With teachers in short supply, states ease job requirements | Hacker News Reader

With teachers in short supply, states ease job requirements

apnews.com

41 pointslxm84 comments

> For Dallas schools, “it’s about the passion, not about the paper,” said Robert Abel, the district’s human capital management chief.

It's also about the paper (the Benjamins).

During Covid, I know and heard of teachers who decided they just weren't getting paid enough for the conditions.

Already underpaid, they were then told to do additional things, including teach before a class of germ-factory children without being allowed to wear a mask when mask advisories were otherwise in effect. Or to take additional workload to teach both in-person and remote. Or, in the case of college lecturers and professors, to record video lectures that the school could reuse without them (video streaming is even cheaper than an adjunct).

It'd make sense to pay and treat teachers like the enormously important educators and nurturers of children that they are.

You can still get passion, but people saying someone else should do work out of passion... always sound like they're exploiting.

Paying teachers more will bring talent. Oklahoma had this problem when Texas started paying more a few years ago and Oklahoma experienced a brain drain of good teachers[0].

Texas is discussed a lot in this article. Texas has a problem with lack of teachers that could easily be alleviated by offering higher teacher salaries. Texas can afford to pay more. Texas gets a flush of money that could easily go to paying teachers more through its recapture system that is supposed to go to education but instead due to corruption is used to balance the general fund[1].

The general fund is used, among other things, to fund oil and gas subsidies.

0:https://www.npr.org/2018/04/07/600322769/he-was-oklahomas-te...

1: https://web.archive.org/web/20220212004001/https%3A%2F%2Fwww...

> Texas gets a flush of money that could easily go to paying teachers more through its recapture system that is supposed to go to education

I'd be curious about how popular a straight-up pay raise for teachers is with voters. Not an education budget boost. Just raising pay on the argument that it will let the district/state attract the best candidates.

People whine about teachers being overpaid constantly. People call it part time work. People call teachers glorified babysitters. People complain about summer break. I’m not confident that the “other people are freeloaders” voters are going to be excited about pay raises.

It probably depends on how high other salaries are in the community. My parents were both teachers and even though they made very little, teachers were perceived as having some of the highest salaries in the area. This shows you how impoverished the rest of the community was. Paying them more was not popular with voters. "They make so much and they even get summers off" went the myth. This was a solidly blue collar working class town where kids were expected to barely graduate high school and then go work at the mill in town or the factory two towns over. Not sure if things have changed since then but they're probably even worse with those mill and factory jobs now gone. Teachers' awful salaries are probably still higher than most there, which is pretty sad.

We went through a recent bond election on our town that is currently under investigation by the state for electioneering.

Schools get a ton of money. Property rates go up. We have good schools.

But let me tell you, every school kid got a stupid iPad.

Every. Single. One. Apparently the "answer" to the pandemic wasn't printed worksheets... it was iPads.

I'm sorry—but it's totally stupid. The schools are wasting crap-tons of money on tech that kids don't need. That money should be going to the teachers... but it isn't!

The kind of base-model iPad that schools buy costs about $300 with education pricing and volume discounts. If you assume they last two years and there are 15 students for each teacher at the school, your school is spending about $2,250 per teacher per year on iPads.

Teachers make about $60k a year, so your school could either give them a 4% raise, or they could buy a bunch of iPads.

The iPads will probably have a bigger short-term impact, even if they're a bad long-term choice. At the very least, they'll look nicer to voters.

Negative impact in my experience. My kids were given ipads at school. Big downtrend in education quality ensued. Chaos really.

It’s all a hand wavey “tech is good” without doing any research, experimentation or preparation.

https://remakelearning.org/blog/2011/11/30/a-silicon-valley-...

Usually people are pretty chill about something like that.

Vocal conservatives hate “government schools” in general, and usually are able to drive school board votes.

> During Covid, I know and heard of teachers who decided they just weren't getting paid enough for the conditions.

This continues to even now.

A bunch of teachers in Texas retired in December/January. That just doesn't normally happen.

These teachers were barred for 12 months or more from coming back to teach. Not exactly a sign of a shortage--now is it?

We need a completely new system of culture in the US - nothing important gets taken care of, the most important roles for peoples well being and enrichment like schoolteachers or nurses are treated like garbage.

Ask any teacher or any nurse about what it’s like to do their jobs.

With the MBA-ification takeover of American society that seemed to start in the early 80's and reach socio-political bipartisan consensus by the mid 90's it has since seemed to me like there's been a significant and persistent priority inversion problem in most of how the US organizes its economy, industry, and investments. The most concise way I can describe it is "pathological myopia".

