Still Doing the Math, But for 100K A Year
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
First, senior teachers control the unions and take care of themselves at the expense of younger teachers -- it's disgusting. A salary spread of $50k to $100k is too much for the same job, and I never noticed older teachers being much more effective than teachers with five years of experience.
Second, the unions have convinced teachers that any measurement of quality will be inaccurate, arbitrary, and a front for administrators' political and personal animosity. Hey, welcome to the real world! Most professionals work in jobs where performance is subjective and difficult to measure. It isn't as bad as you imagine, except when it is, and then you get a different job. It wouldn't ruin education any more than it has ruined law, medicine, engineering, or any other profession where objective measurements of performance are problematic.
...and we all know how well those sorts of tests measure real learning and intelligence, right?
Is a Software Engineer B in my group exactly the same as a Software Engineer B in every other group in the company? Of course not; a pay grade is just a vague description interpreted by many different managers from diverse backgrounds. Yet people are content to say that we have a consistent pay scale.
The union would fight against it because they oppose giving any discretion to management, but teachers might defect from the union if it meant a chance at making teaching a rewarding and respected profession.
I'm not trying to defend the public-sector model -- there are obvious inefficiencies, and many of the best potential hires would never even consider a government job for many of the same reasons you suggested. I'm just not sure how better to balance the need to be accountable to the taxpayers with the desire of administrators to pay their staff according to ability, not just seniority.
First, there are similar margins in engineering as well. It is not unique to teaching.
Second, as to your effectiveness claim, anecdotes != data. I would have a tendency to believe the contrary and would need to see evidence otherwise to be convinced.
Third, part of the pay differential is probably due to the turnover rate in teaching. Why pay someone top dollar when something like 1/2 teachers leave before their fifth year (in the US)?
You have a good point about retention in the early years, which is why I mentioned five years of experience. I also believe that the best teachers just keep getting better. However, among average teachers I couldn't tell much difference between the thirty-year-olds and the sixty-year-olds, except that the thirty-year-olds were better-looking and told better jokes. I had dozens of teachers and cared deeply about the performance of each one (me: valedictorian, mathlete, AP whore) so I expect I would have noticed the pattern if older teachers tended to be significantly better than younger ones.
I've lived the 50K-100K salary spread for the same programming job. Also, at my last "real" job Amazon stole away one of our interns. He was offered a job for $86K whereas the other intern was offered almost the same position for $67K. She was the better of the two developers. I'd like to believe there wasn't any gender discrimination going on with that situation, but I don't.
Anyway, there's definitely huge spreads for the same work in software. Sometimes, even in the same company! In my experience, salaries are completely arbitrary for software engineering. I've gotten paid the most for the easiest work I've done. The only constant I've seen is that salaries are higher across the board when the economy is good.
But this is true. How do you suggest measuring performance? Standardized testing is not an acceptable answer.
I mean, I work in a vast and faceless corporate bureaucracy driven by the most idiotic politics imaginable, but when I think back to my favorite teachers from high school, they got a raw deal compared to me. Even though I got laid off my first job because of the dot-com bust. Even though I left my last job because of an abusive boss. Even though my review process is cookie-cutter and somewhat divorced from reality. It would have been better than having no opportunity to differentiate themselves from the stupid, lazy, coasting teachers who climbed right up the pay scale with them. Heroic, good, average, bad, and sleepwalking, they all have the same job title and same pay all the way to retirement -- it's no wonder teaching isn't respected as a profession.
In enterprise, employees that would perform really well would be accordingly compensated (theoretically) with a higher salary/bonus. This doesn't happen with teachers though. You could be a terrible teachers, with terrible results, but have tenure and still reach that 100,000k mark without a hitch.
I believe unions are important to ensure some job security and fair practice, but not at the expense of our children's education. There should be competitive practices in public education, that allow teachers to earn way more than 100,000k, but also does not guarantee that a teacher will rise on a pay scale when they just babysit in a classroom.
I speak from experience as I was formerly a teacher in NYC, where I encountered many teachers that were not competent to teach, but yet continued to exist in their role. There are schools that are trying experimental means to increase the quality of teaching - http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/07/nyregion/07charter.html?ex... - but ultimately we need to think of a new system of rewarding the best teachers and getting rid of the worst.
