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So the fact that one of the most powerful unions (at least in my state, CA) has orchestrated a pay scheme in which new entrants to the field do not benefit whatsoever is not in the least bit surprising.

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.

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> maximize the amount of money they pull out of the state

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.

Weirdly (to me, at least) private school teachers make substantially less than public. The ones I know say it's worth it to be free of the onerous beauracracy that plagues public education.

I googled a stat thinking you were wrong and you’re very right, $50k public vs $36k private in US.

Shame on whoever thinks the salary difference goes to the education management companies behind the charter school movement. (Looking at you, Edison Schools failing the young people of Philadelphia!)

Charter schools are not the same as private

Not only that but a career public school teacher in many places can retire with a nice pension, private school teachers don't. Even if you look at some of the best private high schools in the country the teacher salary just isn't great.

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.

Unfortunately one of those onerous bureaucracies involves having an actual education in how to educate, or a teaching certification. Which is how my private catholic high school had a baseball coach as a history teacher who didn't really know how to teach history.

I had a few former scientists (left the field after PhD) teach me in high school and holy shit it was amazing, leagues above anything my friends were learning in the local public school. There are pros and cons, but the point I was at in high school I found much more value in talking to those science teachers than the ones that had an education in education with science as a secondary concern. Teaching certifications have a place but I also think it is a good thing most private schools don't require them.

That's not surprising, the private teachers are not unionized. I think a lot of the hate for teachers' unions is driven by decades of propaganda - both from private institutions and both of the major political parties. Slashing teacher salaries by ~20% is the wet dream of many "education reform" advocates. Though I wonder what effect that will have on society and the quality of education, especially for those that can't afford the top tier private schools.

A big part of the hate for teachers unions is the inability to fire bad teachers.

>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...

This makes sense to me (and matches the facts I've found) -- when folks talk about private industry being "more efficient" they often mean cheaper, which also often means those near the bottom rung are the worst paid relative to work and experience. It's unnecessarily explosive and results in qualified and motivated teachers leaving the industry prematurely.

It's a lot more than that from a QOL standpoint.

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!

Private schools (non charter, non voucher) have more engaged parents and by being selective and flexible may have a lower number of children with special needs, behavioral disorders, and/or more flexibility in providing services for them.

The standard answer seems to be vouchers. Keep the free eduction, but let schools compete for students.

We are seeing the outcomes at universities. We are getting football teams and really fancy gyms but not better education. On the contrary, if you fail students who shouldn't really be there you get in trouble with the administration. The naive free market solution does not work.

The government gives out unlimited money for university loans. not a free market. Its okay if you arent familiar with american higher education.

The government doesn’t actually do this. Your eligibility for such loans is means-tested and you’re only obtaining them at a discounted rate. And they cannot be discharged during bankruptcy in most cases.

It’s like saying home mortgages are free money because they’re also partially backed by the fed.

It's pretty much universally accepted at this point that the flood of government student loan money has both distorted the higher education market, and created a trap for millions of people who have gotten an ineffective education with that "free" money.

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.

Anyone can get a loan for any university. Even scam for profit. There is basically no limit on it.

>We are getting football teams and really fancy gyms but not better education.

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.

This is how the American higher education system works.

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.

Private schools don't align the profit motive. Private schools are able select what students go there, public schools aren't.

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.

> 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 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.

This feels correct as a California transplant. The incumbents in a lot of verticals have taken entrenching to a new level. Prop 13 being the capstone.

I lived in California for 10 years (I moved to Chicago last July). The entrenched power is just ridiculous- old politicians never retire, it's all political machines everywhere, and while there are a lot of amazing activists they're fighting huge uphill battles. At the same time costs in lots of areas have risen a huge amount, and Prop 13 incentivizes people being landlords and forces higher prices on newly purchased property to make up for subsidized taxes on those landlords.

It's all very frustrating.

Welcome to Illinois. More school districts per capita than anywhere else. Everyone gets their own highly inefficient fiefdom.

Yeah, it’s great paying 10x the tax of our neighbors with similar house values because they moved here 30 years ago. The argument is always “people shouldn’t be forced out of their homes because of rising prices!” but we shop at the same grocery stores, eat at the same restaurants, pay the same power and gas bills…

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.

Most states have some variety of "homeowners" or "homestead" tax policy that gives deductions for people who live in their own home. I don't mind that, as long as it is fair. In California it isn't fair, and it isn't limited to a the home someone lives in.

> The entrenched power is just ridiculous- old politicians never retire, it's all political machines everywhere, and while there are a lot of amazing activists they're fighting huge uphill battles.

You've probably figured this out by now, but that sentence describes Illinois as well as it does California.

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