You can trace it back to Reagan, basically. Which in turn led to the fetishizing of capital you describe.

Corporations and the investment class took all the money out of the economy, and now they're about to lose it as their balance sheets dry up. It is the people who will suffer the most.

It worked out okay when we had extreme levels of corporate control relative to government aka the 1950s. Privatization has made everything worse. Conservatives are tied chained to the idea that corporations provide a ladder for people but they just straight up don't, its not profitable and they can spend money on stock buybacks instead.

Our economic culture is completely sick, nobody is paying attention to almost any of the real problems. A literal depression seems like the only thing that will ever make change happen at the moment.

We spend more than Europeans but get way less in return. We should just wholesale copy a system that is working like in Finland and scrap what we have, as it's not working.

Maybe its not about economics and cost and more about priorities as a culture.

Start here:

* Teachers should be paid a living wage * Teachers should get overtime pay for working overtime * All schools should be funded such that there are equal standards of teaching, classrooms, recreational activities, etc for the same size school throughout the country * Nurses should be paid a living wage * Nurses should be maximized at 50 hours a week with no shift going longer than 12 hours.

All of those things seem literally impossible given the systems that are in place right now, but to me they're just like basic common sense, and lets not forget when the systems we have were set up nearly all of them existed. We've just backslid from the time we were the only country that was left functioning after WW2.

>We should just wholesale copy a system that is working like in Finland and scrap what we have, as it's not working.

That's impossible. Americas have a pathological amount of NIH syndrome: they are utterly and completely unable, as a society, to look at anything outside their borders and learn from it.

It's administrators who eat up the money. Teachers in Canada earn higher salaries than USA yet spend less per student that USA does.

> And in Florida, military veterans without a bachelor’s degree can teach for up to five years using temporary certificates.

That seems so weird. Why would they have to stop after five years of teaching? Shouldn't they be better at it by that point?

https://www.fldoe.org/veterans/

They're trying to strongly push them to finish their bachelors (which they must have started), but what an odd program.

The page you linked explains the rationale:

> Veterans who successfully obtain their 5-year temporary teaching certificate will be assigned a mentor teacher for a minimum of two years to support their classroom teaching endeavors. They must also earn their bachelor’s degree during the 5-year period to be eligible for a full professional certificate; the temporary certificate cannot be renewed once it expires.

It’s a temporary pathway for veterans to work as teachers while finishing a bachelor’s degree. (This has been widely misreported in the media.)

Florida only requires substitute teachers have a high school diploma and be trained in the school district’s school safety policies and procedures, ethics, professional responsibilities and liability laws.

I strongly suspect the issue in states claiming a shortage of teachers is due to low salaries. Rather than raise salaries to attract talent, they're lowering hiring standards.

Also, what makes soldiers good teachers? Why would we say veterans should get a pass in this particular arena?

fetishism of the military in America, especially the deep south

Only 29% of Americans 17-24 are eligible to become a soldier so that makes them a more exclusive class than those eligible to be teachers. Also they have intelligible resumes providing evidence of past job performance.

From your link, it looks like they have a criterion requiring that the vet has about half a bachelor degree already (60 credits), so it makes sense as a fast pass for college students or an incentive for a near grad dropout to go back and finish.

This school year, is the first that my wife hasn't taught, since she became a teacher. I watched over the last two years, as the pandemic beat her down, until she had to move on. You can only get physically and mentally abused, while being underpaid, for so long, before it becomes too much of a sacrifice.

Teaching qualifications were BS to begin with. For most subjects, having a degree in a subject actually correlates terribly with someone's ability to teach it. These restrictions had more to do with liability and protecting jobs than anything else.

Hard disagree. My partner is an educator with a degree in it, and a lot of the degree is the important “how to teach” as much if not more than the actual content they’re teaching. It’s evident by any research professor, for example, who is sent to teach a course that just knowing the subject doesn’t mean they can adequately communicate or educate on it.

If additional education, in general, made teachers significantly more effective, it should be fairly easy to measure that outcome. But, it seems many people have tried, and continue to try, but have failed to reach much of a consensus [1]. Just reading through a few of the first search results, some find negative effects, some positive, but nothing particularly significant afaict.

Personally, I liked teachers that were enthusiastic about their subject matter more than anything else. Learning how to teach must be important, but someone that has enthusiasm and a skillset could surely pick that up as they go.

1. https://www.mhec.org/sites/default/files/resources/teacherpr...

