Sanders calls for minimum salary of $60000 for public school teachers | Hacker News Reader

Sanders calls for minimum salary of $60000 for public school teachers

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168 pointsgeox388 comments

This is loosely related, but every time I think of public school teacher salaries my mind goes to the public school teachers I know. As a group they are… exceptionally ungifted. As just one example, I lived with two middle school teachers in Texas for a few years. They probably couldn’t pass the grade they were teaching. I have never met two professionals with so many credentials (MS in Education) and so little sense. My memories of friends in college who became elementary school teachers fall into the same bucket. Do others have similar experiences with teachers or do I just have a bad selection?

I think as a society, if increasing teacher pay gets us better teachers and therefore better educational outcomes then we should do it, hands down. But if that increase in pay gets us more of the same thing at higher cost to the public…?

I’m not sure which of these outcomes is more likely. The optimist in me says more smart people see educating the youth as a viable career and we get more competent educators. The cynic in me says it never works like that in a system as bureaucratic as education.

I don’t know what to think.

Both of my parents were math teachers, so I got to experience growing up around a lot of teachers and hearing their compliments and complaints about their peers. There are about 4 million K-12 teachers in the US; it's one of the most common professions and isn't immune to having the resulting distribution of talent.

My brother had a high-school math teacher who could only explain "the reason we say the square root of 2 is irrational is because it says so on page 79". I had a physics teacher who marked an answer wrong on my exam because she didn't know how to do the problem.

Most every one of us has an experience like this, but it's also seeing the teachers at one of their -3σ moments and focusing on that. If you looked at my -3σ coding results or personal decisions, you'd probably conclude I was a mouth-breathing idiot as well. (I would expect an Algebra II teacher to be able to explain what a rational and irrational number meant, though.)

I doubt that the pay of teachers can be raised sufficiently to fundamentally change the makeup of people in the profession. It's just too many people and too expensive to change from any amount of pay difference that the taxpaying public could sustain. There are some great teachers. There are many good teachers. There are millions and millions of completely unexceptional teachers.

Raising pay moves the bell curve a little bit to the right. It allows people to stay a teacher even though they could get a higher paying job instead of having a large percentage of them being someone who couldn't get another job. It won't fix everything, but it will help.

Sure, but because there are so many teachers (about 1 for every 30 households), every $250/yr raise per teacher is over a billion dollars per year and $8/yr per household.

If it will take $20K/yr more to meaningfully nudge the competency curve, that’s ~$700/yr extra for every household. It’s probably even worse than that, though, because in wealthy areas (who might be better able to weather a $700/yr tax increase), teachers are probably already paid more than the average, meaning the lowest paid teachers, the ones most in need of a raise, are likely working in an area with lower income residents in the tax base.

I love it how in the US it's an immediate question if the tax paying public can sustain higher salaries for teachers, while simultaneously happily accept the enormous military spending without batting an eye. Please let us Europeans salute you for providing us with stability and peace at the expense of your own youth!

I went to a private school in India where they only admitted students from families where there was at least one parent who had a graduate degree and knew English. If there weren’t any family who could assist the child, fees for mandatory remedial after school tutoring classes was included. There were programs for those who couldn’t afford the fees. One of my classmates had both parents who were mute+hearing impaired and he got all the after hours assistance.

I grew up in a large multi generational family where all the cousins grew up together. My uncle took care of math/physics/chemistry. My aunt was in charge of English/reading and one of our morning rituals was when we’d sit around her and she’d read out from the newspaper. My grandfather took care of evening sports, chess and history/geography. My mother liked languages and taught us how to read and write in non English languages by reading from vernaculars. Also creative writing. There were 3-5 of us at any given time. Sometimes our friends and neighbors’ kids also joined us. Our hired help/maid had two kids and her daughter joined us for a while. I cannot imagine going to school in the United States and utterly enjoying every single day of school life.

I guess my point is that schools are not baby sitting facilities funded by tax payers. Without parent involvement and encouragement, there cannot be a full and rounded educational experience. It blows my mind that in America, public schools are literally raising the kids. I have seen entire generations being raised by the state and that’s not necessarily a good thing.

I know a few people who are teachers, or related fields like librarians, and I would say they all are smart, hard working and care quite a bit about their students.

They are all underpaid and reaching the point of burnout of the entire system and they are only in their 30's.

I'm honestly concerned that we'll see education in the US quite literally falling apart as people willing to work in education effectively evaporate.

(Totally unrelated to topic at hand) Do you consider librarians in the same category as teachers? They seem like completely different things to me. Like, I don’t really care if my local librarian thinks the world is flat and wants to tell everyone about it. Just keep the library well run and organized. I do care very much if the 3rd grade science teacher is a hardcore flat-earther.

Not who you're replying to, and the circumstances are different, but at many university in the US, librarianships are a tenure-track professorial position. I believe that being a librarian is by all reasonable measures a type of teaching.

I would say that there is a lot of overlap. And at least in the US, a masters degree is required for most librarian positions (at least from what I remember, not sure if that's changed over the years).

This tracks my experience as well.

I think pay is one part of the problem of attracting the best teachers. Potentially an even bigger problem is just how much of the curriculum is dictated by fiat. We require them to get a Masters degree but then give them almost no autonomy. I'm not a teacher, but I feel like that's gotta hurt job satisfaction and be a big contributor to high teacher turnover/burnout. (quick Google says 8%/year leave the field entirely[0])

[0] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/slc

But this isn't just a case of politicians arbitrarily shackling teachers. Research has shown time and time again that standardizing curriculum results in better educational outcomes, particularly at the lower end of students and schools.

In fact the evidence consistently shows that direct instruction is by far more effective than any other major pedagogical framework.[1] And this literally involves the teacher reading from a pre-packaged script.

[1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8476697/

...It also happens to be the only method conducive to quantitative sampling methods at the expense of all qualitative evidence of the times it didn't work.

One size fits all education is literally the propagation of inequality.

It's not just autonomy it's putting up with poor student behavior. There's no real power or respect in the profession.

Stop bending over backwards to please parents. Punish and remove students that can't behave in the classroom. Culturally reward students that excel academically.

Without a doubt all of the best teachers I know say the worst parts of their job is dealing with parents. Many of them who have talked about quitting have almost always cited the parents as the biggest problem.

Also the worst parents are in the richest areas.

Parents in rich areas, and kids in poor areas, according to teachers I know. I suspect "best teachers" introduces a selection bias for particular districts or private schools. It's kind of a choose your poison situation... either hyper-entitled parents (e.g. correcting a properly graded test to the point of claiming 2+2*2 = 8 was actually the correct answer), or kids that are at best on their phone all day, and at worst bring guns and drugs to school.

This is highly dependent on where you teach.

Teach in poor areas and student behavior is going to be your biggest issue because of bad parenting

Supporting this view, practically every person I've met who made it from a Public School to the Ivy League talks about 1 or 2 teachers making all the difference. The rest don't register and some are harmful.

The story is usually something like, "I was always good at school, but it got boring and I didn't feel challenged. Then I had this one teacher who really pushed me and showed me what I was capable of."

> Do others have similar experiences with teachers or do I just have a bad selection

My sixth grade science teacher called on me and asked “if the freezing point of water is 0C and 32F, and the boiling point is 100C, what’s the boiling point in F?” I answered “212F” but she said “132F.” Then the class laughed at me which was very embarrassing.

Most teachers are very nice, very dedicated, but not intellectually gifted people. There’s lots of degrees and certifications, but it’s halfway between white collar work and blue collar work. Your HVAC technician might be better at math and science than your average elementary or middle school teacher.

I’m not opposed to working class people getting paid more money, I just don’t like how teachers are singled out as being especially underpaid because of empty credentialism. Why should having a piece of paper that frankly doesn’t signify much given the standards in the industry entitle teachers to higher pay than other people at the median?

Your HVAC technician might be better at math and science than your accountant, your estate lawyer, your real estate attorney, your corporate contract review attorney, and probably 2/3rds of everyone else that works in an office building. At least in major urban school districts, I don't generally think teachers are underpaid (every OPRF teacher makes 6 figures; the median CPS teacher makes something like 70k, and they all get defined benefit pension plans and large amounts of PTO). But calling them "not intellectually gifted" is mean spirited, reductive, and unhelpful.

> But calling them "not intellectually gifted" is mean spirited, reductive, and unhelpful.

Only if you think there’s something wrong with being of average or modestly above average intelligence.

I’m simply pointing out that—insofar as our society accords higher compensation to intellectually gifted people or intellectually demanding jobs—the credential inflation in teaching creates a false signal about the nature of the job and most of the people who work in it.

You can't use math and science facility to establish that, because, like many high-status careers, math and science ability isn't the figure of merit for evaluating a practitioner. I'm sorry you had a bad experience in 6th grade, but in fact being an excellent 6th grade teacher isn't about how well you did in vector calc.

Some years ago, McKinsey conducted a study which found that a majority of public school teachers in the US come from the bottom of the distribution of academic performance in college:

https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/industries/public%...

...which is consistent with your experience.

While there are public school teachers that come from the top of the academic distribution, they constitute a minority of all public school teachers in the country.

The same study, BTW, found that countries with better public school systems hire teachers that come from the top of the distribution of academic performance.

What else would you expect? Teaching is a crap job with crap wages. Why would higher performing academics choose to work in this field?

I have heard people on HN complain about sub $100k salaries being poverty wages, but apparently they think teachers should work for peanuts and be happy about it.

McKinsey studies are rather suspect. Who paid them to do that research, and what was their agenda?

> Who paid them to do that research, and what was their agenda?

It's on the second page, right after the cover page. The work was part of McKinsey's non-profit pro-bono work. Quoting: "The preparation of this report was co-funded by McKinsey and Proof Points, a non-profit organization designed to support state-level education reform. This work is part of the fulfillment of McKinsey’s social sector mission to help leaders and leading institutions to understand and address important and complex societal challenges."

