Comment by trowawee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by trowawee | Hacker News Reader

The fundamental issue I see with the conclusions/recommendations is that the primary blocker preventing raising teacher salaries isn't the union. From my own time as a grade school teacher and the friends I still have in the profession, I can comfortably say that there are very few teachers who wouldn't cheerfully toss out the entire tenure and pension systems (and honestly, probably the whole union) if they were offered a pay scale comparable to that of coders in their area. The unions aren't powerful because teachers are ideologically attached to unions, they're powerful because teachers have been screwed over and over again and unions are literally the only protection they have. The unions took lower and lower salaries over the years in exchange for pensions and tenure; now everyone still wants to pay poverty wages and they want to strip away the other benefits.

Teachers know who's good and who sucks, and for the most part, they hate the bad ones as much or more than anyone else. But the actual solution (a flat trade of salary in exchange for giving up their protections) will never happen, because too many people would rather nickel and dime the education system and then whine about why the ranks of a job that requires a college degree and pays below minimum wage aren't full of the best and brightest.

Good post. I'm curious about something else in addition. I've heard from friends in teaching that there has been a massive increase in administrative overhead and concentration of power both at the school district (superindents, sub-superintendent, deputy-sub-superintendent) and the school level (increased power and poorly targeted accountability for principals+other school officials). These friends have told me that this has made their job less fulfilling and that the union gives them a way to advocate for themselves in the face of these developments. Is that something you've heard as well and do you think pay increases would be attractive enough to alleviate those issues?

Also, I keep hearing that we're spending more per pupil than ever and yet none of that money seems to end up with the people who most deserve it: the teachers. How come? Is it all going to that administrative overhead? Or are things like operating costs for school facilities going through the (literal and figurative) roof?

Consider it an anecdote, but my direct experience is exactly what you have heard. Consider that the ratio of administrators to classroom teachers is rarely lower than half the union-specified maximal classroom ratio (e.g., <1:10 administrators to teachers versus >=1:30 students to teachers).

Administration is a big issue but is still probably not the origin of the problem. For that, look to No Child Left Behind and the abject pursuit of test scores.

What's more, those teachers would actually often still do the job for those poverty wages in spite of the diminishing benefits for the love of their students and the job. I just watched a local school's entire population of teachers ranked as "distinguished" leave this year (8, my spouse included) because the administration and overhead simply aren't worth it.

Oh sure. Lots of teachers stick with it, live with roommates until they're in their mid-thirties, eat lots of beans and ramen, drive 20 year old cars, the works. My heart goes out to them; I wasn't able to make those kind of sacrifices. But I hate the idea that the people to whom we entrust our children on a daily basis have to make those sacrifices to do the job.

>I hate the idea that the people to whom we entrust our children on a daily basis have to make those sacrifices to do the job.

Yea anyone who deals with children , eg: school bus drivers, nurses, teachers aides ect should be paid atleast (if not more) coders in the area ( like gp suggested) .

It's too bad teachers don't get the sweet deals and salaries and pensions that school administrators and police officers get.

teaching in most schools is babysitting. That's why the pay is so low. For the schools where the primary purpose is not babysitting, the salaries are pulled down by the majority of ones where it is.

We require a college degree to assuage our consciences that schools are not about babysitting and to mask the gigantic class differences between the school districts in high property value areas and the ones in low property value areas.

Few white collar jobs have unions. The teachers do because though they may not be blue collar workers they are in a very blue collar/laborer field - babysitting.

This is not the fault of the teachers. But due to many historical artifacts, political maneuvering and societal dishonesty they are the ones primarily responsible for bridging this unfortunate civilization-wide reality gap

> teaching in most schools is babysitting.

[Citation Needed]

...but seriously, if you think most teaching is babysitting, you have a woefully narrow view of what goes on in classrooms.