Measuring the outcomes of primary/secondary education is not easy. The purpose of such education is not giving kids measurable skills but preparing them for their lives as citizens. You can't measure that with standardized tests. You must follow the kids over their lives and see how they contribute to the society.

What does it mean 'preparing them for their lives as citizens'? School is for learning reading, writing, and arithmetic. Learning how to be part of society is something everyone learns in the theater of life, not from school teachers specifically (as much from school teachers as from all the other important people in their life).

It means being prepared to use political rights such as voting and freedom of speech. It means being responsible for your own life, finances, and social interactions. And other things like that. When a kid turns 18, they suddenly have many rights and responsibilities. The primary purpose of education is preparing kids for those.

A 18-year-old has typically spent 20-25% of their waking hours in formal education, depending on what you count. That's a substantial fraction of their life so far. Formal education is particularly important for less fortunate kids who don't learn many useful things from their friends and family. If you want such people to have rights and responsibilities, they must be given a chance to prepare. Otherwise the society will suffer.

> someone that has enthusiasm and a skill set could surely pick that up as they go.

Sounds like the early days of Teach For America where enthusiasm will mostly get you between a few days and few years of service.

I think it’s pretty complicated to measure the effect of teachers in lots of context, let alone with respect to educational attainment.

The exception is at the intervention level: Teachers who learned X technique for improving Y skill improved Y skill at a higher occurrence than teachers who did not learn X technique.

Even for interventions you need to develop understanding of childhood/adolescent cognitive and emotional development in order to communicate effectively. Maybe enthusiasm gets you there organically through experience, maybe you quit.

Certainly in an otherwise pristine learning environment, enthusiasm for learning itself is a baseline desirable trait.

I think there is a selection bias here though.

My experience is that the people with the best natural teaching ability are not teachers. They end up in random industry jobs because dealing the career ladder of teachers is super unappealing.

In contrast, the teaching profession is full of people who were good students. So requiring more degrees does not do a good job of separating the wheat from the chafe.

In my experience, the best teachers are people in their 50s or 60s who have a ton of diverse experience and still chose to teach. But the median teacher is someone in their 30s who has only ever been a teacher.

Most states want teachers who went through education programs which as -mainly- education and psychology classes. Sure some states with shortages are tryign to make up for that shortage with subject matter experts rather than education pros, but that's what they have to work with.

facts we had teachers teaching the same stuff 100 years ago without this BS degree requirement and a much simpler certificate program. and it's not like we're getting better outcomes per dollar so clearly it's not helping that much. nobody needs a bachelors to teach freaking high school english.

An underrated thing about schooling 100 years ago was that it was one of the only professions a women could respectfully do.

So you ended up having genius women being just an schoolhouse teacher.

While I mostly agree with you, if you look at public vs private schools, the divide in education is not in STEM. It is in history and "English" (grammar, writing, speaking).

And while private schools are doubling down on those things, public schools are reducing the focus on grammar, spelling, writing, and speaking, and changing what it means to teach "history."

Are private schools able to attract talented History and English teachers? It could just be the circles I go in but I'm under the impression that the reasons that people go into teaching those subjects are generally better aligned with teaching the public i.e. if you're teaching rich kids with engaged parents then you're optimizing diminishing returns while a little literacy can go a really long way in an underserved community.

The sociological aspects of teaching are becoming more demanding over time, which draws teachers to private schools despite the generally lower pay.

Private schools often discount tuition for the children of their teachers, sometimes substantially. I knew more than a few teachers at my high school who taught until they got pregnant with their first child, quit until the youngest was in elementary, then went back to teaching - both to have something to do and to defray the cost of tuition.

And while the students and parents may not be perfect gems, they're a lot less likely to threaten actual physical harm.

honestly english class is mostly a waste of time. idk about everyone i know who is very good with the language picked it up from extensive reading starting at an early age, not from cramming in book reports. i completely agree with focusing more on those things just i think the general reading level of American kids going into high school is way too low. there is literally 0 reason why someone entering 6th grade shouldn't be able to read literally any english language text and comprehend it.

and yeah history in public schools sucks. 100 years ago it was taught with a bit more of the "great man" emphasis, now it's a lot about social forces, the experience of the average person at the time. social forces are an important part of history but i have looked at old curricula vs new ones and they are so much more interesting. regardless, history should be taught by lecture paired with reading other info from the time (primary sources, more detailed descriptions of things mentioned etc) not by the godforsaken mess of a subject it is now.

Instead of spending the money on unqualified teachers, provide some vouchers so that students can attend a private school.

