Counterpoint: teachers' pay is great, it's just backloaded in pension plans.
> 2. It seems that education degrees are seen as easier to achieve than others.
Yeah, but cost is the same and cost is what's important.
> 4. Many school problems are caused by disruptive children.
Bingo. Half the success of 4-year colleges is that it's the first time the bottom 50% of the students are filtered out.
Story time. I was an ESL teacher for 5 years in Asia and planned on coming home to the USA and getting my teacher's license in Math to teach at international schools. I am not currently a teacher, I'm a quant at a big bank.
Why didn't I end up in teaching? The licensing requirements in Minnesota are insane. Counselor's straight up told me I'd have to borrow ~$50k from the UMN for a MS in Curriculum and Instruction before I could teach.
The labor unions along with politicians have built a structure in which there is artificial scarcity of teachers. Not only is the profession filled with disrespect, but it's outrageously expensive and bureaucratic.
Lastly, the Economics of Education field is wild. Clearly there's value to basic reading/math/science education, but it's not clear at all whether teachers are schools matter than much (wealthy communities/parents matter a lot).
Edit: feel obligated to add that k12 education is financed and administrated at the local level, which means our experiences with this likely vary a lot. Mine are specific to trying to move back to the USA and become licensed in MN.
Counter-points to that:
You still have to pay the bills before retirement.
And this even assumes they get a good pensions, because a lot of states don't bother funding their public employee pensions properly (using current-year tax income for splashy announcements instead, kicking the liability down the road for the next politician):
* https://vtdigger.org/2021/01/17/painful-cuts-proposed-in-pen...
In various Canadian provinces teachers get decent salaries and good pensions: why can't US states do the same?
That's a valid point, but choices need to be made. Go to the teachers union and ask if they'd be willing to drop future pensions (and cap current ones to the benefits payed in so far) in exchange for a higher salary (based on the amount saved by not longer having pensions). My guess would be that they wouldn't even be willing to discuss it.
But actually, you're the only commenter I've so far seen in the thread who claims that their pensions are enough to make up for their salaries. Personally I think both salaries and pensions for (most) teachers should increase, in most countries including the US, and I have no problem with teachers' unions not being willing to have a discuss boxed into your opinion that they already get as much as they deserve.
That is not true, given that I was replying to you, and you were replying to the person that said _this_.
> Counterpoint: teachers' pay is great, it's just backloaded in pension plans.
That being said, in some places the teachers make good money when you include their pension; in other places they do not. It's not consistent across the country.
> You're talking as if "choices need to be made" doesn't extend to the question of whether or not they get enough tax dollars total
That was not my intent. My intent was to indicate...
If you think that teachers make enough when you include their pension, you can't complain that their pension causes a hardship early in their career; because the choice of a pension is likely not something they'd be willing to give up". If you think the pension causes a hardship earlier in the career and that that needs to be changed, then either 1) You do _not_ believe teachers make enough including their pensions, OR 2) You think pensions should be done away with (which I doubt will be supported by the teachers/union).
a) Oops! Not sure why I thought that diognesofsinope's comment and your comment were written by the same person, my bad.
b) You've either made the same mistake I did or you've excellently satirised my mistake, as you were replying not to me but to somebody else :P
So fair enough, sorry I thought your comment that I replied to was the owner of the original belief that salaries + pensions = enough currently, and then expanding on that belief.
You'll have to learn to live on a low salary for the first 5-10 years of your career. But pensions are paid based on your terminal salary, not your average salary. For elementary school teachers in my district the terminal salary was in excess of $100k as of 2017.
While that may be true, it's important to note that the pension is only salary (and usually only 80% of your terminal salary) and not benefits.
So you'd spend a significant part of that money on getting health insurance.
Most teachers who have earned full pensions wait to retire until 67 anyway so they can get Medicare (and not Social Security, because they don't qualify for it since they have their pension unless they worked another job as well).
My aunt did exactly above, and felt it was a moral duty to let new younger teachers have the spot (nevermind it meant that she was going to draw a pension from the system for more years than she'd actually worked).
Plenty of other teachers feel the same way, though obviously not all.
But basically the only reason we can afford to live in the Silicon Valley is because I'm an engineer with a decent salary. A lot of her paycheck went right back into her classroom, and with the hours she worked, she was basically make $3/hr, despite getting some of the highest teacher pay in the country.
And all of her coworkers were in the same boat -- almost every one of them, even the senior teachers, were married to engineers. The few that weren't either had family money or at least had parents who bought them a condo or house. Or a good friend. We let one of her young teacher friends live with us for a couple years until she managed to save up enough for a down payment on a small condo, and then got married and got a second job.
It is basically impossible to be a teacher in Silicon Valley without a highly paid spouse or multiple side hustles.
The existence of California -- and San Francisco, in particular -- makes discussions like this one difficult, because yes, sure, San Francisco is too weird to exist and is therefore basically irrelevant in national policy discussions.
I live in Rhode Island. East Coast. An hour from Boston. Expensive real estate, high-COL (top 10 or 15, depending on which numbers you trust), etc, etc -- and yet, we are just absolutely nothing at all like California, which is its own very weird outlier that has nothing to do with the experiences of the almost 300 million Americans who aren't Californians.
Not SF, but more people live in LA County than in the ten least popular states. If only we could ignore them and their 20 senators as completely irrelevant when it came to national policy discussions...
(We can't, and we don't.)
[0] I would tell California that they need to permit about 10x as much housing if they want any more federal help. The U.S. Government should not take on the role of dealing with the consequences of such an obvious self-own. "Our teachers can't find places to live and also it's illegal to build apartments on practically every single lot in the state -- what should we do?" is a question that answers itself.
If you want to be in the Union, then one thing you have to do is allow internal migration, and by that I mean actually allow it, which means you have to allow newcomers to build housing. If you're not allowing newcomers to build housing, then you are not actually in any real sense fulfilling your obligations to the rest of the country.
The public sector employees getting generous retirement packages are not the enemy. They are not the reason the rest of us are getting pissed on and told it's raining. That's the very wealthy and the politicians they've bought.
If anyone wants in on it, IT at a large public sector university.
25% of teachers in Minnesota leave the profession within three years [1] so they see no pension. This sort of weed out is common in a lot of professions and it's probably for the best, but weed out careers often combine high starting pay to attract a large pool of candidates. Public sector jobs exchange low pay for a pension and stability. Teaching doesn't offer the latter.
1. https://www.educationworld.com/a_news/state-report-reveals-o...
Even if you don’t contribute to the pension with cash, capital is still allocated on your behalf into the fund that could have been paid to you directly.
For taxpayer funded pensions, it is more like future taxpayers’ capital is allocated on your behalf.
Meaning, the actuary will calculate the government needs to set aside $2 today, the government leaders will say change that to $1 so the taxes are low today, and will end up actually contributing $0.50 because some of the funds were needed to make up for yesterday’s shortfall.