Lets say the average teacher has 30 students per year for 30 years, and the average student has 15 years of school. Your .1% would end up as ~6% of 100k/year. (In high school you have more teachers but they have more students, so the math still works out the same.)
30 students * 30 = 900 students
900 students * 100000 dollars / student * 0.001 = 90000 dollars
Actually, it would probably be transferable. It's worth more if teachers can sell it -- if a student starts working, that stake represents a fraction of the next forty years worth of earnings, but the teacher might expect to spend it over the next ten (and since it is equity, rather than fixed income, it might not be an appropriate thing to own for retirement). So making it something the teacher can sell to invest the proceeds in bonds would be fine -- although they could just sell and invest in the future income of a public school teacher, which apparently has the stability of a T-Bill and the growth rate of Google.
Anyway, your assuming all students make 100k, the average is around 50k/year and the teacher is already looking at a 60k/year pension. But, what about elementary school teachers they can wait 15 years before you are making any money. Retire after 30 years and only 1/2 or less of your students are working. In the end I think we need to recognize that pensions are really a tax on the teachers past performance as a group. As a group they get money because they did a good job as a group, but there is little direct connection.
Good teachers would concentrate in wealthy districts, because the best teachers would have an amplification effect, and those kids are going to end up in college and most will end up in good jobs because of their family connections.
Your scenario only plays out if there is always a higher marginal return to teaching among the already-advantaged. Sorry, but lots of advantaged people are dumb and lazy, and even among those who aren't, there is a point of diminishing economic returns to their education.
Yes, the talented wealthy will be well-served under a 'human capital' system. But then teaching resources will find upside potential wherever it exists, including those areas with disastrously bad public schools today.
Your first point, the VC scenario: are you actually serious?
Here's what I mean by "serious": you actually think that the transaction you're sketching:
- group of good teachers goes to VC, asks for money
- VC invests in group of good teachers
- good teachers teach inner city students for no upfront cost
- good teachers -- and therefore investors -- profit by collecting a portion of their students' future earnings
...is something that'd actually happen.
I can understand if you were just trying to make the rhetorical point: "if education worked the way some speculate, it'd be profitable to invest in a scheme wherein you taught students for free and took a cut of their future earnings; you don't see that, do you? Ergo: education must not work amirite?"
So I really want to know: are you "serious" about your vc-funded educational scheme, or were you just going for the rhetorical point?
Your second point is equally hilarious, and I have to also ask if you're also "serious" about it.
You say: "...since spending billions of dollars on improving these schools and improving these students hasn't had any significant effect on their ability to learn, the problem is not how hard we're trying, but with what we think we can accomplish."
What you appear to be attempting to insinuate is the following:
- there's a class of people who are ineducable
- we know this is true b/c we've spent billions trying to educate them, with precious little to show for it
If that's not what you're trying to insinuate, you're free to clarify.
Assuming that's right, you've got a big jump in your logic.
We've clearly spent billions.
It clearly hasn't worked.
We can conclude: (1) the way we've spent the money thus far doesn't do jack.
We can't really conclude: (2) there's no possible way that that money could've been spent that would've worked.
For your apparent conclusion -- some people can't be educated -- you need (2), but you only have (1).
You tried to sneak your way to (2) by characterizing "spending money in various programs that we hoped might to improve those schools and that we hoped might improve those students" as "spending money on improving those schools and improving those students".
Nice work, when it works.
So yeah: are you serious about your second point?
Here's the exact quote I was responding to:
"That doesn't seem to apply here at all. If education can really make a difference, teachers would be able to raise money from VCs in order to educate inner city kids for no upfront fee and a large cut of their future pay. If they didn't behave that way, you might have to suspect that since spending billions of dollars on improving those schools and improving those students hasn't had any significant effect on their ability to learn, the problem is not with how hard we're trying, but with what we think we can accomplish."
There's so many things wrong with this it was hard to know where to begin; to actually address this one just on the facts is like trying to refute the assertion "colorless dreams sleep furiously", but I'll do what I can.
Part 1: the "teachers raising money from VCs" scenario.
First, let's understand what I think he's saying. I think he's saying this:
- step 1: "assume good education can raise someone's lifetime earning potential"
Hidden Assumptions in Step 1: none relevant.
