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Comment by darkxanthos | Hacker News Reader

It seems like there are so few teachers now. Maybe the first problem to solve is why we as a nation don't invest more in paying good wages to our teachers.

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These issues with teachers are largely in school districts in poor areas. The wealthy suburban school district I attended had no issues with teacher quality, and friends I made in college from all over the country confirmed this to be true on the national level.

Since school districts are primarily funded by local taxes, poor children end up with bad teachers. I believe this is what NCLB was created to fix, but that wasn't successful for a variety of reasons, the most prominent of which was probably the tying of funding to continual yearly improvement in standardized test scores.

Actually, the problem isn't just school districts being funded by local taxes -- even states that have statewide policies that equalize funding have the same problem. The thing is, poor school districts are often, comparatively, unattractive and unsafe places to work even with the same expenditures of funds (because they are often in unattractive and unsafe communities), so teachers often don't want to work there.

(And NCLB wasn't created to fix this problem, it was created to divert funding from education to private testing vendors and provide a mechanism to rate public schools as failing as a political maneuver to build support for privatization of schools.)

> The thing is, poor school districts are often, comparatively, unattractive and unsafe places to work even with the same expenditures of funds

Why is this problem so difficult to fix, at least within the school environment? Schools are a relatively confined space and should be quite easy to police.

> And NCLB wasn't created to fix this problem, it was created to divert funding from education to private testing vendors and provide a mechanism to rate public schools as failing as a political maneuver to build support for privatization of schools.

Sure, that could very likely be the ulterior motive for the program (among other similar theories), but the public justification for NCLB was nevertheless to improve schools in poor areas.

"Schools are a relatively confined space and should be quite easy to police."

It's about a lot more than "policing" a confined space. It's about dealing with all of the issues that come with high-poverty areas. Children come to school hungry, tired, and traumatized. They have had ineffective teachers for multiple years in the past. Many have already given up, because they have felt given up on.

These are not "quite easy" problems to fix.

> They have had ineffective teachers for multiple years in the past.

Even those that have been fortunate enough to have great teachers may not be doing as well as their peers in schools with better economic surroundings. Having involved parents can make a huge difference in academic achievement.

> Children come to school hungry

Year after year the one thing my wife will point out as having made a positive impact at the schools she's taught at has been her students getting breakfast at school every day as part of the routine. Initially she found it disruptive but over time they have logged fewer behavior related incidents, fewer nurse visits and more attentiveness in the morning. It's an anecdote but four years without it followed by four years with it and she's convinced. All eight years were at Title I schools with 100% free/reduced lunch as well as the before and after school meal program. The specific change was serving the morning meal in the classroom ensuring the kids were getting it.

It is difficult to fix "within the school environment" because it is a problem with the socioeconomic environment within which the school environment is embedded (including the population from which the school draws pupils), and it involves the area through which teachers have to transit to get to the school.

Correcting for it maybe can be done, but it costs money, which means even with state level policies which aim to equalize school funding across rich and poor districts the poor districts end up behind in terms of academic resources, because they have to spend more money counteracting the effects of being in poor districts.

>>>Why is this problem so difficult to fix, at least within the school environment? Schools are a relatively confined space and should be quite easy to police.

People who want to commit violence can use all means physically available to them. There are violence problems in many prisons as well, another "relatively confined space". Does this answer your question adequately?

No, because prisons are places you can't kick people out of (as that would defeat their entire purpose). If students are committing acts of physical violence, send them to juvy hall. Problem solved.

That's a fair point, I misunderstood the word "to police" your initial post.

Unfortunately, the system is already supposed to work like this, yet the problem remains unsolved. I have friends that are teachers that make constant calls to police trying to get these kids kicked out of school, all to no avail.

Additionally, my teacher friends say that probably 60% of their students would be in "juvy hall" if the police would respond to their pleas to remove these children from the classroom.

I personally think it would be worth the money to do the experiment, but I'm not sure that everyone would agree. Here are the costs that I was able to find quickly on google:

http://www.bestplaces.net/county/illinois/cook http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/us/reducing-jail-rolls-wou... http://www.illinoisloop.org/spending.html

Cost per student per year in cook county Illinois: $11,333

$/Adult Inmate/year in cook county Illinois: $50,000

Note:it costs $240,000/juvenile inmate/year but I assume this is because there are so many fewer juvenile inmates.

I think that there are probably cheaper ways to incentivize students to not use physical violence, but of course the proof is the results of the experiment.

School funding often breaks down at the state level not the local level though it varies by state of course. Simply being in a wealthy suburb does not mean that your school has any more funding than a school in a poor area. In fact it's quite likely that your schools received significantly less money than schools in poorer areas due to federal funding via grants and things like Title I.

In that case, why are there not better teachers in poor school districts? After all, if my school was receiving less funding and still had good teachers, then those poor districts must have stellar teachers. And yet we continue to hear about how teachers suck.

The higher level of funding does not translate to higher-paid teachers. That money goes to supporting students. It can be used to implement school breakfast programs, hire additional support staff, develop afterschool programs, etc. But a school can't just decide to pay its teachers more.

