It's crazy how underpaid teachers are.

How is it you'd institute a merit system? By the volume-of-students-per-hour, or what, exactly? The least complaining parents? Test scores that depend on parental involvement to be any good? How are disinterested or absentee parents or those parents who have it in for teachers accounted for in such a system?

Like capital class could tell the difference

The point was what makes it worthwhile isn't cash.

I think a lot of teachers do value the experience of teaching enough that they'll stick with it through thick and thin - but a lot of folks never even consider teaching due to just how poor the wages are.

When I say paid, I obviously also mean in intangible ways, such as having enough time to go to the toilet between classes. Or being insulated from being yelled at by parents and meekly saying sorry for telling off their particularly concentration-destroying kid.

Most people are not motivated by money, they reluctantly accept that they need to earn a living, but it is not a big driver per se in most people I know.

The education children get in public schools is abysmal.

Good teachers that actually educate are exceedingly rare.

The education requirements for teachers is a sick joke. If you get a master's degree in underwater basket weaving, have a tolerance for noise, you join a teacher's union, work 9 months out of the year, get weeks of holidays, get virtue by association, a retirement, and are basically employed for life. Unfireable.

The reason teachers aren't paid more is because what they do isn't worth paying them more.

Some of the smarter ones move to private schools, but more of the good ones burn out and either leave, or stop giving a shit. Formalized regurgitation and pavlovian schedule training prepares kids for 9 to 5 bullshit. Barely. The rest is hit and miss on a garbled curriculum of mostly irrelevant filler and fluff.

You can't continue inflicting the bullshit teachers on the good ones, or on the kids. Unions have to end for certain classes of employment, but especially teaching. A vast majority of teachers need to be canned and kicked to the curb.

Kids deserve better, and that starts with honestly addressing the problem in the classroom.

Let's just fire all the teachers and see if the next batch of applicants do any better.

I'm a software engineer and I'll happily admit that I'm grossly overpaid for the contribution to society I provide.

I'm curious what you think teachers should be paid for trying to educate our future.

Actual good teachers are rare.

Simply being able to fire the bad ones would improve things immeasurably, but for some reason people put all teachers on pedestals. It's grotesque. Give PTAs hire/ fire powers or better yet, give the public a vote, weighted by testing scores or some performance metrics. Union ride or die is a garbage way to do things.

Treating teachers like a special caste of unimpeachable holy people is nonsense.

They are already good at driving good teachers out of the profession without a formal direct personnel role, giving them more power would make things worse.

Everything going on in education over the past 20 years has been to add that overarching, cross school performance metric to measure teachers against each other. The problem is:

1. How do you measure performance? Tests. What will any educator or student tell you? Ends up test performance doesn’t really correlate much to the quality of the teacher. What it does correlate well to is income of the student’s parents. You teach in a school that serves low-income families? You’re fired. Also tests don’t factor that some students are special needs. You have a lot of special needs students in your class one year? Sorry. You’re fired.

2. No one could seem to find the money to incentivize good performance of teachers. Just fire poor performers based on dubious criteria. Not exactly motivating.

3. Outside of test scores, which are a bad representation of teacher quality and easily manipulated, there isn’t a driving force to fire teachers.

I don't understand why everyone believes teachers are so undervalued. On average, I don't think teachers provide that much value.

My pet peeve is teachers teaching children maths. How can you teach something that you don't understand?

Your argument is like hiring only minimum wage workers to build rockets, then complain that on average they don't provide that much value and can't solve integrals in their heads.

If we want better teachers, the solution is not surprising: pay more.

I don't say that teachers don't provide much value because they're useless, but because they are usually very generalized and most kids don't seem be to that interested in learning.

Even if you fix problem #1, you haven't fixed the arguably bigger problem. I also don't think that significantly increasing the quality of teachers would change much for most kids.

Faculty at colleges get teaching assistants, but their job is hardly to help with conflicts or prevent violence, their job is to help with instruction, grading, writing homework assignments, etc. When I was a teaching assistant, I myself tended to have 10-20 students in my section, and the class as a whole had close to a hundred people.

I'm most familiar with China (I taught middle-school classrooms of 55-60 in Yunnan around 2010, and had some friends in Guangzhou teaching 75-80), but I assume there have been & are plenty of countries with similar situations.