Comment by willio58 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by willio58 | Hacker News Reader

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> Charter schools are the saving grace to the public schools hijacked by the teachers union and bloated administrations.

Where I live, charter schools are a joke. They're old office buildings converted into "schools". This is super unsafe and honestly quite sad to see in most cases because these office buildings are on busy streets with no playgrounds (what they do have is basically a concrete slab in the back with nearly no play equipment).

News flash: if you want education to "work", we need to pay teachers more. Subsidizing private companies (charter schools) through vouchers is just a leach on resources we could give to our existing schools and teachers instead. There are millions of teachers out there, some with master's degrees, who make much less than a new grad junior dev who goes to work, edits some CSS, and browses Reddit the rest of the day. We simply don't value education in the US enough, and charter schools are a non-solution proposed by those who would rather run away from the problems than face them head-on.

I fail to see how even doubling teachers salary would resolve anything. I’d love to see a study where a school simply increased teacher salaries alone and that improved outcomes for students.

The issue is almost entirely cultural and socioeconomic. Fixing schools is basically fixing society. Intractable, which is why every school from Harvard to Oxford relies on glorified selection bias instead.

Take Nevada as an example.

Entry Level Teacher salary in Nevada is $43,316 as of June 26, 2023, but the range typically falls between $36,172 and $52,827.

Imagine living on 36k per year before taxes. Imagine making that much, being not only in charge of controlling a minimum of 30 kids per year, but also being expected and required to educate those children all while spending (on average) 700$ per year of _your own money_ on classroom supplies. Yes, that's real. That's the new average amount teachers spend out of pocket on classroom supplies because education funding is so abysmal in the US.

Contrast that with an average starting salary of 86k as you suggest. That would be a materially huge jump and change in the financial support we give to teachers, along with an acknowledgment of how important their jobs are. As a web developer in my mid-20s, I make far more than any single person working in my high school. Of course, I took the tech route and that's highly valued in society, but I'm only here because of those teachers taking an interest in me in high school. To me, that just doesn't make any sense.

I’m not saying teachers shouldn’t be paid more. I’m saying paying them more isn’t going to fix the problems.

The reason you make more is because your company presumably has revenue. Schools don’t so the entire value proposition is different.

> I’m saying paying them more isn’t going to fix the problems.

I fundamentally disagree. How can we expect teachers living paycheck to paycheck to educate kids well? They have no emergency fund. They're one medical emergency away from bankruptcy. They don't have retirement savings, and they have no idea when they'll be able to start saving for retirement. Being poor isn't just financial, that stress creeps into every aspect of your life including your job.

Also, I want to note one thing. It's not the dollar amount specifically I'm talking about. Sure, it would be a quick fix in my mind to pay teachers more. But really it comes down to how those dollars are being spent. In our country, too much money is being spent on student loans, housing, healthcare, food, and transportation. If the prices for all of those could come down, that would work too. It's about getting teachers out living paycheck to paycheck.

> The reason you make more is because your company presumably has revenue.

Public schools are a service our government provides for us because there's an understanding that education is important. So important that we actually require children to be educated, which is obviously a good thing. If you ask what's the revenue source, it's called taxes. If we don't have enough money to pay teachers livable wages, we either need to take money from somewhere else cough the military-industrial complex cough or increase taxes on the rich. And when I say rich, I mean the filthy rich. The people who pay almost no taxes currently and instead put the tax burden on the poor and disappearing middle-class families. The highest marginal tax rate reached nearly 94% in the 1940's. Right now, our highest marginal tax rate is just 37%. Essentially if you make 570 million per year in the US you pay no more money relatively speaking than someone making 570 thousand per year. If we taxed the rich more, we could easily pay for better education in the US.

I think the solution people are proposing is paying teachers more AND removing all the fat from the administration side in order to help fund some of it. This will not be enough since the education system has been through decades of being gutted in favor of stealing the public's money in favor of private interests. I am including the whole welfare system the U.S has in its "defense" budget that seems to be invisible to both parties who will otherwise fight tooth an nail for every other bone and scrap that comes in sight.

The U.S should be aiming for something like Finland for its education system. Their secret sauce is not what they teach at all. Teachers are well paid and its a very desirable job therefore its very competitive.

Contrast that to the U.S where its just above the poverty line and therefore most people do not want to do it.

> Imagine living on 36k per year before taxes.

Is that supposed to be hard? I've spent less than that almost every year I've been working, and I live somewhere a lot more expensive than Nevada.

The poverty line is about 15k for a single person in the US. For a family of 3, that line is about 25k. The poverty line is also widely criticized for being too low, so yes. It's hard. If you're not a single person willing to live in a shared apartment, it's exceptionally hard to see any future with that amount of income.