That's a bit of a non-answer. Who is Proof Points; what is their agenda? My google-fu isn't bringing up any information about that organization.

The teaching salary needs to be competitive with other jobs if you want to attract the right people. Why would any potentially great educator work in a completely unrespected field for no pay?

Also, with higher wages comes increased interest in the position and more ability for schools to actually say no to and filter out bad teachers. It's hard to turn away a warm body when there are teacher shortages everywhere.

Anecdotally, I got very lucky with a newly built public school. I had class sizes of < 15 and overwhelmingly positive experiences as well as one of the best classroom experiences of my life with a retired physics/math professor teaching us 3d geometry and discrete maths.

It was like learning in a theoretical sandbox, having every fleeting thought or hypothetical exploration answered with ease, all completely out of the curriculum scope.

That to me is what i imagine education could be if there was enough money in the system and if people actually cared about the education of future generations.

I grew up in Appalachia and had a similar experience. More babysitting than education.

I don't think pay will solely fix it, but I have to assume there's some selection bias from it. We only get the staff who are willing to put up with the boards, students, and pay as a whole set.

Those in Appalachia will be living better, but I have a hard time imagining they're [financially] struggling. The wages are generally depressed and so are living expenses.

Their pressures are probably from-above, their peers, and their students. For example, teachers have to pay for a lot out of pocket (or their personal time)

>More babysitting than education.

This summarizes the entire problem with much of our education system.

We have not learned as a society how to separate out the many functions we ask the public schools to do, and they manage to poorly all of them.

In theory they exist to educate children, but implicitly they also exist to make the labor force larger by providing free or low-cost child care to families. They're also our front-line child welfare and anti-poverty policy tool, and deeply entangled in our justice system.

A school system that was allowed to filter students out with strict standards purely for disruptiveness would find that they can get much better outcomes than one that must accept all students. (and in the school with the disruptive students the focus can be on finding the root cause and helping rather than on teaching advanced skills)

> This is loosely related, but every time I think of public school teacher salaries my mind goes to the public school teachers I know.

The public school teachers you know are the teachers willing to work for non-livable wages.

I wonder what would happen if the subset of people willing to take the job increased (because the pay increases).

That's kind of the point of the bill.

The current pool of teachers is:

1) Old people who have been doing it for a long, long time - back when pay wasn't quite so terrible and were able to scrape together a good life by getting a house when it was somewhat possible.

2) People who love teaching and are willing and somehow able to do it for basically charitable wages.

3) People who are desperate and have no better options.

This isn't exactly the pool you want raising your next generation. Especially after everyone in group 1 retires or dies or whatever...

> 2) People who love teaching and are willing and somehow able to do it for basically charitable wages.

Many of these are subsidized by their spouse.

It's a bit of both, right? Look at doctors, a highly-paid and highly-qualified position. Even with all the training that they go through, you can still have a doctor who seems incompetent or, more commonly, who doesn't know how to work well with patients. But the high pay and social status is a big carrot that pulls in a lot of smart people who are willing to put in the effort.

You want the job to appeal to smart people who have a lot of options. You can never fully get rid of the bad left side of the bell curve, but I think higher pay is a good way to shift and extend the right side.

It's worse now that they are lowering the standards to enter medical school.

I would love to retire and become a public school teacher, but I will not go back to college for a bachelors degree in teaching. Make it easier to become a teacher and you'd see more people consider it, IMO.

What state do you live in? A lot of states will allow you to get a teaching certification as long as you have any relevant bachelors.

https://www.teachaway.com/blog/can-you-become-teacher-withou...

I don't have any degrees, and pursuing a four year so I can take a pay cut is a non starter for me. I'd consider doing a two year technical degree, maybe.

Have you heard of WGU? You can knock out bachelors degrees much faster if you already know the material. After about a decade of software engineering, I was able to knock out a CS degree in about six months. Feel free to email me for more info.

https://www.wgu.edu/

I've always though it was absurd to have a kid get his or her teachers certificate and just start teaching. I'd rather see someone mature, with life experience teaching because they know things outside the narrowly-delineated curriculum. My son came home a couple of weeks ago and showed me a picture he took of his class. One or two were reading, most were on their phones, and I asked "what were you supposed to be doing?" He said "nothing" - the teacher didn't have anything for them to do. I was literally speechless. How could an adult have nothing to teach a bunch of kids?

There are states working on this. I think Virginia may be one of them. If I understand correctly, it's a pursuit undertaken almost solely by Republicans, presumably because teachers' unions are pretty powerful.

I have similar impressions of teachers. Many of the girls from my public school who were always going to go to college as a fact of being from wealthier families, and who possessed some combination of the traits [not hard-working, liked to party, strongly resisted STEM subjects] went to the nearby party-and-education state school and are now elementary school teachers. That doesn't exactly inspire confidence, but on the other hand, it would probably be a severe societal misallocation of resources to send hard-charging people to be elementary school teachers.

>I have never met two professionals with so many credentials (MS in Education) and so little sense.

John Taylor Gatto (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto) is a big name to look into along these lines. He won a bunch of recognition for teaching in New York City, then used that as a platform to loudly quit and agitate against the problems of public education.

> Do others have similar experiences with teachers or do I just have a bad selection?

My main reference point is my brother in law who's a high school physics teacher. He's a very smart person who's enthusiasm for the subject and teaching it is infectious. I love talking to him about physics and about how he gets his students interested in the subject. He loves talking about it even more. I truly wish I'd had someone like him for my own HS physics classes.

I know for sure that he doesn't make much money and I think that's a crime. His father had to help him buy his house so he could live within a reasonable distance to the school.

At the same time I have no doubt that there are plenty bad teachers out there. At the salaries being offered how could that not be the case? I'd be all for raising teacher's salaries because I just don't think many good teachers are willing to make the necessary financial sacrifice.

I also know a couple of former teachers who left the profession to become real estate agents. I don't have any idea if they were good teachers but I do know that at least one of them now earns somewhere in the mid $400 USDs/year and only rarely works a full week. It's hard to see how teaching at $40K/year could be an attractive option for her.

When I was growing up my dentist, pediatrician, high school history and math teachers, and my dad's lawyer and heart surgeon all lived in our neighborhood within a few blocks of each other. I don't know what the difference in compensation was then, but in my view that leant a certain uniform level of respectability to all of these professions. That doesn't exist for teachers anymore, and I think that's another important factor. Now surgeons live in large homes in woody suburbs or brownstones in the city and teachers have long commutes from the cheap, less safe towns. Where I live $60K/year won't fix that problem, but it might at least attract some better teachers.

> I'm not sure which of these outcomes is more likely. The optimist in me says more smart people see educating the youth as a viable career and we get more competent educators. The cynic in me says it never works like that in a system as bureaucratic as education.

You would basically need to have teachers re-interview for the raise (something the unions will never allow).

> I have never met two professionals with so many credentials (MS in Education) and so little sense.

Teacher's pay is incredibly interesting. Engineers are paid on results (this is even more true at serious tech companies where a significant portion of ones earning will be stock comp) while teachers are paid a government approved rate no matter the results.

I know a lot of parents that would pay serious money to teachers based on results (if their kid can get into Stanford/MIT for instance) if said teachers could show a track record of having previously mentored alumni for instance. Instead, the premium is now captured by real-estate since parents that care will pay extra to get into a good school district.

During the pandemic some parents around me simply decided to go ahead with a learning pod [0]. They hired a tutor (burned out local teacher really) and it's been night and day. They have been extremely hesitant to return to the public school system (especially here in SF) thanks to 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...

There are three teachers in my family, there are many more in my extended family. I cannot deny that teaching attracts a weird bunch, but the environment is much more to blame.

A minority of those teachers I know are dedicated, hard working, even to their own detriment; they love imparting knowledge.

Others are just following the study plan year after year, not really invested in a low-paying job, maybe they enjoy teaching but don't feel like doing an extra effort for a meager pay. They'd be out there looking for a better job if teaching wasn't so easy.

The rest are trying to do as little work as possible, and being unethical is not out of the question. They're actually harmful to their students.

In my country, teachers have unions, and those unions have enough clout to promote vices like selling/bequeathing of a job when you retire, qualifications notwithstanding; rejection of continual education for teachers, etc. Their unions are big enough to influence elections, and they use that influence to pressure/support politicians.

I guess what I'm saying is that everyone deserves a decent salary, but simply increasing a salary won't solve all the other grave issues with education.

My mind just goes to the teachers I had growing up. After elementary school, the quality went down, and in high school, it plummeted. I was a very bored student in high school and the only teachers I actually enjoyed learning under were a couple of AP classes. As I look to the future with my children, I can't say I am very eager to put them through the same gauntlet of mediocrity that I went through.

I know a mix of teachers. Some of them are incredibly smart, hard-working people who are underappreciated. Some of them are over-credentialed folks who lack sympathy for students and have a poor understanding of the subjects they teach, or at least some of the subjects.

I think you may have a bad selection. The type of teachers you’re talking about definitely exist, they’re just a subset of the population.

Sample size of 1, and it's up to my friends and peers to determine if I'm "ungifted", but I've wanted to be a professor since I was a teenager; I like teaching, I like research, I don't want to deal with "children".

I'm doing a part time adjunct lecturer thing, and I absolutely love it, but it's an extremely difficult thing for me to consider doing full time. In my full time engineering job, I get paid almost triple what a full time lecturer makes at the school, so it's not something I have seriously considered; nearly anyone qualified to teach software at a college level is also qualified for a cushy engineering gig.

If my professorships paid something comparable to my engineering job (or even if they paid at least half of an engineering job), it would be a much easier sell for me.

I have to think that the same would be true for primary school teachers.

