Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

People do want to teach and get paid to do it. It’s called private schools. They charge what the market will bear for their quality and location, and they pay what the market rate is for teachers of the requisite quality that let them charge the rates they need.

What confuddles people in education is the same thing that causes endless articles about housing, healthcare, inflation… it’s called “basic economics”. Just because education is heavily regulated by the government and full of people ideologically predisposed to pretending economic rules don’t apply, doesn’t mean supply and demand is false and the normal rules of gravity are suspended.

I myself have children and live in Boston, Massachusetts. The per-student funding here is $25,000 per year. Yet excluding a few meritocratic public schools that you have to test into (which they are making ever harder for my Asian children to get into as they reduce the seats allocated to tests and give away to “underprivileged” races, aka not Asians or whites) the schools are dog shit and anyone with a few bucks avoids them like the plague. So money is not the problem in Boston, it’s the horrible nature of the public school system.

I partially agree with you, but private school teachers often get paid less than their public school counterparts. Private schools get a flood of applications from humanities PHDs who don't have the certifications required to teach in public schools, so it's very much a race to the bottom in terms of salary. Private school's biggest advantage for teachers is that the parents treat education seriously, so they are less likely to treat teachers like babysitters.

That is another vector on the spectrum of decisions for why quality teachers choose to work at private schools. No one takes a job purely on salary - a decision like that is based on many things.

Isn’t it obvious that good teachers want to teach children with parents that want them to learn? And punish their children when they are disruptive? And the school can kick out bad kids?

The current vogue of reducing everything in education to the lowest common denominator - eliminating gifted programs, enabling disruptive kids to ruin classes, removing suspensions and expulsions - is exactly why private schools are growing. I don’t want education to optimize for the worst kids who won’t go to college and into intellectual pursuits anyway. I want to optimize education for the kids who will actually get value out of it.

“Isn’t it obvious that good teachers want to teach children with parents that want them to learn? And punish their children when they are disruptive? And the school can kick out bad kids?”

Perhaps, but that kind of school is doing a different “job” than one tasked with ensuring a base level of education for all young people.

There is a place in society for schools that will treat you like cattle and babysit you all day. There is also a place for academically challenging schools that provide a strong education. I don’t want to ban the latter in order to improve the former.

Those are the choices, huh?

Please, put your children in terrible schools out of some sense of social justice or whatever. I myself will do what is actually good for my family. Given the school down the street from me had its Vice Principal of Gang Violence execute a student he recruited to deal drugs for him, our local high school my children would be automatically zoned into is sadly not an option despite my tax dollars paying for it. https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2015/03/05/former-bos...

That’s a societal decision we have to make. Should all children have access to good education - i.e. should we invest in public schooling? Or should it be dependent on your parents ability to pay in which case lets go all in on private.

In my opinion, the voucher system is correct - keep funding public school through tax dollars, but give the parents a voucher for the amount to spend where they wish. If every parent in Boston received a $25,000 voucher to spend at the school they wished, competition would force public schools to improve or shut down as every school vied for the vouchers.

Unlike many on the left, who despise monopolies in business and ruthlessly hunt them down, yet worship monopolies the government has (like in public education), I think public dollars should be allocated to the parents to make decisions they feel are best for their children. Saying “just move if you don’t like your public school” betrays the reality of how difficult it is to relocate for the non-tech elite who can’t just work from anywhere.

> competition would force public schools to improve or shut down as every school vied for the vouchers.

I don't know how to fairly evaluate a school's performance. I guess we could ask if the students perform better in the job market 10-20 years later, but that's not obviously not helpful or useful information on which to make a decision now.

I get why the voucher system is appealing on first glance. After all, you often can evaluate the quality of goods and services. You can, say, estimate that a shirt you find at the mall will last a few years or that it will fall apart in a month. I just don't think you can do the same for schools. I have a feeling most people will evaluate education based on their beliefs (religious, etc) and the grades their kids "earn".

You don’t seem to know how to evaluate them, yet everyone agrees Harvard is better than your local community college, and there is literally a private school half a mile from my house that charges $60,000 per year. So clearly some people know how to distinguish a bad school from a good school and allocate their money appropriately.

Most importantly, everyone knows a very bad performing school when they see one. The role of vouchers is first and foremost to reward schools that don't screw things up too badly. Quality can then be a secondary factor.

