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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

> 2. It seems that education degrees are seen as easier to achieve than others.

Here is the problem. Teachers in America compare themselves to professionals, but their test scores are below the average for college educated people generally: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2017/.... Now 40% of college graduates don’t even get a job that requires a college degree. Disproportionately, those are people with lower aptitude scores. Teachers as a group are right on the borderline above those folks.

Teacher salaries are not low compared to jobs typically held by people with similar test scores—especially when you account for degree-required jobs that pay a premium for mathematical aptitude (accounting, engineering), or dealing with blood and body parts (nursing).

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That's not what that link says. In fact the source explicitly states that they are not looking at SAT scores by major, they are just looking at average SAT scores for a given college and weighting those scores by the percentage of education majors at that college. That led to their conclusion that: "Graduates with education majors are disproportionately found at schools where students have lower SAT scores." That doesn't mean the graduates with education majors themselves have lower scores unless you make some unsupported assumptions about distribution of SAT scores at any given college.

But even if education major SAT scores are lower on average, it it seems like backwards thinking when talking about pay. The point isn't that all current individual teachers deserve to be paid more; it's that teaching as a profession should pay more to attract talented people who otherwise pursue more lucrative fields, just like any other profession. If you paid doctors and engineers low wages, you'd probably fail to attract some top talent as well. But that doesn't then become a justification for those low wages since the low wages caused the issue in the first place.

> That led to their conclusion that: "Graduates with education majors are disproportionately found at schools where students have lower SAT scores." That doesn't mean the graduates with education majors themselves have lower scores unless you make some unsupported assumptions about distribution of SAT scores at any given college.

It assumes that education majors have similar SAT scores to other majors in a given school. That’s an assumption, sure, but I think a pretty reasonable one.

Teaching pays nothing compared to CS, finance, basically most things you need a degree for. Those brilliant individuals who would like to teach have to decide if their passion is worth making less money than some warehouses are paying around here. Those who don't have the grades or abilities to reach for the higher-paid fields have less of a dilemma. We're actively selecting against the candidates who have more lucrative options. This is where the issue comes in where people start saying they should do it for the joy of teaching. That's easy to say when you're drawing a comfortable salary. Being tight on money sucks and passion doesn't pay the bills.

I work in tech and would likely teach if it paid the same. My plan has always been to front load my retirement savings early in my career through tech so that I can take a lower paying teaching job when I'm older.

I’m in the exact same boat. One thing I enjoy doing is guest lecturing at local colleges in CS classes, around topics I have professional expertise in. If that sounds like something you’d like to do as well, I’d recommend getting involved in your local ACM chapter, as most college CS programs have an ACM tie-in.

Same position here, though I realized it a bit later in life. Currently mid 30s and hoping to be out of tech by 40.

It depends on where you're teaching; teaching is a terrible deal in rural school districts and in some states, but teaching in urban and especially wealthy suburban school districts is a pretty fantastic deal: it's a white collar salary (every single teacher at the public high school my kids went to makes over $100k) with a defined-benefit pension plan, ironclad job security, and more vacation days than any other profession.

It's not at all the case that teaching isn't competitive with other degree-requiring white-collar professions; depending on where you are in the CS/IT food chain, it's quite competitive with tech.

Defined-benefit pensions have become so alien to private market jobs that it's easy to overlook how valuable they are, or to forget that a lot of people are very happy to work towards a strong retirement.

My school district is in a middle sized city with a dominant land grant university. A starting teacher makes $40k. Requires both a BA and a teaching credential. Hours are long, and teachers spend a decent amount of money for out of pocket supplies, especially at some of the schools that despite level funding seem to get the short end of the stick.

IT in my area pays anyone with a pulse and basic computer skills $40k. A rookie developer from our land grant university can easily start at $60K with no experience. And that same developer can earn $100k with two years of good experience. Show me a 3rd year teacher pulling in $100k in my school district. No such unicorn exists.

The city doesn't have a DB pension, just a 403k.

Granted, the newbie teacher gets 1.5 months off in the summer, compared to 2 weeks PTO for the developer.

After 10 years, even assuming the teacher gets a Masters, the pay differential is huge.

I don't deny that there are teachers getting shafted all over the US; I'd just want people to know that the deal in many (most? all?) major urban school districts is surprisingly strong.

One suburban school district that you know of. I'm sure there are others. I'm not sure how you're extrapolating to many or all major urban school districts.

I've looked at a bunch of them (I have this argument somewhat frequently). But, sure: let's find some examples. What's a major metro where you think teachers probably get a raw deal? This is easy data to pull up.

I know OPS in Omaha doesn't pay crap. Last year's pay schedule started at $43k with a bachelor's, 47k with a master's, and 51k with a doctorate. Maxes at $71,400 with a doctorate. 2022-23 starts at $44k with a bachelor's and maxes at 75k with a doctorate.