Admission is by lottery if there are more applicants than places, not by cherry-picking applicants. They hire teachers with subject-matter degrees and experience: they have some PhDs and a couple ABDs (all but dissertation). Half-jokingly they said they didn't look to hire people with teaching certificates, but wouldn't hold that against them. I had a master's degree in computer science and worked summers to get another master's.
The school was smaller (maybe 700 total students K-12; the class of 2022 graduated 26), which right there, I think, made for fewer behavior problems. There was a well-thought-out discipline policy which was enforced by the administration and backed up by the board and most parents. After all, parents had made a choice to not go to the regular district schools but enroll in this school instead.
I agree that the odds are much better for school success with smaller sizes, a focused curriculum (whether it's International Baccalaureate, Core Knowledge, STEM, arts, or whatever), highly qualified teachers, and supportive parents.
Filtering out kids who's parents aren't willing or able to complete the application process is the cherry-picking.
The admissions people take some time to represent the whole story or big picture to prospective parents, because the school is not for everybody. I don't think it's cherry-picking to encourage parents to find the best school for their children, even if it isn't yours.
The school accepted applications from parents who had had unsatisfactory experiences at former schools, who were willing to go through the extra steps to try to get better outcomes for their students. The school had its share of free-and-reduced-lunch students and students with individual education plans and such.
I heard parents give heartfelt thanks to everyone at the school who had helped their child overcome what other schools termed learning disabilities. Is it the opposite of cherry-picking to accept a student other schools have, in effect, given up on? I believe the small size of the school and individualized attention helped many students in similar situations.
Why? Because "cherry-picking" is bad and the best things for children are good?
It's, of course, exactly cherry-picking to find the children with the most interested and motivated parents, then filter them down to the ones that you like best. Fuck the kids with bad or no parents.
This isn't a moral condemnation of you, it's just the fact-based explanation for why schools that you have to apply to produce better academic outcomes than default public schooling. If those public schools could just drop the cohort of students whose parents couldn't be arsed to apply to a special school, their quality would also go up.
There is bias in everything, but at least they aren't adding more than needs there needs to be.
At some point, some school is going to have to take the kids who don’t bother applying, since we can’t put 100% of schools behind an application and preserve its benefits, and we should not be surprised that such schools do worse, if the ones who do apply happen to be better.
Yes, getting born with parents who care about you is definitely a smart life hack.
I received my teaching license in Wisconsin and transferred to Minnesota by doing little more than passing the licensure exam. I did not have an MS at that time or when I started teaching in the Minneapolis suburbs.
I believe you were somewhat misled.
Grad school at the UMN is ~$10k a semester (https://onestop.umn.edu/finances/costs/tuition). Would have been ~30 years old, $40k in debt as a beginning teacher in MN. Amazingly, none of that includes actual experience teaching lol.
The teachers union has been waging a war against future teachers to benefit current teachers for 30 years and this is what that looks like after 30 years.
Similar to housing and zoning, education is a government racket.
this statement is presented as The Truth, do you have some information that backs this up?
It's absurd to think someone needs to take a $1k 'Philosophy of Mathematics' class to teach 10th grade geometry.
Considering that the primary complaint 10th grade math students have about math is often "How is this relevant to me and my life?", wouldn't studying the philosophy of mathematics help a teacher in addressing this concern?
This is no longer true in most places, and was never a good enough reason to justify paying starting teachers poverty wages.
New York State, which I think most will agree is a state with a strong teachers' union and all that goes with it, has been phasing out defined-benefit pension plans over the past few decades. My mother-in-law, who retired about 10 years ago, was among the last wave to get the "Tier I" full-salary pensions; if you become a teacher in NYS now, you get a much less generous package (I don't know offhand whether it's still defined-benefit, just less, or if they've switched to defined-contribution plans now).
Yet another counter counterpoint - there are still companies and government jobs with defined pension plans that pay far more than teachers. Even without those, there are still many, many jobs requiring a comparative amount of education, far fewer hours worked, and pay more even once you subtract maximizing 401k contributions yearly (let alone considering the added costs of buying school supplies).
I feel like most people haven't been in an actual ~5th grade classroom in a long time -- literally half of it is playing games/trying to have fun.
And Youtube, good god has the educational content on Youtube evolved in the last decade.
The rest of their day 8:30 AM - 3:30 PM is composed of maths, language, science, history, and technology education all done on paper or at purpose-designated computers. Next year they will receive their own devices.
The playing with blocks and Lincoln logs ended in kindergarten, with the introduction of spelling test and arithmetic quizzes in first grade, so I’m not sure if I’d characterize the work my childrens’ teachers do as “literally half of it is playing games/trying to have fun” or that “[h]alf the reason to be a teacher is because half the job is having fun.”
Seems like it is hard work, with both practical instruction directed toward 20-30 children with varying levels of discipline, interest, and abilities, and management of just as many if not more parents with similarly varying levels of discipline, interest, and abilities.
This is a public school in one of the largest state systems in the country (United States) so perhaps your experience is informed by something more niche.
It’s just like thinking enjoying having a pet means you’d love working with dozens of dogs all day. If you’re lucky to have well behaved dogs, it’s okay. But you’re most likely going to have some barking all day, one’s going to vomit, some are going to fight, and any time anything happens the owners completely blame you and will threaten you in every way they can imagine.
Teaching is work. I have the feeling you haven't been in a 5th grade classroom in a long time. Or any grade. People get into teaching because they want to help others. Especially if they get into special education.
You know, having known and being related to multiple teachers, I've not heard any of them express it as -fun-. Meaningful, important, challenging, yes, but not 'fun'. The two college professors I know have expressed it a such, but that's it. Of the teachers I had, I could see some of the advanced placement ('gifted') teachers viewing it as fun, because we were generally well behaved and smaller class sizes, but even there a common through line was taking advantage of the class' temperament and offloading the curriculum back onto us (i.e., "pick a topic in (X) to teach to everyone").
There is a tradeoff in lesson planning; there are resources around the proscribed curriculum (i.e., teach to the book), but that is decidedly not fun or interesting and the kids -will- misbehave more; the alternative for most classes (the advanced placement as mentioned above notwithstanding) is to prep something more interesting, but that requires using more time outside the classroom for 'work'.
Outside of the workday, which runs from 7-3:30 or so (and sometimes both before and after, if there are faculty meetings and things, or if they recruit from the teaching pool to help with kid drop off/pick up), there is grading, so it is not uncommon for a teacher's workday to run close to 12 hours.
You do, as you say, get summers off, but again, nearly all the teachers I know use that time to look for summer jobs, because the pay is so poor. Sometimes it's summer school or just independent tutoring, sometimes it's service industry work; nothing quite like running into your students from the prior year while handing their mom their McDonald's from the drive through. The only teacher I know who didn't (recently retired) do that had inherited their house, so had no rent/house payment to make, and -could- live, frugally, on a teachers' salary.
No they're not. We just want qualified people teaching our children. There's a reason why Minnesota has some great schools.