I'm Dutch so I don't know to what extent my experience applies here and what it will do to your expectation on outcomes (teacher is a decently paid job with us, though definitely not high paying). The people I know in education are generally highly caring and work way more hours than their contract asks them to. When I was in school, I've definitely also had teachers that were not so good - in some cases that may have been because they were in a field where teaching was one of the few feasible careers (e.g. Latin/Greek) and it was not a fit for them, in other cases maybe there was also a lack of competition or accountability to an extent. Teaching is definitely viewed as a safe/fallback career option, but there are also lots of people who choose it specifically because they are passionate about it.

Here's a good way to think about it - there is no world where education improves if teachers are not a well-paid profession. It's a race to the bottom, as we're seeing today. So if you want to get better, you have to create incentives for otherwise smart/talented teachers to enter the profession, rather than other professions. The only way to do that is to provide some base level of pay that would be enticing. Once you clear that bar, then you work on things that are unique to the profession, like protecting teachers from abusive parents.

If you don't care about education and you just want to extract the most money from parents for the least amount of effort, you do nothing and let the market take over.

You have to weigh actual policy proposals, though. Throwing money around doesn't always help.

This particular proposal doesn't seem likely to help. It's a nationwide hack. An obvious likely consequence is larger class sizes. Is that good or bad? Hard to say in general, it depends on local factors.

Ungifted? Strange, I can say the same thing about highly paid tech people I know. It's rather easy to say such things. We are, after all, on HN, all above average in giftedness. Or so we think.

There are some disciplines in teaching which are easier to improve than others. There are some local Bay Area schools with an excellent standard for performance, with a near-majority of students in the fastest math track and with about half the math faculty as Calculus teachers.

I can't imagine any teacher who enjoys math who'd want to join a school district where the kids don't like learning and where the teacher has to basically be a second parent. A higher salary wouldn't fix that specific problem.

What about a billion dollars a year? I'll bet you get the #1 teacher in the world for those conditions who performs near miracles and wants to be in that environment, as well.

> This is loosely related, but every time I think of public school teacher salaries my mind goes to the public school teachers I know. As a group they are… exceptionally ungifted.

First, not sure I agree with this, but I don't have the numbers.

But second, it leads to this question: why don't schools simply choose higher-quality applicants to hire?

I am not surprised. I have come across both. Some are very well educated coming from top institutions who could be earning much more in private industry, but I have also met those who come from the bottom of the barrel whose grammar and vocabulary is deficient (liberry, expresso, etc) and who were not competent in basic geometry. In summary, it's a very mixed bag. Some are great and some really suck and should not be in education at all. Good CoL adjustment may help to weed out non-hackers in Ed.

The minimum starting salary for a teacher in Chicago is $60,000 (cost of living adjusted), the highest in the country.

It hasn't solved Chicago Public Schools' problems.

Source: https://wirepoints.org/chicago-teachers-are-paid-some-of-the...

> It hasn't solved Chicago Public Schools' problems.

sure but it probably has solved many financial problems for Chicago teachers, which is a good enough reason to implement a tool like this.

At the expense of the school system itself, and students therefore. Illinois has to diminish services and sell the school system’s assets in order to fund the underfunded pensions, which cannot be diminished, as per the Illinois constitution.

Companies (and governments) never raise wages to solve problems for employees. They raise wages to solve problems for themselves.

Maybe that’s the stated reason, and maybe it’s used to drum up political support, but it’s never the real reason.

Sure, for companies. But the government is supposed to act in the interest of all citizens, including the citizens it employs.

It can be both. Everyone prospers when incentives are aligned on both sides of being and using labor.

No it's not.

A teacher is supposed to teach. We want to pay them more because they keep saying that if we do they'll teach better.

We don't owe them money simply because they exist.

> We want to pay them more because they keep saying that if we do they'll teach better.

Given a choice, would you prefer the teacher of your kid paid 30k or 60k? I'd prefer the second option even if it would be the same person teaching, because do you really want your kids to be raised by people in dire financial situation?

A prospect of smarter folks becoming teachers (or staying in the field if they're there already) is a nice bonus.

At the cost of more financial problems for taxpayers? How do you balance those two?

Those teachers aren't burning the money. It goes back to the community around them as they spend it, generally.

It's possible there is more than one problem. And starving teachers is unlikely to improve any of them.

$60K is hardly starvation wages!

With a family of four in the city it's far from a life of luxury.

Salary most likely isn't enough, but it's an easy area to focus on. Danish teachers aren't pay particularly well either, but they are better paid than many other professions, yet salary is the main area of complaint.

I suspect that you could get away with a lower salary, if teachers are given more support and more autonomy. If you have to deal with troublesome students, parents and micromanaging politicians, then you want a lot more money.

Actually good teachers should be paid much more than that, but the bad teachers which are setting up kids for failure in life should be shown the door. Unfortunately that’s not how the teacher unions want it to be. Hard to reward the good ones well if you can’t get rid of the bad ones.

How do you rate a good teacher with a bad one? Education is a bit different than most professions. Testing kids solves for the wrong thing as teachers are forced to "teach to the test" instead of educate children. I recommend the work of Alfie Kohn to learn more.

Perhaps because $60k is not actually that much for what we ask of our public school teachers.

HN: $100k/yr to write webshit is a poverty wage!

Also HN: $60k/yr is too much for the people we expect to educate our children!

I don't believe there is a strong or even weak correlation between teachers' salaries and educational outcomes. Chicago teachers get paid the most yet their schools are among the worst in the nation. Private school teachers get paid less than public but produce better outcomes. Etc. There are other, far more important factors we ought to be paying attention to

No one could achieve all that we ask of our public school teachers, because the set of tasks does not lie within the realm of reality to accomplish, and most municipalities would go bankrupt before they finished trying to atone for that fact by dumping truckloads of money on teachers.

Despite all that, those teachers choose to work in those jobs. Are manning shortfalls at public schools significantly more than in other comparable sectors of the economy?

Is the ratio of teachers to student relevant as well? And perhaps other factors?

Yes. There are many factors far more relevant to outcomes than teachers' salaries

That's a right wing site that runs tabloid stories about "black on black" crime and the criminal history of Ja'Mal Green (who was arrested at a protest). The 2019 outcome it claims are apparently the opposite of the truth; the overwhelming majority of CPS students met or exceeded standards in 2019.

(The pandemic kicked the shit out of those statistics, but we're not debating whether remote schooling was a good policy; it wasn't.)

Even if the statistics were true (again: looks like no), the conclusion that it's drawing is unsupported. The very best teachers in the nation would have a hard time putting up New Trier stats teaching in Lawndale or Englewood. And the very best teaching is probably what it actually takes to eke out any kind of performance from the lowest-performing schools in Chicago, which serve students locked into generational poverty by redlining.

You are not paying teachers a living wage so it “solves” public schools problems. You are paying them a living wage because it is the correct thing to do.

One notion, then, since paying people seems to bring up so much emnity, is how about giving the teachers $10/yr expense accounts instead/as well. What's so heartbreaking about paying schoolteachers so damned little, isn't that they make so little, though that is a travesty in and of itself, but that they have to make a choice between spending money on food for themselves, and school supplies for the children they teach. Notebooks and pencils and shoes are the parents responsibility to purchase for their children, but what's a school teacher to do about a neglected child? A child who's parents can't or won't afford lunch for their kid? An expense account for the teachers would go a long way to improving student outcomes, without actually having to pay the teachers more, which seems to be controversial, for some reason.

This Raj Chetty paper on teacher quality makes a strong case for doing whatever you can to get as many good teachers as possible (and as few bad ones).

https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/aer.104.9.2633

They claim replacing a bad teacher with an average teacher is worth like $250k in earnings per classroom. It's unclear what effect a blanket minimal salary would have on teacher quality. I'd be worried that it might make bad teachers stick around with good ones already making more than that.

I'm in NJ where we value public education, for the most part. According to National Center for Education Statistics our average teacher pay was $77,489 in 2022. This is excluding benefits/pension.

Well worth it.

How come 78% of low income fourth graders in NJ can't read?[0]

[0]https://acnj.org/newsroom/news-releases/nj-4th-graders-score...

Title of that article: "NJ 4th Graders Score Low on Literacy, Still Ahead of Nation"

Throwing more money at the problem often makes some progress, but it's not always a definitive solution. Tough problems usually involve reorganizing processes, which tends to be harder than spending more money or recruiting more talented people.

It doesn't help that teaching programs in universities hold anti-science views about reading and reading comprehension and still cling to whole language nonsense. Furthermore they often reject broad cultural knowledge and vocabulary as key components of reading comprehension and insist that (despite evidence to the contrary) that it is a discrete skill that can be built in a vacuum.

Not being proficient does not mean they can't read, it's more that they're not "good" at reading. The same article says that the national numbers are even worse. The article only states that the gap between low income and wealthier students increased by 3% but it's not clear what the actual total difference is. If you look at the underlying data[1] you'll see that the national average is actually below proficient and that New Jersey is consistently above average, regardless of income. Certainly there is a difference in proficiency by income but there are far more factors at play there, most importantly the child's home life.

[1] https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading/states/scores/?gra...

A hypothesis- their school reading lessons aren't being reinforced at home. Maybe their parents are too busy to do that reinforcement, working long hours, etc. Or there's a housing stability issue that lower income families often encounter.

How are the other 22% of low income fourth graders able to read?

Moreover they aren't being taught vocabulary or to decode text at school so they're going to be pretty hopeless without parental instruction.

You're misinterpreting the data and over-extending the definition of " scoring below proficient on national literacy tests".

The data from here: https://www.aecf.org/resources/2022-kids-count-data-book/aux...

Table 1.6. Confidence Intervals for States and Nation, 2009 and 2019 New Jersey 2019:

58.1% Percent of fourth graders not proficient in reading

Do we really think this is much better?

Maybe socioeconomic status in this country does come with benefits... You're trying to make a different point while ignoring the more profound point.

Doesn't that source point out they're still doing better than most other states?

If you value education, why does your state have unions that force pay based on seniority and not outcome?

