Hacker News Reader

Comment by colinmegill | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, well, I happen to know a union leader for teachers in NJ who is losing tenured staff to COSTCO. So. I reject the clickbait headline and the implications.

View on HN

Costco pays well for retail though.

People with years of preparation and expert practice are giving up a demanding high-skill job to do a retail clerk job that requires no special skill or pre-service training at all.

For individual workers this is fine, and people should do what they like; at scale, for society, it is incredibly wasteful: high-quality teaching has incredibly high leverage. We should get our collective shit together and fix it.

It does require training. You have to watch several videos in the break room.

This reminds me a lot of the fall of the Roman Empire: Romans abandoned the cities and their highly skilled professions so they could move to feudal lords' farms and work the fields. Apparently the society had deteriorated so much that it was more lucrative to work as a field laborer than live in the city doing specialized work. And of course, without skilled people to keep the city's advanced economy going, it fell apart over time.

Note that the result of this was a large drop in total agricultural production. It wasn't so much that people left the cities to work the fields as that the people who lived in the cities died.

Cities have never replaced themselves, by the way - urban population has always come from people leaving the countryside. When the inflow shrinks, the city will shrink even if no one leaves.

I'm sure some people in the cities died if they couldn't find a better situation for themselves, but what I had read was that many abandoned the cities because life there had become unbearable for whatever reason, generally caused by severe mismanagement by the society's rulers.

If people are leaving academic professions to work as stockers at retail stores, this does not bode well for American society long-term. You can't have an advanced economy and society without an academic class.

Counterpoint from a former tenured academic: Maybe we just have too big of an academic class.

Our universities are still trying to teach like it’s the mid 20th Century, but the economics are not in their favor. What we’re seeing is the result of them being squeezed into the new reality.

> high-quality teaching has incredibly high leverage.

This is not a claim supported by the literature. (Though it is a very popular one.) The results of teaching are overwhelmingly determined by the student getting taught. Variation in the teaching itself has a minor effect.

Yes and no.

When you look at populations, it averages out, but there are definitely 10x teachers out there. It’s more of a function of teacher+student combination. The problem is actually more about the structure of schools that limits what great teachers can do.

I’m sure there are studies out there - I’m also extremely skeptical that studies can adequately measure variation in teaching performance (I come from a background in sports / circus, where scientists are always 10-20 years behind the state of the art understanding of the actual practitioners)

(I think it’s kind of like with coding - anyone can write a CRUD app, and anyone can teach basic arithmetic. But certain teaching tasks require very skilled teachers to work)

Care to point to some of those studies? How do they define what a "very good teacher" is versus a "mediocre teacher"? Interviews with students? Interviews with teachers? Average results of their students?

The studies in question are stuff like: if you look at standardized test scores before/after each particular teacher's class, and then run statistical regressions throwing in a bunch of other variables, you will find that most of the variance in the improvements in student performance can be attributed to factors other than which teacher they drew.

But this is a weak way to study the most important influences teachers can have which are about inspiring and exciting students and might not be particularly observable until years or even decades later, when e.g. a student with an inspirational middle school teacher chooses their college major or career path, which might be a different choice from the counterfactual student whose teachers were just phoning it in.

That's not what high leverage means. If you teach 150 students a day then even a small effect of teaching will translate into a big difference in cumulative learning.

That's even less impactful. Cumulative learning is determined by the student much more strongly than per-class learning is. Years after a student took your class, the contribution to their knowledge, positive or negative, from you is negligible.

We don’t know if they were doing high quality teaching.

The free market pays people what they are worth. Costco has decided intelligent, hard working, disciplined people are worth more money than what a university thinks they are worth teaching English, or whatever

Is the suggestion then that we need fewer teachers in order for the price of teaching labor to rise above costco? or that we need teachers to provide more economic value from their teaching labor? How do we measure economic production from teaching labor?

Why do you think teaching at a university is better than working at Costco? How do you decide the optimal number of university teachers vs. optimal number of Costco employees without the market test?

I don't have any emotional attachment to university teachers anymore than I have emotional attachment to buggy whip makers. Maybe a lot of the knowledge a university education provided can be obtained by moving to a major city and watching various Youtube documentaries for 4 years, augmented with debating people in Hacker News comments.

If your goal in life is to be happy, healthy, and fulfilled in purpose, hasn't universal university education been a recent phenomena, not required to fulfil one's life goals? Perhaps university life and its requisite bureaucracy is an aberration, not a requirement for human flourishing.

The professors I know are experts in their small domain (and most of them are really smart, but this is not my point here). They know all the nitty details, I am always amazed by their wide knowledge in discussions. I think for a society it is easily worth it to pay people to dig so deep into their field of interest and the market is not the right mechanism to enable that. I also think Youtube is nice to get started, but I found it insufficient for graduate level material.

Not surprising given how the political class is connected to the capitalist class, at some points basically interests of the capitalist class determine the value of a labor in the current system. So labor that naively maximizes the corporations profits is more and more the only labor that has better than disgustingly low value in capitalist society. That's the magic of "free market" for you - the game is fundamentally rigged because of structural, systemic reasons.

The free market gathers wealth with a few and then determinate value depending on the state of mind of the few. The whole harebrained idea never worked, resulting in even more harebrained counter movements like socialism preventing value to be how many antigerm washings you performed per day. It's civil unrest or the threat of it, that redistribute wealth and restart societys value circulation.

I wonder if you know that there are ideologies like market socialism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_socialism, they too have a market, but they change the relation of ownership of a workplace from some specific owner class to actual workers in the workplace through changing workplaces to worker cooperatives among other postulates.

The market socialist idea is under full attack and in full retreat ever since the thing behind the wall collapsed. It was never more than a temporary pocket of peace, negotiated for by societys that remembered were the journey always ends.

It seems to me like the movement of worker cooperatives is growing and they seem to be on average much better workplaces than the normal workplaces.

Yeah and it seems to have that one flaw that ultimately kills it's biggest benefactors at least over generational scales, the money always flows uphill until the end (revolution) unless some countermeasures like progressive taxes, democracy, and social programs are put into place. That's why I respect capitalism as a part of society but not as the sole determiner of someone's status as a human being that should at least have a chance of a decent existence. I would counter that systems like anarchism (they will always be crushed by forces from within or without) and communism fall flat on their face every time except on small scales not bigger than a modern small town or less modern village.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com