Comment by Rebelgecko | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Rebelgecko | Hacker News Reader

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One thing I find interesting is that teacher pay in California varies from district to district MUCH more than overall budgets do. LAUSD has an awful pay scale, but is close to districts like Redondo or Manhattan Beach who pay much better. Even though Manhattan Beach is a super rich area, because of how California allocates school funding the district isn't any richer than LAUSD* MBUSD has $17.4k of revenue per student compared to LAUSD's $20k.

If LAUSD gets around 15% more money per student, why is their pay so much worse? More administrators? Higher rate of special ed students? Lawsuit payouts? Buying bitcoin for ransomware authors?

* California's school funding is kinda complicated and a whole topic in and off itsf. Mostly the extra complexity is for a good reason, there's a gnarly formula to avoid the problem where quality of education is directly proportional to local property tax revenue. Richer parts of California often actually have less money in their schools, because schools with more economically disadvantaged students get more money in the formula. When schools have high local revenue, the state uses an offset to balance things out. The only exception I know of to that general rule is Beverly Hills. The BH property tax is so obscenely high that it doesn't matter that they get less money from the state+feds, especially taking into account that the area has relatively few children per capita.

> Richer parts of California often actually have less money in their schools

I’ve heard people say that, but as somebody that switched schools in California a lot in high school, public schools in nicer neighborhoods were categorically always much, much, MUCH nicer.

Like “had an on-site computing museum and shared latin and ancient greek teachers with the nearby UC campus” and “had a couple decade-old pcs for a desktop publishing class taught from a binder by the PE teacher” different.

One explanation that I've heard is parent-teacher associations and non-governmental funding.

At some point in the past, maybe the 70s, California move from a model of locally supported schools two state allocated funding.

I think this was a mistake and had a number of negative Downstream consequences. One was the passage of Prop 13 because homeowners and even parents are unwilling to pay more to fund schools if their children in community will see only a fraction or possibly no benefit.

Given human nature and self-interest, I think people need to see significant benefit for their dollar. I think it would be a lot better to roll back this law and replace it with something that siphons off a maximum percent of school funding to be dispersed Statewide. You might see more money going to schools in for neighborhoods.

I think the problem is that teachers' salary is from the "school funding" budget. Here in Germany it's different per state, but in my state (at least when I was in school) - ALL the teachers of ALL public schools were paid by the state directly, and according to a fixed table, it didn't matter if you worked in a rich district in the city or somewhere on the countryside (or let's say small town for a high school). So yes, of course housing prices can still be vastly different (and of course teachers who live on the countryside might have a house and the ones in the city may rent a small flat) but it wasn't a real problem that they couldn't afford housing, especially on a district basis.

The funding formula is also why CA’s student:teacher ratio is so obscenely high — districts simply do not have funds to hire more teachers and can’t raise taxes to get the money.

Its an odd one, maby something like more churn at low income schools leading to a lower average seniority; and therefor lower average pay?

The difference isn't just average pay, you can compare LAUSD with neighboring districts and the pay is lower for a teacher at a given pay band, although the difference is less pronounced for entry level teachers (teacher pay at public schools is typically just determined by years of experience and level of education, and districts (or the corresponding union) publish those salary tables.

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