I'm not going to defend New Jersey's teacher unions specifically.

However, pay based on outcome is really hard to get right, especially for something like teaching. What is the outcome? Well, what we really want is adults who can contribute to society. But that's too hard to measure and would take too long, so we need a proxy. Anything to do with tests is tough: not only do you have to (somehow -- this isn't a solved problem) calibrate for the students themselves to suss out what the teacher's contribution is, but there's immense pressure to teach to the test and prep for the test specifically, even at the expense of actual education. Not nothing, but imperfect. Other measures suffer from the same basic problem: any measure that becomes a goal ceases to be a useful measure because people optimize for that.

So what's an alternative? Maybe it's to make teaching a respected, well-paid profession where you have stability and advancement. One good way of doing that is by having clear seniority-based pay, not because it reflects how good at the job you are, but because that attracts teachers who are serious about making it a career and establishes it as a mainstream, lucrative profession.

But I don't know. This stuff is all extremely hard, and I don't think anywhere has figured it all out.

I don't like this argument at all. You are trying to enforce excess rules and micromanagements on teachers. I live in an area where teachers are paid well, and know a lot of educator who have been at it for 20+ years. Guess what, most them aren't trying to game the system. They care about their students and doing a good job. Sure some people might just try to coast, but it's not the majority. By trying to punish this minority, you end up hurting everyone.

Teaching jobs don't exist in a vacuum, and the reason to have pay based on seniority is simple. If you want competent people to go into the profession from the start, they need to know they have a steady and worthwhile career. If you can provide that, like NJ does, (and where I live in NY does) then you might actually get good teachers. If instead you make it unappealing and difficult because of uncertainty, you will only get people who are incompetent and have no other options.

NJ schools are consistently ranked best in the nation[0], so it seems like outcomes are 'good enough' even if that's true

[0]https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/education

The state doesn't have unions, the teachers do. The state negotiates with the union and then the teachers vote to approve the agreed on contract. If the teachers don't like the contract the union has negotiated, they can vote against it. If the union leadership continues to negotiate unacceptable contracts, the teachers can vote their union leadership out.

How is outcome measured?

Well, if you get to teach a lot of well-off kids who have a lot of extra support at home and you can siphon off the undesirables onto others, you get good marks when most of them inevitably "succeed".

If you have to teach the kids who need help, you get poor marks when some of them inevitably fail.

Recidivism.

School choice via vouchers, etc would allow parents to decide for themselves how outcome is measured

Edit: why the downvotes? If you are uncertain of or unamenable to the way outcomes are measured, vouchers are a reasonable solution that puts the power in your hands

There’s a significant race and religion component to school choice.

Measuring "outcome" in education is very hard, specially when deciding pay, as it creates perverse incentives. For example, teachers optimizing for test results instead of actual education, disadvantaged classes getting less attention (because results will be worse so it will affect teacher's evaluation)... Evaluating teachers based on outcome is something that sounds good at first but it's plagued with problems no matter how you try to do it.

You bring up a real issue, but we can value education and have an imperfect implementation at the same time though.

Does NJ really value education? Or do you value education funding for other reasons?

I remember a while ago, googling around about the schools of Newark NJ, because of a rather complicated Mark Zuckerberg story. The school district's budget was around a billion a year, while a third of graduating students weren't proficient at reading.

And when public officials were trying to do something about this, their motives were rather ...peculiar. I think the words of governor Christie were something like "Nobody votes for me in Newark, so why not do the right thing?"

Think about that for a minute. The governor would have expected to to loose votes for trying to improve a city's public schools. Does that sound like a place that values the education of it's children?

I don't live in Essex County so Newark's schools don't effect me directly.

Newark's problems are at the family level, not at the school level. Parental involvement is a baseline requirement for a successful student. It's unfortunate but Newark is hurting in this regard.

Yeah but in NJ, that's 35k-45k in most other states. Not really worth bragging about. If it was over 100k for NJ, I'd say it was an leading. 75k there just barely pays rent on a small apartment.

60k is okay in some areas, personally I think the average salary should be 85-90k and over 100k where cost of living is much higher.

The entirety of New Jersey isn't just the New York suburbs. Plenty of people live well and even raise family on 70k salaries.

I lived in an area for a little bit Strongsville OH where the teachers went on strike because they wanted better benefits and they were making 90k. My mom with a master's and 7 years experience was only making around 40k as a school teacher where I grew up. It is interesting.

In another part of Ohio my SO was making 46k as a teacher. Keep in mind not every teacher is paid the same. To get higher salaries they often have to take on more preps or administrative duties, requiring even more hours.

it is 100% worth it but most states also don't have the property tax like NJ does. Imagine if California somehow voted to drastically up the property tax. The homes might become semi affordable.

My first “real” job after college (2013) I started at $60k. It was more than my mom, an elementary school teacher, ever made. It felt embarrassing. Teachers are at least as valuable as software developers (probably more), given their impact on society. Why do they make so little?

Impact is huge, but they don't generate revenue for the organization which pays them. Therefore - their pay is a function of the budget that is available.

Public school budgets are set of course by property taxes. If you teach in a rich district, you get paid more. If you teach in a poor district, you get paid less. The way public schools are funded helps keep the rich rich, and the poor poor.

Unfortunately, the political clout is held by the rich who want their tax money to go only to their children and not those other children (or "those othered children" if you like). Even though, if we switched to a more equal funding model for public schools, we'd see improvements in the wealth gap and society in general within a generation or two.

> Public school budgets are set of course by property taxes. If you teach in a rich district, you get paid more. If you teach in a poor district, you get paid less. The way public schools are funded helps keep the rich rich, and the poor poor.

That depends on the state. In California, most school districts have their budgets set by the state funding formula which provides state funding above the local property tax revenues. There are a handful of school districts where local property tax revenue provides more than the state formula, although I haven't been able to find a list of those districts recently.

The California funding system was in place since 1972 (with major changes in 2013). Have we seen improvements in the wealth gap and society in general?

I wasn't aware of this funding system, so I had to look it up. The (quite prolific) literature suggest that the funding system was severely limited in 1978 by Prop 13.

Sure, school funding has been limited; but the point is that excluding the basic aid school districts (which are mostly smaller districts, afaik, the largest is Newport-Mesa Unified), all of the school districts across the state have been subject to the same funding formulas.

Your comment was that equalizing funding would make society better; my question is, given that funding has been mostly equalized in California, is society better?

In Washington state, funding for basic education is apportioned from state revenues; local districts can raise taxes for enrichment, but there's a cap, and state funds are provided if local taxes don't meet a minimum. I'm not familiar with other states, but there have been several court cases where states were forced to reform systems that relied on local property tax [1]; and I'd imagine many states would have changed their systems after seeing those results, rather than waiting for their own case.

[1] https://edeq.stanford.edu/sections/section-4-lawsuits/landma...

Supply and demand, like always. The market cares not one bit about what someone “should” be paid, it cares about the price where no one is left willing to do the same job for less.

If you want teachers to be paid more, increase the requirements to be a teacher. I’m a proponent of requiring at least n years experience in real world work, plus education in a hard science or trade.

I mean, we already have massive teacher shortages. Class sizes keep going up, and many school systems are switching to four day schedules because of staffing issues.

Not everything can be looked at from a macro econ 101 supply and demand take; the real world is much more complicated than that.

Sometimes it is more complicated, but in this case the analysis does apply. The problem isn't on the demand side, but on the supply. And one way to increase supply is to charge a higher price, or otherwise compensate (more time off, better work environment, prestige, etc ...) and a big part of the reason we have a teacher shortage is that there aren't enough compensatory incentives.

Sure, my point was more about the parent's analysis of "if you want teachers to be paid more, make less teachers".

ie. I'm saying that we don't have to put our hopes in the basket of hoping that economic pressures force higher wages if we make teachers less prevalent; we can simply pay them more.

Supply and demand aren't part of macroeconomics but of microeconomics

It's part of both.

What demand though? Nobody “buys” what public teachers produce - it’s a public service. It’s up to the state (and ultimately, voters) to decide what teachers make. And it’s even harder for teachers to advocate for themselves in states where teacher unions are banned.

There’s absolutely a supply demand cycle here. If wages are too low, teachers will do something else. School quality suffers, parents (may) make noise, politicians raise the wages (or do something else to appease their constituents).

The voters are the customers.

Can you give any material historical examples to support your hypothesis?

What other requirements? Teachers require at least a 4 year degree. Specialists like speech therapists require a masters degree. Try paying off a masters degree with a teachers salary.

I think we tend to see the opposite cycle playing out more often:

"We can't hire enough teachers" -> "Let's reduce the requirements" -> "These teachers aren't very good or qualified, there's no reason to give them a raise" -> "We can't hire enough teachers!"

Ideological divides aside, this is an obvious downside of modern capitalism; Value is defined as what brings in money, which I would wager 99% of people would generally agree is not the best definition for the public interest. It is the easiest to measure, though.

Trite as it may be to say, there's an obvious value to attracting a larger amount of people to teaching, it's just hard to quantify and takes longer than most politicians' term limits to see the larger benefits.

"brings in money" is so specious. The whole system is subject to how the accounting is structured.

Education certainly produces community value. Moving around what column the cost and benefits should be attributed to is a kind of social gerrymandering.

It's a function of ideology and power asymmetry. A well educated populace will of course be better off.

You're not going to find out why police make twice as much as teachers with neoliberal economics. Fabulists depict things this way to remove human agency and make specific legislative and policy decisions take on the authority of natural law, as if it's a scientific absolute.

It's just a slight of hand. All these things can be changed and the sky will not fall.

> this is an obvious downside of modern capitalism; Value is defined as what brings in money,

And in communism value is defined as what will get you promoted.

And in autocracy value is loyalty to the party line

And in Neo-Nazism value is what kills the most Jews

And so on and so forth, let's not pretend that people making short sighted decisions for personal gain is limited to a single economic system it may be more visible or exactrebated by one system or another but it isn't like Lusheynkinism was pushed because it helped the students of the USSR better feed their people.

