> The wage gap between teachers and non-teachers disappears when both groups are matched on an objective measure of cognitive ability rather than on years of education.
That “objective measure” is based on human capital model of wages, and it seems to me pretty biased to apply to such a specialized profession.
Being wonderful at making a group of 6 years old engaged in your teaching and making them progress seems pretty hard to directly transfer to any other non teaching job.
I feel it’s like asking a pro sax player to transfer skills in another domain and ponder they lose a lot of market value.
Which is also part of the other quote you bring in. If I were to move to a teaching position, I’d look damn hard to be better paid or I wouldn’t move. And it’s not like an Amazon factory worker could just move into teaching tomorrow when he can’t take it anymore. So the pool going into teaching is extremely self selected and also biased.
Color me skeptical that it's a specialized profession. It does not appear to me that decades of education majors have done any better than those who didn't possess such a degree, or that there are any special skills involved beyond knowing the subject and good interpersonal skills. When I think back to my best teachers, none of them had any special skills. They were just passionate. It doesn't help that when you delve into it, all this 'specialized knowledge' about how to learn turns out to be junk science: cf. 'learning styles' or 'three cueing', which destroyed the ability of millions of kids to actually read. [1]
Let's try a model where yes, we pay teachers more - much more. But instead of hiring "teachers", we hire experts who are passionate about their subject and want others to learn about it. Let's do this from middle school onward.
In elementary school, we can focus on getting kids to read and do basic arithmetic, and otherwise let it basically be daycare. A lot of underperformance at that age goes away if you simply give the kid more time to mature - for some mad reason at least in my school district, kindergarteners are expected to already know their letters and numbers and be able to read a few words.
> none of them had any special skills
Great teachers make it look easy. What you don't see is the preparation and the previous iterations of their ideas. It's like acting - good actors make it look like an easy profession. But try "acting naturally" in front of a camera sometime. For most people, even walking becomes awkward.
Or programming. Behind most great programmers is a trail of terrible code that they have written over the years.
>They were just passionate. It doesn't help that when you delve into it, all this 'specialized knowledge' about how to learn turns out to be junk science: cf. 'learning styles' or 'three cueing', which destroyed the ability of millions of kids to actually read.
There are quite a few people who can read, even at a high level. But how do you teach it, and teach it in a scalable way? It's not as easy as you think.
Also, what field doesn't have fashion and missteps? Doesn't HN regularly complain about how various programming paradigms and languages were terrible ideas? What makes you think that anyone can do something complex by going from zero to the best implementation in one iteration?
There is no good source on "this kind of thing"!
This is a type of "Wicked Problem"[1] and also a political darling of every political group.
And since every social scientist is just a person, with political, personal, and moral beliefs, any papers that they are willing to release typically reflect that. Further, any "peers" that review those papers will have similar beliefs because they know which places they would like that info published.
If you have pretty progressive beliefs, you will "know" that more money, in combination with identity awareness and additional help to those that match historically oppressed identities, is the answer.
If you have pretty conservative beliefs, you will "know" that it is the environment, "brainwashed" and "lazy" teachers and students (but not your kids, of course!) that are the blame. Vouchers and private schools (letting the market work) are the answer.
And there are people with beliefs everywhere on that spectrum. And not matter your beliefs, you can find research to back it up.
Education is just something that will forever be argued about and there is no clear-cut solution, even though nearly everyone thinks that there is, if only everyone else could just understand their point of view!.
If you have better facts, please provide them. Disparaging a source of information adds nothing to the conversation.
Teaching doesn’t attract highly paid workers because in addition to a big pay cut those workers would be considering likely worse working conditions as well.
If teaching is low-status it is no wonder that education standards are low and thus educational achievement is low, as they note in the article. The alternative is failing most students and having a labour supply problem. In my country, Australia, you occasionally see news articles describing some shockingly bad final year high school scores (ATAR scores) being accepted into teaching degrees. Unfortunately, the fact that this happens further entrenches teaching as low status and puts downward pressure on the minimum bar for ATAR scores.
Remarkable, but unsurprising, that the Heritage foundation then suggests _lowering_ wages even further. You’ll get even worse candidates heading for teaching and they may even be able to next time show the same 9% positive bump.
You could double teacher pay and it wouldn't make a lick of difference.
As a teacher, you have no control over your classroom.
Disruptive students that destroy everybody else's learning environment? Too bad. No Child Left Behind! Wait, that's the old slogan, what's the new one? Equity Uber Alles? Equity Macht Frei?