Pensions are cheap. I have a much better pension plan than the teachers in my state and the long term cost is about 16% of payroll - 8% from my employer and 8% from me. Hardly unreasonable cost, and yet I'll be able to comfortably retire around 55 and never worry about money again. That's not insignificant but it's not what is causing public schools to be underfunded.
Nonsense. Even the most basic look at the numbers shows you this is absolutely false.
Let's take a rich liberal state first. MA. Average teacher salary: $60k. Average pension $43k. Teachers contribute 9.78% of their salary in order to get this pension! The state contributes 18.17% This is not all that different from a 401k.
You're confusing teachers with police officers, where the average pension is twice as high.
> Why didn't I end up in teaching? The licensing requirements in Minnesota are insane. Counselor's straight up told me I'd have to borrow ~$50k from the UMN for a MS in Curriculum and Instruction before I could teach.
Then you got terrible advice.
Because the licensing requirements in Minnesota are very lax: https://mn.gov/pelsb/aspiring-educators/portfolio/
You take two tests and fill out some forms. You don't even need a Master's in education.
They should really tighten that up. btw, you can definitely do that MS for <$20k online.
In our district, once you qualify for a pension you get 2% of your terminal salary per year you work. If you work for 40 years, you will be paid 80% of your last year's salary.
I quoted you the actual statistics for MA. https://www.teacherpensions.org/state/massachusetts
Teachers pay into the system, quite substantially, at rates that are similar to what you would pay for a 401k. And their average pensions are quite low.
This is nothing like a 401k.
Ironically, given the social politics implied by the author, a significant amount of administration bloat is specifically tied to DEI.
2. Well, they are. A teaching certification used to only require two years of higher learning compared to typical 4 for other things. That said, most teachers are actually more highly educated than the average person because schools use educational attainment as direct basis for pay. My mother has a Master’s and is shy only a few hours and a dissertation from being a Ph.D. This was relatively common, especially for special ed teachers or those who focus on a specific subject like Math or English.
3. Partly because school in the US is boring and designed to grind out individuality in favor of making good industrial cogs. We no longer have an economy that rewards industrial cogs so students resent their school experience in adulthood as they discover how illy prepared they are for the world. That and parents/social fabric encourages and allows anti-social behavior and viewpoints.
4. Yes, and parents not giving a shit isn’t even a cause, it’s a symptom of larger and more intractable social and cultural problems in parts of America. Fixing this is nearly impossible because those most motivated to fix it are even more heavily motivated to ignore significant amounts of critical data about the causal factors.
5. Yes. Scaling is hard, and we’ve roughly tripled the population since we built the institutionalization of education in the US. It’s obvious a breakpoint exists somewhere and we failed to pivot.
If you take any school budget, and strip away everything that is not an actual classroom teacher, you will find that ~1/3 or less goes to "frontline" teaching costs.
Another 1/3 goes to special ed and all that is attendant with that. I mean, my district BOUGHT a car and hired a FULLTIME driver for one student who had to be taken to special programs. You have 1:1 class aids for many kids. Special ed is < 10% of kids, and even then the huge costs add up for the 1%. This is a massively subscale operation where every school is legally obligated to deliver services.
Then you have the last 1/3 which is everything else. Food, facilities, sports, admin, transportation, etc. Admin is actually a leaner slice than most unless you are getting into really small schools where you have a principal on top of the teachers and that adds significant salary. In bigger schools this fades away with scale.
Basically most of her time is spent dealing with the one kid. Or the aftermath. Not fun calling parents telling them that Susan is bleeding from a thrown chair. Of John was assaulted in the bathroom.
Lots of time spent chasing kid when he runs away.
Never mind her own wounds. These are kindergartners.
This year She’s currently has 2 full time aids for basically 2 kids. She only got the aids because she threatened to quit on the spot.
She deals with other 22 kids.
Pay is crap.
A lot of time and talk gets spent about equity between poor and rich kids, or white and black kids, but you rarely see talk of normalizing the spending differential between special and gen pop.
As I said elsewhere, I defy anyone to claim that Finland doesn't care about kids' special needs. They have the best education in the world. What percent do they spend on it?
because it's hard to get, poopy. Even for the US.
I can find their total spending & their general policies on special ed (which I did share), but not that. On the other hand, we do have some Finnish people on HN, so maybe they know.
> If Finland is really significant to this debate
If? They have what's generally considered the best education in the world.
To be fair the author was fairly balanced and presented the arguments against, such as that they tend to come from wealthier families that can provide that support, that they will be fine on their own without it whereas the bottom 1% need the support, and so on.
But it was an interesting thought experiment none the less. What would our society look like if we spent as much on the top 1% of students as the bottom? Or do we already via college education?
Spending for gifted children means putting other kids even higher up the pecking order than their own average kid. Who wants to spend a bunch of money to watch their kid get left further behind the front of the pack?
I saw the corrupt administrators in certain schools effectively diverting funds for things like special education by hiring their friends for the well-paid jobs like special ed and resource specialist and then calling a substitute (me) to actually do the job.
And that isn't saying this always happens (I imagine the smaller suburban schools with people involved would have less of this). But the existence of these special programs present a great opportunity for graft and so there's incentive to avoid making special education at all efficient.
I'm guessing "special ed" costs have increased the most. Why is that?
In Finland and Singapore (two countries with education systems among the top in the world):
1) What's the percentage of education spending that goes to special ed?
Looking at Finland, we can find their total spending:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/538122/general-governmen...
and we can find ample evidence that they care just as much about special needs kids as the US does, if not more:
https://www.heischools.com/blog/finlands-approach-to-special...
What I'm having a harder time finding is: what percent of the education budget goes to special ed?
This in turn leads to building a society in which the disabled are discarded as an inconvenience to society, rather than as people with equal rights to public accommodation.
If I give Johnny, Jimmy, and Karen an equal investment of $20 and 20 hours of labor each for their education, I haven't "discarded" Karen, even if she needs more money and more time to get the same equality of outcome. In the same vein, I don't at all want to "discard" special ed children, I just want any public funds provided to the other children to be a nearly equal monetary investment.
>That’s why we have laws like the ADA
The period after passing of the ADA was associated with sharp drops in employment inclusion of the disabled [0]. The ADA may have actually been one of the biggest drivers of the discarding of the disabled. Not only that, the ADA encouraged racketeering against business owners for disingenuous accommodation complaints (someone off the street runs up, asked to use your bathroom, you allow the public to use it just this once and bam ADA complaint as they were secretly working for a lawyer checking for the "right" kind of grab bar) where businesses sometimes end up closing accommodations to the public. Personally I am heavily against the ADA as I believe eliminating these "protections" helps protect the disabled's inclusion within society.
An equal $4000/student/year is not enough to hire anyone for a special needs student, who 1) won’t be able to benefit from the economy of scale in a normal classroom and 2) has needs that require a larger portion of a person’s time to attend to.