The other important answer to this question is that low pay is not the major disincentive for working in an urban school. It's the challenges of working in a high-poverty environment. Those challenges are numerous, and pretty well documented. There are many similar issues in low-income rural areas.

> But a school can't just decide to pay its teachers more.

Why not? If there are so many environmental reasons why teaching at such a school is disincentivized, providing a monetary incentive could bring in teachers.

> Why not?

State law prevents it in many cases. Collective bargaining agreements with unions, standard pay scales etc.

That sounds like a place to start then. Change the laws.

One of the provisions of being eligible for federal funding as part of the Race to the Top program is that states implement merit pay. I don't personally believe that will change anything and may place even more emphasis on standardized testing, but it could also lead to diversified pay scales.

I am really suspicious of any teacher evaluation system that ties to merit pay. I don't trust administrators and politicians to understand statistics well enough to measure my impact on student learning, as distinct from impacts such as home life, previous teachers, environmental factors, etc.

I would love to be able to earn higher pay for better performance. I have been so frustrated with terrible teachers getting paid much more than me throughout my career, simply because they'd been there longer. But I haven't seen any merit pay system yet that is anything more than a token bonus for some nebulous student performance measures.

Nate Silver did an AMA on reddit the other day, and the top question related to teacher evaluation and merit pay:

"What are your thoughts on data-driven metrics for teacher evaluation? Do you think a system that accurately reflects teacher value could ever be created, or will it always be plagued by perverse incentives (teaching to the test, neglecting certain types of students, etc)?"

He basically said that's too big of a question to answer in an AMA[0], it would take a book. But his first line captures my stance on merit pay:

"There are certainly cases where applying objective measures badly is worse than not applying them at all, and education may well be one of those."

[0] - http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/166yeo/iama_blogger_fo...

I agree with Silver that it's far too big of a question for an AMA. My biggest concern in the short term regarding merit pay is that it is little more than a buzz word. Politicians throw it around as if it's a quick fix and then administrators are handed mandates that are poorly thought out so that it looks like something is being done.

The teachers are making the same amount of money regardless of what school they work at. Most school districts have had pay scales based on amount of college education (degrees and credit hours) and longevity in the district. That is starting to change but there doesn't seem to be a good way to judge "merit" when determining teacher pay at the moment.

Teaching jobs in wealthy areas can often be vastly easier than in poor areas and as such they are highly desirable and hard to get due to a lack of teachers leaving those positions. When you teach at a school in a wealthy neighborhood you can expect great parental involvement, an active PTA that picks up the slack during budget shortfalls etc. When you work at a poor school you can expect to be a counselor, get little to no parental involvement and have to deal with tons of issues tangential to education. Teachers don't last long, the average teacher is only expected to last 3-5 years in the field.

A few anecdotes. The school district my wife teaches in pays for no PE teachers due to budget shortfalls. Three of the elementary schools in town have PE teachers that show up between three and four days per week entirely funded by the schools PTAs. The elementary schools in wealthy neighborhoods send home supply lists with items like paper, pencils, crayons, paper towels and kleenex. The parents send all that stuff in. The poor schools have that provided but once it's gone there isn't any more because the parents can't afford to pick up the slack. The school my wife teaches at is Title I provision G. That means the kids get all three of their meals at school during the week. 40% of the students at her school are classified as being "in transition" which is a bureaucratic way of saying homeless. There's a lot more money being spent at my wife's school than the "good" schools but most of it isn't spent on education, it's spent on the basic needs of the kids.

I am of the opinion that if these people cannot afford to properly raise their children, they should not be having them. It shouldn't be the school's responsibility to take care of all these basic parenting duties. Perhaps that is where we should start.

What if the government were to offer $X to women in return for having their tubes tied (same for the male equivalent)? Only the poor people would need the money badly enough to actually do so. You could offer a small sum for a reversible process (which you'd have to pay back in order to get it undone), or a large sum for a permanent procedure. This could very likely solve a lot of these issues in a generation.

> It shouldn't be the school's responsibility to take care of all these basic parenting duties. Perhaps that is where we should start.

That's true, but as a society we've pushed a LOT of non education related responsibilities onto schools. Picking up the slack for parents that don't want to be parents, or those that are trying very hard but struggling is just the tip of the iceberg.

Where I went to highschool, there was an obvious difference between schools in upper middle class, middle class, and lower middle class areas. The upper middle class public schools had access to the best/most resources, to the point where their football teams would recruit students from other areas in the state and some of their games would be televised. The buildings were newer and better maintained. The schools in poorer areas were ugly, aging, had problems with mold and flooding, etc. Being in that kind of environment is demotivating to both students and teachers.

Where I went to school the nicer schools were in the nicer areas because both the homes and the schools were newer. While the district spent the same amount of money to maintain them all two of the schools I went to were much nicer than surrounding schools due entirely to private donations. During the summer following my freshman year of highschool we got a brand new basketball court, all the materials and labor were donated. After I graduated the school got a new football field and track, also all through donations. Simply having extremely wealthy individuals living nearby and having their kids go to those schools provided incentive for them to help make the schools better. The other schools couldn't keep up because the families they service didn't have the same type of resources.

The article addresses this. Do you have an argument to make?

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