It changes so often, I keep forgetting.
Assaulted by the kids? Suck it up, we don't want to be sued! Better to have a battered teacher -- the Unions will keep them in check -- than a lawyered-up parent.
I have seen this first-hand.
Want to actually teach kids things they need to learn to succeed? This is the wrong job for you.
I know a lot of motivated folks that went into teaching, with big salary bonuses, full scholarships for their degrees, everything. None of them lasted more than four years.
Public education in the US selects for Dolores Umbridge, and against Remis Lupin.
The teachers as a group research and plan curriculum. They coordinate across grade levels and determine how to roll out changes in the most effective way possible for students and parents as well. They rolled out common core math over 5 years with great success well before it was forced on public schools.
In other words, they let the people who have studied to be professional educators make decisions about the best way to…educate. There’s no school board, no state level involvement, no federal disruption every time there’s an election.
And it’s fantastic. I see this work and my first instinct is that EVERYONE should have an option like this, not just the people who can afford it.
For that reason, I support some type of voucher program that could achieve these goals. Yet for some reason in the US this is a political hot button, which doesn’t make any sense to me. Currently, the only people who have all the options are people who can afford them out of pocket. Everybody else is stuck with either public school or home school and home school is on the rise.
I share in your bafflement. Charitably, perhaps they reason that parents will pick schools that are worse on average than public schools, but I suspect it is more of a “equality demands poor schooling regardless of class” with a side of “the state gets to determine the values your child is taught”.
> Just not being dragged down from low scoring kids is worth it.
It depends on the kind of society you want to live in. I would rather live in a society that prioritizes decreasing inequality rather than exacerbating it.
https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/success-academy-charter-sc...
And anyway, why would "discriminating based on competence" exacerbate inequality? Shouldn't competence-based discrimination lessen inequality e.g. by giving bright, poorer schools a shot at more prestigious institutions while financially-but-not-intellectually privileged kids move to more middling institutions?
Given the choice between wealth discrimination and merit discrimination, I would prefer the latter.
Just from a scientific perspective, more experiments that are able to learn from each other and adapt things they see working elsewhere into their approach should naturally lead to constantly improving schools.
A single lowest common denominator that nobody is allowed to escape from is doomed to failure by comparison.
Right now, the only parents with a choice are the ones who can afford all the options, including moving to a better public school district.
I'd be interested in seeing data showing this.
No.
> Even worst: you can manipulate parents, and perverse incentives all but guarantee that evil people will be attracted to this opportunity.
Of course, those evil people would never think of becoming teachers or professors in order to brainwash thousands of students over their careers.
Because that would be, what, wrong and stuff?
It is often related to efforts to create charter schools which are essentially private schools funded by taxes but run by a commercial or non-profit management company. These schools are usually regulated similarly to other private schools, having fewer regulations than the public schools and not under any direct authority of elected officials.
This system does not exist today, but there are many who would like to see it. Lots of people are fed up with what they perceive as the failings of public schools. Very few who advocate for vouchers seem to advocate for education funding in general - most seem to simply want their kids somewhere else.
Historically, the push for vouchers is a right-wing, small-government kind of effort intended to further undermine the public school systems, and also to allow government funds to support religious education which, under the current system, is not permitted.
> Vouchers are a great way to permanently cement the cradle to prison cycle.
I could as easily say they are a way out of the cradle to prison cycle for many at risk youths.
You want the brutal truth? Yes, that's exactly the solution. Want an education? Learn to behave in class.
And note that this is the only workable answer even in public school systems that aren't insolvent. No amount of money can educate a kid who refuses to be educated.
Who’s the job to teach those kids how to behave in class ? Their parents ? And what do you do if their parents don’t care (which is the common case with those kids) ? What do you do if the student has undiagnosed mental illness ? Entire generations of misbehaved children were in fact suffering ADHD. How do you manage a misbehaving children that is bullied every single morning when he comes to school ?
Not educating a kid is ruining its life and, since you speak with « brutal truth », yeah, just sentence those students to jail for life already, at least they’ll not have to struggle with hunger and homelessness during years.
Yes.
> what do you do if their parents don’t care
Then other family members should pitch in. Or other adults in the kid's life should pitch in. Or, if you believe the government can exercise such power with good judgment (I personally don't), you could have the parents' rights terminated and put the kids up for adoption.
