chalkboards vs. smartboards or overhead projectors vs digital projectors.
It's not like my kids don't have all the technology at home, chromebooks, tablets, etc. I don't think they need it school too, especially when often all they do with it is the app from the subscription they have in place of a textbook.
I'd be dubious of any improved outcome claims.
This is an article from 2002 about new schools being built in Baltimore. One for $14M and one for $13M. The article laments how much school construction costs are rising.
https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-2002-05-12-02051202...
This is an article from last April about two new schools being built in Baltimore. One for $53M and the other for over $100M.
https://www.wbaltv.com/article/new-school-construction-north...
Sure, there has been some inflation since 2002, but not that much! Google tells me $13M in 2002 is only $20M in 2022. It's just insane.
Interestingly, private school teachers are paid even less: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_211.10.a...
Given that, something about public schools must indeed be terrible for teachers too, not just for students and taxpayers ;)
What "many"? Are there any industries besides software and finance that offer equity compensation?
I had real jobs in a couple fields before I became a coder, and never once did they give me free stocks. I think one company you could use part of your pay check automatically _buy_ their stock at nearly market prices, which would have been a silly thing to do.
https://laschoolreport.com/antonucci-retiring-california-tea... : retiring ca teachers will eat more than working school teachers.
Yes, the get "summers off", but there are also mandatory continuing education requirements that must be completed, so they're still working (unpaid) during those two months.
Teachers also cannot request a vacation day. If you need to call in sick, you're responsible for securing a substitute (school provides the list of approved people, better start calling them frantically).
Can we expect school teachers to be paid as much as a project manager or surgeon? It is not an easy job or an unskilled one, but it is not at par with the more you well paid jobs as well.
Cities want to have a mixed housing and diversity and all kinds of income earning citizens. But then the low wage earning populace start complaining that pay isn’t good enough and wages need to be increased. You can’t have the cake and eat it too. We can create subsidized affordable homes in expensive Ca zip codes but we can’t bring down cost of living…because it’s the high cost of living that supports the rest of the pyramid by way of high cost of goods and services. And taxes. From gas to utilities to restaurants, everything costs more. So those on the lower wages who are subsidized will always have a lag in cost of living no matter what.
It’s all relative. The govt should make infrastructure and basic support systems equal to ALL cities with diverse cost of living index. That’s all we can do in terms of equality.
Completely random google search and this about rural schools : https://hechingerreport.org/rural-schools-have-a-teacher-sho.... [..] “People arrive here, and they can’t deal,” said Kohl of the many teachers who come for a few years but don’t stay. “Yeah, the mountains are beautiful, but they’re nine hours away. If you want to fly anywhere, you drive 325 miles to Billings.”[..] For many reasons, including low pay, isolation and scarcity of housing, hanging on to local talent is an especially acute problem in Montana.[…] you can’t fix isolation and lack of housing with higher pay. This is a govt failing.
How much does tutoring cost? It costs 10-12k per student per annum according to most schools budgets. And most school districts have 10-15k students.
Schools are for social reasons as well as educational. So children can learn from their peers..but consider what is happening in schools. There is violence, guns, bullying and drugs in school. They are becoming political and it’s like rounding up all the impressionables for any kind of indoctrination. Education has become secondary to politics in American schools.
Private school teachers don’t have benefits nor are they unionized..and they are paid less. In the UK, it seems to be more hours for extra pay(https://amp.theguardian.com/teacher-network/teacher-blog/201...)
This dated article says it’s because of working conditions: https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/10/why-ar...
Union negotiated working conditions are worse but pay is higher. Something is utterly rotten with American public education and it’s been this way for the past two decades. It has gotten worse in the last ten years. It might be beyond repair at this point and needs to be dismantled and rebuilt.
These benefits are, of course, slipping away.
Really? The states I've been in doesn't require it. Generally a bachelor degree with a teaching certificate is all you need.
So, no, you don't really need a masters to be a teacher in the US. But you will be perpetually at the bottom of the pay scale if you don't get one, aren't in an in-demand subject area, or obtain some useful and in-demand specialist certificates.
GA: https://www.gadoe.org/Technology-Services/Data-Collections/D... (updated to 2021 PDF, fixed link again not sure how that got goofed before)
The T-# levels are certification levels, largely dependent on getting a graduate degree or specialists degree or certificate. Without those, you will stay at the lower tiers. School districts do offer pay above and beyond this, but unless you're in a wealthier district you won't get much past these numbers.
It's a labor of love. People become teachers because they love the idea of being in that profession.
Unfortunately, governments, corporations, parents, and even students, see this as carte blanche to pay them even worse, and yank all support from them.
IT is a crazy field. People make a lot of money here, and we are used to being given a fairly free rein. Most folks in IT like their jobs, don't question whether or not we made the right life choices, are valued by our employers and customers, and, on top of that, we make great money.
Night and day. It's fairly hard for people to understand what teachers face.
I know quite a few.
Despite all the crying about teaching jobs being open, it's actually really difficult for teachers to find work; especially work that doesn't involve a two-hours-each-way commute, to teach in neglected urban schools, while being paid far too little to live near their work.
It's a tough gig.
If students bully or assault each other? just call the police. Why would we even call teachers to resolve this kind of conflict?
Teachers should only teach... not discipline or punishing kids. We should have separate roles for this.
Calling the police is definitely not the right way to handle things in a lot of kid situations.
Exactly why we should involve law enforcement.
Kids especially teenagers can be dangerous.
Teachers who have almost no training on how to handle violent situation should not be required to handle this.
Not to mention, teachers also have absolutely no authority to do anything.
There are infractions that need police, but the majority are best handled without.
The original comment on this thread conflated bullying and violence with all discipline of all kinds (did not nuance between them). Cops don’t care about bullying anyway, it’s not against the law.
Yeah, if adult go around with scissor cutting people's hair? That is fucked up.
> you perp-walking him and printing him, throwing him juvie for 60 days
You came up with a strong punishment just to support your argument.
The punishment could be a warning as well unless it is repeated offender.
The punishment could be fining a parent.
