Hacker News Reader

Comment by kian | Hacker News Reader

It doesn't seem like there's been a precipitous drop in resources compared to the decades of requests and warnings that have led up to this point. So what's different now, if not resourcing?

View on HN

There hasn't been a preciptious drop in outcomes either. There have been statistically significant drops in average test scores, but the large number of students who take those tests means that even small differences can be statistically significant. Generally, the average test score just fluctuates within a few percentage points over the long term. The differences between individual students are much larger. If you pick two random students in a year and compare their scores, they'll likely be much farther apart than the average scores of different years.

As a corollary, the variation that people personally experience at small scales (e.g. high-school teachers comparing the various students they encountered throughout their career) is dominated by changes in class composition. Some years, there are just randomly more bad students than in others. When the students seem to be getting worse over time, the teacher might attribute this to societal decline; when the students seem to be getting better, they credit their skill at teaching instead.

Thus things are constantly getting worse and the sky is falling, yet somehow it never makes contact with the ground, and when you compare with ancient records, it's more or less where it has always been.

I'm not sure which precipitous less than a decade drop you are referring to, but I would be inclined to think, in the last decade, a period of social isolation and absence of education might have been a factor.

Resources have never been higher. Theres an expectation now that the schools will do everything and pay for everything but its never enough.

Pay is comically non competitive - a fraction of what it would need to be to reconstitute the sixties.

Pay for teachers has ALWAYS been terrible. Governments are shit like that.

But you know what teachers got? Respect. Teachers were part of the elite that ran the village.

Yes, but you can get away with it when you keep 51% of the ultra-high quality brain power of society in bondage. If you want to replicate American greatness under conditions of free competition, you must ~triple the wage. People do not think through what America had in its public schools in the postwar period and expect good results when wages have fallen behind even nursing. Ask your preferred AI to compare nurse:high school teacher:dentist:physician between the 50s and today, keeping in mind that high school teacher pay was grossly suppressed by the bondage of women. The teaching staff of American greatness and economic dynamism was ultra-highly educated women who were paid basically nothing. Teachers are paid in a much lower proportion to e.g. physicians - another hightly trained service, than they were in the 50s. The difference is that women can be physicians. Educator wages and thus competition for them is infinitely too low in contemporary America. If you want to bash teachers, I'm fine with that, the fact is we get what we pay for.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com