Teaching is not a 9 to 5 job with 12 weeks of vacation a year.

The median salary in San Francisco is about $70k per year. How many developers would accept that as a salary in SF these days? Yet you would still claim that teachers get paid well.

(Runs a few calculations on a napkin ...) Exactly half.

Many teachers get $0 or a pittance for supplies and have to spend from their own salary so other people’s kids to have access to learning activities and materials.

They’re spending their days dealing with a room full of emotionally selfish brats. You think they grade all that homework from 8-3? Nope. Many spend dozens of hours working outside the classroom.

Meanwhile, I’ve worked with dozens of coders who contribute jack squat, but earn &100k+.

Coders who often could be replaced with a few git clone ops and a Squarespace front end if companies weren’t obsessed with re-inventing the wheel, or over fetishing their web ui which really just follows one of 6 common looks.

Quite simply our economics around who gets paid are effed.

There are few tech folks that couldn’t be replaced by thousands of other workers who are just as capable at churning out CRUD app after CRUD app

Smart and capable people that might be interested in teaching the next generation if the pay didn’t suck given the expectations put on them

I can not describe in words how much I hate this utter false narrative.

Stop giving money for this bullshit and it instantly stops within 24 months. Period.

It only continues because of wording like "have to" in these sort of posts. No, they don't have no. If they didn't, schools would pick up the insanely trivial cost of these items. This is not a source of school funding issues. 99% of parents can figure out where to get an extra $50 over the course of a school year if they care even a tiny little bit.

The 80/20 rule you describe holds true almost everywhere in life. 20% of the people on the planet do 80% of the work, that's how it always has been and always will be. Unfortunately compensation will never properly align.

> Smart and capable people that might be interested in teaching the next generation if the pay didn’t suc

This has almost nothing to do with the pay, and everything to do with how shitty the job is. I'd educate smart motivated kids with parents who would kick their ass at home for a very marginal salary - it's fulfilling and interesting. Public school in the US as it's practiced today? I'm not sure you could offer me enough money to do such a thing. I'd rather retire today than take such a job at 4x my current pay.

Perhaps solve that last paragraph of mine and we could actually fix education in this country.

Edit: tldr; we agree for the most part but I'm much more militant in nature :)

"...shortening school weeks and enacting emergency certification for people who aren’t trained as educators."

and

"This year in Oklahoma, a record number of teachers were given emergency teaching certifications, despite no traditional training."

and

"The pipeline, meanwhile, is drying up. Between 2008 and 2016, the number of new educators completing preparatory programs fell by 23%, according to the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. And once ­teachers make it to the classroom, attrition is high: at least 17% leave the profession within the first five years, a 2015 study found."

UK metrics: the government tends to plan on a 9% per year replacement rate for most public sector jobs. We have around half a million teachers in England and Wales, so that is 45,000 extra newly qualified teachers each year. Not sure what the numbers are like in the various states in the US. Remember that employing a cohort of teachers with a lower qualification level is going to give you a support and in-service training need that lasts for 20, 25 years or so.

Mind you, 17% leaving in first five years is actually pretty good. Much higher in UK. Could be the fact that the occupation is more accessible to people with children keeping people in as alluded to early in the article.

Time off: the summer holiday isn't pure holiday as such, and a lot of what you do as a teacher happens outside the classroom. Being able to decide when I do the extra work is nice, but the work still has to get done.

I know a bunch of people will jump in here and lecture about supply and demand, but the fact is the American economy is weirdly bimodal where essential services (public education, bridge repair, public transit) are cut to the bone, while you pay an exorbitant fortune to people doing nonsense jobs targeting ads or moving numbers around in Excel.

A key concept in teaching is what we call 'differentiation', the idea that different students will need a different approach. A good model for HN people here would be (say) a computer game. If a game is too easy, you get bored. If the game is impossibly challenging, you give up. A well designed game that develops you has to be pitched at the right level for you. Individually.

English differentiates by student response to a common task.

Maths differentiates by topic.

So, the English teacher can (for example) set a title for a piece of writing and the whole class can work on that for say half an hour, and each person can feel that they have done their best. The teacher has to mark the pieces and that is where the differentiation comes in: one student might have shown really good progress by producing sentences organised into paragraphs, another student might have explored a metaphor and developed a simile, but might have been 'phoning it in' compared to their previous performance. Marking a class set of work and providing feedback to each student is where the time goes.

In my maths class, some students just need different work to other students. Some students will finish a lot quicker than other students. So my work is more on identifying and producing resources, skill development exercises and enrichment activities than the marking. Mind you, the marking still takes time. As a concrete example, how long do you think it would take to mark a worksheet like [1]?

[1] http://www.maths91.uk/files/week10-algebra02.pdf

The coming in early and working late, as well as the occasional weekend is something that a lot of other professional jobs do as well, without a ten week summer break.

I'm sure it depends heavily on the district, but the "teachers are the hardest workers!" tagline always seemed like an easy story to tell to (justifiably) ask for wage increases.

"gasp They have to grade homework at home!". Well, yeah, I have to take office work home as well as the United States has no labor laws preventing that.

Lesson plans change frequently and aside from some macro-level planning, re-use is quite difficult from year-to-year. Some children also have individualized lesson plans that require more attention.

> The coming in early and working late, as well as the occasional weekend is something that a lot of other professional jobs do as well, without a ten week summer break.

Again, they are not off the entire ten weeks. They have work obligations to fulfill during the summer. Furthermore, during the school year, teachers work just about every weekend and not 'the occasional weekend'.

Within the planning process, you often have to allow for significant changes in the syllabus content and mode of assessment.

There is usually staff training provided by school management, and career progression in teaching is linked to taking on extra responsibility.

Now, a very interesting question is why do we have the long summer holidays still? Lets face it, a very small proportion of the population work on farms these days. Changing that would have to be a big bang change of course. The whole system would need to move over to a new school year in one go, which is probably why no government has done it yet.

I'm also, looking back on a 30 year career, beginning to wonder if a more 'industrial' approach to curriculum design might be useful. Why not simply devise a national curriculum and produce standardised lesson plans and schemes to go with it? In the UK we have the national curriculum bit but teachers are still scrabbling around for resources and activities.

That's what we do in France. In most cases, it works rather well.

The main problem is that it means that every change has to be synchronized nation-wide, which is time and resource consuming. Also, since it's national, it can quickly become a national cause, both for the government (who sometimes decide to change the curriculum for purely political reasons) and for some parts the opposition (« No, that's not how you do Sex Ed! », or such).

Also, we're not too good at handling edge cases (e.g. students with special needs, gifted students, students in places where most parents don't speak French).

Are your teachers noticeably less busy by the way?