Instead of coming up with a better solution like this, we let teachers handle it.
This is why bullying is not often resolved. This is why school has the strange zero tolerance policy. They don't even care about justice. They just want the problem to go away.
Let's throw the shittiest responsibility, potentially dangerous, at the teachers since the responsibility doesn't fall on anybody.
Police is the closest one to handle assault and bullying problem.
> Getting police involved often makes things more dangerous for everybody
I doubt this is true. Some cases are escalated but not most cases.
Certainly not often.
Who says educators want the unaccountable police force to assault their students and drag them to jail if there's a bullying problem? Where is this idea coming from?
At a minimum, calling someone in with a state monopoly on violence is unpredictable, and you do not know what the police officer will do or if/ to what extent they will hurt people.
Teaching as a profession is in an awful state, but involving more police is not the solution. Better pay, student to teacher ratios, and so on would go a long way towards making it an attractive profession again. Also, in my opinion education (even at the tertiary level) has become too "customer service" focused, and many children are no longer taught to respect educators by their parents, which leads to appalling behaviour. There needs to be an overall attitude shift to help repair the teacher-student relationship.
This is how much we value teachers a society.
The responsibility is shitty and potentially dangerous, so we throw it at the teachers.
Because involving police during an assault is not the solution?
If someone punches me, I would immediately involve police.
Kids who punch others should be punished by law enforcement.
Teachers have no authority to punish a kid whatsoever.
>Kids who punch others should be punished by law enforcement.
It really depends on the situation - in my jurisdiction the age of criminal responsibility is 10 years old, below that age it is not possible to press criminal charges. And for children aged 10 to 14 'the onus is on the prosecution to prove that the young person alleged to have committed the crime had a sufficient understanding of the criminality of their actions. That understanding must amount to the knowledge that the actions were criminally wrong, and not just naughty"' [1]. Again, it would be highly inappropriate to get police involved except in the most drastic circumstances.
For older teens, sure, but they generally have the sense to not brawl on-campus / within the school's duty of care. I'm mainly referring to breaking up squabbles between primary to middle schoolers. Teachers should be compensated more for having to put up with this, but I believe it's an unavoidable part of school yard/classroom management.
I will note that here in Australia we don't have a police officer stationed in schools as (many? most? of) the USA does, so maybe the cost/benefit changes if you have a dedicated resource and aren't diverting police from useful work off-site. But I still feel it's inappropriate.
>Teachers have no authority to punish a kid whatsoever.
What would you do, bring back spanking? I agree with you, kids get away with things that would not have gone unpunished when I was a lad, but you have to remember that the goal of the system is (at least in theory) to nurture and educate children. If you keep excluding or eventually expel students they won't get educated, if you on calling parents in to collect their misbehaving kids they might get punished at work or eventually fired for being unreliable (which certainly will make the child's home life more difficult, and if it's a troubled family may actually result in the child being physically harmed), and so on.
It's a very tough problem and I don't have a good answer for it. But I do believe that children need to be taught more discipline at home so that teachers can maintain effective control in class, and that this whole trend of parents wanting to be their child's friend over parenting them effectively is very bad for society.
[1] https://www.lawsocietysa.asn.au/Public/Publications/Resource...
Everyone can claim the same. Very few people will claim they are paid too well, or they don't have to do thing that don't exactly fit their job description, or their administration/management does not provide them the support they deserve, etc. Oh, and regulation? Lots and lots of trades have to deal with unreasonable regulation, don't ask me how I know.
Here's the thing. This is a free country. Nobody's putting a gun at anyone's head and asking them to be a teacher. The teacher job may suck from some points of view, but it probably is quite ok from other points of view (like vacation, maternity leave, maybe benefits, etc). One way or another millions of people decide to be teachers.
In the end, I like to tell people: 98% of jobs suck 98% of the time. If you manage to make your job suck only 90% of the time, you're having 5 times more fun than the average worker out there. If your name is Feynman, then probably your job sucks 0% of the time. But your name is not Feynman.
So 1 of the married couple sends the kids to public school while the other sends those same kids to private school?
Some parents around me simply decided to go ahead with a learning pod [0] during the pandemic. They hired a tutor (burned out local teacher really) and it’s been night and day. They are considering doing it again next year. Last I heard, they wanted to structure it as a non-profit so they could at least get a tax break on their contribution to it (really makes no sense to use post-tax dollars for this). At least now, I guess they won’t be double paying for initiatives like this [1] or curriculum where math is considered racist [2].
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/article/learning-pods-coronavirus.ht...
[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/Sa...
[2] https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11...
A few years ago, she got her first salary increase in seven fucking years after her union threatened a strike. And it was 7%. This all during one of the biggest economic run ups ever. While the district and admins had all gotten consistent wage increases every year she didn’t.
She has multiple children who literally take off their clothes, flip over tables, and try to climb the fences of the school to leave every single day. Not kidding, multiple grown adults have to intervene multiple times a week to protect these kids and their peers. And literally nothing changes, absolutely no support from admin to get these kids support they clearly need. I have zero respect for the professional abilities of school administrators, I’ve regularly interacted with them and wondered how they are employed, it’s crazy.
School administrators are by and large bureaucratic idiots that are incapable of innovating or improving schooling. The pandemic proved this perfectly. My wife was required to do 3 hours of real time education a day, to 6 year olds, including filling out a physical piece of paper for attendance at the beginning of the day, then taking a photo and sending it in.
For virtual school.
For 6 year olds.
She has to perpetually pull individual children to test their progress against state standards, while the rest of the class has to occupy themselves with activities.
6 year olds.
The amount of bullshit wrapped around public education, along with completely upside down incentive structures, will be ripping apart the very concept of school over the next ten years.
She wants to educate, but we are already working on pursuing that as a small business vs being a public educator.
It’s a sad state of affairs.
I think that the size and uselessness of the para-ecudational layer should not be underestimated. The ministry, committees, the commercial education ecosystem; they have been extremely successful in absorbing whatever money we have been trying to poor in. It's like a ship with two seamen and a council of 5 captains and 20 contractors to keep the messhall's leisure PC running in exchange for 80% of personell expenditures.
