You Can't Solve the Teacher Shortage by Pretending Anyone Can Do the Job | Hacker News Reader

You Can't Solve the Teacher Shortage by Pretending Anyone Can Do the Job

thewalrus.ca

28 pointslaurex16 comments

Maybe if you stop criminalizing teaching of real science and facts, you would get more teachers. And as the article said, salaries is a very big issue.

In many parts of the US, if teaching about Birth Control, discrimination and what slavery really like was not illegal, you would find get more applications. In some places teachers where even brought up on criminal charges.

These days, no smart person would even think about teaching is many regions of the US, and maybe Canada too.

In America, they want to erase facts and have teachers like factory workers. The metric of teachers matters more than the job of education and the quality offered to the next generation

It's not some unspecified "they". It's because the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965 forbids the US having a national curriculum, and hence having nationwide-standardized tests of an entire curriculum (rather than much narrower skills, like basic reading/writing/math), unlike almost every other OECD country does (German Abitur, French Baccalauréat, even Chinese Gaokao, etc.) at HS completion. Hence the US federal ED can't meaningfully measure (HS-leaving) student outcomes across states/counties/districts, not now, not ever. (The 1965 ESEA was a severe compromise forced on LBJ by southern voters opposing public-funded integrated education). NCLB (2002-2015) didn't meaningfully fix any of this, and was replaced by ESSA (2015), which does not standardize across states.

Hence given the federal ED is prohibited from meaningfully measuring student outcomes, their metrics focus on other things which are worse proxies and more gameable.

I wonder if any study has ever quantified the economic cost to the US of not having nationally-standardized measurements of educational outcomes for all HS students, and what that cost is. (Even the ones who never apply to college. Especially the ones who never apply to college. Also the ones who don't graduate.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_and_Secondary_Educa...

I had no idea it was this bad.

(Public education, that is. Private education is allowed do things very differently.)

Here are two people from the Cato Institute [0] cheerfully expounding their ideological belief that the US Constitution doesn’t give the federal government any power over education (not even the "promoting the general welfare" clause of Article I, Section 8 which has been held to cover tax collection, public health, Social Security), and that in their opinion the rot set in with FDR in the 1930s.

(Of course the Constitution doesn’t say anything about things like federal air traffic control, either, but few advocate mounting a constitutional challenge to strike down the overreaching government tyranny of the Federal Aviation Act of 1958, which established the FAA by statute.)

[0]: https://www.cato.org/policy-report/november/december-2007/sc...

Interesting, if there are many potential teachers fleeing the areas you describe, then at least reasonable and well-governed cities like New York/Chicago/Baltimore/LA must have no problem finding high quality teachers to educate their children.

I’m thinking you never took a logic class. Is there only one reason why teachers quit the profession? Do problems in one location mean there aren’t other problems elsewhere? I suspect not, which is why your comment makes no sense.

Argue all you want about the merits of specific university diplomas, but it's astounding the number of people who don't seem to understand that in a post-industrial world an educated and literate populace is the only way to ensure a nation thrives. Seems to be another one of those things where we've had it too good for too long and now people have forgotten why.

The goal isn’t about thriving anymore. It’s about compliance.

However, you can do the usual thing and pretend to solve it.

For reference, the $100k CAD figure in the article from 2014 when USD/CAD was closer to parity (around 1 USD for 1 to 1.1 CAD)

> The end-stage dystopia of the deprofessionalization of teachers is already apparent in some parts of the US. A new online charter school, Unbound Academy, plans to teach kids for two hours a day using learning apps driven by artificial intelligence. Afternoons will be spent on activities like public speaking and group projects.

> Initially approved for grades four to eight, this school replaces teachers with “guides,” who provide emotional support and individual coaching, at a ratio of one guide to every thirty-three students. For the moment, these guides still need teaching degrees, at least according to the charter school’s initial application for approval.

Given that a giant chunk of "teaching" just involves lecturing about the same material over and over again, replacing 50% of a teacher's time with video lectures that the child watches at home seems like a good option. Then the teacher could spend the time answering questions and helping the student directly. And since videos have a marginal scaling cost, the school could use high-quality videos (e.g, 3Blue1Brown YT videos) for everyone in the school system.

> just involves lecturing about the same material over and over again

It doesn't, specifically not in primary education. Also definitely not for subjects with any kind of amount of practical work. Let's see.. foreign languages, sports, physics, chemistry, biology...

Which part of these relevant quotes understand? Or perhaps have counter-arguments?

> shows how low our appreciation of pedagogues has fallen

> Dropout rates for these classes hovered around 90 percent

> learning is a social experience

> an expert is watching you and cares whether you succeed or fail

I have no problem admitting... I cannot do that job.

You can't solve it by insisting that only those with teaching degrees can teach, either.

But some sort of accreditation makes sense, right? Anyone who has taken a university course knows that having a lot of knowledge in a subject doesn't automatically make one good at teaching it.

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