It's seems the better option is to homeschool or use a local homeschool pod

Unfortunately hiring a private teacher to teach a small group of similarly-aged kids is reasonably affordable for families (less than half the price of private school), gives them a better education than public school (1:5 or 1:6 instead of 1:20), and takes a good qualified teacher out of the public school system (also while paying them more for working fewer hours).

We've always supported public schools but as a Florida resident, a private teacher is looking more and more like the better alternative.

Why is it unfortunate? If the government organized government funded meals for children in government funded restaurants, ran by government employees, would you also find it unfortunate if regular people were able to afford feeding their own kids outside of the system, without depending on what government thinks is appropriate to feed to children? If the regular people can opt out of the system, and instead pick what their like at their own expense, why is it bad?

>Why is it unfortunate?

Because it's a strictly zero-sum situation. Removing one teacher from public teaching in favor of teaching 5 kids privately means those 15 other kids still in public school need to find another teacher. Since there's already a shortage of teachers, it seems unfortunate that the "smart move" on the individual level is to exacerbate the collective issue even more.

It might be great for your kid, sure, but overall it's pretty unfortunate.

This is not a "zero-sum situation". There's no such thing as a fixed pool of teachers that everyone is competing against. The number of teachers, who count as a teacher etc, it all depends.

For example, public schools typically demand very specific credentials before they employ someone in a teaching position. Individuals or private institutions might have different demands here. I certainly know personally a lot of people who I'd gladly hire to teach my kids, but who do not fulfill the requirements the public schools set upon teachers.

Second, there's no such thing as "shortage" in absolute terms. There is only shortage at a given price point. If government finds it hard to hire people, tough shit, maybe it should pay more, or demand less at the current wages? Government is not entitled to artificially cheap labor, and if it finds itself unable to compete for the workers, who are poached by the private sector, maybe it should just outsource the entire enterprise to organization more capable at the task?

>"There's no such thing as a fixed pool of teachers that everyone is competing against."

Maybe the definition of zero-sum, in the economic sense, is the wrong phrase. But there's still only so many people who can be (or are willing to be, qualified to be, whatever) teaching class in a public school tomorrow.

>I certainly know personally a lot of people who I'd gladly hire to teach my kids, but who do not fulfill the requirements the public schools set upon teachers.

Cool. If that was the case for all of the private teaching pods, my opinion would probably be different.

>Second, there's no such thing as "shortage" in absolute terms. There is only shortage at a given price point. [...]

Yeah, I agree, and I have no idea why the rest of the paragraph is written as if I wouldn't agree. Teachers should get paid more (and/or reduced workload) given their importance. Whatever lets to largest amount of kids grow up with a good education.

I don't think going private with 5 kid pods is going to give the largest amount of kids a good education, and I think that's unfortunate, because that seems to be the best route for teacher's who are trying to live a decent life.

As I said, I think the government should outsource the entire business. Just give parents education vouchers, and let them choose the education they want for their kids. I think every parent should be able to hire a private teacher, not only the wealthy ones.

Where I am, the good private schools charge about 30% less tuition than the public school district spends per student. This means that providing good schooling is very much possible at what government spends. Food stamps do not have to be spent on government-produced food in government stores. Section 8 vouchers do not have to be spent on government-owned housing. Why not just do the same with education?

Just out of curiosity - do you have any examples of cases where the "government" outsourced a responsibility and it resulted in both a better outcome/results and at a cheaper cost?

Have you heard about Soviet Union before? I hear that things have significantly improved in its former borders since it’s gone.

So I'll take it that you do NOT have any examples of the private sector privatizing a function previously done by the government (in the US) and doing it better/cheaper.... Sounds to me like you've read some Ayn Rand books thought it sounded great, but haven't put forth the effort to imagine how a fictional tale translates to real life. I don't say this as someone who is pro-government. I'd love to see things done better/cheaper. I'm just someone who wants proof not promises...

No, I just grew up in a formerly communist country, and when you ask me for an example, the nation-sized experiment I brought up is the first thing that comes to my mind. You never specified you want to ask about US in particular, and I don’t know why you reject a clear and convincing example from outside US. In fact, I find your imagined version of me, with the Ayn Rand books and all, rather insulting.

In any case, there are plenty of examples in the US as well. Private education can successfully compete with public education, despite great structural disadvantages (private schools literally have to compete with free product). Using EBT at Walmart works better than government cheese. Section 8 housing works better than the projects. VA hospitals are not exactly preferred to regular ones by the public.

