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rant warning I may get voted down simply for using loaded phrases, but stepping around them would be laborious. the largest labor unions in the US (Teachers, AMA, etc) operate off a marxist labor theory. this is completely fucking ridiculous considering the average education level of these organization's members. how long is it going to take basic econ to sink into the general knowledge base of humanity? the world seems completely mired in mid 19th century economic thought. If we can't at least get to the level of understanding marginal utility it is going to kill us. More modern economic theories are paid lip service to in the form of being implemented whenever doing so is politically expedient. This is the polar opposite of the spirit of econ. An economist by definition looks past the consequences that are of immediate concern to the public/political body.

OTOH: massive tech improvements causing changes to society will probably hit before we WWIII ourselves with our economic ignorance so all the angst may be for nothing. that is if economic ignorance doesn't (continue to) severely hamper technological improvements to the point that we fall short of saving ourselves from ourselves.

"When you test the IQ of people by university subject, you generally find that the hard sciences have the highest IQs (physics and math at the top) followed by the social sciences followed by the artsy stuff."

"[T]he artsy stuff?" Another good indicator of high IQ is not being completely dismissive of things that you have no experience in. Try it out.

HN has a lot of biases. We're more economically conservative than average, much more pro-motivation, and there's a lot of contempt for the arts here. It's a shame, since otherwise this is a terrific community.

Its interesting how differently people see things. I would consider We're more economically conservative than average, much more pro-motivation, to be positives.

I do agree that a genuine contempt for the arts is a bad thing, but I haven't seen a ton of that.

I like having good arguments on both sides. I'm not saying that pro-motivation or pro-conservation is bad, because it's not. At the same time, I've got a lot of friends on both extremes of the economic argument, both anarchosocialist and Objectivist-libertarian, and I think there's a lot of value to be had by arguing both sides. Similarly, the calmer life philosophies that are less about motivation and more about contentment aren't thrown about as much here, and so sometimes conversations seem a bit lopsided.

I'm not advocating just for the arts specifically, but rather for a degree of thoughtfulness, stemming from the belief that;

1. Education is valuable

2. You likely do not fully appreciate the complexity and beauty of areas that you have not studied at all.

Many outside this community are dismissive of mathematics, and they would be just as wrong.

Props up wages? I doubt that. Average K-12 salary: 40-45,000 according to PayScale (http://www.payscale.com/research/US/All_K-12_Teachers/Salary).

At least here in Michigan and Ohio, there's far more teachers than there are teaching jobs.

That's misleading.

First it takes into account places in the Country where the cost of living is very low (and hence the salaries are as well).

Second it's an average which is a big deal in an industry where half the members quit after 5 years (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05...). So half your employees are at the lowest level at any given time.

Third it doesn't account for the other benefits. Every teacher belongs to a union which means full benefits (medical, dental, vision) and a generous pension/401(k) matching program

Finally, you have to take into account the hours. School hours are generally 8a to 2p with an hour lunch. Teachers get a prep period so they don't have to stay late and they often get contract pay for most extra curricular activities (coaching sports for example). So even if you take the 45,000 a year number (which is again low) divide it by 180 school days a year and then 6 hours a day you get an hourly wage of $41.66 (The equivalent of $86,652 per year in a normal job)

Um, I'm not entirely sure why you think teachers only work 6 hours a day. I know a few high school teachers, and between lesson prep, grading, meeting with parents, etc. they work way, way more than 40 hours a week.

I have to call Bulls*t on that. Again, they have a prep period to do things in. That's 5 hours a week for grading, lesson prep etc... (and the reality is most teachers get their lesson plans off one of the hundreds of web sites that provide that service now days). As for meeting with parents, last I checked that doesn't happen too often. My parents never met any of my High School teachers.

It may very well be 7 or 8 hours a day. I'd concede that's possible. But over 40 hours a week? That (including the prep period) would be nearly 14 hours a week devoted to grading papers. I just don't think so.

Edit: Thinking a little more on this. Average Class Size in California is about 23 students per teacher (http://www.laalmanac.com/education/ed09.htm). Lets assume 2 assignments per week and just to make it fair lets assume they're typed essay based assignments (that the teacher has to read through and grade rather than multiple choice). A teacher has 5 periods so that's about 115 students or 230 assignments per week. The average words per typed page is about 600 and the average adult reads 250wpm (http://ezinearticles.com/?What-is-the-Average-Reading-Speed-...). Even under that heavy workload you're only looking at about 9 hours worth to grade it all and honestly that's with an unrealistic workload. No teacher assigns two full page typed essays every week.

I think the amortized amount of graded coursework, per class, per week for me in high school was at least that amount, probably more.

But how? Again, here's the facts I'm basing my opinion on:

1. I know, for a fact, that the School District in my area has a list of approved sites from which teachers can get lessons plans from. So they don't have to make those up from scratch.

2. Every teacher is guaranteed a prep period to take care of work

3. Grading shouldn't take all that much time. I could be missing something (and if so please tell me) but I ran the numbers above and they seem pretty accurate.

If public teachers really are as underpaid and over worked as they say I'd like to know about it. But they never offer any explanation and the numbers I can come up with (see above) paint a different picture.

Average reading speed means nothing: you have to add time to write comments in the margins and mark up the paper, you read more slowly when you're grading, often you're working with hard-to-read handwriting, and math problems (show your work!) take time to go through and debug, especially if you're giving partial credit (suppose I make a mistake at step 2 but the rest of my answer is logically consistent with that mistake...).

