Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Teachers in major metro school systems already have quite a good deal. Rural schoolteachers really do have the deal everyone heard about in 1990s politics, but urban schoolteachers are generally economically privileged.

(That doesn't mean they aren't impacted by housing scarcity in ways that disrupt the administration of school systems; they are. But the problem isn't compensation, the problem is corrupt regulation written to prop up homeowner assets.)

View on HN

I genuinely need to see what data you're citing with this statement. Until recently, I worked in education and often worked with urban schools. Starting salaries of 55-60k/year living in a major metropolitan area is not what I would call economically privileged.

The average CPS salary is somewhere around $75k, with 10+ weeks of vacation, but that undercounts it dramatically because CPS teachers get defined-benefit pension plans and often earn tens of thousands in additional cash comp for extracurricular work, and that's before what happens when you get a masters.

> the average is around $96,000

https://www.cps.edu/media/community-updates/2025/january/neg...

What are you trying to say by posting this link?

(The commenter responded to me inline in their original post, I think; I now understand why they posted the link.)

Yeah sorry I was in a hurry. I’d originally vouched for your comment (it was dead/flagkilled), then threw up that link as a quick support for your numbers.

The other half of this is that with declining enrollment city school districts are finding themselves with a lot of land. They don't feel any pressure to sell the land. Nor do they feel any pressure to use it for other government services.

In Chicago at least land use and closing of schools is extremely contentious.

The areas losing the most students are also the areas that have historically been underserved or down right biased against by local governments.

So when it becomes time to consolidate schools it falls disproportionately on poor neighborhoods, which at the very least looks a lot like punishing the victims.

So there is a lot of community push back. So I wouldn’t say they don’t feel any pressure to deal with school land use, it’s a generally contentious problem with pressure on both sides.

Sure there's some pressure but as you note it comes from the communities that couldn't stop their school from being closed. So ultimately it's a lot of noise that doesn't lead to much action.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com