- step 2: "assuming good education raises someone's lifetime earning potential, a good teacher or teachers could get raise funds from investors and then educate people free-of-charge NOW in exchange for a sizable cut of the students' future lifetime earnings."
Hidden Assumptions in Step 2: when he says "would be able to raise money from VCs" I assume he means "it'd be a net-profitable endeavor to educate people NOW in exchange for a large cut of their future earnings, and thus investors would be willing to fund it." I edited "VCs" to "investors" to be generous, and I'm assuming the investors want to see a profit (investors could do this out of charity -- let's call that a "scholarship" -- but for sake of argument let's stick to profit-seeking investors).
- step 3: "if they didn't behave that way, then...". By this, I'm going to assume he is saying "clearly, people aren't investing in people's education in exchange for a percentage of their future earnings".
I assume he is saying these kinds of investments aren't happening for the following reason: the rest of his "argument" depends on it not being the case that people are currently investing in schemes like the one we're sketching here.
Where does this get us? About how I summarized the "rhetorical point" last time:
"If education substantially improved people's future earning potential, it'd be a profitable investment to fund people's education NOW in exchange for a percentage of their future income, but you don't see that happening, which I choose to take as evidence in favor of my world view (which appears to be that there are many people who can't be educated)."
There's more ways than I have time for to make a mockery of that, but let's pick three of the easier one.
Firstly: there's an enormous industry dedicated to loaning people money to get an education. You can characterize this behavior as: "paying for someone's education NOW in exchange for a portion of their future income". It's not 100% isomorphic to his proposal, but it's quite close, don't you think? Most of the larger loans -- like for medical school or law school -- only make economic sense under the assumption the education received in law school or medical school leads to substantially increased earning ability once the education is finished.
Sure, student loans are debt and not equity, but they're quite cheap as a % of lifetime earnings (you'll find census figures for average lifetime earnings of college grads in the $2.1 million range versus average net indebtedness at graduation from a 4-year program in the $20k range if you search around; even assuming punitive interest leading to paying back a total of $40k you're talking < 2% of your lifetime earnings to pay for an undergraduate education; you'll find, if you crunch #s for law school or medical school, that the %s are quite clear).
The reason student loans are regarded as painful is because they're expected to be paid back immediately after graduating, which is exactly when you're typically at your very lowest earning potential; as a % of lifetime earnings they're quite reasonable.
It might be possible to salvage the argument, but the existence of the student loan industry makes it a lot harder to claim flat-out that people aren't investing in students' education-boosted future income; investors are investing, just not quite in the way this guy sketched out.
Secondly: using exactly the same logic as he's using you can make more ridiculous claims. Here's how you do it:
- If medical school / ivy league / law school / pro football really increased your earnings potential, you'd see investors willing to fund people's medical school / ivy league / law school / football training for no upfront cost in exchange for a large cut of the student's future earnings. But, you don't see that, so I take this as evidence in support of my worldview.
Take your pick of "sure-thing" -- the arrangement he's sketching is extremely rare, and arguing that its absence in a particular field implies anything about that field is more than a little dubious.
Thirdly: you could handwave about the various pragmatic reasons why such an arrangement is unlikely -- imperfect information, various transaction and friction costs -- or point to the arrangement's relative rarity across most fields and assume there's something intrinsically unrealistic about it that has limited its adoption. Not a whiz-bang refutation, sure, but about as robust as that argument was, and thus equally convincing.
OK
I've gone through part one, the "teachers raising VC" scenario, and explained why the whole thing is worthy of derision:
- contrary to his claims, it's happening all the time, just as debt and not equity investment
- using the same logic you can show that eg medical school can't possibly raise someone's lifetime earnings
- you can also point to the "equity" version of the arrangement appearing to be rarely used in practice, hinting at its unworkability with at least as much rigor as his "argument" had
Part 2: the argumentative fallacy
I'm going to reproduce the quote, but split into parts with short commentary.
Section A: "If education can really make a difference, teachers would be able to raise money from VCs in order to educate inner city kids for no upfront fee and a large cut of their future pay."
NB: we're talking about a hypothetical scenario (if X then Y). Leaving aside the issues already arranged, remember this: he's talking about something that might happen, not something that is happening, or did happen but failed. Pure conjecture.
