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Comment by germinalphrase | Hacker News Reader

As a former high school teacher, I am in favor of reduced requirements to enter the profession; however, I taught in two states that supported these types of on ramps, and they didn’t seem to make a notable impact on applicant numbers (that is, out of the hundreds of educators I worked with over the years, I knew only one who came in via a non-traditional pathway after working in a different field (engineering)).

That’s not the question the article is asking, but I’m skeptical that making it easier for professionals to career switch into teaching is going to cause any meaningful number of them to do so.

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Teacher pay is too low for anyone to want to take a teaching job when they have professional qualifications that would allow them to work a much better-paid job. (Especially when getting those skills also involved paying hundreds of thousands in student loans to a university. You need to earn your way out of that hole, and not working the best-paying job you can would be prolonging that debt!)

But I think the article is suggesting something different: that teachers could and should be hired fresh out of high school, when they don’t yet have any of those other professional skills — or the debt involved in acquiring them — and then simply given on-the-job training. Quote:

> Another recent study, out of Oakland, California, backs up this theory. Parents with high school diplomas who were given 10 weeks of training on a structured literacy program helped students produce strong early literacy gains, roughly on par with those made under fully credentialed teachers.

How much approximately do you think a teacher gets paid? Obviously it depends on specifics so maybe say whether you’re imagining a city centre / suburban / rural school, and whether the state/district is wealthy and whether it’s a high school or whatever.

I have some guesses in my head for something like ‘high school teacher in moderately wealthy Chicago suburb’ (I haven’t written the number here because I don’t want to anchor you) though I don’t have a great sense for how many jobs like that there are in the US. Above base pay there can also be more for helping with extracurriculars, potentially a defined benefit pension, and after settling in teachers will have a lot of free time/vacation not spent planning lessons. The amount of pay may not excite you if you’re a professional software developer at a well-paying company in the US, but I’m not sure that a more typical professional job would be “much better-paid”.

I taught in a moderately wealthy suburb of Minneapolis. With ten years of experience, my comp was about 50k. While I have heard stories of teachers from prior generations receiving somewhat lavish defined benefit pensions, I don’t believe that has been an option for new teachers in decades. With regard to vacations, we had the school calendar vacations (which is fine), but otherwise I accrued about 8 days of PTO per year without any other sort of vacation/parent leave/etc. When our first child was born, I burned all three weeks of accrued PTO and was back on the job. By comparison, when I left teaching - I doubled my income, work about 20 percent fewer hours a week, have comparable healthcare, unlimited PTO, took 8 weeks paid parental leave with our second child, and have much less day-to-day stress. Teaching isn’t a salt mine, but - in my experience - it wasn’t a cushy job either.

For another anecdote, someone I know teaching private with 0 years experience in the Bay Area / Silicon Valley makes $80k.

There are huge regional differences.

Public school in WA state, Masters degree, first year I'm making about $75k.

The trick is that it will take me 16 years to get to the top of the pay scale and make what I made as a software developer last year ($115K). When the union asks what I want, that is what I tell them. Top pay is fine, but it takes too long to get there.

I like the job a lot more and its only about three times as much work.

Oak Park, IL is wealthy but not like Kennilworth wealthy, or Lincoln Park wealthy. OPRF, our public high school, has zero teachers making less than six figures.

Lane III (bachelor's degree) CPS teacher entry comp --- year 1 --- is over $80k/yr, including benefits (a defined-benefit pension) and 10 weeks vacation.

The equivalent starting pay in my former district would by 37k/yr. I have relative living the Chicago suburbs that teaches. The difference in comp between her and I supports the numbers you have provided. I have also heard anecdotes about teachers that retired about 10 years ago and are provided 110+/yr on their pensions; however, the Illinois pension system seems to have crossed into "too big to fail" territory.

My mental model for this is that teacher comp in large urban and suburban school districts is quite good, and that comp in rural school districts is quite bad, and everything else is a crap shoot.

Almost my entire family are educators (wife, children, etc.) and we all agree that teacher pay is very low. Specifically, when you break it down at an hourly rate the pay is comically low. I think my wife calculated her pay several years ago at something like $2.00 / hour.

Interestingly, during the height of the pandemic everyone seemed to come around to the fact that teachers didn't get paid enough for the amount of work that they do. This was because parents and caregivers got first hand experience in what teachers go through on a day-to-day basis. However, that sentiment has faded with time and with it the value of a good teacher.

That rhetoric about teacher (and medical worker) pay during the pandemic was, whether people realize it or not, nothing but a cynical attempt to encourage teachers not to quit, in order to save the parents' jobs.

A lot of teachers (my wife being one as well) truly thought that people had been woken up to the incredible crisis in our education system, but 2-3 years later, we know better; they just wanted teachers to stay on long enough for their life situations to stabilize, so they could go back to ignoring them.