In general, in the US, the government doesn’t directly run too many things other than the regulatory agencies. Most of what it does is already outsourced. The US government doesn’t build infrastructure, doesn’t design or build military hardware etc., and most people (not just the straw man Ayn Rand fans in your head) would recoil in horror at the idea of government directly hiring people, buying materials, and managing operations.

Many states have made this model (teacher "pods") illegal, which is terrible because I believe it is the future of education.

Sounds like a good life lesson for children: if you want to live freely, don't tell the state what you're doing.

That sounds like “fortunately” not “unfortunately.” For everyone involved, including the teacher.

Yep.

Unfortunate is for the public schools though as there are now fewer teachers available to hire. There's teacher shortages in almost every state in the country.

I'd be curious to hear the numbers on that because 6 students doesn't sound like enough to cover one teacher unless maybe they're paying near $20K each or so.

10-15k per student per year beats out nearly any public school system in my state. They only _just_ raised the starting salaries to a bit under 40k.

edit: also - homeschooling/private teachers are much more efficient. An elementary school day takes more like 2 hours instead of 7, and there's basically zero after-hours work. Do you know any teachers who would give up public school to work 2-3 hours a day for 70k a year with no all-night grading/etc? Cause my bet is it's a huge majority of them.

120k/yr seems like it'd be more than teachers make almost anywhere. $10k/kid seems closer to average.

You could also get access to a larger pool of potential teachers (with STEM backgrounds even!): I don't think I'd ever consider teaching public school for any pay level at this point, but I could see myself teaching some of my neighbors' kids with mine in a few years for cheap/free if there were interest.

I assume most public teachers total compensation would near $120k/yr when you factor in health insurance and pension benefits, and senior teachers with lots of time in in decent states are probably doing a bit better than that. I don't know how self employment tax works either other than it adds costs too.

I thought teachers in the US mostly have 403b now (which as far as I know works like 401k), but I don't really know. A solo 401k would actually be more attractive if so, but probably not until above 60k gross income. Depending on state, family situation, and tax planning ability, they could also potentially get free or heavily subsidized Obamacare.

The small "class" sizes and much greater autonomy would be big non-tangible benefits though. And of course these arrangements can have more... flexible tax reporting.

The teachers I know in central California have 457 plans and defined pensions.

I don't know how reliable the data is, but the median total comp for a US based public school teacher is allegedly ~78k:

https://www.salary.com/tools/salary-calculator/public-school...

With inflation being what it is, civil service workers (including teachers) are going to be feeling a bit of a squeeze. We are already seeing it with bus drivers and teacher aides - there is no way for the public sector to keep up with private sector wages during high inflation (the tax levy can't grow fast enough).

What will be interesting is if having non-certified teachers doesn't impact education outcomes, which for K-5 gen ed classes seems at least a possibility. Then the core argument for teacher pay (that they have masters degrees) will go out the window.

The tax rate doesn't need to go up: with the same tax rate, the revenues will increase with inflation because the costs of things will go up, so of course the amount of tax will also go up.

Governments simply don't want to pay enough to attract and retain talent, inflation or not.

I am highly involved in local and statewide policymaking in this field.

The property tax levy is fixed year to year, and makes up the majority of the revenue for school districts in my state. That levy can only go up by law 2% yoy without an exemption from the state (which is difficult to secure).

And with property values declining due to higher interest rates, the landscape of the levy itself is going to change drastically, putting much more burden on commercial property than residential (which doesn't bode well for a struggling local economy).

>The property tax levy is fixed year to year, and makes up the majority of the revenue for school districts in my state.

I'm sorry, I don't understand this. What do you mean by "levy"? Every place I've ever seen had property taxes based on assessed property values; there was a tax rate, which is a percentage of the property value. (And yes, the assessed value is almost always lower than the market value, but it still rises with the market values.) Property values have shot up tremendously over the past ~5 years, so local governments have gotten a windfall in property tax revenues. Did they use this to pay teachers better and make the teaching profession more attractive? No. Now, all of a sudden, property values are declining and you're complaining about revenues falling?

Students also getting good at easing their own education requirements as well.

>The internet ruined homework which hurt test scores.

>When students did their homework in 2008, it improved test grades for 86% of them, but only helped 45% in 2017. Why? A majority of students are now copying internet answers. The benefit of homework requires doing it yourself!

https://twitter.com/emollick/status/1553369439353069568

Or you know they could just make job conditions and pay better? The single most important factor in children's education is an afterthought to the administrators and politicians.

Imagine a world where higher pay attracts higher quality.

Not that the quality of education could possibly have long term consequences!

This can only end well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com