Section B: "If they didn't behave that way, you might have to suspect that..." -- still in the hypothetical mode (if X then Y), not the definite mode "because X happened a conclusion of Y is implied"
Section C: "since spending billions of dollars on improving those schools and improving those students hasn't had any significant effect on their ability to learn, the problem is not with how hard we're trying, but with what we think we can accomplish"
NB: here's where stuff gets dirty. You see how he slid from speaking in a hypothetical mode in Section A and Section B to speaking about stuff that actually happened (money we spent, results we didn't get)?
You also see how the qualifiers and signs of uncertainty start to disappear: "if education can really make a difference, teachers would be able to raise money from VCs...If they didn't behave that way you might have to suspect...
Go look for qualifiers or signs of uncertainty in Section C; you won't find any.
It's possible it's entirely accidental, but it has the look of dishonest writing commonly employed in eg direct mail campaigns soliciting donations for politicians or advocacy groups: you start with careful hypotheticals and finish with a conclusion.
It's no different than "If asteroid mining was profitable, astronauts would be able to raise funds from VCS to go mind asteroids. If they didn't behave that way, you might have to suspect that, since spending billions of dollars on improving our space program hasn't brought us much space-metal, the problem is not with how hard we're trying, it's with what we think we can accomplish." If that sounds a little off to you, it should, but it's the same "logical" "argument" at work, just with sections A and B chosen to draw out the incongruity of section C.
Part Three: the "improving" fallacy
Thankfully this one is short. Let's go back to section C:
Section C: "since spending billions of dollars on improving those schools and improving those students hasn't had any significant effect on their ability to learn, the problem is not with how hard we're trying, but with what we think we can accomplish"
This is sneaky writing, too.
Facts:
Fact A: billions have been spent on the schools
Fact B: those billions haven't had any significant effect on their ability to learn
I'd argue fact B slightly: compared to, say, the kids of coal miners or sharecroppers or appalachian mountain folks, I'd be shocked if the schools -- as bad as they often are -- aren't having a significant effect on the kids' ability to learn. Whether the cost of the schools is too high for the benefit is separate; claiming outright "no significant effect on their ability to learn" seems unwarranted. You'd also have to explain the Flynn effect.
Where do those get you? Not as far as they're taken in Section C.
You could say "we've spent billions in schemes we hoped might improve outcomes, but they didn't work the way we hoped they would." That'd be honest, but it'd also weaken the argument that's being attempted here, which is essentially "proof by exhaustion" (there's only one possible plan that might "improve" the schools' outcomes, we tried it, it didn't work).
Hence the omission of the qualifiers (instead of "the stuff we tried didn't work" it's like "we improved it and it was still crap"), as it makes the intended conclusion flow more naturally.
I gotta jet, it's been a long day and it's nice to have something to do to procrastinate; I hate intellectual dishonesty and so coming back to see that post after burying one of my dogs pretty much put me into conniption.
This kind of stuff seems out of place here so after this I quit; I submit as a parting shot in my defense that the post I replied to was every bit as flawed as I claimed it was.
* Increased child abuse * Poorer nutrition. * Lower chance of a safety net. My parents helped me out with college expenses and I stayed at home, so I only had to work every other semester, taking challenging semesters off. I contrast that to friends who were working full time jobs making very little and taking as many hours as they could. It was a lot easier path for me, and it was still easier for families who sent their children off to school fully paid with spending money.
Great people will overcome these barriers, but there's a reason that middle class parents raise middle class children. Let's say that a series of median teachers would pass on students that make 1.2 million over their lifetimes, graduating high school on average. * Let's say that median teacher in a wealthy school district passes on students that averages college degrees because their parents have them, and those who don't are balanced out by those who get doctorates or MBAs or are handed their parents' businesses. As such, their studends make 2.1 million dollars in their lifetimes on average.
That's 75% more for being an average teacher.
Now, let's say that you are able to increase the average student's lifetime salary by 40% by being a great teacher. You've raised the lower income up to 1.68 million in their lifetimes, but you've raised that student from wealthier parents to nearly 3 million dollars! You have to actively decide not to pursue money in this system, even if that 40% means a world more to the lower income student than the higher income student.
* http://www.earnmydegree.com/online-education/learning-center...
Is that always true? Do you have a source for that?
Does having a college degree increase earning power/potential? Do you have a source for that?