What you can't do is ask schools to do the job, because that isn't what schools are for. Schools are not supposed to be rehabilitation centers for kids who can't be educated because they have bad parents. They're supposed to be places where kids who can be educated, are educated. Trying to make them into rehabilitation centers just ruins the education of all the other kids who can be educated.
> Not educating a kid is ruining its life
I entirely agree. But that doesn't change the fact that a kid who refuses to behave in class cannot be educated. Even if it's not the kid's fault, that's still the fact.
Also, if kids who can't be educated are put in schools, now you don't just have them not being educated, you have all the kids not being educated because of the constant disruptions. How is that an improvement?
[Edit: I see you mentioned specialized schools elsewhere in the thread. I'll respond to that point there.]
> just sentence those students to jail for life already
I didn't do that; the kids' parents did, by making them unable to be educated. So why aren't you all on fire to hold the parents accountable? Why are you going after me, who had nothing to do with it?
A lot of countries have dedicated schools for those children, so they damage nothing around them and can be treated individually. And in lot of cases, since it requires removing them from families where their problems comes, it’s a breadth of fresh air for them.
I agree, that special programs and schools are required for challenging students. But that is a different question.
I am sympathetic to the thought process behind it but the end results are hard to argue with.
Who pays for the specialized schools? If it's we, the taxpayers, then we have a right to expect that those schools do their jobs. Do they? Do you have any specific references you can give?
Are they getting an education now?
According to most metrics - including this article - more and more students are passed without meeting the requirements for their grade level.
You don't solve a problem by making it worse. Making smart and/or motivated kids stay in the same classrooms as disruptive and demotivated kids just turns the motivated kids into more disruptive and demotivated kids. Right now it looks like we can choose between some people getting educated, and almost nobody getting educated because of the disruptive environment.
Of course, it still takes thought to make sure that the public schools improve in this scenario, because they will also be fighting an adverse-selection headwind of being stuck with students from lower classes and those that the private schools don't want. But if you can shrink classes and cater classes to similar ability levels, I'd think this would win out.
In other words is it simply a case of $10 000 per child per year, so here's a voucher for 10k, go wherever you like?
There are no extra resources here for underperforming schools - in fact there are likely fewer resources. Public shools won't get smaller though, they'll just merge together to create fewer schools, and the bad teachers will go away.
And perhaps therein lies the root of the resistance to vouchers. It starts to measure school, and by extension, teacher quality. And that's not a rabbit hole teacher unions want to go down.
When vouchers were proposed in California in 1993, it was to be half the amount spent by the state on each child for public education. In 2000, it was to be $4000/year, when the state spent about $7000/year per student.
Of course, there's the big existing population in private schools that would also have been eligible for vouchers-- about 7%-- so these amounts probably still would drive down per-pupil spending in public schools. You'd need to roughly double private school enrollment to "break even" in per-pupil spending.
I favor something like 20-33%-- that might reasonably be expected to both make it significantly easier for parents to send their children to private schools and increase resources per student in public schools.
I teach at a community college and for years I've told newcomers to profession that one thing this job is not about is teaching.
So, what is about then?
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"
A kind of "choice-based" market system within a school.
I sincerely doubt that. Having a teacher who isn't struggling financially would be a huge improvement.
Also investment bankers have as much autonomy as a client allows them to. And MDs and VPs are as much responsible for their subordinates and client relationships (although not in the same way as teachers are for students).
I had several high-school teachers who weren't financially comfortable, yet still chose to spend hundreds or even thousands on their students during a school year.
Of course, those teachers would have been much more effective if they were in a financially stable position. I also would have had fewer quality teachers leave.
If so, maybe you’ve hit on a kernel of truth: we can’t risk paying teachers enough that they’d have the financial security to leave a bad work situation.
So when the workers have not other options, working conditions can stay low?
(I'm all for financially rewarding good teachers, but because their work is incredibly valuable. It's just ab incredibly hard context in which to separate the good and the bad without creating perverse incentives)
I would imagine education degrees are not particularly versatile: they’re meant to train you to become a teacher, more or less. Given that, it is not particularly surprising that teaching is one of the better-paying options once you commit to that pathway. However, there are plenty of other, career tracks: potential teachers might become accountants or engineers instead.
Zooming in a bit…the big “fringe benefit” is obviously summer vacation. Valuing that correctly is tricky, and the assumption used in that report is that it’s linear in the amount of time off: one week off is worth $X, so the summer vacation must be worth $15X. I would bet that’s not really true and it has declining marginal value like everything else.