The problem I'm trying to highlight is that the capitalism and focus on the short-term of business is leaking a bit too much into the operation of government. Instead of directing resources in a thoughtful way, it seems more like we're trying to check boxes for the lowest price and forget about the purpose of that funding.

> Supply and demand, like always.

Not everything follows the rules of capitalism, especially when public school teachers are paid by the government. There are giant teacher shortages across many locales in the US, so according to you we should see skyrocketing teacher pay, but that hasn't happened (pay has gone up in some locales but nowhere near the amount needed to fix teacher shortages).

The government doesn't have traditional shareholders like a corporation. Obviously they have their citizens as shareholders of a sort, but at the moment it feels like the loudest groups are prioritizing budget over outcomes.

Because of targeted propaganda and attacks by an organized political group that holds, as an ideology, that public institutions should not exist and everything should be done by the private sector.

This suggests a large disparity that's culturally based which I've been unable to find. I can find a comparative disparity such as https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/10/teachers-pay-countrie...

But this isn't helpful. Those need to be normalized by the median by country and then expressed in some deviation metric to get a real idea.

If this were true, wouldn't private school teachers be paid considerably more? In my area, they are paid considerably less.

That could only happen if private schools hired from a closed environment. In reality, there's a large pool of underpaid public school teachers that private schools can hire from while giving a 5-10% raise, which leaves private school teachers with 1.1x of a low salary.

Why would that follow that private school teachers would be paid more?

The claim was that school teacher salaries were low "Because of targeted propaganda and attacks by an organized political group that holds, as an ideology, that public institutions should not exist and everything should be done by the private sector. reply".

Since private schools are not subject to these attacks, their salaries would not be lowered by these attacks, making them relatively higher.

Yeah, the horrible pay in private school is proof enough that the "free" market is the absolute wrong way to go if you want better teachers.

maybe because "impact on society" is a totally delusional way to make pay scales. Pay is almost entirely based on talent scarcity. Thats why low skill jobs are lower pay, and highly skilled professions pay more accordingly. It doesn't matter at all what your impact is, think of people who work(ed) in mines or in the fields.

I'd argue it's not just talent scarcity it's measurable talent scarcity. There are really great teachers out there that do a fantastic job there are terrible teachers that suck, they are mostly paid the same because it's hard to differentiate between a good teacher and a bad teacher.

Whereas with a software developer especially at small orgs their ability is easier to measure and evaluate.

All explained, without embarrassment, by the undergraduate economics concepts of supply and demand.

I'm sure your mom is great, but teachers have low value over replacement. Teaching is not a particularly high skill or difficult job.

Difficult how? A relative of mine is a teacher in a high-poverty area and it seems like a very taxing job. Regularly having to deal with children who are emotionally or physically abused, or who recently immigrated and don't even speak english, and trying to teach them math. I daresay this is not a set of challenges most software engineers I've met would be well equipped to handle.

I haven't seen a lot of evidence actual teachers handle problem children all that well either.

Right, seems rather difficult!

I'd strongly disagree with your assertion that teaching is not a difficult job. I won't address the exertion that goes into individual parts of it, but all of the teachers I know regularly work nights and weekends in addition to handling the emotional stress of teaching, which itself is a huge burden, especially for those working in less affluent schools.

In any case, the measure for teachers should not be "how hard is the job" but rather "how important is the outcome". It might be easy enough to replace a teacher without raising the salary (another assertion I have issues with - there are rampant teacher shortages nationwide), but could you not be potentially getting a better teacher and having broadly positive effects on society if you're offering more money?

> all of the teachers I know regularly work nights and weekends

There's a difference between difficulty and exertion.

> how important is the outcome

It's pretty damn important that the garbage man comes and collects the trash every week, but we don't pay him the marginal value of trash collection to the county.

> another assertion I have issues with - there are rampant teacher shortages nationwide

I actually agree that the market doesn't seem to be clearing due to stingy education departments and state government. We should probably break their monopsony power by privatizing education.

> could you not be potentially getting a better teacher and having broadly positive effects on society if you're offering more money

If you want to make the argument we should fire all the current teachers and replace them with people who would otherwise be accountants or actuaries or software engineers, I'd be amenable to the argument.

> I actually agree that the market doesn't seem to be clearing due to stingy education departments and state government. We should probably break their monopsony power by privatizing education.

If the state is still paying, they're still going to be stingy.

A private school has roughly the same administrative staff as a public school. Their buildings may be a little bit less expensive, as they probably can get away with less ADA accessibility. They probably don't pay into pensions and may not provide as nice of health care, so they may be able to move more of total comp into salaries, but they may also compensate their board members more. Word on the street is private school teachers get paid less and have less due process, but also have less stringent degree requirements and fewer mandates in their classroom. But they also get a lot more parental engagement, and a rather different cohort of students.

Note we tend to pay garbagemen more than teachers! I think that probably seeks to the job desirability. More people are willing to be teachers than haul garbage and that is reflected in the pay, net of other impacts.

>Teaching is not a particularly high skill or difficult job.

Even though I disagree with you I can see where you're coming from with this sentence, but: the impact is HUGE. The impact of good teachers on society cannot be overstated. It's an amazing ROI and everything we can do to further the education of humankind is worth doing.

Programming (mostly) isn't that hard as well, compare software engineering with electronics engineering, for example, but the impact is huge: that's why you're probably well paid to do it and your company makes your life really easy, with all the bells and whistles to make you happy.

> Programming (mostly) isn't that hard as well

More people could be trained to program, especially in a casual way many more (spreadsheet formulas, low-code forms or glue) but working as mentor in high-school CS programs, I've been surprised in both directions. There are a bunch of bright people out there that could move into programming with just a boost to their training to enable them to bootstrap further ... and there are lots of people that just don't have the mindset. Abstract reasoning or modeling the world is just not something they are capable of doing without intense concentration, if that. It just doesn't come naturally to these people.

I definitely agree that teachers in many areas are underpaid, but I think a single nationwide minimum wage for teachers is a bad idea. There is just way too much variability in cost of living between different locales for a single amount to make sense. Would much rather it be based on some localizable metric, e.g. X times the median apartment rent or some such (don't want to get caught up on the details, other than to say it should take some form of regional COLA into consideration).

See this is something I wish people would understand more when talking about economics things like a federal minimum wage in a place like NYC or Cali may not sound like much but in rural Missouri or Arkansas that could bankrupt most of the businesses overnight.

If only we divided the country into geographical areas that could each be responsible for administering their own issues for the most part, so they would have a better understanding of the costs and tradeoffs, and be able to live they way they want without enforcing their way of life on people halfway across the country, and instead of the people in a few big cities and Washington DC ruling everyone from afar each regional area could be self governed.

Oh well that sounds like nonsense anyway after all the same things that are good for NJ are obviously the way things should be run in Montana .

The federal government already uses locality pay tables when calculating civil servant salaries [1], so I guess they could use those.

[1] https://www.federalpay.org/gs/locality

I don't see why this couldn't be done on a smaller (state or county) level instead. If someone starts offering an attractive starting salary and that leads to better educational outcomes you would expect others to follow (at least make it easy to campaign on it).

Edit: And obviously adjust the salary to match local conditions as you point out.

I’m trying to get a real grip on the financial hellscape of my home state, Illinois, for a novel I’m working on. The Illinois constitution ensures the benefits of public sector employees, and these benefits, once enacted, cannot be diminished. Basically, it made short term political sense to increase benefits, and so politicians did, whereas in the long term this spelled doom. In order to fund the pension, the state cuts services and puts assets from the school system into hock. Teachers, cops, firefighters, municipal workers, et. al. consume the state’s finances, and every plan that has been proposed to reduce the pension problems, even if endorsed by the union, has been challenged by individual members and been ruled unconstitutional by the state’s Supreme Court.

It seems like teachers in Illinois are on a defined benefit plan where the contributions are a percentage of the salary. Increasing the salary of starting teachers statewide to $60,000.00 would have staggering consequences in Illinois. It’s pretty interesting, if bleak.

https://www.illinoispolicy.org/reports/pensions-101-understa...

I'd be OK with raising the minimum salary for public school teachers a LOT more, BUT ONLY for teachers who graduate in the top 10% of their high-school class and in the top 10% of their college class -- like in Finland, which has one of the world's best public school systems.

It makes sense that if public schools hire teachers only from the most academically competent population in a country, and pay them well, those individuals will figure out how to improve the quality of public education.

Some years ago I recall seeing a study by McKinsey which found that a majority of public school teachers in the US came from the bottom of their high-school class and the bottom of their college class.[a] Quite literally the opposite of Finland.

[a] I found the study. Here it is: https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/industries/public%...

Yes we should all aspire to be more like the Fins. Which has a population slightly smaller than that of, checks notes, Missouri.

I didn't say we should aspire to be more like the Finnish. What I did say is that I would be OK with teachers getting paid a lot more if they are drawn from the top of the distribution of academic performance in the country, which is what public schools in Finland do. It makes sense that if public schools hire teachers only from the most academically competent population in the country, and pay them well, they will improve the quality of public education.

Please don't attack a straw man!

I'll just throw out there that the elementary school bear where I live pays teachers around 20-25k. It is a LOC area for now, and it works out for the most part because most of the teachers there are doing it as a second job while their husband works (and yes the fact of the matter is where I live it is heavily cultural for the man to be the primary breadwinner in a home) but I worry about it shifting as we are seeing more and more people move in and it straining teaching resources more and more.

Teachers are such a fucked up system that its hard to visualize just how bad it is. Having worked in teacher support orgs in the past, I can tell you... its bad.