College is pretty different than grade school. It's a lot easier for adults to understand whether or not they're learning well and to see where people end up following graduation. You'd have a hard time convincing me that the way an 8 year old is taught today will lead to better results in better outcomes decades later (after those that ran the schools have retired and have thus left the market).

Further, how many Harvard-level grade schools do you think we can run as a society? Given that private school pay is substantially worse than public school pay on average, how could one say that private schools, again on average, would outperform public schools?

I would just ban private schools and home schooling entirely, and make everyone go to public schools. The standards would improve in no time.

Thank goodness in America we have the constitution to prevent such authoritarian activity.

There's an unspoken benefit of private schools though: kids of teachers get to attend for free or at a hugely discounted rate. When I was at one, just about every teacher left after their kids graduated. The ones who stayed either had some nice admin role, or their spouse was the main breadwinner.

This is no longer the case in the two schools I’m familiar with.

I went for cheap 20 years ago, but my younger siblings did not. Not even a discount

That depends on where you live. In the Midwest, most (if not all) parochial private schools pay teachers substantially less than the public schools pay teachers. And it isn’t like the public school teachers are making enough either. But to say private school teachers get paid well is very incorrect for the large midwestern cities

Do you feel that the private system is taking all of the good educators and administrators? America isn't the only country with a private/public school ecosystem, yet other countries are able to maintain quality public schooling while it seems America struggles.

A lot of Western non-US countries honestly don’t have a lot of attractive private sector businesses. Small nations with strong public education are very unique. For example Norway only has 5 million citizens, extremely low immigration, a mono-culture and mono-ethnicity, and earns a huge amount of money from selling fossil fuels which are then funneled to public use. Yet the left in America pretends the Nordic model can apply here.

America is unique. A lot of our public services are quite expensive and quite low quality. Our system is organized around the private sector and the more we embrace the private sector the better things are.

Re: Teaching in Norway

https://rebekahjbuchanan.com/2018/10/21/teaching-in-norway

The environment Rebekah describes seems like a modern US tech business. Everyone is expected to be where they're needed, treat each other with respect and focus on their work. Sometimes I wonder why successful businesses can create the environment schools can't and then remind myself that businesses (and private schools) can easily exclude troublemakers, malcontents and people who don't fit in for whatever reason. Also some of the things you mention (e.g. mono-culture) make it easier to create an environment suitable for learning.

It shouldn't be a priori to honor the private sector and shit on the public sector but as long as we do we shouldn't be surprised at the results. Teaching and education simply needs to be valued more than it is. We shouldn't have to beg people to do the job. Instead we should reward and honor the profession so well that we can set high standards for teachers and still have a surplus of applicants.

Perhaps if we compensated teachers more like police or firefighters and required advanced credentials as more successful countries do our schools would be better.

Or perhaps if we had the demographics of Norway our schools would be vastly better in every single category except “diversity”.

Like it or not students are not born genetically equal. Throw in poverty and lack of effective parenting and there’s no hope that endless funding will somehow fix that situation.

I think you would benefit from approaching the situation with a bit more understanding. Also forget Norway, America is a big a diverse country so that is your problem to solve. You are not competing with Norway, you are trying to solve your own problems and failing.

America is big and diverse, but it is not a special snowflake. You are choosing to provide public schooling but failing to do so well. There is a myriad of reasons why and I am sure it is different per location but the fact remains. In your ideal private focused system, are kids not provided a good education when their parent's income can't keep up with the worsening class divide? If so, do you think that will result in a positive situation for America long term?

I do appreciate your perspective by the way, thanks for engaging.

I want to take the same public dollars that are funneled directly the monopolistic, corrupt, badly run system and instead give the money directly to parents to use as a voucher. If they like their current public school, wonderful, they can give them the voucher. If they want to go someplace else, the money is there for them.

Problem is two things: one, Americans strongly believe that every child should have access to an education. Two, not every family can afford 25k per child. Hell many cannot afford one child at that rate.

You’ve got a point - quality schooling does exist, if schools can pay well and offer sensible class loads. However to apply that to the current public school system requires significant dollars long term, and a lot of people don’t want to pay for that - think retired people whose children are out of school, or couples who have no children.

I don’t agree with that, but I’m simply stating some different positions from people whom I’ve talked to about this topic.

I disagree. Private schools self select their student population. Most private schools do not take students with special needs or students with really difficult home lives - and those students deserve education. Once private schools have to accept every student regardless of need, will their quality remain? I doubt it.

There are some very good public schools out there too - but you’re going to pay tuition in the form of housing costs in expensive neighborhoods.

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