This would imply that education degrees make their recipients better educators. There is no strong evidence of that.
https://www.brookings.edu/research/who-profits-from-the-mast...
> The fact that teachers with master’s degrees are no more effective in the classroom, on average, than their colleagues without advanced degrees is one of the most consistent findings in education research. In a study published in 2011, Paul Peterson and I confirmed this finding by comparing the student achievement of the same teachers before and after they earned master’s degrees, and found no impact.[1]
> This finding may be non-controversial among researchers, but it has largely been ignored by policymakers.
[1] It's easier to pick a good teacher than to train one: Familiar and new results on the correlates of teacher effectiveness
Neither holding a college major in education nor acquiring a master's degree is correlated with elementary and middle school teaching effectiveness, regardless of the university at which the degree was earned. Teachers generally do become more effective with a few years of teaching experience, but we also find evidence that teachers may become less effective with experience, particularly later in their careers. These and other findings with respect to the correlates of teacher effectiveness are obtained from estimations using value-added models that control for student characteristics as well as school and (where appropriate teacher) fixed effects in order to measure teacher effectiveness in reading and math for Florida students in fourth through eighth grades for eight school years, 2001–2002 through 2008–2009.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02727...
Not necessarily. It might just be an artifact of mandatory certifications. Suppose that teacher training were completely useless (debatable), but nevertheless legally required (mostly true, esp. for public schools) and expensive in terms of time or money (definitely true). I think you’d still expect increased earnings in those who obtained the certification, if only because they are now eligible for jobs where the supply of potential employees is limited. If they leave the industry, however, that certification often counts for very little, and the pay bump disappears. None of this, of course, tells you anything about conditions across industries.
The quotes in your comment are missing some important context. As §2.1 of the linked paper says, nearly all teachers in the US are somehow licensed, but this can be part of an education degree or an “alternative certification” for those with other degrees. Those two types of training are what the paper compares, not trained vs totally untrained. Critically, both take time and money.
The advanced degree data is also hard to interpret. It could be that a masters is totally worthless. However, selection effects also seem possible: teachers with more training could be given more challenging students or courses, or, as the paper proposes, underperforming teachers could preferentially do a masters to shore up their skills. They could also have more out-of-classroom responsibilities (e.g., curriculum development or admin), which would be consistent with how advanced degrees work in many other fields.
Anyway, all this is to say that “haha teachers are overpaid dummies” is, IMO, too simplistic and not supported by the data either.
This is orthogonal to what he is discussing; he's just discussing the relative pay picture (in-profession vs. out of profession) for one who holds such a degree.
> > The fact that teachers with master’s degrees are no more effective in the classroom, on average, than their colleagues without advanced degrees
This is -further- orthogonal and off-topic, because we're not talking about the relative merits of graduate education for teachers compared to bachelors degrees.
Taking things to an obviously absurd extreme, being unemployed is clearly not worth $400k/year: people work for far, far less.
As you say, longer blocks of vacation time definitely open up new possibilities, but perhaps there’s an inflection point: an 11-week trip seems like it’d be very nearly the same as a 10 week one.
Things get weird when much of the total comp is in benefits. For example, if your cash salary is $50k, that limits what you can do with your $100k “worth” of vacation.
I'm definitely a subject matter expert. And I'm able to get pretty deep content into middle school and high school classrooms. And working with smaller subgroups of students is a lot like mentoring junior engineers.
But man, dealing with a lot of kids in the room is a challenge-- keeping the lower third of students motivated; modulating strictness up and down so that you can have exuberance but not disruption; picking up on the subtle signs that there is a problem from outside spilling over into the classroom while multitasking and doing 3 other things. And... just coping when there's an entire class period that felt like a waste and you don't know why.
It is -hard-, and I'm dealing with an unusually easy teaching environment (classes of ~18-20 of well-behaved and academically advanced private school kids). I'm also not a core teacher and so I have the benefit of leaning on other professionals to do the heavy lifting in these areas. I still have hope I'll get good at it (this past year was a difficult one for me to self-assess my performance).
I do think that being an expert/having passion for what you teach is a bonus: if you have students that are already inclined to be engaged, that spark will help a little in getting and keeping their attention. But it is not the most important thing day to day.
Actually, my best performance lately was when I was a long-term sub in science classes teaching subject matter that is not my core competence. I could geek out and learn deeper stuff than I knew about volcanoes and share my surprise with the students, and that felt really good for engagement.