It's ridiculous. And if that was not enough, some people believe even more privatisation is the solution.
This can’t be overstated and, unless you have first hand experience, impossible to comprehend. We’re talking the very basic levels of competence like don’t smoke weed in your car before school because you’re the principal of a middle school level of competence.
/wife is a long time teacher quitting this year
All serious potential legal issues. Whatever happened to expulsion? No way I'd accept students like that. If your child is that out of control they're your problem to deal with.
School is frequently viewed as a day care more than a house of education unfortunately.
For some it's genuinely a calling, a vocation. The buzz you get from seeing the lights go on, from making a difference, from seeing a student blossom, is unequalled.
But external pressures are squeezing that out, and the utter neglect of the teachers and utter contempt for the profession is finally catching up.
The warning signs have been there for decades, the momentum is growing, and it may now be too late.
What's interesting, and isn't something the article covers, is that demand side at the high end is nearly insatiable. Private schools in London consistently increase fees well above inflation year after year and never fail to fill places. The teachers there do okay but it's hardly stellar pay and although many of the schools discourage teachers tutoring it's commonly the way that income is boosted.
I was lucky. I taught high school in northern California for almost a decade and it was a lovely job. Sure, the work expands to fill your nights and weekends, and part of every summer vacation I worked on improving my lesson plans, but it was an enjoyable job with good students, great fellow teachers, a supportive administration, a wonderfully diverse and accepting student body, and only the occasional annoying parent.
Benefits were decent, pay was decent, and psychological rewards were tremendous. It was far more rewarding than the previous fifteen years I spent in software development. I felt I developed software not because the world needed it but just so some rich guy could get a little richer and maybe a bit of that richness would filter down to me. Not an inspiring reason to get up in the morning.
I could tell right away I had an impact on my students, introducing them to new areas of knowledge (in my case it was chemistry). My goals were to be a role model; for them to know what kinds of questions chemistry addressed; and for them to just maybe fall in love with science a little bit. I had no illusions they were going to grow up to be chemists.
I would have remained a teacher if I hadn't decided to leave the US. I am fortunate to have left before COVID because teaching online sounds really hard.
Just my 2 cents.
1) regarding state differences in pay, how does that compare to cost of living? California pays more than Florida, sure but its cost of living is higher also (https://www.insure.com/cost-of-living-by-state.html). Looking at how cost-of-living-adjusted pay varies between states would be more informative. California probably still pays more, but how much more? It's like comparing housing costs now and 20 years ago without adjusting for inflation.
2) how many of these teachers are leaving the profession entirely, vs. going into private or religious schools or tutoring? Knowing that would help tease out how much of the issue is due to how the public schools are administered, vs. how much they are afraid of contracting covid-19, vs. whatever else.
3) how does the labor shortage in teaching compare to the labor shortage generally? The article gives the impression that it's worse, and I could believe it, but I'd like to see some comparisons.
What the article had was a lot of quotes, and not much in the way of facts or good analysis. Which is probably because the reporter in question had 1 hour to write it, perhaps from their bedroom or their parents' basement, before they had to move on to the next article. Disclaimer: I have no facts to back up that last sentence.
Teachers unions don't exist to help students, they don't exist to help those who might want to become teachers, they exist to help entrenched teachers maximize the amount of money they pull out of the state.
This is why in California entry level teachers, who are doing the same job as 65 year old teachers, are making less than half.
the root "cause" of the problem is that the money spent on education does not produce profit (to fund the endeavour). It is reliant on a taxation scheme, which means the source of funding is adversarial to the payment of wages.
Private schools _do_ align the profit motives, but it also breaks the social good that free public education has. I dunno how one can solve this problem.
The only way it makes sense financially to teach at a private school is if you have kids you want to go there. Many schools will do reduced or even free tuition for teachers' kids. It's relatively common for private school teachers to either be early retirees from a more lucrative field or have a spouse that works.
That said, many private school teachers do it because they have more flexibility in designing a curriculum, are much less likely to encounter disruptive students, etc. Private schools also don't actually do 180 days. So it is a more enjoyable job day to day for sure.
>California has more than 1,000 school districts and 300,000 teachers, yet only 667 dismissal cases were filed with the Office of Administrative Hearings between January 2003 and March 2012, according to the Los Angeles Unified School District”s chief labor and employment counsel, Alex Molina. Only 130 of those actually got to the hearing stage, and 82 resulted in dismissals — fewer than 10 a year.
https://www.willitsnews.com/2013/01/26/firing-a-tenured-teac...
Private schools
- a lot less paperwork and mind bending BS. - flexibility is higher. Hey, we're going to teach outside on stumps during the pandemic -> no problem. This is with most things. That said private schools tended to stay open with modifications (so if you didn't want that public school would be better to be at to check out during pandemic). - Teacher has a lot of authority in their class. - Teachers / teacher aids etc that don't work out, pretty simple process not to bring them back for the following year - so peer group tends to enjoy working with each other. - You don't have to wade through the massive teacher certification processes necessarily. - Admin often has your back on discipline issues.
Some downsides too. - You can be let go easily if school feels its not working out (practically, if you have things covered its hard enough to find teachers they will work to keep you). - Pay is lower. - Expectations can be higher at good schools ie, you might need a masters etc. - Quality of programs varies WILDLY!
It’s like saying home mortgages are free money because they’re also partially backed by the fed.
Your analogy to mortgages is right on, but you've drawn the wrong conclusions. Fed-backed mortgages absolutely functioned as free money. Because the risk of unqualified borrowers was assumed by the government and by opaque, byzantine, and corrupt securitization schemes, banks were incentivized to hand over money to people who weren't able to pay it back.
This was, in every sense that matters, "free money". And it led directly to a financial crisis that many millions of people have never fully recovered from.
This is an often flouted myth. Football pays for itself and then some. There's more money in education, per capita, inflation adjusted, then there ever has been ever.
It's not a money problem, and it's not a sports problem.