I was taking time off in 2022 when my daughter's high school CS teacher quit (to take a job at Microsoft).

I volunteered to step in until they could find a qualified replacement. It ended up working out, but it was a pretty big problem to have an unlicensed teacher in the school. They ultimately had me enroll as a substitute who just happened to get assigned to the same classes every day, but they said if I wanted to come back the following year I'd need to become officially licensed.

I could see myself teaching high school in retirement. Helps the community, keeps you busy, and your summers are open. But not if I have to jump through a bunch of make-work hoops for the privilege of helping out.

> I could see myself teaching high school in retirement.

My calc & discrete math teacher in HS was a retired guy from bell labs, apparently knew claude shannon. He had made a bunch of money doing that and was just teaching at the HS as a philanthropic service in old age. He wrote & printed the textbooks we used. Practically every other teacher seemed inadequate afterwards. Oddly enough I had a professor in college who was from bell labs too, absolutely brilliant too and taught in the same, in some way brutal, style too.

Just work at a community college, you just need a relevant masters degree.

I would love to teach high school but there would need to be some major changes to the system before I would be willing to.

What I really want is to be able to teach the kind of CS courses that I took in high school—they were optional classes that kids chose to be in because they were interested, and the teacher had full discretion on what to teach.

Unfortunately, that's not the typical high school class, and most teachers have to teach at least a few mandatory classes with curricula dictated at the state level. Props to the teachers who are willing to deal with reluctant students and enabling parents, but I would go crazy in that environment, and I've had bad experiences trying to teach curricula handed down from on high.

And the GPA-grubbing is ridiculous to the point of being comical.

It may not make any significant change in the numbers applying for k-12 positions, but do people really need to go through the torture, indoctrination, and expense of graduate school to teach k-12? Won't a handful of undergrad courses, seminars, and internships suffice in addition to whatever other degree is pursued? As it is now wannabe teachers already have too much time, the most precious of all commodities, invested in ramping up to teaching.

Teachers need graduate degrees to teach K-12?

It depends on the state, but in some cases yes. In New York there are undergraduate programs which provide an "initial certification", which is sufficient to teach in a public school for X number of years. However, you must obtain a masters degree before the initial certification expires.

I Googled around a bit. Looks like Connecticut, Maryland, and New York requires them and a small set of other states lock specific licensures behind graduate degrees. I sincerely had no idea this was happening. I have young kids, in California, but we haven't hit kindergarten yet.

States that don’t require higher degrees often have a wall on the pay scale that’s hit early in one’s career, without a graduate degree.

What’s weird about the market for teaching master’s degrees, at least (idk about PhDs) is that this generates a ton of demand for them, but it makes no difference how good the program is. Teachers don’t care because they don’t really matter that much for improving teaching skill. Schools don’t care—pay bump is the same no matter what.

This has all the effects one might guess on the quality of these programs—almost all are very easy, because nobody involved cares how rigorous they are, and one party would generally prefer they not be very difficult. Whole thing’s a joke, total waste of money and teachers’ time.

Thanks for the reply. It's not surprising to hear any of this, honestly, but I am surprised all the same. What a sad state of affairs.

My guess from what I've seen over the past three decades is that this started because private schools and some public schools in wealthy areas were touting how many of their teachers had master's degrees. Other school systems wanted to compete, so they started offering higher salaries to teachers if they had a master's degree. Soon it became very common for most teachers to have one. Amongst the teachers I know, most have master's degrees from the University of Phoenix because apparently it's one of the quickest and easiest ways to get that credential.

Back when this started, much of the alure of teachers with master's degrees was that they were highly educated in the subject matter they were teaching. It was implied that the chemistry teacher would have an MS in Chemistry. But now all the teachers I know have their MA in either Elementary Education or Secondary Education but none of them are teaching how to be teachers. It's a strange situation and recently one of them was ranting about the pay difference between having a master's degree and just a bachelor's degree had shrunk to nearly nothing. This is probably because the MA in Education has become so ubiquitous that it has little value. What school brags about the percentage of teachers with a master's degree anymore now that almost every school is over 80%-90%?

depends on the state, but in most of them, you earn more by having a graduate degree.

Maybe not significant numbers, but my wife and I have both thought about switching (along with a move to a lower COL area) as an exit ramp from the corporate rat race.

I have a BA in economics and a 20+ year career in software. As best we can tell, in order to teach middle or high school in VA (I’d want to teach CS/IT) I need to obtain a Masters in Education to do so. Spending $30k+ on a post-graduate degree for a career with starting pay 1/4 of my current income doesn’t make any sense.

If there was an on-job path to certification it would be viable. But the expense of taking a year off work to get a Masters pretty well kills it.

I did an online masters in teaching while working full time for less than $6K. When figuring out costs be sure to remember that you pay tuition for your observations and student teaching as well as your regular class time. Those add up to 4-5 months of full time unpaid work in a classroom.

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