Could we reproduce the effects of tutoring by getting rid of all the government contracts for school paraphernalia like smart boards and hiring lots of teachers while giving them reliable access to basic necessities?
A smart board is $3000. Another teacher is $66,397.
You can buy 20 boards per year for the _salary_ (ignoring benefits and other non-payroll costs) of a single teacher.
https://usafacts.org/data/topics/people-society/education/k-...
https://oaklandside.org/2022/01/12/oakland-schools-are-facin...
So this cost 13% of one years spending in a mid-size district.
On the other hand the rich person has a strong incentive to succeed - avoiding ridicule and getting more recognition. The public employee on the other hand gets no recognition, or ridicule, and is spending someone else's money.
If we could combine the incentives of the rich person with the knowledge of the public workers that understand the programs that work, we could have something on our hands.
I would argue that Zuckerberg couldn't care less what the world thinks of him. Otherwise he would have been rather embarrassed by the Meta project. I would put Elon Musk and X up as another example of a very rich person who seems unperturbed by ridicule.
>The public employee on the other hand gets no recognition, or ridicule,
So politicians don't have a need for recognition and to avoid ridicule?
What they're doing isn't working. Even they would tell you there's a results crisis. Children aren't learning. They certainly aren't becoming well-prepared for adult life in an efficient manner. They're barely even being supervised and kept out of trouble. The school-to-prison pipeline is getting worse, not better.
These people may "know what they're doing," but they also know what they're doing isn't accomplishing the goals they have for it.
Knowing how to do something that isn't working isn't a benefit, and is certainly not a reason to give them money.
That suggests 'they' do know what they are doing, they are just denied the resources to do it
Agreeing on a solution when the results don't bear out that that solution actually solves the problem doesn't make them right.
I mentor a robotics team that’s attached to a set of high school courses. One of the best things I’ve seen when it comes to bureaucracy is that the three teachers who basically run those courses were handed a budget and bought exactly what they needed. A mitre saw, 3D printers, a plasma cutter, etc.
Very unlikely.
We are short of good teachers as it is. Adding more teachers basically means you’re pulling from the bottom of the barrel, so overall instruction quality will decrease.
Plus, lots of people don’t actually want to be educated, so no sense in broadly spending money on those folks (large percentage of the population).
Ask the good teachers what would make the job more attractive to them.
I can make wild guesses...
* Better pay. (Seems 100% obvious to a techbro forum.)
* Better administrations.
* Better career flexibility.
* No colleagues of the crappy variety.
* Less curricula mandated by politicians.
* Students taught well in prerequisite classes.
* Families helped with difficulties that translate to behavior problems.
* Covid sensitivity (e.g., no forbidding mask use in a classroom of germ factories during a pandemic).
...but you really have to ask the good teachers, not guess.
If you're leaning towards being a teacher, wouldn't it benefit your kids more to teach them now, while they're still young?
It’s best for their own kids if mom/dad makes good money and can pay for things like private school or tutoring.
Depending on what your undergrad is (preferably STEM), there are plenty of districts that will hire you, let you teach on a provisional license with a crash course, and pay for you to get your teaching qualification.
See this article for some examples:
https://edsource.org/2022/what-you-need-to-know-to-become-a-...
In CA, the term of art to look for is “intern” or “internship” (even though the pay is either regular teacher pay or close to it).
if the pay was better
Historically the main way that labor productivity has been improved was through technology. Without that you get Baumol’s cost disease.
In fact you could tax the money off Zuckerberg and then he would have to give up on other ridiculous personal projects like the multi- billion dollar metaverse shambles. That would free up loads of people who have wasted years of their lives as a billionaires play thing
I've been talking with him about maybe gathering the necessary data (it's available upon request but the district records people aren't exactly a sane API, you get PDF's with hundreds of pages). If I do that analysis to confirm his claim, I'll send you a link to it.
But even without the budget information, we can just look at headcount. What ratio of teachers to admin would you consider unhealthy? How many assistants to the vice principal do there need to be before it starts to look like a retirement program for people who can't be bothered to teach anymore?