Comment by thot_experiment | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thot_experiment | Hacker News Reader

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thot_experiment

Crazy that such a load bearing job isn't better funded and more respected. Arguably the most important job in society and the level of respect, pay and to some extent training (at least a lot of places require a masters for what that's worth) is absolutely not commensurate with it's importance.

I dropped out of high school for the same reason, I had a teacher that failed me for writing an essay in three different styles of handwriting, and it just broke me. I wasn't a particularly good student, and I especially had a habit of just not doing essays, but I was making an effort to make it through the humanities and get my shit together, and to have that effort rewarded with a 0/100 just made me view the entire system as an absolute joke. I have a more nuanced take now, but it's still impossible to wrap my head around how comfortable people are with the education system here.

Society is made of people, people! You live in a society. Why do we not want the foundational atoms of it to be the best they can be? It just seems so obvious and simple and non controversial.

I think the problem is people prefer to solve immediate problems affecting themselves (or their close kin) rather than long-term or indirect improvements, and education is the long-term project if there ever was one: magically improve things tomorrow, and you will only start to see the effects in 20 years.

I don't know how it is in your place, but where I'm from governments have — at least for the last 15 years — governed exclusively with a max horizon of 4 years (the time until the next elections). Everything is quick-fixes or patches that kick the can down the road. It's very hard to convince people to care and vote for you if you promise to show results over the next generations, vs if you bump up pensions next year or something.

Basically, to give a different example, that's in essence why you the response to "traffic is abysmal" is "we will widen the urban highways cutting through the city" rather than "we will implement a plan to actually redesign our city away from car-exclusiveness".

Multiple things can be true, because the goal is to optimize in aggregate.

- Some teachers are bad (and some students will have them)

- Overriding teachers with policies intended to control the bad ones impairs and burns out the others

Consequently, the reasonable path is somewhere in the middle. Create feedback systems designed to identify and weed out the worse teachers* and avoid overloading everyone else with outcome-less proscriptive policies.

* F.ex. it consistently amazes me that few systems, teaching included, regularly poll their end users (students or employees). "Well, people will give bad reviews if they get bad grades!" No shit, and somehow that's something we can't adjust for with a basic statistical analysis?

> it consistently amazes me that few systems, teaching included, regularly poll their end users (students or employees)

That completely ignores the social and political aspects.

You need to understand that the people who have the authority to do so do not want to document bad teachers, ever. Documenting bad teachers makes political waves and principals and superintendents never want to make waves because that impedes their ability to both do their job as well as get their next job.

Even if a teacher is very bad, they may be well-liked or be an important part of the community. If you attempt to remove that teacher, they may rally support from the community that can be extremely noisy and inconvenient.

Entitled to your opinion, but this feels like an overly-complicated socio-political rationale for something that's equally explained by leadership laziness.

It's not rocket science to set up a continuous leader feedback mechanism.

> identify and weed out the worse teachers

By and large, everyone knows.

Data might be useful to tell you "hey that longtime great teacher approaching retirement has checked out early" or "the new hire who was struggling last semester has turned the corner" but it's no secret in a school building which teacher everyone hates and which one everyone loves.

If you woke up tomorrow and discovered you were an elementary school principal, you would have the lay of the land by week two at the latest.

The problem is not separating the flowers from the weeds, it's what will happen if you pull the weeds. Who's gonna take care of that room full of 8 year olds tomorrow? And for the next several years? If a weed shows up every day and doesn't commit any crimes, the downside of replacing them is larger than the upside.

Most teachers have strong union protections. It’s nearly impossible to fire one. Many districts now have a temporary period where they can be removed much easier. Once they have tenure it’s really difficult.

Tenure for a 3rd grade teacher is crazy.

> By and large, everyone knows.

For elementary school they absolutely do not know.

In my town the most acclaimed teachers were those organising many recitals with the kids and stuff like that.

Except that 20 years later parents were saying to the strict ones that just taught the material how good they were.

So yeah everybody knows. Not immediately though!

It is very respected in Finland. Having not many natural resources (trees / lumber aside) they made education their national resource. Teachers there are highly respected and have authority in the classroom. Masters degrees are required as well as multi-year in-classroom apprenticeships. Admission to education masters programs are highly competitive.

Always finland. Cool. Such a paradise.

It is very well funded but the money has gone to the new administrative layers of busybodies instead of the people in the classrooms.

education is highly funded. teachers are not paid well because there is a perception that "anyone can be a teacher" (which is true in the sense that there is no particular enumerable qualification or credential that makes you a good teacher) so the market is full of people who decide that they should be a teacher (many should not, but there is no a priori way of knowing). supply high. a lot of education funding goes to things that are not teacher pay.

Education United States is not necessarily highly funded nor are all teachers necessarily good. Can you identify a good teacher? Yes you can. Will you get rid of the ones that are bad well not really.

I still remember all of the teachers that were really good and I remember some of the ones that were bad, the ones that were good. I wish that many of them could have lived long enough for me to say thank you.

> Can you identify a good teacher? Yes you can.

Can you? How? Do you have a questionnaire or something?

across all spending education in the us is higher than most oecd countries.

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