- There are definitely bad teachers out there. The older the get the worse they get. But what's really counter-intuitive is that the teacher filter is absolutely backwards. The teachers who are smart, tallented, and trully exceptional... they end up leaving and getting better professions. Anyone who is tallented with mathematics has a real chance at getting a job in IT/Programming. And I've seen trully caring teachers just leave because a 3x pay increase OVERNIGHT is much more of a quality of life improvement than any sort of feel good from teaching. The worst with no other opportunities stay. And the best lave. And sometimes the best stay, but it is an exception, not the rule.

- Teachers are overworked, underpaid, and often pay from their own pocket. They burn out. Worse, they often can't afford to live where the work is. And to make things even worse, the more educated they are, the harder it is to find work. I know a PHD who wants to teach highschool because he loves it... he has to basically find a school so despearte for teachers that they can't pass on him, because any other school thinks that the small pay the union demands to increase him by is just not worth it.

- Teachers in cities get paid so little they can't afford rent. Seriously, 50k salaries in NYC. Even at 60k its basically poverty pay, and you need a Masters!!!

- 1 in 3 teachers burn out within a couple of years. This has been a very consistent statistic.

60k is far too low. I don't think teachers should be paid below 100k fresh out of school. The work is hard, and we need people fighting to get these positions by showing excellence. This is our future, we should not give it to the shittiest educators who can't afford not to be a teacher.

Every time I talk to a teacher who's smart, all I can think of is "literally you can find work in the tech sector, even doing just customer service, for double your pay"

My sister is working on her masters (lots of cost) and is a NYC teacher (not DOE, she gets paid a bit better working for a charter school). She cannot afford to move out of our parent's house because her quality of life would go down drastically because most of her money will go to survival. The fact that she gets to save 24k a year on rent (pretty much the minimum rent I could find that's not dilapidated) allows her to live even a bit. Not to mention that she has to still pay the 6-7 years of college tuition out of pocket. OH and she's specialized (special education).

> 50k salaries in NYC. Even at 60k its basically poverty pay, and you need a Masters!!!

While I agree with you, I would suggest there are plenty of people in NYC who are just as qualified and get paid even less. For example, grad students (who have a Masters) working in biomedical sciences in NYC are paid on avg 40K. You could argue that grad students as students aren't a fair comparison, in that case look to postdocs - they have literal PhDs - and make something like 55K in NYC. With the academic job market the way it is, many people end up as postdocs for over 5 years, if not more.

yeah incentives are aalllll wrong

One of my former bosses realized he could just be a tech manager instead of a DOCTOR because his medical research job paid nothing.

Or perhaps we could try asking schools to do less. Based on my experience in education burnout in "Bad schools" comes from a handful of terror students, and in "good schools" from a handful of overly demanding parents.

Students who cannot behave in an appropriate manner shouldn't be the schools problem, they should be the parents problem. Ultimately they are the communities problem, but schools aren't the appropriate place to solve it.

Demanding parents is a different problem but is much easier to manage if you are treated as a professional(on par with a Lawyer, or Accountant) and have the ability to make professional decisions that require formal steps to challenge.

my ex wife worked in a nyc school. She had a lot of troubled kids she dealt with. all her complaints were about administration and travel time.

i reject your assessment.

And she dealt with an illiterate high school kid.

Schools need to attract more competitive applicants. Raising the salaries of already-veteran teachers, although a kind gratitude for their service, will not have a significant impact on educational outcomes for students.

Education expenditures compares the public expenditure on education as a percent of GDP. https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/education-expen...

Education Expenditures by Country https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd

Government expenditure on education, total (% of GDP) https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.XPD.TOTL.GD.ZS

> Education expenditures compares the public expenditure on education as a percent of GDP. https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/education-expen...

I think this only counts federal spending - state and local spending total to ~3.5% of US GDP.

I think the rule should be, the combined salaries of the teachers and anyone else spending most of the time with kids, like special education assistants, counselors, etc. have to be some multiple of the salaries of everyone else in the district. Ideally, a multiple should be such that the districts are initially out of compliance by 2-3x, and they either have to come up with lot more money, or get rid/cut salaries of a bunch of non-teaching parasites they now employ. Then in future when they want to hire a diversity coordinator or spike an administrator's salary before retirement so that they could get a $300k pension, they have to raise teacher salaries automatically.

Would paying more get the results we are looking for? Or does additional funding just pad the pockets of administrators? Also why should we pay more for the poor education of the pandemic? We should be funding alternative strategies.

Sanders calls for a lot and never delivers. I wouldn’t hold your breath teachers.

Better him than those who actively attempt to harm the US populace to benefit their donors.

He's one senator. There's not that much you can do as a single senator.

The people of Vermont love him though.

Nobody in the Senate has figured out how to be something other than one Senator, but some of them can count to 50.

This is one of those things that just makes sense and unfortunately will likely not happen. Teaching should be a profession that attracts the best instead of one that attracts those who can afford to do it.

The idea of a single minimum salary nation-wide is absurd IMO.

In my state, the average starting salary for a degreed and certified public school teacher is ~$35k. That's one of the lowest in the nation, for sure, but my point is that New York's starting salary is ~$63k.

Making a $60k base salary law would cripple my state's ability to staff its schools, while having no impact on states like NY, as they higher cost of living there means that they're already well in excess of this proposed minimum.

Anecdotally, I spent a two separate days leading a single hour of my mom's class (about a single topic each time) as a guest instructor.

Both times it exhausted the hell out of me. At the time I was incredibly fit (ran 4x a week for 3mi+) but the attention requirements of teaching 1st and 3rd graders was INTENSE.

I was amazed at how my mom could do this day in and day out. Plus she dug into her own pocket to supplement the classroom supplies.

Teachers should be paid well north of $60K.

CoL differs significantly within states and across the country.

There should be a base plus CoL adjustment adjusted annually to account for inflation or deflation. A flat standard amount for anything does not make sense given the CoL disparities. 60,000 dollars is good for someone in Ukiah CA or Huntsville AL, but not for someone in NYC or Burbank, CA.

Reminds me of lots of things kicking in at $10Gs. A figure that was set in the '70s and has not been revisited since.

Then maybe we can do the same for the Federal minimum wage? This is just a floor. States can take this and run with it to increase local teacher salaries beyond the floor. Sanders knows it won't pass in this corrupt senate, but possibly a future one may take this seed of an idea and make something workable.

Nationwide minimum salaries don’t make sense. In nearby Carroll county, MD, the median individual salary is $45,000 and about 45% of the population over 25 has a bachelors degree. Minimum teacher’s salary is about $48,000, which puts them above the median for all workers, in a county that’s pretty highly educated, but also fairly cheap and rural.

By contrast, $60,000 in NYC is quite out of line with what other college educated workers earn in that city.

$60k is below the starting salary for an NYC public school teacher.

not sure this really fix any problem. $60k good salary in arkansas maybe. if you in expensive city..not go very far.

have kids in public america school system. government spending money in my opinion uncompetitive and wasteful. but public education must all support. it still good in america.

national minimum salary ok but need states or cities to tune to living cost. $60k only work maybe in central us.. cheaper state or city.

I mean it's a national minimum. School systems would be allowed to continue to pay more.

It'd help here in Colorado which is both a relatively HCOL area and a place that pays our teachers peanuts. I know teachers here that get less that $60k/yr as it is.

Unless federal gov will fund this, it doesn't make sense to set it like that, it is more feel-good measure. Teachers and staff need to be paid well for sure but also a lot of funding need to be spent on schools and infrastructure and equipment for example.

Federal Government could help with standardize maybe software and equipment for kids... that is if they were not corrupted like they are.

It’s really hard to make moral judgments on what someone should get paid.

How much does a bricklayer deserve to get paid? How much does an insurance broker deserve to pay? How much does a blackjack dealer deserve to get paid?

It’s easy to say teachers or X deserve to get paid more, but by how much? And if you just say everyone deserves more pay, that just means no one deserves more pay.

It barely makes any economic sense to train to be a teacher. It's unlikely you'll make enough money to pay off your debt unless you get PSLF... but who knows if that's going to even exist in 10 years--that program's in the crosshairs of at least one of the major parties. You're risking being in debt for life.

I really wonder why those headlines still make the news.

It's been centuries, and probably millenias, that politics have asked for things that they did not grant once they were in a position to do so.

I demand a minimum salary of $1,000,000 for everyone, and immortality for all! Vote for me and make a news article I guess?

Yeah, it's pretty easy to say that teachers should make that much.

This is a terrible idea. Teaching difficulty is directly linked to the quality of students and their parents. I'm all for the federal govt given bonuses to teachers teaching in poor and high crime areas because students in those areas tend to have significantly more behavioral issues.

I see no reason this should not be the case. That is the starting wage in my Dallas area school district.

Where I grew up, this kind of thing would make the schools go to a 3 day per week schedule. They are already on a 4 day schedule due to budget problems.

Isn't that actually an argument against a minimum salary? Market has already adjusted.

Tangential to the main topic: I live in Boston which has a reputation for having lousy public schools. Is there any major city (for whatever definition of major you want) that is considered to have a good public school system? If so, what do they do right?

How about we align incentives instead?

Here's an idea: when a student graduates, they allocate 1% of their yearly salary to their favorite 5-10 teachers for the next 5 years. I call it the "thankfulness tax".

Incentives aligned: the most impactful teachers make the most money.

In the "give this a read" category... The Unincorporated Man. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unincorporated_Man // https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4025200-the-unincorporat...

It has some intriguing ideas that... bear thinking about. I'll note that this is a social / political / economic paper with a story more than a good story with interesting ideas.

From one of the Goodreads reviews which spells out the basics of society:

> This novel offers a really interesting and innovative SF concept: in the future, every person is incorporated upon birth. Twenty percent of the shares go to the parents, five percent goes to the government, the rest can be sold by the owner for education, possessions and so on. You can buy and sell someone's shares as an investment, for charity, even as a hostile act. Reaching "self-majority" - owning the majority of your own shares - is similar to becoming independently wealthy in today's world. The entire future society is based on this basic economic concept. I thought it was a fantastic idea and was really excited about the novel.