The problem with this approach for public schools in the US is that there are multiple taxing authorities involved in determining how much $$$ gets attached to a student, and most of it comes from local property taxes.
The biggest factors that contribute to student academic outcomes are household income and parental education levels.
Private schools as having a superior educational experience is really about being from wealthier households than it does about better teachers.
This isn't true at all. I know of teacher unions (that my family members belong to) that have refused deals because they weren't fair to their younger members. My local teacher's union refused a deal that wouldn't have applied to substitute teachers. Just because California has an entrenched entitled boomer problem doesn't mean all unions are bad. You're using one of the worst examples in the country to generalize unions with.
It's all very frustrating.
What we end up with is neighborhoods with literal multi-millionaires in >1m properties living next to squalor, and people living in such a situation can’t afford to move anywhere else within 50 miles. They stay and try to scrape by until they can’t take it anymore and move somewhere cheaper, or pass away and the property is promptly torn down, rebuilt, and sold by the family for a ~1m profit. The reality of someone who can barely afford that even massively-reduced tax bill living in a million-dollar house that they can’t sell without moving out of state isn’t pretty, but these are the situations that Prop13 advocates are supposedly protecting (when really they just want to keep their own much lower tax bill forever in a vacuum detached from reality).
A lot of the really bad Prop13 offenders are businesses though. I don’t have much sympathy for landlords, but I have even less for Disney paying 1/100th of their property tax because of prop 13: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/dis...
https://aagla.org/2021/12/the-california-chamber-of-commerce...
Unfortunately, boomers and existing home owners will keep voting against ANYTHING that reduces Prop13’s benefit to businesses because they all think it’s a slippery slope and that they’ll come for residential next.
You've probably figured this out by now, but that sentence describes Illinois as well as it does California.
Oh the irony
~ George W. Bush, during a campaign speech in South Carolina (2000)
That particular question had probably not been asked much before, but it's been asked more frequently ever since.
> states and local districts should make education policy, not the U.S. government.
It would be a breath of fresh air for a philosophy like this to be implemented but you would have to fire everyone in the department of education and start over to actually get anything done.
Teacher pay in the US doesn't attract stellar candidates. Further in the comments here people claim that 65k a year for a field that typically requires a bachelors/masters is great, when those are mid career earnings and if you have a modicum of drive or ambition, those earnings are what you could get as an entry level salary at any tech company.
Anecdotally, I can't think of many smart, ambitious people that I personally know that went into teaching. My experiences aren't a statistical sample, but its telling that its not a career choice that anyone talks much about aspiring into.
Consider who is quoted as an expert: someone who makes money training teachers. Seems like someone who will profit from greater funding of the general system.
A while ago, a friend of mine read articles in the newspaper about a dire shortage of math teachers. So he enrolled in a teacher training program, put in the hours and couldn't find anything anywhere. He's a personable guy. Polite and very sociable. So when he couldn't find anything anywhere, I started to believe that this is one of those self-serving fibs circulated by the unions and the teacher prep programs. There may be some truth to it, but it may be wildly inflated.
Imagine you are the kid which will end in prison. Wouldn't you feel betrayed from society if society can already see that you will end in prison and is doing nothing against it?
You can we haven't accepted the right answer though: more money for education.
Smaller classes, more support, proper trained psychologist
This isn’t nature versus nurture per se (although I believe the data does show some ability and intelligence is genetic/inherent), but that it takes a lot for a human child to succeed unless they’re at the higher end of the bell curve (and even then it’s no guarantee).
There is some evidence that large class sizes produce better results, and it would seem that whatever the US spends its education money on isn't working, because our students test much lower than our investment would predict.
Mostly outside of education. The US spends a lot on education and gets poor results for the investment because it also spends on lot on institutionalizing racism and reinforcing socioeconomic insecurity in the working class, which creates a lot for the education system to work against.
We were well down this path when I graduated in '99, and went full steam ahead during my kid's primary school career. You either escaped to a (private or suburban) school not full of juvenile delinquents who had parents that still cared, or you simply gave up on having your child have an actual education.
The inner city school I had to attend in 1998 was more or less a daycare even back then, and the anecdotes I hear today have only gone further in that direction.
Young people now literally behave better wherever you look. The generation that grew in 90ties just was not better behaved.
I'm not talking about better behaved. I'm talking about better behaved in school, or you got expelled very quickly. That left others who were there to learn (or at least not to be disruptive) move forward in peace. I have no opinion on if kids were better behaved outside the classroom - likely not, having grown up during that time.
A single kid can ruin an entire semester for 40 kids in the classroom. I've personally watched it happen, and there was nothing the teacher could do. Averages don't matter in this situation - only outliers do.
I'd go back to a "rougher" generation that learns to behave when appropriate (and those that don't learn, get removed) any day of the week over what we currently have in the average urban public school system.
Edit: Heck, I got suspended from a couple classes in high school due to attendance issues. Rightfully so since I was holding back other students on group projects and the like. Today that would be utterly unheard of in that same school system.
You just idealize own generation, that is all. Which is odd, because at the time superpredators panic was going on and people fretted.
I still believe we're talking about entirely different things. One of my schools was incredibly rough. If you talked back to a teacher you'd get instantly suspended, and on the third one bounced to alternative schooling. I was one of those kids.
That no longer happens, and was starting to slip when I was due to graduate. These days I've witnessed students literally hurling desks at teachers and smashing windows only to be back in the classroom on Monday.
Yes, I totally agree violence was more in your face in the 90s. The utter disrespect towards teachers and those trying to learn with zero consequences for your actions was simply not there yet, at least in my small section of the world. Perhaps on the coasts and other major cities this was already the norm.
There simply is no mechanism to separate the small percentage of troublemakers from the general student population any longer, much less providing challenges for the high achievers. This drags down standards and morale on a massive fashion, and the results simply speak for themselves.
The "best" school I went to during my illustrious schooling career was an inner city private school where almost all the kids were on 90%+ needs-based scholarships. Selection bias where only the parents who cared enough to jump through the loopholes made that place bearable - so teachers that actually taught stuck around. The difference in attitudes and hope was utterly night and day. Almost entirely because the bottom 10% or so wasn't dragging everyone else down to their behavioural level.