You need many multiple times the investment to accommodate kids with special needs because they have special needs.
>An equal $4000/student/year
You're off by almost 4x the average if you live in the US. For reference, for the $~16k spent per year, I was able to (privately) hire someone to take care of my infant over 40 hours a week (and all 12 months), an infant that needed around the clock care and couldn't be counted on to go unwatched for even a few seconds and who constantly irritated others with utterly mind-shattering screaming colic.
Let's say the state spends $15K per student with no disabilities. The state says to the parent, "OK, we'll give you $25K to take care of your kid."
The parents grumble, but they find a school that caters to those kids and will take that voucher. Would it be much worse than they're getting now? I doubt it. If it is, the state can subsidize that school, and probably still end up spending less than they are now.
Now it's a question of money, as it should be for a state-wide program. Would the state say "we'll give you $150K to take care of your kid?" Probably not. Really extreme cases that need that much money could be handled by other public & private organizations, but the state gains a measure of reasonableness for the school budget.
I disagree with the rest. Universal schooling is an important part of a health society. It is up to the government to provide adequate funding for its obligations. Systematically discriminating to ease budget constraints is not an ethical solution.
For example, all the classroom aids are typically assigned as teaching costs. But the reality is that they are assigned to individual students with IEPs (individual education plans), ergo, they should be categorized as special ed.
Same thing in pulling out transportation. Or tuition to other districts. Admin dealing with special ed grants and recordkeeping. It goes on and on...
On the other hand, as a way to provide social services to underprivileged children they are pretty decent. But that's not what they're advertised as (school isn't known as an acronym for Social Care and Health Out Of a Location), and people end up pissed.
The absolute dollar amount does matter, and it has nothing to do with being assholes or not. There are different ways to meet children's needs and spending an infinite amount of money is just not sustainable.
It’s easy to say X is expensive or Y takes up Z part of the budget. We saw a lot of that with the whole defund the police movement. But no one asks what should X cost? Maybe it’s already at the required level, or even less, despite it being such a large percentage of the budget?
But the reality is it a) very expensive and b) very disruptive. As some siblings mention, you will often have a class with 3-4 adults, only one of which is a teacher. And then several students who (through no fault of their own) can barely hold it together. For the 90% of kids in class, this is not helpful. And distributing it amongst many classes vs a more centralized special ed delivery system compounds the cost.
We have aggressively used the school system as a distribution point of social services. Again, this seems logical. But this takes focus away from what the main intent is for the school system.
There are pros and cons to this approach. I don't exactly know the answer, but instead of blaming administrators or teachers, we should be looking at what else we are asking schools to do besides educate. I know personally that the principals and superintendents spent less than 20% of their time thinking about how to make education better for the 90%.
Instead, all students would be better served (and served more efficiently) if schools would admit that people learn at different rates, and segregated the children based on that. The disruptive special ed kids, who are often years behind, should have very small classes with other kids of the same level and lots of attention from teachers. Conversely, the kids who are good at math or reading should be put in accelerated classes.
Unfortunately, this kind of separation makes parents unhappy: they want their kids to all be in the "super special" classes despite the fact that on average, their kids are average. Parents are the ones who vote for school board, so school boards are unlikely to do anything that makes parents unhappy.
Conversely, the kids who do need tons of resources are usually kids with severe mental or developmental disabilities. These kids usually have a 1:1 aide telling them what to do and trying to help them either understand the lesson or work through a totally different lesson (which also must be a humiliating experience - I would never want that for my child). I have seen both of these cases in public schools. These kids would certainly be better served by having a teacher who can pay attention to their needs instead of a teacher who can't and an aide who tries to keep up.
Both are total grifts. I'd rather that money went to teachers.
For example, each school in my county has at least one person dedicated to managing iPads and tech equipment. This isn’t the networking and server support or even desktop support, that’s done centrally. This is just a human who hands them out, collects them, and processes warranty claims. The person knows nothing about the equipment and is basically just an asset manager.
That’s one of many examples of people who don’t perform much value add and take resources from higher priorities. Why not hire a dedicated librarian who also manages devices but can help with organizing information, research, etc.
You might argue that managing inventory should be automated but... that's just not how systems involving lots of random people work. The reason it's a full-time job to keep track of iPads and laptops is because the people using those things are kids and distracted parents. Stuff gets lost, power adapters get yanked and broken, etc. A parent stuffs an iPad in a random bin in the teacher's classroom. They think they "returned" it, but no one knows it's in there. Someone has to do actual communication and legwork to sort all that out. It's a real job.
My point is that hiring an iPad manager as a 100% human is a bad idea. I suggested hiring an additional librarian, not adding extra work to the existing librarian.
The librarians in my city manage computers in the library and manage short term loaners of tablets and laptops.
I work with librarians who have masters and phd and I don’t work in education. It’s an interesting job.
I think I have enough of an understanding that it’s fair that a librarian could manage the iPad distribution for a school. It’s busy two times of the year and other times they could do more productive tasks.
The current iPad wrangler is there all year and does nothing beyond hand out and collect iPads and coordinate the repairs (<5%/year).
A difference in learning format that can be beneficial to some. It is helpful just to introduce children to technology as well. And for some it may spark interests that paper does not.
This is under-appreciated. I don’t know about other 1990s kids, but a lot of my teachers growing up pushed a “question authority” attitude. Like, painting the Tinker anti-Vietnam War protestors in a positive light, etc. “Follow social norms without questioning them” definitely wasn’t a thing we were taught. Is it really surprising then that you ended up with a generation who thinks Joe Rogen is a smart guy they should listen to?
If by industrial cog, you mean someone who's suited for work in manufacturing, the US certainly isn't producing those at even the level it's reduced manufacturing base needs. It's hard to say what the exact aim of the US education system is though it does produce some amount of people sort-of competent for the jobs that are out. It's one of X many bureaucracy/industries that both produce stuff, that once produced stuff quite efficiently but become more and more characterized by an interlocked combination of administrators/pseudo-entrepreneurs who use their connections and framework of capital investment to soak a large portion of the funds going into the industry. I mean, aside from education, you have health care, the police/judicial/prison complex, the construction industry (note recent mention of $4 billion planning in the creation of high speed rail) and etc. You could say the special product of the US education system is people appropriate to be either petty bureaucrat such as social workers or people appropriate to be client of the petty bureaucrats. But of course, the education still does, to some extent, teach people ordinary skills for more ordinary jobs but in fashion abusive to both teachers and children and profitably to those in the rackets.
But that guy was awesome, fun, and super clever. His lowest score was an A-, and he had a great character. I'm sure he had to work ten times harder than I ever did just to get into that position, but I never heard him complain. Personally, I think keeping a mind as great as his in some sort of hedonic trance instead of letting him learn and contribute would have been a great loss, and possibly quite cruel.
What do countries with education systems that are superior to the US in almost every metric do with these kids? We need to look at the best way to handle it, not just how much we care in the abstract.