One one page typed essay assignment per week? I had 5 page papers, 20 page term projects, weekly quizzes in class, exams, 30 math problems once or twice a week, labs.

Of 30 math problems about five would be randomly selected and checked. 30 seconds on average to check a problem on your class size assumptions is about 5 hours a week (this is an average between about 10 seconds for someone who gets it right and 1-2 minutes for someone who makes some amount of mistakes and needs careful correction). Then you have quizzes and exams: let's amortize that to about 10 questions per week, and you need to carefully inspect them for partial credit. That's another 20 hours a week (let's say you take a full minute per problem). That's 25 hours a week to grade math.

But you're assuming the only thing teachers do is grade papers and teach. This isn't a spreadsheet calculation here.

Teachers also council students, tutor, do extra work such as activity clubs (debate club, for instance), coach sports, etc. Some of these, such as coaching, they may get paid an extra fee for, but it's not usually much. Most teachers (I know a few) feel lucky if they get to do these things, because it's usually working in a smaller group with the students that are excelling in the subject. In other words, the reason teachers want to teach in the first place..

Oh yea, and there's actually preparing to teach the class. When's the last time you gave a speech to 30 people with no outline? And then, you still have to grade the work.

And don't forget time to deal with parents too. Trust me, I've seen what they do, I'll take my 9-5 cubicle any day.

Here is a report on working hours of teachers.

http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf

Teachers work 24 fewer minutes per weekday and 42 minutes per Saturday than other professionals. They worked a little bit more on Sundays, I'd guesstimate about 10 minutes based on the graph. (The weekday and saturday numbers are given in the text, the sunday number is not.)

Table 5 suggests this works out to about 7 hours and 15 minutes per weekday, and about 1 hour per saturday, maybe 1.5 hours per sunday. That's just shy of 39 hours/week, for 10 months/year.

Useful link, but I think your interpretation is slightly off.

I don't think that table is limited to full time teachers. Table 10 seems to make it clear that it isn't.

The full time teachers that I know put in more than 40 hours a week. That being said, the pay is usually decent when compared with the cost of living. I certainly make more than many of my relatives who are teachers in central Illinois, but the costs of living tend to offset most of that. The teachers working locally are fairly well compensated for their jobs.

From everything I've seen, outside of the sciences, computers, and mathematics fields, teachers are paid well for their education. (I'm not sure how business fits in there. )

Lies, damn lies, and statistics. :-)

My interpretation is fine.

Paragraph 3 on Page 55 (which is describing Table 5) indicates that it refers to full time teachers. It's true that the caption doesn't make it completely clear, however.

Table 10 says full time teachers work about 5.5 hours/day (averaged over a week) which adds up to 38.5 hours/week. My estimate from Table 5 was 38.25 hours/week.

I don't find the IQ correlation that important, to be honest. What makes a good educator? Is it the ability to process IQ-type problems? Or is it more tied to some other attribute not measured by IQ, say, emphasizing with students? (I have no clue, just saying that IQ may or may not be the end all be all for educators).

I think it really depends on the subject being taught. I had an eighth grade Algebra teacher who could barely do the problems herself. She could empathize with the student pretty well, especially when neither of them could figure out how the get the answer in the key.

It's possible to teach a subject while not being an expert. That's where a good teacher pulls them in and helps teach the students how to learn on their own. That being said, this requires a teacher who is at least as intelligent as their students.

Apparently my grandfather ended up teaching a course he was taking while in the military. He was able to teach it better than whomever was originally assigned as the teacher.

* when neither of them could figure out how the get the answer in the key.*

It's possible that the answer in the key was wrong. I spent a few years volunteering for RFBD.org, reading math & science textbooks a few hours a week, and many of the texts had answers in the back which frequently were not for the question in the front.

Unfortunately that was not the case. She just had to rely on the smarter students to help her. Then they hired us (woohoo 4.15/hr) to come tutor the algebra class after school three times a week while we were in high school. Almost every algebra student came to the tutoring session most of the time. The teacher never showed up once.

Are you seriously defending the thesis that it doesn't matter whether a teacher is smart, bearing in mind that just about the only thing IQ is good for is predicting good academic performance which is exactly the sort of thing we're looking for (for once!)?

"A ditz who can really connect to the students" sounds like a mortal threat to my child's education, not something to be celebrated!

Education ought to be about more than academic performance. I see what you're saying, but having teachers that can't work with students is just as much a problem as having teachers that don't know their subject.

Then, of course, there are the teachers that can't do either. I TA'd a writing class with a teacher that was both ignorant and disliked, who was kept on because of tenure. Not a nice position to think of.

Personality is a lot more important than intelligence in elementary school. You should actually be smarter than your students, yes, but dealing with young kids takes a certain temperament and ability to adapt to personality differences.

Between kindergarten and fifth grade, I'd probably rate my teachers entirely based upon personality. The ones who lost their temper with me or were arbitrary or capricious in discipline were bad teachers. To some extent this remained true even until eighth grade (I was somewhat of a disciplinary problem until high school), but middle school is where my teachers' stupidity started becoming an issue.

In high school, most of my teachers were pretty smart at what they taught. But personality still mattered.

Sources?

Robin Hanson has some citations in this post: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/05/econ-neglects-licensin...