> Could we reproduce the effects of tutoring by getting rid of all the government contracts for school paraphernalia like smart boards and hiring lots of teachers while giving them reliable access to basic necessities?

Very unlikely.

We are short of good teachers as it is. Adding more teachers basically means you’re pulling from the bottom of the barrel, so overall instruction quality will decrease.

Plus, lots of people don’t actually want to be educated, so no sense in broadly spending money on those folks (large percentage of the population).

> Adding more teachers basically means you’re pulling from the bottom of the barrel,

Ask the good teachers what would make the job more attractive to them.

I can make wild guesses...

* Better pay. (Seems 100% obvious to a techbro forum.)

* Better administrations.

* Better career flexibility.

* No colleagues of the crappy variety.

* Less curricula mandated by politicians.

* Students taught well in prerequisite classes.

* Families helped with difficulties that translate to behavior problems.

* Covid sensitivity (e.g., no forbidding mask use in a classroom of germ factories during a pandemic).

...but you really have to ask the good teachers, not guess.

I would quit my job in an instant to become a high school teacher if the pay was better. But more than I want to teach, I want to be able to support my family. I save most of what I make in my tech job, and I'll look at becoming a teacher 20 years from now after the kids are on their own.

> I'll look at becoming a teacher 20 years from now after the kids are on their own.

If you're leaning towards being a teacher, wouldn't it benefit your kids more to teach them now, while they're still young?

I’m not the GP, but them becoming a teacher isn’t likely to have any particular effect on their own kids, right?

It’s best for their own kids if mom/dad makes good money and can pay for things like private school or tutoring.

Same. Unfortunately, I don't have four years to get a teaching degree, let alone a master's degree, let alone $50,000 to pay for one.

> Unfortunately, I don't have four years to get a teaching degree, let alone a master's degree, let alone $50,000 to pay for one.

Depending on what your undergrad is (preferably STEM), there are plenty of districts that will hire you, let you teach on a provisional license with a crash course, and pay for you to get your teaching qualification.

See this article for some examples:

https://edsource.org/2022/what-you-need-to-know-to-become-a-...

In CA, the term of art to look for is “intern” or “internship”.

    if the pay was better

What is it in your school district? What level do you need?

I was a teacher for a while and the main fustration we had was class size. Large classes (maybe more than 20 pupils but 15 was really nice size) were really hard to control and engage whereas smaller classes were always a pleasure.

No?

A smart board is $3000. Another teacher is $66,397.

You can buy 20 boards per year for the _salary_ (ignoring benefits and other non-payroll costs) of a single teacher.

https://usafacts.org/data/topics/people-society/education/k-...

I think it's great how out of several theoretical replies one person found the numbers - thank you!

And? One has a negative effect, and the other a positive one.

Also interesting that $100m would have bought 1,506 teacher years. It makes me think that philanthropy doesn't work as well as some would make out. This is another example of rich people wasting money on things they know nothing about. If it had been paid in tax it could have been spent on more teachers by people who do know what they are doing. This would have had a real benefit for kids even with some degree of inefficiency and waste.

The closest large city to me is Oakland, which spent $750m on schools last year:

https://oaklandside.org/2022/01/12/oakland-schools-are-facin...

So this cost 13% of one years spending in a mid-size district.

Presumably there are a number of fixed costs in the $750m. That means the extra money might have disproportionate benefit.

> This is another example of rich people wasting money on things they know nothing about. If it had been paid in tax it could have been spent on more teachers by people who do know what they are doing.

On the other hand the rich person has a strong incentive to succeed - avoiding ridicule and getting more recognition. The public employee on the other hand gets no recognition, or ridicule, and is spending someone else's money.

If we could combine the incentives of the rich person with the knowledge of the public workers that understand the programs that work, we could have something on our hands.

> On the other hand the rich person has a strong incentive to succeed - avoiding ridicule and getting more recognition.

I would argue that Zuckerberg couldn't care less what the world thinks of him. Otherwise he would have been rather embarrassed by the Meta project. I would put Elon Musk and X up as another example of a very rich person who seems unperturbed by ridicule.

>The public employee on the other hand gets no recognition, or ridicule,

So politicians don't have a need for recognition and to avoid ridicule?

> people who do know what they're doing.

What they're doing isn't working. Even they would tell you there's a results crisis. Children aren't learning. They certainly aren't becoming well-prepared for adult life in an efficient manner. They're barely even being supervised and kept out of trouble. The school-to-prison pipeline is getting worse, not better.

These people may "know what they're doing," but they also know what they're doing isn't accomplishing the goals they have for it.

Knowing how to do something that isn't working isn't a benefit, and is certainly not a reason to give them money.

This thread says multiple times that experts agree that education would be better with more teachers.

That suggests 'they' do know what they are doing, they are just denied the resources to do it

They've been adding teachers for ages. It's still not working.

Agreeing on a solution when the results don't bear out that that solution actually solves the problem doesn't make them right.

Where are we going to manifest more teachers from? In the current labor market, there are a lot more openings than job-seekers. You can always get more people into a specific job by raising wages, but that mostly that’s just a bidding war that redistributes the labor shortage to whoever can afford the least. It can raise labor force participation, but there is not so much juice to squeeze there. Kind of like how higher home prices don’t fix a housing shortage.

Historically the main way that labor productivity has been improved was through technology. Without that you get Baumol’s cost disease.

You could use the people that are currently wasting their time on Zuckerberg's project, since he is laying them off anyway.

In fact you could tax the money off Zuckerberg and then he would have to give up on other ridiculous personal projects like the multi- billion dollar metaverse shambles. That would free up loads of people who have wasted years of their lives as a billionaires play thing

Lower gatekeeping requirements would solve it. Higher wages would solve the problem locally. Keeping gatekeeping requirements and increasing supply by paying for training and creating more training spaces. A % of education budget could be allotted to this yearly.

Many school districts with teacher shortages have already eliminated gatekeeping requirements. They will hire new teachers with just a relevant Bachelor's degree, then pay them while they obtain a proper teaching credential.

Sometimes teachers actually want non-basic necessities like smart boards. We just need to give them what they want, not prescribe to them yet a different approach.

I mentor a robotics team that’s attached to a set of high school courses. One of the best things I’ve seen when it comes to bureaucracy is that the three teachers who basically run those courses were handed a budget and bought exactly what they needed. A mitre saw, 3D printers, a plasma cutter, etc.

If you're looking reduce class sizes by hiring more teachers, you'll get further by scrutinizing the admin headcount and salaries.

I would like to see a citation, because that sounds like right wing propaganda to me.

All I can cite is my wife's boss, a teacher and very left wing, who nearly got fired for talking about it.

I've been talking with him about maybe gathering the necessary data (it's available upon request but the district records people aren't exactly a sane API, you get PDF's with hundreds of pages). If I do that analysis to confirm his claim, I'll send you a link to it.

But even without the budget information, we can just look at headcount. What ratio of teachers to admin would you consider unhealthy? How many assistants to the vice principal do there need to be before it starts to look like a retirement program for people who can't be bothered to teach anymore?

Can anyone explain how smartboards work, who creates the software, etc. My kid is in pre-k and he likes smart boards but i suspect that’s because of very limited screen time at home. Are smartbords detrimental in any way having that they’re not excessively used? I wish I could see them myself but am not allowed in the school.