Did the University pay for that? Or did that student / his family carry pretty much all those costs, except maybe the campus being built to ADA requirements? If a parent wants to spend 10x on their kid verse the 'average' kid I have no problem with that at all.
Gifted children fall under the banner of special education as well. They also require resources average students don't.
Meanwhile I saw nearly daily the math teacher spend 20 minutes trying to console the girl in the previous period who would beat the chair I was going to sit in senseless.
Personally I would have been much happier in 'gen pop' anyways and then there would have been even easier bullshit tests while I spent my public school time reading college CS and chemistry books.
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>You were in "gen pop". Honors classes are just that, honors classes. Gifted classes are another thing altogether.
My school was a country school, we didn't have anything beyond 'honors' classes. If you want to call yourself gifted and the people in my country school's honor class not, that's fine, I don't think we were particularly gifted. In my experience the student:teacher ratio were significantly tighter in these classes. I realize some people only consider 'gifted' as the very most challenging class in a large school system (not including 'honors' even if that is the highest available in the school) whereas others may call the gifted classes anything more challenging than the 'normal' core (I call gen-pop) curriculum.
>If you agree with the guy I responded to, in that you wouldn't mind removing the mentally challenged from the school system entirely, boy, that's not a good look for you.
I would think someone so eager to call themselves 'gifted' and the people they are speaking with 'not' would understand this is what's called a straw-man. I'm only asking for the gen-pop kids to be given roughly equal financial per-capita investment as special-ed.
>ifted classes are like 5 to 10 students.
Lower ratios to the extent you spend significantly disproportionately more than the average student are exactly the kind of special treatment I'm against when using public funds. If you want a private school for that where the student or their family pays for it, have at it.
If you agree with the guy I responded to, in that you wouldn't mind removing the mentally challenged from the school system entirely, boy, that's not a good look for you.
Because the difference between the average student to those with severe learning disabilities is the same as the difference between truly gifted students and even the honors students. And here's how you can tell the difference. Honors classes are always a full class. I've not been in a single honors class that wasn't the average class size. Gifted classes are like 5 to 10 students. I personally knew every other gifted student in my high school. Grades 9 - 12, knew them all. There were not that many, roughly 30 any given year. Across all four grades.
(That's not to say DEI is necessarily benign or useful; the jury is still out for me.)
Incorrect: it depends on the state, the subject, and the grade level. For secondary education of a core subject, in Michigan, for example, I had to take all of the classes for a normal 4-year degree in the subject, plus taking the equivalent of two years of education classes. Taking 18-20 credit hours per semester, it took me five years to graduate. So the requirements can actually be much more difficult than a normal degree.
When I taught Title I, there was an additional requirement that you had to be "highly qualified". That typically meant a 4-year degree out equivalent experience, no matter the subject or grade level.
Many teachers have a master's not due to pay, as you claim, but because states essentially mandate it. In Michigan you're required to get continuing education credits. I believe the requirement drops off once you have a master's. So it doesn't make a lot of sense not to get one.
How exactly do you mean this?
The U.S. spent $90.5 billion for "Elementary, Secondary, and Vocational Education" in 2021* (a subset of "Education, Training, Employment, and Social Services"), which is 1.3% of $6.82 trillion in total 2021 government expenditures. Compare to $696.5B for Medicare, $754.8B for National Defense, etc.
If anything, this illustrates how relatively unimportant a base level of education is in the U.S.
* https://datalab.usaspending.gov/americas-finance-guide/spend...
Per the US Department of Education[0], the US spends 34% more per student than the OECD average. At the post-secondary level, the US spends double the OECD average.
[0] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp...
My state of Washingon spent $17.5 billion on schooling this year, on top of that federal funding.
That looks like ~28% of the state budget, and per-student spending appears to very high (the 4th highest in the U.S.). Washington is spending 1.5X per student as compared to California, and is apparently not seeing commensurate improvements. I wonder if there are folks working on debugging the apparent inefficiencies of state education systems.
I was a disruptive child and my parents were the opposite of people who didn’t give a shit. Both of them highly valued education and spent plenty of time with me. they just had to contend with a child who wasn’t well behaved at school and it was genetics more than anything they did. They spent thousands of dollars on therapists and medicines and it didn’t help that much. Luckily for me, puberty seemed to turn things around and I ended up doing well in high school and very well in college (at a good school). Now I’ve got two little trouble makers of my own and it’s pretty obvious to me where they got those genes from.
I agree that dealing with problematic kids is a pain in the ass for teachers and I do try to thank them when I see them, and I even agree that parenting is often the issue, but a lot of it is genetics and luck.
A good friend of mine at high school was very bright, kind of a troublemaker, diagnosed with ADHD, took prescription Ritalin, was a bit of a pain in the ass with his teachers, but had parents who cared and he ended up graduating and doing fine.
I’ve asked this question of some acquaintances that prioritize sports above all else. Their kids play different sports all year around and are on all these traveling teams. I’ve asked them if they seriously think their kids will be good enough to get a college scholarship or play pro sports (I’ve seen them, they won’t be). They just shrug. I have to presume this is how they were raised and so they are doing it to their own kids.
Because in order to even get a shot to play professionally, you have to play well in college, preferably at a notable school. In order to get a shot to play well in a notable college, you have to play well in high school. That means you have to make varsity, play on the team, be a starter. And that usually means you have to be ready to play when you get to high school. And the best way to do that is to play peewee, travel ball, etc.
You'll find out if the kid is coachable, if he can be made coachable, if he's got aptitude, etc.
I don't know if they think their children just aren't capable intellectually or what.
There is a whole industry around youth sports that is designed to extract money from parents. That doesn't mean that the kids don't enjoy it though.
How does a parent prioritize their kid growing tall?
Now I have a highly disruptive 2-year old that Preschool calls "behavioural issues" and wants psychologists involved. And I'm like "yes, we're willing to have those conversations", but secretly I think "He'll have the same journey as me - I will need to make sure he's sufficiently physically and intellectually stimulated for the next 20 years, and everything will turn out fine." Of course it's not fair to place that burden on others - his peers, or educators - and I will do as much as I can in extracurricular time, BUT, there's only so much my partner and I can do.
Here is the problem. Teachers in America compare themselves to professionals, but their test scores are below the average for college educated people generally: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2017/.... Now 40% of college graduates don’t even get a job that requires a college degree. Disproportionately, those are people with lower aptitude scores. Teachers as a group are right on the borderline above those folks.
Teacher salaries are not low compared to jobs typically held by people with similar test scores—especially when you account for degree-required jobs that pay a premium for mathematical aptitude (accounting, engineering), or dealing with blood and body parts (nursing).
But even if education major SAT scores are lower on average, it it seems like backwards thinking when talking about pay. The point isn't that all current individual teachers deserve to be paid more; it's that teaching as a profession should pay more to attract talented people who otherwise pursue more lucrative fields, just like any other profession. If you paid doctors and engineers low wages, you'd probably fail to attract some top talent as well. But that doesn't then become a justification for those low wages since the low wages caused the issue in the first place.