This does make things harder and disrupts learning for others.
And kids at the very bottom have better and more support available now. It is not perfect, it often sux and is not available to everybody. I definitely don't mean to say it is somehow super great. But the kids at the bottom with cognitively issues or impulsive control issues have better chance to learn more then used to be normal.
If the kids failed either way, it's cheaper to make them fail in 12 years than 13 or 14.
But that also was seen as discriminatory I think because it wasn't that easy to move out of basic etc once you were there so I think they stopped this as well - I think system was called tracking.
>According to transcripts, France's son passed only three classes in his four years of high school, earning a 0.13 grade point average. What's worse is that her son's GPA puts him near the top half of this class. He was also late or absent to school 359 days.
https://www.willitsnews.com/2013/01/26/firing-a-tenured-teac...
The only difference is rituál around it.
It was literally never true that the word would refer to beating a kid by open hand only. The books that teach parents to spank also give advice to use instruments and call it spanking.
Old books that contain spanking use the word beating as synonyms. It started to be used as different word when people started to take issue with it more often.
I agree that it is not the right way to discipline a child, but I can recognize this distinction in meaning.
I find this interesting, actually, as a form of argument. The annihilation of semantic categories. It's like argument via Sapir-Whorf.
This is in bad faith, a drug lord won't give you a spanking unless it's sexual in nature. I assume you know the difference between a sexual spanking and a beating in the street. Perhaps not. A parent can give a beating, but that is different from a spanking.
I think trying to equivocate a spanking with a beating is intellectually dishonest. If you can't tell the difference in both intent and intensity, I have no idea where you are coming from. You might be against spankings but to argue the words spanking and beating are synonyms is simply wrong, and quite honestly, juvenile in the level of reasoning. As the OP said, words matter.
I assume people are so appalled by the concept of physical punishment (which, let's be clear, I don't do and barely experienced either), that they don't want to acknowledge... how English works.
"Spanking" implies an open palm or maybe a belt or thin switch, on the rump. It hurts; it may leave a bruise; it may be barbaric -- but it doesn't involve serious injury (say, to internal organs). The point is to inflict pain without serious injury.
"Beating" carries no such connotations of limited harm. It can be done with fists or blunt objects; it can target the face or internal organs like the kidneys; it can be severe enough to lead to death.
This difference in meaning is as much about connotation as denotation, but the connotational differences are very large. You might say that, logically, a spanking is a kind of limited beating, but not all beatings are spankings.
So, as a matter of language, you're right.
My father, 84 years old, remembers his elementary school teacher kicking him full-force on his flank (for fooling around with his buddies). Probably not the best approach, but he remembers it to this day.
He also remembers students being forced to kneel on hardened kernels of corn as punishment.
And I was repeatedly told when I was in elementary school, "If you were stupid enough to go home and complain to your parents that your teacher beat you, you just got beaten twice as hard."
kids these days...
How were we to know they'd go home to their fat psychopathic wives to be beaten within and inch of their lives?
It sounds like you leaving the profession was best for everyone involved.
Rather, it said things like this:
> One of the things that students benefit from (diverse educators) is this idea of seeing themselves not only leading classrooms, but also in the curriculum
Do you see the difference? They want to engage students by empowering them. In contrast, you wanted to demand respect through fear of punishment. It’s not hard to imagine why your days were plagued with interpersonal conflict.
They lack any ability or willpower to meaningfully hold students accountable. My wife felt physically unsafe with this student in her room, yet apparently nothing could be done.
"Inability to punish students, lack of respect"
To people today this all sounds barbaric. However, there were far fewer "broken people" coming out of that system than is produced today. That generation was not filled with sociopaths and 'challenged" people -- quite the opposite. It's the system today that produces those. Lack of ability to administer punishment is part of why teachers get so little respect.
The past 2 years was very revealing as to how our modern public schools are failing today. It's embarrassing, and I understand and support the moves many parents are making to private or home schooling.
People will argue this until they’re blue in the face, but pulling a deadly weapon out escalates the situation, when de-escalation would likely lead to a less physically harmful outcome.
Is this some kind of joke? If you want to lead with _that_, I hope you never are put in a position of power over any kid ever again.
I was generally a good and respectful student, and I was punished on the occasions I misbehaved or was disruptive. I think that punishment was necessary and helpful.
As a father, I remember the only time my kid got in trouble at school. I received a strongly worded letter from my child's school that my child had been disrespectful to a teacher and that he was going to receive detention. It was like pulling teeth to get them to tell me what my child had actually done that was disrespectful. When asked (in email) they just kept repeating that he was disrespectful and they talked a lot about the teacher's feelings but never told me what my specifically kid had done or said. I wrote them back a last time suggesting I meet with the principal and the teacher in person to discuss the issue. They never replied to me, but I found out through my kid that they dropped the detention. I'd have pressed further, but we were already moving our kid to another school because of other shenanigans and overall low education quality.
I asked my kid for his version of events. He said that he took a test about the field trip they had been on, and he had left the last question "What did you learn?" blank. The teacher suggested he answer the question. My kid said leaving it blank was his answer and the teacher left to check on the other kids. If this bothered the teacher, it wasn't even addressed at the time.
Now, I had a good talk with my kid about the situation and I agree that he shouldn't have left that question blank. (I also sympathized with him because the field trip was the same each year and not exactly information rich. It was overall I think a good learning moment for him.) But this was what hurt the teacher's feelings and she found disrespectful? If the kid refuses to answer the question let his score reflect it. If you're not okay with blank questions, make that a detention-worthy offense. But to bring me your hurt feelings and how my kid was disrespectful... and then to not even be willing to tell me about it? I thought maybe my kid had a tone or was otherwise rude in his delivery of his decision; but if so, they wouldn't tell me about it. And I've talked to my kid about this incident since, and even as an adult he has no idea why the teacher had the reaction she seemed to have had.
