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Comment by HEmanZ | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

Uhhh... If you think rich kids are well behaved I've got some bad news for you.

The rich parent is the one who is going to show up after the teacher disciplines a kid insisting their little darling would never do such a thing.

Yes and the poor student is aggressive and violent because they've been bounced around foster homes because their mom is a junkie and their dad has never been in the picture.

Rich parents can be bad, but it's not the same stress as dealing with students raised in environments that have completely normalized violence

The solution is obvious from where I, a happily childless person, is sitting: The federal government takes over the school system from the states and makes every school a boarding school. Ban private schools.

No children are all in a controlled environment with the same access to after-hours resources as all their peers. They do not have to deal with whatever home life fate dealt them and can focus on their education. They will all have access to the same nutritional standards. They will have access to counseling. They will have shelter. Move them around the country randomly every year or two to minimize local influences.

Of course, aside from parents not being particularly happy with the idea of not seeing their kids all year, the biggest problem with this is that it is far too meritocratic and equal for most of the wealthy to stomach, and they'd be the ones largely paying for it.

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.

Figures of merit used to gate-keep high-status professions (SAT, LSAT, MCAT, etc.), correlate well with general intelligence. It's not that math/science reasoning ability is especially important in every job, but that it's especially revealing of general intelligence in a way that's hard to paper over with credentials.

I agree being a teacher doesn't require someone to be smart. But why should we expect teachers, who are mostly quite average people, to make more money than the average person?

I don't agree that being a teacher doesn't require someone to be smart, just like I wouldn't agree that being weak in math means you're not smart. I probably know more smart people who are weak at math than people who are strong at math, and I work in part in a math-intensive subspecialty. Just a weird argument to make. Again: sorry you were humiliated by a 6th grade teacher. That's not OK.

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/

That's a big if! My issue with college degrees is all the BS classes unrelated to the degree that you have to take. Looking at WGU's catalog for a secondary math education degree, I have to take classes on US history, biology, natural science, and composition. I think these are the classes that you allude to skipping, but it seems like WGU and other colleges are incentivized to make the skipping process quite difficult as skipped classes == lost revenue, no?

When I did the degree in CS, I was able to almost immediately test out of nearly every "fluff" class. There's no "minimum time" required or anything like that; if you know the material you can schedule the exam and test out of it.

For example, I enrolled in the history class on Tuesday morning. I went through the per-assessment and got a 90%, so Tuesday afternoon, I took the exam, and got an 85%, which was high enough to pass. I knocked out a class in about a day.

This of course won't apply to all classes, but I didn't think it was so bad; the "BS classes" were also my initial hesitation to going back to school, but I was able to whip through them pretty quick.

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.

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