I'm not at all surprised if teachers in Nebraska get a shittier deal than teachers in California or Illinois, but if you click around the financials for the DC West school district, teachers in suburban Omaha are routinely making 85k+. These teachers do not have doctorates. Note that the base salary of a teacher is just the floor on their compensation; they make substantial additional money from extracurriculars and in-school mentoring work.

Valley is not suburban Omaha. They're in the same county, but Valley is distinctly a separate city and not a suburb. Even with how far West Omaha has expanded, there's no one in the area that's going to call it a suburb without laughing a little. Is that the best you could find?

How about you look at the number of teachers employed by OPS vs DC West? They have one elementary school, one middle school, and one high school in that district vs OPS serving an area encompassing hundreds of thousands of residents.

You were excited about 100k/year in California? Please tell me that's not the Bay area where that still leaves them unable to purchase a home anywhere near the area.

You also understand extracurriculars are a lot of extra time and work for a bit of extra pay, right? One of the biggest complaints I've heard is that teachers are being forced into running extracurriculars because they already work way too many hours for the pay and for any kind of work/life balance.

I found DC West by looking at a list of Omaha suburbs, finding Waterloo, and looking up its school district. It's significantly closer to Omaha than Naperville is to Chicago, so yeah, I'm sticking with that being a suburb. If it wasn't a suburb, if it was its own city, that would make my argument stronger, not weaker.

I don't know what "excited" means. By national standards, I've been extraordinarily lucky; a $100k/yr comp package wouldn't excite me right now. But I can compare what teachers make to what other white collar professionals make, and I understand how to account for the rest of the compensation package --- a defined-benefit pension in many major districts (actually, a defined-benefit pension would light me up right now) and an enormous allotment of vacation days.

Speaking only to my local school district, which breaks comp out, extracurriculars are not a "bit" of extra money; it's as much as a 20% pay boost. My real point though is simply that the base salary is where most teacher comp packages start, and there's other things that go into it.

I'm not saying "teacher" is the best deal in the whole economy, but in major metro school districts, it's not a bad deal.

And, just to be ultra clear: obviously there are a lot of school districts, especially rural districts, where this isn't the case at all.

Alright, you pick the data you want to pay attention to and ignore the fact that the majority of teachers in the Omaha Metro are on the first pay scale I showed you. And go ahead and tell me that you know the lay of the land of an area you've never stepped foot in. Nice talking to you.

I have most definitely "stepped foot" in Omaha.

How do you know what degrees they have?

I know a lot about the Omaha area.

If we paid them more, it’d be easier to hold them to a higher standard

I’m all for creating a new salary band for teachers with 1300+ SAT scores and STEM degrees. I’ll pay whatever taxes you want for that.

Is there any evidence to show that these people make good teachers?

You don't need to be a genious to teach. You need to have good social skills with kids, care about doing a good job, and a mastery of the subject matter (which not very demanding for even average-intelligence adults, at least until the latter part of high school).

Yes to all of those: necessary but not sufficient.

You left out "willing to do whatever it takes for THAT kid, regardless of what the textbooks or principal or union says."

So instead of putting in the work and weighing out the different qualities of an effective educator, you pick out the most arbitrary of criteria out there and want to make that the gold standard for evaluating teachers.

I'm not a betting man, but I'd feel comfortable wagering that you are a STEM grad with solid SAT scores.

I am, and I'd make an awful teacher. Engineers are generally horrible teachers, I think because they've become so immersed in their subject that everything that is entirely alien to the learner seems obvious to them. I'm so impatient. I just want people to repeat after me, do the thing exactly like I said, and to show no initiative.

Teacher unions don't want higher standards.

They don’t want higher standards that are essentially arbitrary and capricious and imposed by boards, committees and other groups composed of individuals who have little or no expertise in teaching.

That’s a bit more accurate than your comment.

There's very little that I know of on an SAT that would demonstrate the skills to teach a 10 year-old math. Somebody who teaches a 10 year-old math doesn't even have to be very good at math.

So the problem I have with this argument is that it implies that virtually all of the essential skills (as I see it) that are required to be a good teacher shouldn't be compensated. Instead, teachers should be compensated for the skills that make them a good engineer or historian.

I'm sure that (1) anyone can come up with counter-anecdotes, and (2) there are different kinds of intelligence, and most of us couldn't begin to cope with a class full of kids.

That said: practically every college student knows that the Education majors are the dumbest people on campus.

I don't put much weight in the judgements college-age people make of others. They're still in the mindset of the high school status game they just left.

So do you have some other estimate of their relative intelligence?

At some point along the way I stopped trying to rank people by intelligence.

>At some point along the way I stopped trying to rank people by intelligence.

I agree. Some of the nicest, kindest and best people I've ever met aren't very bright, and some of the nastiest, stab-you-in-the-back jerks are quite intelligent.

That's not to say the converse isn't true for many folks, but "intelligence" isn't a proxy for the quality of a human, IMHO.

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