In the ideal world, the best teachers would be celebrities and their lectures/lessons would be high demand items.
Wait... Maybe it's coming... with YouTube, HubPages, and Google's 10^100 contest. Who knows.
I think a good (grade school) teacher is not necessarily one who is an expert in the material (though, of course, base competence is necessary) but one who is an expert in motivating and engaging students.
"It is amazing how big a difference a great teacher makes versus an ineffective one. If you want your child to get the best education possible, it is actually more important to get him assigned to a great teacher than to a great school." Bill Gates
http://2mm.typepad.com/usa/2009/01/it-is-amazing-how-big-a-d...
Most people simply do not want to work in an environment like that.
Think of it this way: in private firms, employees who demonstrate mastery of both their own specialization and "people skills" are promoted to management, so that they can guide and support the next generation of workers. They are paid more for this than their employees, in part due to the fact that not everyone can do what they do. Similarly, teachers have to balance knowledge of the actual material being taught, and all the "soft" skills of classroom management: facilitating discussions, maintaining discipline, keeping emotions and energy on an even keel.
Any manager who could effectively herd 30+ techies would be lauded as worth their weight in gold; why then isn't a teacher who does the same thing with as many children (a harder task, to be sure) appreciated as the deft administrator they must be?
Assuming that pay is tied to performance and the material being taught is relevant (two huge problems,) a good teacher more than pays for their salary in the increased productive output of their students.
I would have thought it obvious that "hardness of the material" has little to do with what makes a great elementary school or even high school teacher.
Give bonuses and raises to teachers who's students perform well on standardized tests? That just encourages teaching to the book.
Student evaluations? Then the teachers are obliged to suck up to the students for good ratings.
Leave it up to administrators? That creates huge potential for bias and currying for favor. At least when that happens in a for-profit company, the free market will shake out the worst cases eventually.
Seniority is not a great way to determine pay, but it's not an absolutely terrible way either, as generally, more experienced teachers ARE better teachers.
PS: Students at the edges students will tend to regress to the mean, so you can still measure performance on a class that scored 95% last year.
Further, you can "teach to the test" by giving students only classes of problems that will appear on the test and drilling them in that and little else. I imagine that you could end up with lots of functional-illiteracy type issues where students would only be able to do a task in the tightly controlled circumstances that they have been trained on but have difficulty generalizing.
A simple multiple choice test covering vary limited subject matter is one option, but we can do better than that. I remember taking a vary comprehensive series of tests when I was !10 years old that included such things as attempting to sound out words that don't exist in English. Granted, the possibility of extremely high quality testing in this country is one thing, I suspect the actual creation of standardized tests in the public school system has become extremely political.
PS: I think AP tests are fairly good indicators of their subject matter. Even teachers who "teach to the test" still cover the subject to an acceptable degree.
Wikipedia link on validity:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Validity_(psychometric)#Factors...
I don't actually know how long the teachers I had in grade school had been teaching, but if experience can be roughly estimated by age then I am not convinced there's any correlation between experience and quality. I had a lot of great young teachers and a lot of rotten old ones.
And if you pay for seniority, you're rewarding people who know how to make themselves hard to get rid of.
On a boat ride in Brugges, I heard a boat operator/philosopher expound on why it was so that teachers were paid so little, rockstars like Ozzy Osbourne were rich, and famous composers like Mozart died broke.
He said it was a question of network effects and impact. Mozart died broke because of poor money management and the inability to reach a worldwide audience.
An elementary school teacher is only paid a small amount relative to most celebrities because their impact is small. They cannot reach more 10-30 students at a time.
A baseball player is paid millions because he (through cable TV) can impact/entertain many more anonymous people indirectly.
This brings to mind the interesting question of micro-payments and distance learning - could an effective model for rock star professors be implemented, in an effective implementation of feedback-based distance learning?
There's another interesting question - what happens to the "not quite rockstar" professors/teachers?
As Sousa pointed out, recorded music reduces the number of people who can make a living playing music. (It may increase the amount of money spent by listeners.)
Note that only some things scale through distribution. Lectures may. Office hours don't. Thesis advising doesn't.