It assumes that education majors have similar SAT scores to other majors in a given school. That’s an assumption, sure, but I think a pretty reasonable one.
It's not at all the case that teaching isn't competitive with other degree-requiring white-collar professions; depending on where you are in the CS/IT food chain, it's quite competitive with tech.
Defined-benefit pensions have become so alien to private market jobs that it's easy to overlook how valuable they are, or to forget that a lot of people are very happy to work towards a strong retirement.
IT in my area pays anyone with a pulse and basic computer skills $40k. A rookie developer from our land grant university can easily start at $60K with no experience. And that same developer can earn $100k with two years of good experience. Show me a 3rd year teacher pulling in $100k in my school district. No such unicorn exists.
The city doesn't have a DB pension, just a 403k.
Granted, the newbie teacher gets 1.5 months off in the summer, compared to 2 weeks PTO for the developer.
After 10 years, even assuming the teacher gets a Masters, the pay differential is huge.
How about you look at the number of teachers employed by OPS vs DC West? They have one elementary school, one middle school, and one high school in that district vs OPS serving an area encompassing hundreds of thousands of residents.
You were excited about 100k/year in California? Please tell me that's not the Bay area where that still leaves them unable to purchase a home anywhere near the area.
You also understand extracurriculars are a lot of extra time and work for a bit of extra pay, right? One of the biggest complaints I've heard is that teachers are being forced into running extracurriculars because they already work way too many hours for the pay and for any kind of work/life balance.
I don't know what "excited" means. By national standards, I've been extraordinarily lucky; a $100k/yr comp package wouldn't excite me right now. But I can compare what teachers make to what other white collar professionals make, and I understand how to account for the rest of the compensation package --- a defined-benefit pension in many major districts (actually, a defined-benefit pension would light me up right now) and an enormous allotment of vacation days.
Speaking only to my local school district, which breaks comp out, extracurriculars are not a "bit" of extra money; it's as much as a 20% pay boost. My real point though is simply that the base salary is where most teacher comp packages start, and there's other things that go into it.
I'm not saying "teacher" is the best deal in the whole economy, but in major metro school districts, it's not a bad deal.
And, just to be ultra clear: obviously there are a lot of school districts, especially rural districts, where this isn't the case at all.
You don't need to be a genious to teach. You need to have good social skills with kids, care about doing a good job, and a mastery of the subject matter (which not very demanding for even average-intelligence adults, at least until the latter part of high school).
You left out "willing to do whatever it takes for THAT kid, regardless of what the textbooks or principal or union says."
I'm not a betting man, but I'd feel comfortable wagering that you are a STEM grad with solid SAT scores.
That’s a bit more accurate than your comment.
So the problem I have with this argument is that it implies that virtually all of the essential skills (as I see it) that are required to be a good teacher shouldn't be compensated. Instead, teachers should be compensated for the skills that make them a good engineer or historian.
That said: practically every college student knows that the Education majors are the dumbest people on campus.
I agree. Some of the nicest, kindest and best people I've ever met aren't very bright, and some of the nastiest, stab-you-in-the-back jerks are quite intelligent.
That's not to say the converse isn't true for many folks, but "intelligence" isn't a proxy for the quality of a human, IMHO.
2. They are, and there is a useless but direct correlation to pay and degree attainment. Having more degrees will get you more money, but rarely has any correlation to the quality of teacher.
3. As in most industries where the customer isn't the payer compensation does not correlate to performance. The worst teachers make the same as the best, or more if they have the degrees.
4. Equality, no child left behind and related concepts dictate that the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Any efforts at exclusion are met with resistance, typically by unaffected / uninvolved parties.
5. The idea here is that consolidation of services will save money. The trend away from neighborhood schools to mega-schools / school complexes looks good from a burecratic view.
2. Depending on the state you may not even need one
3. It's the parents, not the kids that make them feel this way. Kids typically love their teachers
4. 100%
5. Building a new school is 10-100s of millions typically. Why it costs so much is worthy of debate, but plunking down new schools these days is far more costly than in the past.
Any loss that occurs, no matter how low probability it is, get litigated and once litigated gets incorporated into expected losses by insurance companies and mitigations for it get stipulated into the insurance coverage.
Fire, handicap accessibilities, school shootings, tornado, earthquake, trip and falls, sports equipment injury, etc.
If an entity does not cover its ass head to toe on “known” risks, and lets a loss happen due to negligence, then it is on them. The response to this is lots of protocols and code requirements, and lots of additional bureaucracy to continuously check if those protocols and code requirements are being followed.
2) How little do you pay babysitters? At, say, $5 per kid per hour, a teacher of 20 would be doing pretty well, and that's on the low side of class sizes these days I think.
Yes. Gone are the days that you would hire a teacher to teach you something. These days you turn to automated teaching services. The fact that the word teacher is now synonymous with the K-12 school teacher further emphasizes that the career in general has effectively disappeared. As before, "teaching" has survived as a career where childcare is the actual service offered.
> How little do you pay babysitters?
In my case it is $3 per hour for a daycare provider that cares for no more than five children at a time. If the babysitter cared for more children I would expect to pay less as I would get much less value for my dollar. The quality of care and attention declines as the number of children increases.
Large class sizes are accepted because we are going for bang for our buck over quality of care. If teachers were charging on the same order per child as other daycare providers providing higher quality care, indeed it would be good money, but there would be a shift to putting children into those better care facilities and so it wouldn't last. Why pay the same amount for lesser care?
I would imagine the 10-20x value-adders aren't incentivized and are probably actively de-incentivized in the faculty senate/union dynamic unless they literally love the job that much which is debunked in the OP post.
Like I said before, we don't even recognize the existence of general teachers anymore, with the word under typical use now only referring to those who work at schools for children.
You have not heard of automated teaching as a thing because we invent names for automation. The automated kitchen servant isn't called an automated kitchen servant, it's called a dishwasher (among others).
Likewise, automated teachers are not called automated teachers. They are given names, depending on the teaching method at play. Automated teacher is used here as a generalization as the specific automation is immaterial.
Wishful thinking. If kids magically taught themselves there would be no schools. Some do. Most don't.
Children require care. Again, "teaching" survives when children are present because childcare is the functional service offered. There is no impetus to move to automation here as childcare is not easily automated, necessitating a warm body anyway. However, the value of a teacher is constrained by the value of childcare as there is no longer market value in teaching alone.
Like I said in the other comment, teaching outside of schools for children isn't even recognized in the word teacher anymore because the career, as a general one, effectively no longer exists. You've proven my point.
Hell no. What made you think that? Kids like teachers that are likeable and hate those that are hateful.
You lose some efficiency of scale with smaller schools, but they'll be cheaper individually.
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/02/the-ex...
