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Comment by alecco | Hacker News Reader

Of course a forum for teachers does not admit they are part of the problem.

The teachers can only teach what the admins allow and only discipline in the way the admins allow. They don't have many degrees of freedom.

Yeah, I had the same thought.

It couldn't possibly be that teachers' unions are the problem!

Can you elaborate?

Perhaps it was a reference to teachers' unions advocating school closure during the pandemic, which could have affected education?

"The dispute echoes those that occurred earlier in the pandemic when some of the nation’s biggest school districts battled unions over school reopening plans and safety precautions in classrooms."[1]

[1] https://msutoday.msu.edu/news/2022/conversation-teacher-stri...

Multiple comments complain they are blamed and multiple comments complain about pay. Yet education spending is at its highest (relative to GDP).

I agree with them about bad parents and mobile phones/social media, though.

High education spending doesn't equate to good teacher pay. The pay for administrative staff has gone through the roof.

IMHO, teachers are underpaid for what they do and what we expect of them.

> High education spending doesn't equate to good teacher pay. The pay for administrative staff has gone through the roof.

Am I reading this chart correctly? It seems to indicate that US teachers' salaries are at #6 in the OECD countries (behind Luxembourg, Germany, Netherlands, Canada, and Australia):

https://data.oecd.org/teachers/teachers-salaries.htm

Surprisingly Finland is at #17.

And this chart [2] seems to indicate that administrative expenditures have consistently accounted for around 40% of public elementary and secondary education expenditures since 1980. However they were lower in 1970 (32%), so there seems to have been some expansion in the 1970s.

[2] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d21/tables/dt21_236.10.a...

When I taught in the San Bernardino City Unified School District there were more administrator staff than teachers.

Ah, still the case: https://nces.ed.gov/ccd/districtsearch/district_detail.asp?I...

Apparently Canada spends less on its Public Education System than the United States but teachers salaries are higher in Canada. US Public School System is top heavy with administrators by comparison.

It's unAmerican if the managers aren't being paid 10-100 times what their underlings are being paid.

Higher education is also more expensive than ever, but most of that money is going to bloated administration positions and programs that didn’t exist a decade ago. Just because money is being spent doesn’t mean it’s being spent on teachers.

so your argument about teachers being part of the problem is that high investment is a leading factor in the collapse of our education system, and teacher salaries, which are about 3/4 of the average salary, are to blame for this high investment?

Sorry just trying to understand. They are part of the problem because they complain about how much they get paid?

Correct me if I’m making an incorrect assumption, but you seem to imply that they get paid too much because of the spending relative to GDP?

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