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hammock

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...

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> 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 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.

We gave out a bunch of free money during the pandemic. What was the result of that?

We didn’t have a fucking depression.

Also, there was some inflation.

Well, aren't you lucky that the rising cost of basic and essential goods isn't a strain on your personal finances.

It can be possible that two things are true at the same time: the current situation is bad, and the alternative was worse.

The actual correct alternative would have been to not freak out about COVID. I can understand the first 3-6 months of restrictions. The rest was a total own-goal. A politicized circus. At least we didn't own ourselves for almost 3 years like China.

One small part of the complicated answer to that question - a huge portion of that free money went to businesses in the form of PPP loans in a top-down kind of approach, which resulted in a dramatically high amount of fraud and misdirected public funds that will take tens of years to unravel.

To ask another question: (presuming our hands were to be tied to give out that free money) Had we instead given that money directly to teachers and other low income individuals, essentially doubling or tripling the proportion we actually gave them, would we have seen the same level of fraud or waste? I can't imagine so. Would the economy have been better off? I feel like probably, but I'm no economist. It's a supply side argument and I have a hard time believing those based on the results of 'corporate socialism' experiments.

"Had we instead given that money directly to teachers"

You mean the people who went to great lengths to be considered non-essential, so they could work remotely? We know the result of that was historic learning loss for American children. They don't deserve another dime.

I sense a polarity in our opinions regarding responses to the pandemic that indicates we're unlikely to come to an agreement on much with regard to adjacent topics, which is okay with me. Trying to put myself in your shoes, my heart breaks for the things you probably saw and experiences you probably had during the pandemic that I presume contributed to this harsh perspective on the public education system in Chicago. The next generations are so important and I think we agree we should strive to serve them as best we can. Wishing the best for you and yours.

Thank you for your comment. It's not often someone tries to empathize with someone on the opposite side of an argument. Especially on the internet. Indeed, I saw things I hope to never see again.

And taxpayers usually burn money?

Generally tax structures should be set up to tax the most wealthy entities first, and the poorest last, by my understanding. The wealthiest entities are going to be corporations and their leaders and they don't live where the teachers do.

So, from the perspective of businesses and individuals that live where the teachers do, yes, the largest taxpayers do usually burn money.

(Quite literally, in the form of things like very expensive-to-operate private planes, such as to attend the recent 'super bowl')

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.

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

I absolutely agree in principle, but unless pay is in some way linked to performance I really don’t see how.

The existing seniority based pay system completely decouples money as an incentive, doesn’t it?

It's a tough nut to crack, I do agree. On one end of the scale you have labor incentive systems that are overly associated to (perceived) performance, which can produce much misery, inequity, and arguably reduced productivity - toxic stack ranking, the 2014 amazon NYT article, 996 Taylorism, etc.

On the other hand you have systems that you describe that are not at all calibrated to performance, and only care about seat time. Such as, toxic school systems or government agencies.

But, somewhere in between, there is a tremendous amount of happiness, equity and productivity. Such as, the customer service representatives that have worked for Amazon in Germany in the same roles since 1998. Or, airline pilots who, setting aside the various labor and equity troubles for a second, get great performance results from a seat-time oriented approach. Or someone that happily worked as a dishwasher at a restaurant in Rome for 20 years. In USA there's also a good deal of civil servants that have faithfully served our local societies for decades with a high quality of labor and life. The USPS mail person that delivers to my parents' house has been running that route for like 2 or 3 decades, he's still great at it and spends as much time playing with my parents' dogs as he wants.

I don't know what the perfect formula is, but I do think it involves outpacing inflation for compensation increases regardless of performance, and some amount of performance evaluation too. But maybe not too much of either.

Just my two cents, not an economist, etc.

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

The government is supposed to act according to its constitution, and the elected officials are supposed to represent their constituents

And of those constituents are employed by the government. Hence the government should consider the interests of its own employees to a certain degree.