"...men continued to make up most of the high-school teaching force until the late 1970s"
Humans are still largely primal and male presence tends to instill respect and behavior changes in younger people; I suspect the absence of it has not helped the current situation in many schools.
From my experience teaching in multiple Western and non-Western countries, I believe that this factor outweighs all the others put together.
My father is a black American who never went to college. He doesn't understand the point of education. He wanted me to a be a movie director or singer or otherwise "famous". He didn't give a crap about school and let me do whatever I wanted when I stayed with him a couple weekends a month.
My mother, an Indian immigrant, sat me down every night and made me do my homework even though she worked three jobs. She paid for twelve years of private schooling. She told me every single day that my education was the only thing I would ever have that would let me survive in this world.
Thanks to her obsession with education, I completed college and never stopped educating myself. I now work as a front-end dev and make six figures. I'm currently preparing to apply for master's programs. I live a happy and comfortable life. I have some savings in the bank. I am constantly working to educate myself. I don't have vague fantasies about becoming "famous" or winning the lottery to support myself.
Education is truly the only guarantee for people of color to achieve a comfortable life in the US. I would never have understood this without my Indian mother's cultural drive towards education.
The fact is most people are average. We freak ourselves out about these very few super teachers or super devs but most are not these people and they still need jobs and perform valid functions.
Couple that with high licensing requirements and bad working conditions, neither of which are secret, and of course the best and brightest do not consider it a real option.
Is this true? It seems like teachers in the US [0] make the 7th highest in the world on average. Of course the US is big and has lots of diversity so there may be pockets that aren’t paid more. But I think they are paid more than other countries.
I think the issue isn’t pay as they are paid more than the US median and mean for annual salary (since they aren’t paid for their two summer months off). And they have more vacation days than any other profession with their 40-60 days of leave.
It’s an important profession, but it’s pretty well paid and stable.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/teacher-salaries-by-country-...
They absolutely are. I taught math as a university lecturer while I was finishing my PhD. I taught one Algebra course and one Geometry course to education majors. These were both literally just high school math courses and the people I taught were mostly not able to do the work. Yes, literally high school math and over half flunked the courses outright. That is just pathetic. I was told to pass 85% of the class, so most got curved right into a classroom anyway, against my wishes. This is what teaches your kids. I can also anecdotally report that they were clearly the dumbest people I ever ran into teaching. Bad English, can't think in a straight line, and ready to argue at the first sign that you might enforce standards and fail their pitiful "work". They were perfect for a bureaucratic job that rewards idiots.
Some disruptive children have undiagnosed learning disabilities. Having more money for screening and special education can help get them the support they need.
Class sizes are also going to matter. Many disruptive children are just seeking attention. With smaller classes teachers can spend more time with each student, which will help with behavior management.
I don’t know what the right level of investment here is, but from speaking with friends who are teachers it sure seems like classes are too big and special Ed is stretched incredibly thin.
Well many students hated school, it is what it is. If you get beat up on a daily basis or are bored out of your mind (because let's face it, most of the material IS boring) I don't see why you should feel obligated to thank your teachers. It's not their fault but they also don't really deserve a thank you. Yes most teacher do what they can but it doesn't change the fact so many students are generally unhappy in school.
Exceptional teachers help kids survive, not thrive.
I'm not sure where you're from, but every single teacher I have known, both as a student, and as an adult, has been incredibly motivated to teach.
Personal anecdotal: I started programming on my own freshmen year of High School and I wrote and self published a book sophomore year. When I showed my computer programs and a physical copy of my self-published book to my teachers, they basically gave me a pat on the back. I did not receive 1 point of extra credit. I was told to take my seat and learn about Microsoft Word (by my computer teacher) and to write a 3 page story like everybody else (by my English teacher). As I’m sitting in my desk, I’m thinking “Why waste my time with Word, clearly I’m beyond it? Why am I writing a 3 page paper, I already wrote a book!”
What I concluded from this experience was that the education system is not designed for self starters. It’s designed for the lowest common denominator. I don’t dislike my teachers, rather I dislike the education system for being inflexible. I can only hope technology will allow students in the future to customize their educations to a degree beyond what I was offered. Another commenter mentioned schools being about churning out cogs. I don't disagree.
Being able to fire your students is greatest advantage that private schools have over public ones.
Not every kid should be going to high school. They and/or their families are not capable of supporting them through it. We need public vocational and alternative high schools.
Math teachers could be using Jupyter notebooks and decent plots. Instead they are using their poor drawing skills.
Everyone should do what 3b1b is doing.
They could be using cool physics simulations, but instead everything are lame poorly drawn arrows.
Technology that exists for education often has developer art level UX and bad usability.
7. Art used in school material is cringy as fuck. What artists think kids like and what kids actually like has nothing to do with each other.
8. There could be a github or reddit of class material that teachers could use, saving teachers' time and improving the learning experience.
9. People in the department of education are fucking bozos and should all be fired. Their job is to neglect education so that politicians can keep using better education as vote bait.
They exist. What are you going to do with their children? Teachers are the people who have to answer that question.
There are over 8 million people employed in primary and secondary education, which is about 5% of the workforce. Public spending on primary and secondary education is 3.2% of GDP and private spending is 0.3%. By the latest numbers, that's about $800 billion/year. If we assume that 2/3 of the costs are personnel and 1/3 are facilities and other expenses, that leaves just $65k for the wages and benefits of the average employee.
Note, I'm biased. My undergraduate degree was not in teaching but in physics. I did a masters programme in teaching to transition to becoming a teacher. I enjoyed teaching, but just ended up finding it boring teaching the same thing six times a day, so when an opportunity to do a new masters came along, I took it. I didn't leave because I got burnt out or hated it, I just wanted something a bit more challenging.
2) They are. The masters I did for teaching was a joke. I've seen high schoolers with better writing abilities than half my professors. And these are people with 'educational doctorates'. Also, this might be different at better universities, but at least in my state several are propped up by their online teaching masters (the state requires a masters) and they exist just to pump them out. If you don't get a 4.0 something is wrong. I've heard similar issues with the undergraduate programmes in the state.
3. Kids don't want to be at school. They want to be out doing kid things, which we are limiting more and more in school. They also don't want to necessarily sit and learn the stuff they're supposed to learn. It's a complex issue, but that's my take on it a lot.
4. Yep. This is, in my opinion, the number one issue facing American schools, and why private/charter (sometimes) do so much better. They can be picky about the students they take -- thus they only take those who are well behaved and who want to be there and have active parent involvement. Parent involvement is a huge predictor of school success. Until we fix that -- including the issues of poverty and not social safety net -- some schools won't improve. Kids need a safe place at home and at school if they're to truly learn and achieve what they can. Sadly, nobody talks about this issue, nor are any steps taken to change it or the culture around education. I'm from a rural area, there's people proud they dropped out and didn't get a degree and even more proud they didn't get a college one. It gets passed on.
