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Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

Sure. And I 100% accept there could be survivorship fallacy at play here. But I am just repeating what I have been told by SMEs - that teachers and administrators are less equipped for their jobs than they might have been a generation or two ago.

If there was a uneven distribution it would pretty easily be explainable as an inverse relationship to social media and screen time.

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In the US at least I'd be more inclined to suspect brain drain than something generational. Almost everyone who could teach is doing something that pays better instead.

I suspect we'd have better teachers if school systems didn't have constant teacher shortages. Being able to select teachers on merit would be an improvement over hiring anyone who can fog a mirror.

This is very much the case, the US is quickly becoming a playground for the wealthy who can pay to put their kids through private school, and skilled workers from abroad who didn't have to suffer through the American educational system. The only essential difference between education in a place like the Japan and the US is the level of funding--their school system is based off of America's, and yet their teachers are competent, their students often score far higher on standardized tests. I suppose I learned something in HS, but I was an absolutely shit student and my district did what they could for me but in the end it was my own drive to succeed, after graduating, that led me to becoming a top student at college and transferring to a very respectable university.

The whole system is fucked up, and while I might be one single individual who "pulled myself up by my bootstraps," there are perhaps hundreds of thousands, if not millions of young students just like me who either dropped out of highschool or barely finished and couldn't cut it at college and ended up doing unskilled labor. They suffer with no chance for a better life, no shot at a more comprehensive education, and no consciousness of their labor conditions such that they never even think about trying to fundamentally alter the system that has placed them in such an awful social position. I am not a success story, I am the exception that proves the rule.

In what US school are kids serving others lunch, cleaning, etc? There are huge differences in the systems. Even if the curriculum is similar (which I doubt, but having investigated) the execution is vastly different. The societal/cultural aspects are also very different.

I agree that there are vast social differences, but I think the primary difference is that teachers are not respected, both in terms of their wage and in terms of their social status, and education is not treated as sacred and liberating, but is used mostly (in the US) as a means of discipline and control, and the "educational" part is little more than propaganda. In the rare instances where it is not simply a means of state-control and propaganda, the would be teachers of math, science, and humanities subjects who are genuinely interested in education only for the purpose of showing what is beautiful and freeing in the world are never treated in a way which would make them want to do such a noble benefit for society.

Not responding to the differences in systems but there are US schools where kids do serve meals, clean, etc.

Military schools. I’m not talking West Point, the other Academies, or VMI and the others. There are military boarding high schools where they do this.

Definitely. They typically score very highly for academics (like most private schools).

Yuuuuup. Teaching has suffered some bad Baumol's Cost Disease... but wages haven't risen to compensate, and meanwhile a bunch of other crap has made the job even less pleasant than it was decades ago, and also costs of essentials like healthcare and housing and education have shot up, further encouraging people to maximize income just to not feel very poor.

[EDIT] That is, to keep teacher supply & quality roughly static, I'd have expected Baumol-like increases in the cost of teacher labor (because accessible alternative careers are paying a lot more than they used to) but instead wages have stayed fairly flat, or even slowly fallen in many places, once you take inflation into account.

Bingo. I think it's a strong case of Baumol.

If we want to have a consistent quality of education we either need to drastically increase the quality of teachers, or find a way to increase class size while keeping outcomes consistent.

There are states that pay their teachers well. We still see issue there. I think the majority of student performance issues are societal in nature. Just like the Harvard study about two parent households being the biggest factor for success.

> Almost everyone who could teach is doing something that pays better instead.

The US pays their teachers better than almost every other country in the world [0]. So while teachers aren’t the highest paid profession, in the US they make more than other countries. And the US has worse outcomes than those other countries that pay worse.

That makes me think that teacher pay isn’t the problem. Or at least isn’t the biggest problem.

#7 on this list, https://www.businessinsider.com/teacher-salaries-by-country-...

Consider that the issue isn't overall teacher salaries, but instead how teacher salaries compare against other professions in other places.

Have you ever seen Software Engineer salaries in the EU? Way less than America. Probably not much more than their teachers.

So if teaching is making the kinds of income that your top earners are, it becomes a lot more likely people will go into teaching than trying to go earn more elsewhere.

That’s a good point. But it also means we could do an h1b visa program for teachers and really clean up by scooping up all the best teachers from around the world.

Why would they come here to make shit-tier teacher pay? They'd have to completely uproot their lives, live in systems / cultures / languages drastically different from their normal, and in exchange get painfully median or sub-par pay?

If I'm gonna schlep my ass to another country it had better be for a stark improvement in pay, bennies, and lifestyle -- not corralling brats so they can figure out what a Sin, Cos, and Tan means.

Because they’d make significantly more than they could in their home country. (The same reason programmers and nurses do it).

The goal isn’t to convince you, but to convince the many others who would make 2-4x from in their home country (see the chart I referenced).

And pay isn’t shit tier in the US even as it’s above the median salary. It’s not the highest paying, but it pays more than most jobs in the US.

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