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.

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.

I'm perfectly happy with a teacher making 60k provided that they're teaching my kid well. I'm not happy with giving them a raise if they're not, and "their lives could be easier so we should do it anyway" is not a compelling argument. In the rest of the professional world we have to earn our salaries.

What if underperforming teachers were fired and replaced with high-performing teachers? This is really what needs to happen, but...

It's way harder to find high-performing teachers when you lowball salaries. It's actually way harder to find _any_ teachers when you do that. So if you're not willing to raise pay, you'll take what you get and you'll like it.

> In the rest of the professional world we have to earn our salaries.

As someone who worked decades in the professional world before giving up a huge chunk of salary to pursue my passion for teaching, this is not entirely true. There are tons of slacker leeches in the professional world. I've seen it worse than in teaching.

Absolutely if underperforming teachers were all fired, the bar was raised along with pay I'd be happy.

Now, that's hard and I get that, just deciding how to measure teacher performance is difficult, but if it can be done it should be done.

There seem to be a lot of people here who know an underperforming teacher when they see one. :)

As someone who spent their formative years primarily interacting with teachers I think I can say that I do. Most teachers underperform, so even if you have a hard time, just assuming that one is not a good one will have you right more often than not.

The few teachers I had that left a lasting impression on me I value greatly, I wish more teachers were like that. And that's a teachers job, isn't it? Without a lasting impression most of what was learned is lost, so then it's not really teaching, just busywork.

I will say that there are probably a good number of teachers with the drive just beaten out of them by the bureaucracy. When you go into your profession to educate and you spend more time dealing with authorities, paperwork and silly requirements, that has a tendency to drag your performance down. The flip side of that though is ofc that that bureaucracy was largely created by teachers, probably the ones who would get fired without it protecting them.

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.

> How do you rate a good teacher with a bad one?

If the education experts can't tell the difference why bother trying to find good ones? Pay low wages and scrape the bottom of the barrel, there is no measurable difference between any of them right?

How do you rate a good software developer with a bad one? Software development is a but different than most professions. Counting completed Jira tickets solves for the wrong thing as developers are forced to game the ticket system rather than optimize for business value. /s

And yet somehow we continue to hire and manage software developers, evaluating their performance holistically.

What is it about teaching that supposedly makes skill so uniquely opaque to administrators that it's (teach to the test) XOR (pay by seniority).

Software development is a far more evaluable profession than teachers. Most of the "problems" that bad teachers create don't show up for a few years.

Contrast that with code that doesn't compile/link or requires way more QA. Or personality issues that are sorted quite easily by a functional team/leader.

Teachers are more like naval vessel commanders than software engineers.

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

> Private school teachers get paid less than public but produce better outcomes.

I'd like a citation for that. I can't help but imagine that private schools game the numbers, because when I worked for a school district that's what I saw: private schools can easily get rid of underperforming students and pretty much never take any with disabilities.

The most recent NAEP data shows what other research has found: Private school students score better in almost all subjects.

https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/dashboards/schools_dashboa...

On college entry tests such as the SAT, NAIS found that students in private schools consistently out-performed their public school peers in all subject areas.

https://www.nais.org/magazine/independent-school/spring-2016...

I don’t doubt that private schools teacher have students that score better than public school students (we can argue the weight of all the factors later) and I don’t think GP is doubting that.

His doubt is that private teachers that are paid less than public school teachers provide better results. To prove the original assertion you need to include the income levels of these private school teachers and graph them against the performance and income level of the public school teachers.

Cite a source on Chicago schools being "the worst in the nation"? Chicago is a huge city, and large tracts of it are locked into generational poverty as a result of redlining, which sets up a vicious cycle with low-performing schools in those areas. It does not follow that the whole CPS system is the worst in the nation, and given state rankings and the population distribution of Illinois, that in fact seems very unlikely to be true.

But maybe you have a source that says otherwise.

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.

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