5. Absolutely. It's incredibly difficult to teach 30+ kids at once, of various levels. Especially when they refuse to create differentiated classes. I had some classes that ran the gamut from kids who needed extra assistance and had learning disabilities to kids who would literally be in the running for valedictorian and had all accelerated classes in the subjects that had it. If I spend time on one subset of those kids, it immediately hurts the other. Now, this is a school-specific problem and lazy guidance counselors and a principal who just didn't give a shit about academically gifted students, but I had a cousin leave the school just this year because they don't care about academics because they're too worried about passing the weaker ones (not catching them up, but just making sure they can squeak by with the bare minimum). Not entirely the dehumanisation and alienation you mentioned, but I think it leads to it when the classes can't be catered towards them.
This is the one thing where I think more money could help -- get more teachers and get smaller class sizes. It'd also be nice I think to have a teacher go all four years with the students in high school, unless there's major issues, so the students get to truly know the teacher and feel like they can trust them. It could work in my state, except for science because each subject has its own certification as opposed to just one for 'math'.
I feel like a more trades-oriented approach with kids who don’t have the desire, motivation or aptitude for college would lead to more engagement and give those kids a better chance at success.
But, to answer the question more broadly, it's the 'equality' bit I think. I'm all for giving everyone equal opportunity, and the ability to move into accelerated pathways if you can prove you have the requisite knowledge to do so. But if you stick students with learning disabilities with accelerated students nobody is going to have a good time. It doesn't help either group and just harms them.
And, again, I say this as someone who didn't think California's math updates were all that terrible. Pushing kids to do stats as opposed to just the whole "everyone needs to aim towards calculus" attitude is a great thing and I stand behind that. But if we can differentiate classes, we can serve all groups of kids better and provide better outcomes for all. But the whole class needs to be differentiated; differentiation within a set of 30 kids is nigh impossible, especially when there's such a gap between abilities. For a personal story, the smartest kid I ever taught was in my last year teaching. He worked hard, if there was something he didn't understand he asked for more help and practice problems. The lowest kid I ever taught was in the same class. The kid was a freshman in high school and couldn't add single digit numbers without a calculator. There's no way that should ever be happening.
This was explicitly the operating philosophy of my middle school. It was terrible.
The concern is that they become a self-fulfilling prophecy. You get sorted into the lower grade, perhaps because of maturing more slowly in the early years, or a home environment non-conducive to study due to two working parents, or just economic disadvantages like having to live further away from the school and therefore spending time commuting that other kids are spending on study. (and in the US there's a correlation with race for the structural disadvantages because of more outright historical racism).
So students end up in a lower grade of class, don't get taught as complex versions of their subjects, and finish school with a lesser educational attainment, thereby setting the seeds for their next generation to be in the same place.
Even without seperated classes, this does happen to some level between schools.
An effective education is ultimately the student's responsibility. If we could somehow teach that at an early age, lot of these problems become irrelevant.
As a freshman I was placed in a geometry class in high school that included several seniors that obviously came to class high and some that spoke 0 English. I asked for more difficult problems in class, unaware that an advanced geometry class even existed at the school.
After taking a precalc class as a junior (which was after I took a precalc summer class at a local university), I was told I would be placed in AP calc AB.
I literally had to accost the teacher after class and say that was unacceptable. He said if I could convince the Calc teacher I should be in BC calc, I could take it. As luck would have it, the calc teacher was my former geometry teacher. I finished AP calc BC with an A and a 5/5 on the AP exam, but what if I hadn't been so lucky (knew the teacher) or so pissed off with my education up to that point that I had respected the precalc teacher's decision?
(1) My mom was a teacher there, so she knew what classes were offered better than I did, and was able to help me plan stuff early on without the counselor.
(2) The curriculum director used to teach beside my mom and got hired the same year (and they retired the same year even), and had known me my entire life. She often just went over the counselor's head to make sure my schedule lined up like I needed it to
(3) I had an uncle who worked over at the central administration for the school. He got sent lots of information about summer camps, etc, and passed them on both to my mom and the curriculum director to advocate for them.
All three of them are, sadly, retired now (though my mom keeps coming out of retirement because they can't find biology teachers) and there's not many at the school who advocate for the kids in the same way. The old principal (left at the end of the 2021 school year) was horrible too. I've heard the new one is better, and is slowly trying to re-rigourise the curriculum, but he's fighting against a lot of lazy teachers and our guidance office. It's a mess, but I truly hope he succeeds. It's almost made me want to go back to help push for that and for academically gifted kids, so they actually realise what's available.
My single mom worked three jobs to put me through private school and pay for my college. I grew up thinking that no college == bag groceries for the rest of your life.
How could anyone be proud of depriving themselves of the tools to succeed in life? It's like being proud of gouging out your own eyes and walking around blind.
Though lots of America is fundamentally based in anti-intellectualism. Anti-Intellectualism in American Life was an eye-opening read and helped explain a lot of what I saw around me in the rural Bible Belt.
> Disruptive children are caused by parents who frankly just don’t give a shit.
This isn’t necessarily true; sometimes the parents simply don’t have the proper info or education themselves. Example: parent of a kid with ADHD who has no understanding of what ADHD is or how it presents, and thus that their kid even has it.
Almost always in the examples of why teachers don't want to teach anymore. The focus is always on pay, testing, and administration. But who wants to come to work and teach children that are so disrespectful and so disruptive that class can't be taught. My salary wouldn't be the deciding factor here.
> Disruptive children are caused by parents who frankly just don’t give a shit. Throwing more money into schools won’t ever fix this problem.
Some. Most children I believe require an approach that the education system cannot adequately provide (for numerous reasons). Children are relatively malleable and in the right environment will thrive.
I was disruptive. I had ADHD. Parents did a fantastic job being present and caring but strict. My brothers and I were in multiple sports leagues.
The majority of teachers make a median US wage fairly early into their career and plenty make a multiple of it later on, on top of great benefits. Their job is no more challenging than nearly all other professions. “But they have to”… yes, everyone else has shit they have to deal with. The fact that the Waltons, crypto lottery winners, etc. exist is a separate problem that doesn’t mean teachers are underpaid.
Education majors are easier.The sky is blue. If we even remotely believe in a meritocracy (liberals often really don’t when you dig into their beliefs, granted) starting teachers should not make as much as a starting EE major. Nobody in their right mind would or should pursue an engineering career if teaching paid equivalently.
1. For as much as we spend on education, teachers seem to be grossly underpaid - to be getting robbed of their share of the budget. Where does that money go?
2. It seems that education degrees are seen as easier to achieve than others.
3. Teachers frequently complain about how they are unappreciated, yet children spend _12 years_ in their care. Why do people come up to them and say they hated school rather than “thank you”?
4. Many school problems are caused by disruptive children.
Disruptive children are caused by parents who frankly just don’t give a shit. Throwing more money into schools won’t ever fix this problem.
5. Schools are just too darn big. Thousands of kids in a big prison-shaped building and we wonder why everyone is alienated, miserable and dehumanized?