Anyway, the point of this is that discipline in schools is mostly unfair, arbitrary, and not clearly effective. In the general case there are no trials, no weighing of the evidence, or anything to protect the student from unfair treatment or abuse.
I don't know what the solution is; parents suck and let their kids get away with murder. But many current parents also experienced such 'guidance' and have no desire to see their kids experience it as well.
"Anyway, the point of this is that discipline in schools is mostly unfair, arbitrary, and not clearly effective. In the general case there are no trials, no weighing of the evidence, or anything to protect the student from unfair treatment or abuse."
To be fair, the criminal "justice" system works the same way - abuses of power, arbitrary punishments, recidivism, etc. And, you can have a trial if you feel like starting a law suit, but I don't know how much justice one finds there either. Up to 10% of the incarcerated are wrongfully convicted. I think we should be working to fix both systems, but given this it's perhaps better to learn that this is how the system works when the stakes are detention vs prison.
The evidence that physical violence as punishment against children is counterproductive and harmful to their development is pretty overwhelming (and the evidence that it is harmful for those who merely witness and are under pervasive threat of it rather than actually punished with it is also strong.)
Promoting abuse of children just because you were raised in an environment where abuse was normalized (and one where that might have been excusable as nonculpable ignorance because the evidence of harm was not as compelling as it has since become) does little but demonstrate what the phrase “cycle of abuse” means.
Studies that separated measured corporal punishment from outright abuse found drastically different results.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7992110/
I had this debate with a friend a year ago, and when we dug into the literature, it was certainly rather mixed.
Both my parents were teachers. My mother was a teacher in public schools. When we would talk about this very thing, she said whenever they would fail students, it would glut up the system and it would start to cease to function. It's a tough problem. When I was young, they had alternate schools for bad kids. At least two levels. The bad kid school, then if you got kicked out of that, the really bad kid school. If you got kicked out of that, you didn't go to school anymore. I don't know why we stopped doing that. The public school system was bad then and it's bad now, so it might not matter.
"A gay dad volunteers for one of eight open slots on a parent committee that advises the school board. All of the 10 current members are straight moms. Three are white. Three are Latina. Two are Black. One is Tongan. They all want the dad to join them.
The seven school board members talk for two hours about whether the dad brings enough diversity. Yes, he’d be the only man. And the only LGBTQ representative. ... The gay dad never utters a single word. The board members do not ask the dad a single question before declining to approve him for the committee."
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/Sa...
They have trouble recruiting for these spots. He was white. His credentials, interest, commitment, skills he might bring to the position were not relevant.
I am extremely grateful for the talents of several of my public school teachers (and until they were downsized) counselors.
That wasn't really necessary? Your point is taken and some of us are indeed grateful (and I don't doubt GP is or was), but I think we're in the minority. And it seems a general thing in Western societies? There's a lot of teacher bashing in France too, and also a difficulty to find ones. The pay, the teaching conditions, the permanent bashing and ridiculing by the elites, the ruling class, and any class really...
I mean, when your secretary of education tells teachers during the first covid lockdown, most of them fighting to keep classes running, to go help pick strawberries instead. Err... When you can't even fund 5 kn95 masks (to be reused) for every teacher and you relax all covid constraints because the economy is grinding to a halt. 15 euros... Not even that. Even my company pays for 2 daily kn95 masks and I'm not exposed to kids.
Perhaps not. I guess what I'm trying to say is:
Yes, it's a woefully underappreciated and underpaid job. But unlike what must of us fully-hatched adults do with our lives - I do feel that (good) teachers are in fact doing something very valuable and important, and ultimately, at least some of their students will appreciate their efforts long after the fact.
What OP is saying is that most people don't appreciate teachers, and aren't greatful for them, not that THEY (OP) don't appreciate teachers.
Had I only listened to my teachers more, when it still mattered.
It's not terrific by Hacker News standards, but should be a living wage in most places especially if you marry or room with someone who can split housing costs with you.
Remember educators also have to get a master’s within 5-10 years in most states.
So yes it’s unlikely to occur. But it could and it requires very little effort to be prepared.
Older American folks here may remember doing nuclear attack drills in school, where the kids were told to crouch under their desk.
As teacher is normal to deal with problematic, or even very twisted children sometimes, but the feeling in Europe is very different. I can perfectly understand somebody that leaves after experiencing such traumatic events non-stop each ten days.
> relatively short day
Citation needed. Teachers I know spend a ridiculous amount of time prepping, marking, and going to meetings outside of class hours.
Teachers can't even bring their dog to work! How can anyone deal with that.
The job has gotten harder and more involved and the pay has gotten, relative to cost of living, much worse. In many districts teachers do not know if and when their next raise will come. It could be next year or in 10 years.
If as a society we value education we need to fund it.
The reality is that teachers in America make horrific wages for a job that requires a degree, are treated like garbage, held to impossible standards, constantly subject to budget cuts, and then we wonder why America, the wealthiest country in the world, ranks 14th in education. It's not a mystery. Teachers deserve better.
Some teachers deserve better, to be sure. The reality is that educational spending in the U.S. is quite high by developed-country standards. But the system still fails to reward the best teachers, and many teachers are quite simply not properly qualified for what they're supposed to teach. "Education" degrees are practically meaningless.
The problem is that measuring the efficacy of a teacher is a dubious task. What would probably work the best is to incentivize teachers to get advanced degrees outside of the field of education by providing a substantial pay increase upon completion. Right now it is actually harder to get a degree in a field outside of education because in many districts you would need explicit permission from a supervisor to be reimbursed for a non-education degree versus an education degree that requires no permissions for reimbursement.
An advanced degree does not make a great teacher, but it does provide some solid foundational knowledge.
She works about 14 hour days during the week, and 12 hours per day on weekends. Hourly equivalent is about 1/2 the department stores.
She told me about the new safety policy the police advise to use in the event of a shooter, after the Oxford MI incident (about an hour from us). The idea is to barricade the door, get anything you can use as a weapon, and defend the kids. Alternatively, you can break out a window and run away. Of course, they won't let the teachers open carry weapons, which, honestly, would turn the soft targets into very hard ones.
