Comment by danielweber | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danielweber | Hacker News Reader

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requires an advanced degree

For no reason whatsoever besides credentialism.

very long hours with no flexibility

My dad worked hard as a teacher. But he didn't work 60 hours a week or anything like that. He'd grade papers while the kids were doing homework.

low pay even before you adjust for true hours worked

Two months vacation.

and you are given very little professional discretion.

I agree with you here. The constraints put on teachers and schools by all sorts of outsiders are very limiting.

Most of them are because the people paying the bill want some sort of feedback and control mechanism. Instead, I think teachers should be given great leeway, but also be very easy to hire and fire. If a parent isn't happy with their teacher/school, they shouldn't need to appeal to the schoolboard to place rules on the teachers. Instead they should be able to vote with their feet. Exit beats voice.

To put some facts into the discussion: this assessment by the American Statistical Association found that teachers are responsible for 1 to 14% of student's test score variance

If the theory is that teachers aren't that important, we shouldn't worry so much about who they are, or if we are paying enough to attract quality teachers. NB I am not saying I agree with the antecedent.

So your one experience with your father not working 60 hours weeks means what exactly when talking about teacher hours? Not much. I know a lot of teachers, most of whom work in very poorly performing urban districts, which are much different than say a well funded suburban district. They work all the time. 7am-10pm. They work weekends. They teach 4-6 classes of 40 kids where 5 students leave and 5 join every 2 weeks and 90% are ESL. Even with "2 months vacation" which also is shortening every year with professional development requirements (not saying those are bad, but it is becoming a myth in a lot of places that teachers get the summer off) it doesn't balance out.

Sure there are some teachers that don't need to work all those hours. Some because they are in a good district, some because they are fine doing the minimum, but you just can't make the blanket statement that teachers don't need to work long hours and "it's ok" because of the summers break. It just is not correct.

My data point sure isn't dispositive, but it heads off the "none of you know what teachers jobs are really like!" noize. As a rule almost all my friends have a parent who was a teacher or worked as teachers themselves.

shortening every year with professional development requirements (not saying those are bad

I'll say they are no good. They are, again, credentialism: put up some hurdles for people to jump over, and then say that they should get paid more because they jumped over some hurdles.

> If the theory is that teachers aren't that important, we shouldn't worry so much about who they are, or if we are paying enough to attract quality teachers. NB I am not saying I agree with the antecedent.

I was just trying to point out that we're talking about a small part of the problem. I think teachers are incredibly important but they only have a limited area within which to work and the results are hard to reduce to a single number. Merit pay systems aren't a bad idea in theory but basing them so heavily on standardized tests doesn't seem like it'll set good incentives since it discourages all but a very small part of what you'd hope someone learns in school.

By analogy, imagine how it'd sound if we looked at America's obesity problem and said that the problem was caused by bad doctors and we should fix it by linking pay to their patients' blood pressure, measured annually.

Nobody would spend a minute taking that person seriously but the equivalent is basically the mainstream consensus for how to talk about education - even the Democrats who generally considered friends of the teachers unions always talk about how we need to attract better teachers, which is basically an insult to anyone who currently has the job.

always talk about how we need to attract better teachers, which is basically an insult to anyone who currently has the job

I'm going to just leave this as is.

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