He should have read his Henry Ford. http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/hnfrd10.txt
In a little dark shop on a side street an old man had laboured for years making axe handles. Out of seasoned hickory he fashioned them, with the help of a draw shave, a chisel, and a supply of sandpaper. Carefully was each handle weighed and balanced. No two of them were alike. The curve must exactly fit the hand and must conform to the grain of the wood. From dawn until dark the old man laboured. His average product was eight handles a week, for which he received a dollar and a half each. And often some of these were unsaleable--because the balance was not true.
To-day you can buy a better axe handle, made by machinery, for a few cents. And you need not worry about the balance. They are all alike--and every one is perfect. Modern methods applied in a big way have not only brought the cost of axe handles down to a fraction of their former cost--but they have immensely improved the product.
Like the machine-made, to the artisan-made, axe handle, recorded music is vastly superior to live music - especially given today's digital recording and distribution systems. Leveraging mass distribution, a musician today can afford the luxury of honing a fine product. A live performance is rarely a fine product. It is usually middling in quality, and often below middling. It is usually expensive. For those that wish to see as well as hear their music, today, with DVD and Blu Ray, the live performances that are good can be distributed in a high-quality captured form to wide audiences, at low cost.
Music isn't much like an axe handle. Is teaching?
Don't get me wrong - I think that distributing good lectures is a great thing. Rock-star lecturers will do extremely well and ordinary ones will have to find something else to do.
However, there's more to education than lectures. The question is what happens to the rest and to education as a whole when lectures come through a separate channel.
Artisan made:
Instances are produced one at a time. The quality varies wildly and is usually poor. The cost is high.
Machine made:
The design is perfected, and then limitless high-quality copies are made. The cost is low.
What is the relevant difference between axe-handles and music?
Is teaching [much like an axe handle]?
Yes. The above applies to teaching, as well as to music and axe-handles.
there's more to education than lectures. [...] what happens to the rest
Interactive educational software.
distributing good lectures is a great thing.
By the way, lectures are often written by pharmaceutical companies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmaceutical_industry#Controv...
Lecture scripts and even journal articles presented by academic researchers may actually be 'ghost-written' by pharmaceutical companies.
Music is more than a product -- live performance is a social experience, not just private consumption. People go to see bands live for many reasons other than the rendition of notes they could get from a recording: they flirt with other concert-goers, they experience mistakes and improvisations by the artists, and they drink and dance in public.
Similarly, good teaching is not a solitary or entirely reproducible event. The best teachers I've ever had were the ones who could get students talking to each other, generating and assessing ideas faster than any one pupil could alone. You can't get the same experience reading a textbook or watching time-delayed streaming video of a lecture. I'm not even entirely convinced that online interaction can pull it off, at least in areas like history and the arts, where subjective and emotional arguments are just as critical as hard logic.
Interaction: calling back to the singer, requesting a song. Fidelity: being right there. Shared experience: being right there with a whole bunch of other excited people.
I've had tremendously emotional experiences listening to recorded music, but none so potent as hearing the same song live.
You might extend this to teaching: a recording of even the greatest lecturer can't answer your question.
Further to the discussion, though: mass production increased the base quality of tools like axes and knives, and improved efficiency. However, if you want something bespoke, mass production doesn't care. I like my semi- and full-custom knives: they were made for me, according to my specifications. Modern tooling can bridge the gap, too, yielding full-custom items of the same quality as mass-produced items.
It's a lot easier to carve out a small niche if you have access to a lot of people. Lets say that a band's fan base can reliably get x number of their fans to their shows every six months. Well, those fans will bring their friends, and promotions will get more people into the show who think they might be interested in the music. Well, most of those newcomers won't want to see that band has often as the fans do. So a band would get more people if their fans were spread out. because more of the surrounding community would be willing to support.
I personally am not interested some of the concerts that they have had at my college, but I've gone to them before with friends. I'm sure I would not be interested in seeing those artists again if they were local and played more shows.
Compared to Sousa's time, the country isn't "full" of places where live music is performed. It's practically empty.
In his time, every bar had live music every night. Today, most don't any night, and most of the ones that do only have it on weekends.
Even fairly small companies had bands - big ones had one or more at every facility. I can't think of three established companies that have bands today. (A group of people getting together to jam at the company party doesn't count.)
We may hear more music today, but people heard far more live music before recorded music caught on.