Aside from that obvious solution, the problem is, what do you do if you have a kid who doesn't want to leave for any reason? This literally becomes a trolley problem, decide whose life is more important. Should she stay with the reluctant child, or should she save her own life and as many of the others as she can?
And I don't know if I mentioned it, but the pay really really sucks.
Add to this, parents who don't work with the teachers to help their kids. Often major communication problems with parents who don't speak english. Parents who only sometimes take their kids to school. Kids who just don't care enough to do any work, and then come begging at the end of every quarter/semester for "extra credit", which they are ineligible for, given that they have not completed a majority of their work. Often any work at all.
I hear about this. Every day. It is burning her out.
But more than that. I see what these schools are producing, see the attempts not to make the kids unhappy by giving them a 50% score for doing no work, not even showing up to class, or tests. Letting them retake tests to improve grades. All these little things we do to coddle, and protect people from the consequences of their own decisions.
And I think what sort of adults we are unleashing. Which explains much of what we see in society now.
Wait so the correct way to defend yourself against an active shooter is to... seek cover and run away? Why can't she simply carry a weapon, as the second amendment gives her the inalienable right to?
Education is ripe for disruption. The US should move to a South Korean model where a few very good superstar teachers lecture thousands of students simultaneously.
I think there’s ways to address the need to ask questions here. Forums and discussion pods for instance.
And that (in my opinion) may be part of the reason so many teachers are leaving the field. Teaching is very rewarding, playing social service aid giver and municipal cop not as much.
Plus, watching and reading stuff does not mean teacher can skip it. It still needs to be said again, either because many kids read only half of it or because they forgot it all due to not switching between active and passive learning by themselves.
Sorry..if those are their working hours, there is something wrong. It’s just odd. All public schools teachers are unionized. All the teachers here spout the same numbers for work hours and talk about spending from their pockets for school supplies and working at home.
Only in the USA, the teachers are ‘overworked’. And the results aren’t stellar compared to the rest of the world. Maybe something’s got to change. I am not buying it anymore. Unless there is something in American tap water that is making all the kids dumb as rocks.
My friends buy cases of wine and gifts and swag bags for their kids’ teachers..and the parents have to spend mandatory volunteer hours. And the teachers still complain about buying school supplies. Maybe ask for school supplies instead of wine club membership? Especially with younger students, they are holding the parents hostage. And the teacher who had an after school tutoring outfit for which they only accepted cash. Almost every single kid I know has extra tutors.
Ohh, and there were no breaks during the work day. Most days she was required to be supervising/helping kids in the lunchroom during her "lunch break", so she couldn't really sit down to eat her own food. Good luck finding a time to use the restroom.
There are no vacation days. You can't say, "I'd like Friday off because my son has an event on Saturday and we need to travel there the day before".
If you were sick, you were required to find your own replacement from a list of substitutes that the school provided.
There are no public employee unions in our state (North Carolina). She made low $40k when she quit. Per-hour it was less than minimum wage. I've always made double or triple her salary in Tech, for half the hours.
The summers are "vacation", but they're also unpaid. She was only paid for 10 months out of the year. Ohh, and she had mandatory teacher workdays over the summer (unpaid), which were essentially 3-4 days of all-day training. We couldn't just leave for vacation.
Fast food is really a better gig. You can leave the work at work when the day is done, and it pays better too.
here is my question: all teachers are represented by a union that negotiates on their behalf. the teachers union in california is the most hard ass and powerful lobby. why isnt the union bargaining for better hours and better spending of literally 40% of california's annual state budget? more than 70% of our school budget goes towards salaries. schools are overcrowded and crumbling. many have cancelled programs and every year, we increase teachers' salaries(noone earns less than 100k) with lifetime pensions(including for dependents after they die). A union that can negotiate all this and coordinate with the ginormous pension management fund cannot bargain better working hours and useful school supplies? its almost as if they advise the teachers to do this so they use the 'sacrificing teachers' as a bargaining chip for more raises and votes. i have been watching this in ca for almost a decade now and it blows my mind.
Schools need security guards in some counties and they have become hotspots for political agitation. In the bay area schools, students walked out of class and demostrated during lunch break in support of teachers union. they are using the kids as their weapons against the tax paying parent who are literally held hostage. the unholy union and melding of political agendas between the UC system and CA public schools is another nail on the coffin of california public education system.
if anything, education costs should be coming down. personal story: the biggest expense when i was a student in school was notebooks because i had a lovely but a somewhat benevolent dictator as a math tutor who would make me to do 100 math sums everyday. it just had to be any kind of math..her method was that i had to sit down and have the discipline to set aside the time for math. i was always scrambling for paper. and it was getting expensive. finally my mother got permission to use her old office ledgers where accounts were only recorded on one side and were meant to be pulped. and every weekend, we'd have to burn them because even though it was 5 plus years old, we couldn't just discard them.
i marvel..MARVEL...at the tablet and the computer now. i rented a computer on a weekly basis to learn programming at home. i am so envious of the kids these days. and education is FREE for all!! i am SO MAD that this dumbass state of california is fighting to remove mathematics from school curriculums amongst other shenanigans and no disrespect to your wife, i dont feel like i can throw my support or show sympathy to the teachers. if there is a mafia and a godfather, the henchmen still dont get my sympathy.
education should be CHEAPER now! education should be more evolved now and tailored to suit individual children according to their aptitude. we had textbooks and one teacher for 40 students. in a country of about close to a billion. why isnt america better in 2022? every child should be able to be the best of what they can be and not some cookie cutter failed method that is unevolved even by developing countries standard.
if i were a conspiracy theorist, i would say that unionised public schools are america's soft underbelly where the poisoned dagger will be thrust to destroy the country. without a doubt, the educational system of this country(i dont know about the rest of the country..but at least speaking for california) is how the children will be weaponised against this nation. maybe ten years ago, there might have been a way to reverse this downfall. It is too late now as a whole generation has been poisoned. it starts with making an entire generation dumber. and teachers have been complicit.