I have a dev friend who makes over 200k working for Apple and lives in our friend's garage paying just 200 a month for rent. His case has nothing to do with the average living expenses of average teachers in the US. He's an outlier, as I suspect you are.

> The poverty line is about 15k for a single person in the US. For a family of 3, that line is about 25k.

Then 36k should be enough to support two dependents without any other income, as it’s almost 150% of poverty. And I suspect most teachers are not supporting two dependents on their incomes alone, so your comment makes me feel stronger about my previous statement.

As for me being an outlier, maybe? I don’t live in a basement. I live in a regular apartment with one roommate. I have a car (2014 sedan) and buy regular groceries, go on vacations, do things with friends, live a pretty regular life. The main way I’m probably an outlier is not buying a new car, and keeping my car for probably 10 years.

I take objection to you saying “if you are not … willing to live in a shared apartment” as if that’s some grand imposition. To me it sounds like you might be the outlier? Normal people, even couples live in shared apartments all the time.

I want to note that I didn’t claim that teachers aren’t underpaid (I haven't researched or thought about it enough to make a decision). Just that 36k isn’t some impossible amount to live on, which it’s not in most places.

36k before taxes

- 2.2k (FICA)

- 4k (Health Insurance)

- 4.3k (Income Tax)

- 1k (3% matching Simple IRA)

but ignoring 3.8k into HSA and 6k going to Roth IRA because we are probably too poor to do that

=

whopping 24.5k

If you spend less than that I'd love to know what is in the care packages your mom sends you each week.

You're right that I forgot to factor in taxes. I agree that 24.5k is not enough if you have dependents. I think it's doable as a single person. You would need to go into debt if you needed to buy a car or something that year, but also, this is the entry level salary for new hires. You can expect your salary to go up, probably on a predefined schedule.

The part about my mother was unnecessary.

I broadly agree, but teachers and other public employees have pension plans that are funded mostly by the employer (public) and pay 50-80% of their annual salary for their lifetime after 30 years of service. So you can't compare those numbers directly.

The promise of future pensions can't be used to pay bills, though. The teacher still has to survive in the world using the dollars that show up on their paycheck today.

Good luck living on that pension after a decade or two of inflation.

A lot of really good educators leave the field because the money is garbage. Pay peanuts, get monkeys.

Given the central role of education in our society, teachers should absolutely be paid more.

Quality of the education isn’t the main issue with schools though. Or to put it another way, do you think Baltimore Public schools issues would be resolved with simply better teachers and a more rigorous curriculum?

It's almost like there isn't one cause and YET we try to find the one silver bullet over and over and over again.

Some schools the issue is teacher quality. Some is curriculum and resources. Some is external factors like food insecurity, housing, or crime.

It's weird like that.

After decades in education, I can tell you that the same five ideas get rehashed every six to eight years. And we ignore that our education system is nothing but a reflection of society in the US.

If you have money and connections, everything is groovy. If you don't, it's not.

A more rigorous curriculum? Maybe no. But better teachers? Absolutely yes. There is more to teaching than lecturing in front of a blackboard.

I think it's more complex than this. The unions have effectively traded higher-pay for greater job security, so we have the worst of both worlds.

I generally find myself pro-organized labor, but when we start reducing in-group competitiveness for high pay, into low pay alternatives like seniority systems, job security becoming job permanence, or outright hostility to technology, that's when I start seeing the model break down.

> Given the central role of education in our society

The “central role of education in our society” seems a lot like a slogan that is, at best, aspirational, and at worst false-meritocracy cover for persistent structural inequality.

While educational performance and attainment seems to correlate a lot with success, differences in educational interventions and methods seem to do a lot less: those measures that seem to matter seem to themselves largely be a function of who you are and what your home environment is. Its not clear that education, particularly K-12, is doing a lot more than measuring structural advantage.

Spending more does exactly nothing.

https://www.schooldigger.com/

It is almost universal that the worst performing schools have the highest spend per student, while the best schools have the lowest spend.

The rating methodology on this website is exclusively test score based[1]. When I compare nearby schools, the school rating is almost perfectly inversely correlated with the % of Free/Discounted Lunch Recipients. The reduced lunch % is also pretty correlated with $/pupil, making the $/pupil inversely correlated with the lowest test scores, as you said.

But, that's like saying hospitals don't work because the highest expenditures are on the sickest people. This isn't measuring whether more money helps schools perform better, it's showing that we spend more money on schools with lower test scores.

[1] https://www.schooldigger.com/aboutrankingmethodology.aspx

Pay is only one part of what motivates teachers. I've seen more teachers leave because they don't feel empowered than I have because of pay.

I wonder if lack of empowerment is partially caused by unnecessary layers in administration. Admins are there "support" teachers but that probably also takes away some of the job aspects that feel "empowering."

Definitely part of it. Public schools, like many businesses and institutions, are full of administrative positions with inflated salaries who do some vaguely defined job.

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