> Unfortunately the brothers Kollin ruined this inventive idea with some really poor writing and plotting. It's a classic example of great concept, poor execution.

---

The "sold by the owner for education" - gets into a "you want to go to college? Sell 5% of your shares to the college."

I'm not going to claim it's a good idea, just an interesting point for discussion to think about and bring up when political discourse is acceptable late at night at a party or other social event.

What an interesting concept. Thanks for sharing this!

I know this is crazy but: Recently I was thinking about opening a foundation that will create a universal multimedia "product" (combination of software, movies, games, maybe vr) that will teach kids around the world in schools subjects that all nations agree upon like mathematics, physics, chemistry, informatics etc. This is extremely challenging to convince governments to impose this in the schools but the gains are huge - naming only few: - We can release the workforce of millions teacher around the world that do repetitive job every day so that can focus on different aspects of education - We can hire the best of the best in the world teachers to prepare the product and all the kids around the world, no matter if big cities or small towns will have access to the same best possible education. - Education could be totally individual and adapted to every kid - Education can be fun so kids actually will like it

What do you think?

> Recently I was thinking about opening a foundation that will create a universal multimedia "product" (combination of software, movies, games, maybe vr) that will teach kids around the world in schools subjects that all nations agree upon like mathematics, physics, chemistry, informatics etc.

If this ever got made it would only be used my school administrators as a cudgel to discipline teachers unions. It would never get used to actually teach children.

I would say that teachers unions will definitely not be happy about it as work style of all teachers will need to change and a lot of them will not be necessary anymore. But kids will have the best possible education. We do it for kids, right?

what is your experience with teaching?

I'm in the camp that believes individualized education is best solved using AI. Not ChatGPT, something better.

Likely will need in-person teacher facilitation as well, setting up kids alone with a laptop and an AI feels very wrong and dystopian to me.

Edit: Also getting all nations to agree will be impossible, if not then you will probably a curriculum that suffers death by committee.

It will need to be done step by step. When nations see how good and cheap this system is and how great are the education results they will be more willing to join.

I also think that AI can play a huge role in this - but for sure it needs to be improved.

So, replace teachers with Linux servers and javascript?

In short "yes". Millions of teachers around the world every day do exactly the same work as other teachers - this is a huge waste of talented resources. If they don't need to do repetitive job, that can focus on individual learning for those who really need it or help society in other way.

Did you ask the kids whether they would rather be educated with a teacher in the company of fellow same-age kids, or with "technology" and "multimedia" without any chance to raise a hand, ask a question, get a slow answer?

Sorry, but this just reeks brutal tech-broism to me. "We have such a powerful technology that we can do everything, nevermind asking if we should."

My kids were confined to the home at the covid-19 lockdowns, and the learning over zoom not only wasn't even remotely efficient, it had profound long-term negative effects on their psychological well-being too. They actually enjoy being in the classroom with their friends and their teacher.

I’m in favor of pushing all kids to excel and rewarding excellence and achievement regardless of race or social status.

If that is included in a minimum salary of $60,000, I would support it. If it isn’t, I would not, and would support private schooling instead.

The only way teachers would ever be able to make a lot of money is if some metrics apparatus was created by the United States and income outcomes were traced back to individual schools and teachers in said schools got some portion of that as part of their salary.

Of course, the USA would have to bootstrap the first "cohort" of this.

Otherwise, the point is simple - good teachers don't get paid more, because there's nothing you can point at to justify giving them more money, because the money that comes from the municipality (to fund the school and consequently the teacher) has nothing to do with the outcome.

---

It's sad that the "privatize school", or "school voucher" discussion has become so corrupted by politics. Regardless of whether or not you agree with it, or not, it's worth critically thinking about and whether the implications of that kind of change are good or bad, and why.

I'm not sure how you reward outcomes of teaching without also actively discouraging teachers from taking positions at any school that could be seen as "struggling" from an academic perspective.

There are plenty of ways you could do it. The simplest is that you could normalize by the area.

Later life success over median replacement value seems like a nice bonus structure for retirement.

E.g. statistically normalize cohort (income, etc.), measure their median outcomes, and then see how the teacher's cohort does

It'll be dirty, given the small sample size and number of variables, but it'd be a nice bonus +/- to retirement.

I'd also hazard prior student reviews, sampled when they turn 30 & 40 would be very interesting.

Funny, this doesn't seem to be in place for other government employees yet they make much more. Nor in the "meritocratic" "free economy".

I'm not sure if anyone has tried doing this as a going concern, but economists have done a pretty convincing (IMO) analysis of teachers value-add ex post. The most well known is the 2014 Raj Chetty paper. Seems to support your view.

https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/aer.104.9.2633

>The only way teachers would ever be able to make a lot of money

Public school teachers already make more than private school teachers. Their salaries are propped up by governments and unions

I agree with Sanders that teachers are underpayed. I'd like to see a good plan to pay for it, though. (Where's that Golden Fleece list?)

A simple rule of thumb is that if you pay more salary than they deserve, it is a harm for them, and for society as well in this case.

My experience of teachers is in Canada, and spans my children's (15 and 25) current and completed school careers and my wife's employment at the local university's BEd program. While I've met a couple of exceptional and outstanding teachers in the last two decades, they are vanishingly rare. By far, the majority of teachers I have met call themselves teachers, but are, in reality, dispensers of goverment-directed and union-approved knowledge. They use the internet to produce generic fill-in-the-blank exercises, send home atrociously spelled and grammatically incorrect instructions that don't make sense (when there's anything sent home at all), and only hold the kids to the lowest standards, so that everyone can pass. Their unions fight for maximal pay, but demand increasingly minimal interaction with the children. Teachers can't volunteer their time anymore, staying to help kids that need it, or running clubs. In many cases, they don't even supervise the children during lunch hours, instead relying on community volunteers, or, more commonly have the grade 6 kids watch the younger kids. Of course, this is the same province that famously allows a shop class teacher to wear impossibly huge prosthetic breasts because presumably it helps him deal with teenage boys or something. I would love to see teachers being paid according to their worth, but with the standards they are set for the kids and themselves model, a lot of them are already.

TLDR: Teachers deserve better, mechanical, unionized, education dispensers really don't.

Sadly, he can call for world peace and an end to fossil fuel extraction, but this is only a dream.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2022, the median income in the US was $54,132/yr [1] and the US Census Bureau says median household income was $70,784/yr [2].

I'm not opposed to teachers making $60k/yr, but I think setting this as a floor at a federal level for what is one of the most common professions in the US [3] will have significant and serious unintended consequences. There is a massive amount of territory in the US, where people reside, and are entitled to a public education, that are not major cities with significant tax income. These places don't have the necessary population and tax base to pay this type of salary for a teacher.

Let's take a look at one such state, Missouri, basically smack in the middle of the country. It has two major cities (Kansas City and St Louis) and a significant number of rural communities. The average salary for a teacher in Missouri is $51557/yr [4] but falls to around $40k/yr in rural areas like Marceline and Fredericktown, while being nearly $60k/yr in major cities like KC and STL. If you compare this to another common public profession, police officers, you see a similar story [5] with average pay around $58k/yr, but falling to less than 40k/yr starting for communities like Fredericktown [6] and Marceline [7].

How are small communities supposed to pay teachers $60k/yr? The reality is that politicians and pundits on the coasts never give a thought in their mind to "flyover country" or how rural and urban economics differ in the US. Instead, we try to manipulate the economy at the federal level, not giving any credence to the fact the United States is geographically massive with exceedingly varied local and regional economies and cultures.

[1]: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkyeng.pdf

[2]: https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2022/demo/p60-27...

[3]: https://www.weareteachers.com/how-many-teachers-are-in-the-u...

[4]: https://missouri.teach.org/salary-benefits-missouri

[5]: https://www.salary.com/research/salary/alternate/police-offi...

[6]: https://www.indeed.com/career/police-officer/salaries/Freder...

[7]: http://marcelinemo.us/home/employment.html

You're not wrong. And - to compound this problem, many states rely heavily on local property taxes to fund education, leading to even more disparity between rural and low-income areas where the property is worth less, so taxed for a lower total than in high-value, high-tax urban areas.

So. What do we do with that?

keep in mind that teachers only work 9 months of the year as well. Not really that impressive to take a 2nd job when you have 3 months in the summer to do whatever you want.

So I'm married to a teacher, I taught, and I still work in education.

Many teachers take graduate courses, do extra-curriculars for students, teach summer school, and prep for the fall/spring in the summer. It's not just free time for many teachers, but it is unpaid time.

You can't just hand wave away the work they do all year long because you want to.

edit: I just thought of this. My wife, who has taught for over 15 years, only gets 4 days of PTO a year. Any other time she needs off is unpaid, as well. So, how much PTO do you get a year?

I don't really see how any of those things are peculiar compared to normal jobs. Teachers usually get paid for extracurriculars and summer school, maybe a small lump sum but still.

The PTO argument is ridiculous, teachers get off for school breaks and the whole summer, way more than average workers. Yes their vacation schedule during year is a little rigid, but that is pretty obvious tradeoff. Not to mention their benefits persist over the summer anyway so they are compensated year round.

Teach your own kids.

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Now imagine how much worse it is for those who make LESS than $60,000

Hard agree! Time to strip some of the administrators and get some talent in the classrooms.

I heard Florida was letting people in classrooms after just a few hours of supervision.

If the education crisis isn’t addressed, this country will be absolutely decimated in another thirty years. A level of brain drain hitherto unwitnessed in modern times.

If I was raising a young child now (mine are in their late twenties) I’d be strongly weighing the pros and cons of suggesting they go abroad for higher education, and I’d certainly be hiring a tutor rather than trusting the K12 system. Not everybody can afford all of that, despite the money being taxed already. We could lower the military budget by a percentage point and fix all this tomorrow, if we really wanted to…

What a world would we live in if Bernie Sanders won those 2016 elections...