If you are a private school, sure. This is not the case for unionized public schools. Did you hear of that famous case where a superintendent fired multiple teachers for abysmal performance and even abusive behavior and was forced by the courts/union to reinstate them with back pay? It's very eye opening.
I'm sure there are states where teachers are underpaid. My state is in the top ten and that is not an issue here. I know a teacher making more than I do as a developer. The local district spends $14k per student per year (about average for the state). Money is not a problem here. There are still districts that have poor performance and test scores.
Instead if just trying to throw money at problems, we need to change the structure. Pay for performance would be a great way encourage good teachers and discourage people who perform poorly. It can be tricky to get the right metrics. The biggest issue is that the teachers unions oppose this.
You're mostly correct though, that they are separate things. For teaching technical topics well, both are needed.
Is there data on the average effectiveness there?
Now we could use a performance based pay system that could pay teachers more. Some of those systems fail to capture the right metrics. All of them are opposed by the teachers union. I think a slightly below average salary (factoring in benefits which are not typically seen in industry) with the potential to make more than average based on performance would be a good system.
Higher pay under a pay for performance structure and the ability to remove ineffective teachers would be good. This would bring it more in line with industry. It can be tricky to get the right metrics. The bigger issue is that the teachers union opposes any of them.
We have to reframe this for what it is, a person being paid to do a job.
The overall issue here is that when you let values guide decision-making, there's no "right" answer. There is no "right" answer to how much the US should spend on health insurance. Likewise there is no "right" answer to what to pay teachers.
The only way I see to solve this is to peg it to something set by a market. Markets operate under constraints. Maybe set pay (all-in including vacation, pension, benefits, etc) relative to a local private school that sets wages competitively based on what teachers can get vs what the school can afford to pay from fees. Modulate +/- 10% based on overall funding levels if you want to split hairs.
The alternative is much worse: a big slugging match between taxpayers and well-organized special interests (e.g. teacher unions), and news flash, the special interests usually win, because it matters much more for them than for the average taxpayer, and they're better at playing the long game (e.g. organizing member rolls, getting members to show up to meetings/vote, knowing relevant laws, developing relationships with city management/school board members). This is a big part of why secondary education in the US sucks. In any other business, software development, architecture, law, manufacturing, the management has discretion to manage -- set wages and salaries, hire, fire, supervise, and hand out bonuses. School managers (administrators) are absolutely handcuffed by collective bargaining agreements that restrict how they hire, fire, and promote.
You think I'm being hyperbolic? Tell me one other job, apart from a competitive process at a university, that gives people firing-proof "tenure". That's insane.
Its exactly what I'd expect if tecahers were underpaid but most switches from other jobs into teaching were from jobs taken as a student pre-qualification for entry-level teaching jobs and most switches out were post-retirement-from teaching “have something productive to do” jobs.
Meanwhile my anecdotal rebuttal is I graduated with 6 folks who went into teaching. All 6 left to do other things and within 5 years were making more than they would have at the end of a 30 year teaching career.
"We just need better teachers" says a group composed of people who are entirely sure the profession is beneath them.
I agree. I have a friend that took a lower paying job because he could not stand the handcuffs that the administration placed on teachers. Stuff like you have to give people a 50% if they put their name on the paper, you can't discipline students effectively, etc. I also know many teachers at private schools that make less than the public school counterparts but would not switch due to similar reasons.
[0] As per https://theconversation.com/three-charts-on-teachers-pay-in-..., the US starts out below the bar for tertiary-educated workers and gets even lower
Is this true? I have several friends who are teachers in the US and they say they get pay raises for experience and for any extra accreditation they pursue. Which isn’t to remark on whether the pay is satisfactory, but I get the impression that the pay does increase and can do so pretty significantly.
> Workers who switch from non-teaching jobs to teaching jobs receive a wage increase of roughly 9 percent. Teachers who change to non-teaching jobs, on the other hand, see their wages decrease by roughly 3 percent. This is the opposite of what one would expect if teachers were underpaid.
https://www.heritage.org/education/report/critical-issues-as...
> Our recent report, “Assessing the Compensation of Public-School Teachers,” [1] concluded that, on average, public-school teachers receive total compensation that is roughly 50 percent higher than what they would receive in private-sector employment. While salaries are at appropriate levels, fringe benefits push teacher compensation far ahead of what private-sector workers enjoy. Consequently, recruiting more effective teachers for public schools will be much more difficult than simply raising salaries.