When I visited Portland, I was amazed at the multiple, majority no-cost free music every night of the week
suggests that your experience in Portland was different from what you are used to.
Some places do have lots of live music. (Nashville and Austin are also big.) However, they're the exceptions these days.
It's a little bit of a chicken and egg situation. At the college level students are willing to go out of the way to attend a lecture that they know will be good. How many high school students have the freedom and motivation to do the same?
Teach for America throws inexperienced recent liberal arts grads into teaching and pays them peanuts. They generally outperform experienced teachers.
Teachers are generally over-paid, I think. The problem is really that nobody with ability would choose to work in such a bureaucratic shit-show. It's not the money.
I bet lots of SUPER qualified people would go for a four year stint in teaching. Retired people, young mothers looking for reduced hours for a couple years, or recently cashed out entrepreneurs, or whatever. The bureaucracy currently precludes this.
The system seems to punish new teachers and the job sucks even at 100k/year let alone what they start at. The types of skills that make a great teacher are in high demand. Many great teachers would also make a great consultants and where I work 200k/year is not that rare for senior people. Hell, at 28 I am 2 promotions from that pay grade.
PS: We need to compare teachers to other collage educated professions not just random call center / factory workers with lots of supervision.
This is commonly said by teachers, but there is not a research base to back up this statement. There is a considerable research base (especially from cross-national comparisons) to suggest that grouping students by readiness at a given time benefits all learners.
I have definitely taken languages classes where I hated the teachers (the class was hard!) but I learned a great deal and actually have pretty good recall years later. If I had been able to bail out and go join my friends in the class taught by the easy teacher I would have, but I certainly would not have learned anything.
In fact, now that I think about it, I think such a system would probably encourage a trend toward treating schooling as a sort of nationalized childcare program, as the money and rewards would go to teachers (and schools) where students are allowed to float through. You can argue all you want about how much you enjoy learning, but I imagine that the vast majority of the people in my high school could have cared less. (There are similar arguments for why private schools do better than public schools: private schools are primarily composed of the kids/families that actually care about what said student is learning.)
You don't think that trend is already here? The parents I know who are shopping for more academics in their children's school programs have very limited scope of choice to look for something better, as something better has little incentive currently even to be offered.
Fully agreed with the goal. And in fact the newly industrialized countries of east Asia (where I lived for many years) are conspicuous in reaching this goal. But they are also conspicuous in ability grouping of a certain kind (although with higher expectations for the below-average students than the United States has for above-average students) and for a substantial degree of family-chosen, privately funded supplemental education after school hours. My claim is that the instrumentality I propose, letting state funding follow the learner and letting the learner choose the provider of schooling with the program best suited for the learner, actually better achieves your commendable goal of providing all learners with a better education.
Americans are capitalists -- we only do things when we understand the investment and have confidence in the return. The more educated and successful the parents, the more credibility they have, and the more likely their kids are to work hard in school. Plus, the main effect is still emulation, which works in their favor. So the rich get richer while the poor get poorer.
It would help if poor kids had some exposure to normal well-off people, but their only exposure is through television, and normal people are frickin' boring on TV and therefore invisible. People glamorous enough to shine on TV tend to be terrible role models.
That's the way it would be if all schooling were on online. Naturally, there would be no physical schools, but children not logging-in from home might use local commercial generic offices for internet access, just as some telecommuters do. From the local generic office, children could still log-in to the school of their choice. Since the school choices could be worldwide, the number of schools available to choose from might number in the millions.
As to whether this will last or not: well, that pension has been available for thirty of the last thirty years. One of the two political parties in the United States would rather scrape out its belly with a rusty fork before seriously taking a whack at teachers unions, and the other is the Democrats[1]. I'm not predicting rapid change with respect to the employment market for teachers in the US.
Do you want to be the political candidate cutting education funding and then facing, quite literally, a NEA warchest and a small army of very popular people in your district who you just made enemies of for life? Who will mention, in a totally non-partisan and objectively true manner, that you are cutting funding for the school Little Davey attends? To Little Davey's dotting parents?
[1]: Edited to add -- in deference to readers from outside the US, I should add the common knowledge that makes the joke work (at the expense of killing the funny): there are two major political parties in the United States, Republicans and Democrats. Organized labor and, in particular, the national teachers unions are inseparable from the Democratic Party.