No, this is not true. Some teachers are represented by unions. In our state (North Carolina), public employees are prohibited by law from organizing into unions and cannot strike.
There is a "teacher's association" that lobbies on their behalf, but the republican-controlled legislature pretty much ignores the association. Without the option the strike, the association is pretty much powerless. They publish opinions and give feedback about what they'd prefer to have happen, but they have no leverage to actually make any changes.
The money spent out-of-pocket is not just decorations and sidewalk chalk. It's pencils, paper, erasers, folders, name tags, cleaning supplies, sticky notes, pencil sharpeners, "prize box" rewards (because you have to have a behavior reward system, it works wonders at practical level for elementary students). It's all of the practical things that make a classroom function on a day-to-day basis. Heck, sometimes they'd run out of paper for the copy machine and we'd buy a few reems just so she could have a particular activity the next day.
Maybe a startup to facilitate the founding of private schools is in order?
Many people who teach would have trouble at other jobs from what I've observed.
I don't think it's about the money.
So, good teachers who want to be rewarded on merit should seek to abolish their unions and abolish public schools generally speaking. Let parents compete for the best teachers in part by using taxes to fund children and not administrations and unions.
https://www.governor.state.nm.us/2021/12/01/governor-plans-t...
Oh, and we are ranked 50'th in the nation in education. Down again, I think we managed to bump up to 49'th place last year.
This is more then a fair salary for the area, with the pension, and time off, and the (nearly complete lack of) results being obtained.
Additionally in most cases their unions negotiate their compensation. Clearly they wouldn’t work if their unions didn’t believe they were being compensated fairly.
Those benefits are for those who stick it out as teachers. More and more, new teachers don't even last until their benefits start vesting at 3 years, let alone 20 years!
The biggest complaint is they are just tired of all the nonsense with covid.
I feel like this conversation is pretty much a constant across time though that teachers are underpaid.
Underpaid compared to what? A plumber? Going to quit teaching to fix pipes in the cold?
Everyone is underpaid compared to this idealized job in the abstract that almost no one actually has.
1. Manage a 25+ children 2. Be responsible for their learning/growth 3. Expected to be part-time law enforcement 4. Expected to be part-time psychologist 5. In some districts, carry weapons and tasked with keeping the peace 6. Get paid way below what skillset that requires 7. Get targeted by parents, politicians for under performing children when parents are not involved and politicians constantly cut funding 8. Have to go on strike just to get cost of living adjustments 9. Funding is so poor, that a lot of teachers have to reach into their own pockets to cover up the difference (voluntary, but still) 10. And after all that, to not be compensated financially is just pouring salt on the wound.
If you want people to pick teaching as a career path, we need a complete shift in the culture of America. As it stands, teachers get zero respect in our culture. The coach is put on a pedestal, the match teach - good luck. He is lucky if the only acknowledgement he receives are insults
In other countries, teachers are respected by parents and students. They are paid well. They are elevated to a higher station in society. In America they are put down, vilified and threatened.
The entire model of how humans pass on knowledge and experience to others needs to change. To what, I'm not sure, but what I do know is the current system is woeful.
People are getting sick of shitty jobs, regardless of pay, and I think it's going to force us to redefine some roles. Unless the economy absolutely crashes and makes people desperate enough to take these jobs, I think the trajectory is clear.
We might be able to import enough workers to fill the gap, but with the attitudes towards immigrants changing in the US, I'm not so sure.
It was bad enough when the worst parts of the job were standardized testing, and that you were paid little and had to spend your own money on school supplies for your classroom.
Then it got worse when school shootings became so commonplace that bulletproof backpacks and active shooter drills became a thing. Of course you still have to pay for your own school supplies, but now you also have to pay for body armor, ammo for target practice, and therapy.
Now there's covid, and it's more of a shitshow than it's ever been. Inability to find substitutes. Bus driver shortages. Staff shortages. Faculty shortages. Even though there's a vaccine, there's no mandates for vaccination. Here's a running tally of educators and staff in Georgia who have died since July [1]. The average age of 42 teachers on this list who have died is 46 years old. FORTY SIX! The youngest was in their 20s!
And then on top of it all, if you think that maybe your workplace is dangerous for you as your colleagues drop dead around you, and you'd prefer to teach from home or at least offer some protections at work, then you are called lazy and unamerican by parents in your district. If you hold the opinion that there should be a vaccine mandate at your workplace you are called a Nazi. Meanwhile, legislators are working to pass laws empowering students to sue you personally (for an amount which is maybe 25-30% of your annual salary) if they feel what you're teaching goes against their religious beliefs [2]. You have a moral panic over Critical Race Theory which has metastasized into rumblings about book burnings [3], and moral busybodies combing their way through your library...
Yeah, it's no wonder teachers are leaving and it's hard to find replacements.
[1] https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/atlanta/60-georgia-teachers...
[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
[3] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/book-burnings-1933-2022/
https://ncse.ngo/creationism-texas-charter-schools
They should accurately teach subjects such as science.
For every one of these schools teaching kids religious nonsense that is clearly wrong, there is some other school using that freedom to try alternative ways of running classroom. If you don't allow this you end up with a pretty rigid system that basically everyone but educational board members hates, like the Common Core requirements that are so tight that teachers basically have to design their entire quarter around them.
https://relevantmagazine.com/current/texas-board-education-d...
This is one example. There are lots more.
Small steps like these could improve the confidence of those working in schools and the many parents trusting schools to safely educate their children
If in fact you are, then those things are important, but most Americans don’t want to think of their local communities this way and resent developments that reify such a perception. Especially when it comes to children. We really don’t like young children being cognizant of evils and threats and other such “adult” concerns. Innocence is important.
My wife’s school had:
* metal detectors
* police
* drug dogs
* 12 foot fencing
* no doors on toilets
* active shooter drills
* no on-site medical staff
* restrictions on access to medication, including inhalers
That is what public schools in America are. They are prisons, and the on-site police treat the children as criminals.
My wife went through school never using the bathrooms
Nobody ever seemed to care, but I sure never set foot in those bathrooms.