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Comment by geomark | Hacker News Reader

How do you do that? Isn't it true that with the way teachers are organized you pay everyone the same based on some blanket criteria like seniority? So you can't pay the good ones handsomely without also paying the bad ones well, which breaks the bank. If you try you get some combination of union/legal/government action that ties you up.

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In principle the solution is trivial. You raise the bar for becoming a teacher (supply will grow as well if salaries are much higher and there are these benefits like respect and autonomy). And then if some bad teachers do get in, the institution uses personalized oversight (in the form of "good" teachers observing and critiquing "bad" ones), and any problem teachers are given a smaller load with additional training. In other words, you invest to make all the teachers good.

The question is whether public schools have the funding to do this, and that's a more political question.

So far "raising the bar" has just meant more hoops to jump through and make-work/rubber stamp masters programs just for teachers.

I don't see why it's unreasonable to expect a math teacher to be on par with the average person who gets a math Bachelor's. The reality today is that math teachers take special "watered down" math courses with lowered expectations and less work. I know because I witnessed it first hand.

Funding is not really relevant. You can't do that in a big institution. Much less with fixed grants from government.

"If you were building an online school", you could do that. But if you manage a public school, you have no chance.

Right. It's political because school funding is tied to land and house taxes and such.

Teachers are not all organized like that. Just the ones for public schools.

Isn't that the majority of them? I don't know the numbers. That's why I'm asking.

"If you were building an online school", by definition you'd be organizing the teachers yourself.

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