The executive branch has a lot less power than people think it does. Aside from the executive orders on "how" to implement laws that congress passes and the curtailments to power by the Supreme Court, they don't have much control over the purse strings. If congress doesn't like the "how" they either update the law or have the SCOTUS to make a ruling that says they don't have that power in the first place.

A president can say to congress "I'd like you to pass a bill that..." and they can change some things for federal workers - but for states, they've got very little regulatory power outside of what has been granted to them through the various departments (e.g. Department of Education).

2016 had a 52/46/2 senate composition with a republican majority. The house was 241 to 194 with a republican majority.

My crystal ball for a hypothetical president Sanders shows a president who would have been able to do very little except for some executive orders which would get overridden by congress. The house would have been very unlikely to give him the budget to fulfill his promises and ideals while blaming him and every executive branch agency for every failing and catastrophe that occurred in 2020.

One where nothing much changed but the Democrats would be doing the populist posturing instead of the Republicans.

We wouldn't have had tax cuts in 2017 and we would have a much more liberal Supreme Court. I guess Jan 6th wouldn't have happened either. I have no idea how we would have fared differently through the pandemic. I don't think Bernie would have gotten any meaningful legislation passed but I've been wrong before.

Instead, allow for a voucher system where parents can apply the equivalent amount of money the public school spends and apply it towards private schools. Make it easy for teachers to start their own school or coop to compete for vouchers. Definitely a pipe dream but it might work.

You do understand how this would and has played out, right?

Basically the government would be subsidizing private schools for the rich, and since rich people are getting their needs met the funding will evaporate for schools in poorer neighbourhoods. Society will be move divided and your ability to succeed will depend on the class you’re born into above all else.

How can developers understand the value and need for dogfooding your own products, and yet advocate for a two tier public-private healthcare or education system?

We did this in Indiana and handled this by having an income cap for voucher eligibility. The reality is that people living in poor areas now have access to better schools. Rich people don't get vouchers.

That’s good for Indiana if true. What about other places? My understanding was that many voucher proposals did not have income caps.

We did this in Indiana. Vouchers have been very popular, particularly with lower income families who are stuck with failing traditional public schools. In short, kids really don't have decades to wait for the existing system to be fixed, and vouchers give parents a way to make sure their kids are in better situations. It also has forced public schools to up their game in every way because if you don't offer what parents want, you will get competition. In well-funded, wealthy areas, vouchers have mattered a lot less.

Isn't the typical argument against such vouchers in Housing that companies will simply bake the voucher amount into the price, leaving us in the same place without a public option?

None of the voucher systems I've heard of abolish the public system. It simply gives parents and students more choices and actually forces the public system to compete instead of continually beg for more funding that ultimately goes into the pockets of administrators instead of teachers and resources for students.

I do not see what public education advocates are fearing here. If their systems are so amazing and essential than surely the private sector can do no better, right? This will force school systems to become more lean from an administrative point of view.

One issue is that good quality education isn’t linear in cost. A school with 5 students may have lower overhead but will lack amenities that enable better learning, eg athletic infrastructure, libraries, etc. We provide public versions of those things, but then we’re back to funding parts of the education system with public levies. Furthermore there are some economies of scale that a public system enables, particularly around equitable access. For instance, I read somewhere that the postal service loses money delivering to remote areas. But given their mandate to serve all Americans, those in remote areas have access to a postal service. A private model would not likely serve those people well, if at all.

From an economic scale perspective, I don't think you can just parcel out an individual student's "cost" like this.

Put another way: the tax is lower than the net individual cost. I suspect that most school voucher advocates understand this, and see it as a convenient way to additionally weaken public schooling.

What would stop this from further becoming a segregated system where public schools are left supporting IEP and other expensive student groups on a shoestring budget while private schools accept only the most profitable students?

Make sure IEP is covered as part of the law and the budget is allocated adequately? This is a hypothetical law, you can suggest whatever you want for the sake of discussion.

Ah yes! Funnel MORE tax payer dollars to the wealthy.

What a dystopian education system that would be.

Why? The idea that everyone is forced to go to the same place and be educated the same way is dystopian, IMHO. What ever happened to diversity?

It might work in doing what exactly?

One thing that it’s really good at is diverting money from public schools to religious private schools. It’s also good at segregating the student population.

Many schools spend a lot of money on everything but the teachers. Voucher run schools are like small experiments to do things differently.

It allows more choice. Why should a poor student be forced to have only one public school option?

How about “also yes”

Teachers don’t work year round. So that 60k salary if adjusted to days worked + pension benefits is equivalent to six figures in the private sector.

Teachers do more work outside of their standard hours than most other professions. I dated a teacher for a long time and she worked much harder for her public school salary (waking up at 6am, prepping, lesson planning, grading, chasing up kids who aren't making it to school, dealing with social workers, etc.), than I do for my cushy six-figure tech job salary.

Besides, why shouldn't teachers make six-figures? Why are teachers treated like this in the US?

> Besides, why shouldn't teachers make six-figures?

Exactly. Compared to what I do, educating 15-20 future citizens and adults seems on par.

And to your broader point, indeed, the average US teacher at this point is 1/5 lesson planning, 3/5 instruction, 1/10 social worker, and 1/10 data entry/report filing.

Here is a thread on r/Teachers where teachers discuss how many hours they work [1]. From a quick skimming it seems to vary with new teachers working really hard, older ones having pretty easy hours, and some teachers doing things like extracurriculars which are not difficult but do take time.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/6f1m76/how_many_h...

I know this is a biased sample.

Why are teachers treated like this in the US?

The U.S. has a large contingent of free-market maximalists. These groups are opposed to public services like education and health care across the board. They are allied with right-wing religious groups who oppose public schools on religious grounds (they want a religious curriculum and that’s unconstitutional).

Their tactic is called “starve the beast.” They believe that underfunding and neglect will drive the best teachers out of the public school system and into private schools. Their goal is to bring about the collapse of the public school system and then ultimately convince voters to abolish public schools altogether.

Teachers should make six figures, the best ones should make seven like couches do now.

And it should be very easy to fire bad ones. Basically should be at will employment with school district.

Not American, so a couple of questions:

1. Is it normal for teachers to have alternative income for the days they don't work?

2. Sounds like the term "six figures" has a special meaning other than just being in the range 100.000 - 999.999? It appears like there is a connotation that it is a special things to achieve in your life.

3. Taking inflation into account, shouldn't it soon be normal to earn that amount (when including pensions and benefits like health, which I know is expensive).

> 2. Sounds like the term "six figures" has a special meaning?

Six figures simply refers to a salary with six digits (i.e. in excess of $100,000). This is nearly double the median income so "six figures" is often just used to mean "a lot of money."

For #2, "six figures" has a connotation of being a large annual income for one person to earn. It's similar to being called a "millionaire". This is a bit outdated now, especially after the last couple of years, as inflation and higher salaries make earning "six figures" less of a rarity than it was in the 1990s and 2000s, but the connotation remains.

1. Yes a lot of teacher have different summer jobs. 2. Means at least 100,000 3. Yes, it should be normal.

Answering #2, six figures refers to the number of digits in your paycheck, so 100k+

Lmao the downvotes are hilarious. I literally am explaining something the parent comment wanted to know. They didn't even have the bit about "100.000-999.999" when this comment was posted, as evidenced by another person quoting the original comment and the commenter saying they clarified the question.

I am not american, but both my parents were teachers, and they absolutely worked all year round, and longer than 8hr days. There are such a things as lesson plans, and marking homework, and being asked to do extra work such as editing the school paper, or coaching basketball, or whatever.

This idea that teachers work the same hours they are physically inside school and nothing else is laughable.

Though regardless, entry level software developers in the united states get six figures out of the gate, so it seems remarkably reasonable.

That's a tiring argument that's reiterated every time teacher pay is involved. Most teachers also don't get the luxury of working 9-5, they have to do additional planning and grading outside of hours. Also, if you want to compare with the private sector, there are teachers in the private sector who make more.

I don't understand these comparisons. Sure, the pay per hour worked might be the same as someone who works full time year around and earns $100k annually. But that doesn't mean teachers are paid $100k. They're still paid $60k. It's a $60k job with some large blocks of time off.

Teachers do create massive amounts of value for the society at large, so that would likely be very appropriate

teachers still have to exist in society all year round though

They shouldn't have their salary entirely prorated, but having a two month vacation during summer, one week spring break, and two week winter break is a huge benefit that should be considered when analyzing their compensation. Especially since they can make extra by teaching summer school, camps, taking other summer jobs.

Then they get a summer job. I remember an elementary school teacher from when I was a kid who was a park ranger in the summer.

Good?

If you want maths taught by actual maths grads, then you will need six figure salaries to attract them.

That's the problem, they don't want kids to actually learn. They view teachers as glorified babysitters.

This. A lot of districts are also trying to add some computer science curriculum but can't find anyone to teach it.

60k is extremely low for CS grads in any moderately-sized city but they might be willing to make that trade for two months off in the summer.

Schools wouldn't hire math grads even if they could pay them six figure salaries. You'll just end up paying the same type of people you have now six figures.

No one needs a math grad to teach 3rd grade math. That would be a huge waste of money and expertise.

Why shouldn't teachers make six figures? I mean after all, half the people here just put buttons on websites and get paid six figures.

Because teacher salaries, like the salaries of people here, should be determined by the market not by warm and fuzzy feelings.

Asjusted to inflation, 100k today are worth about as much as 60k two years ago.

Assuming Wolfram Alpha's CPI data is correct, I think you'd have to go back to 2002 for $100k now to be worth $60k then: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%2460%2C000+from+2002

Good teachers are worth six figures easily.

Adjusted salary doesn't pay your mortgage.

good

Great! They deserve it.

How dare we reap privilege on babysitters freeing devops engineers to copy-paste off stackoverflow

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