No, he's correct for many schools. I had to attend a few of these schools when I was young (this was back in the 80s BTW). Even in one of the top-ranked and best-funded middle schools in my state, I had an English teacher who just gave us some busywork and watched soap operas on her portable TV. In the crappier school I went to before that in the poor part of town, most of the classes amounted to babysitting.

I don't know how it's changed since then, but I doubt it's gotten any better, though this was before the days of Common Core and statewide testing and all that. From my perspective of what I saw as a kid, some teachers were good and really tried to teach kids well, other teachers were terrible and did the absolute minimum, if that. There was no consistency, though the schools with poorer kids did seem to have more bad teachers. So from my perspective, the problem seemed to be two-fold: incompetent administrators, and crappy teachers who couldn't get rated on job performance and fired. The good teachers hung in there despite the institutional and systemic problems.

> this was back in the 80s BTW

I'll see your 30-year old anecdote and raise you my own 10-15 year old anecdote: that didn't go on in my school at all.

As an adult, involved in the local schools, I see something different. I'd invite you to consider it through a fresh perspective, not 30 year old memories of what your life was like as a kid.

I also went to different schools in different places, and another thing I noticed is that they're all very different.

Schools are administered at the local level, not the state or federal levels. So they can be run in totally different ways. Schools in richer districts tend to have pretty good reputations, whereas schools in poor ghetto districts are notorious for their bad teaching and conditions.

I feel safe in assuming that your 10-15 year old anecdote, or whatever you're seeing in your local schools, does not jive with the experience that some poor kid in Detroit public schools is getting today.

A true voucher type system that made schools competitive would help with that. In the current system you either work for the district or you don't. A voucher system would include many employment options and even a reason for them to advertise and promote their teachers competitively.

Money does not show up from nowhere. A district that can't afford to pay teachers can't afford to subsidize private schools. The vast majority of private schools don't increase student preformance instead they reject poor performing students.

A more sustainable solution is to have rotating class schedules, so teachers teach year round even if students don't go to class year round.

You'd have to come up with the money to pay those teachers the extra days, though. In my mother's district, their contract is for 191 days - I can't imagine that the union would roll over and work an extra 25% without getting paid for it.

The assumption is by having 25% fewer teachers you can pay the remainder 25+% more. With the extra based on the idea you don't need to pay for health insurance again. 42k * 1.25 = 52.5k which is not bad with full benefits and a pension.

We have a voucher system in sweden and it sucks. It sucks bad. Schools compete to offer better 'test scores', so the test scores go up, while the quality goes down. Sweden has been on a downward trajectory in the Pisa rankings since vouchers were introduced. Finland do it right. No vouchers, pay teachers well, high status job. As it should be.

How do you know the quality goes down?

PISA scores

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_St...

Considering the cultural and ethnic similarity between Sweden and Finland as Nordic countries, PISA score trajectory based on voucher vs highly paid public professionals is really shocking.

If what you are saying is true, that is shocking about Finland vs Sweden. Both are fairly ethnically homogenous and share similar Nordic sensibilities from what I understand, and tend to be co-compared for where they are different.

Wow

From what I've read, voucher schools don't outperform public schools, despite having advantages such as freedom to attract the best teachers, and being able to kick kids out for disabilities, behavioral issues, and low test scores.

In addition, I'm of the opinion that a voucher school system still needs to be backed up by public schools, for a number of reasons:

1. To make up for capacity shortages. There's no evidence that voucher schools would voluntarily maintain a surplus of seats, and there could be entire regions with permanent under-capacity, leaving kids with no schools to attend.

2. To bail out voucher schools that fail. At the very least I'd like to be assured (via legislation) that no public money will be spent to pay the debts of charter schools that are taken over by the state or by municipalities.

3. To educate kids who can't get into a voucher school.

Expecting healthy competition, after experiencing passenger aviation, cable TV service, or consumer banking, seems like a pipe dream.

An additional concern, which I don't know how to analyze: The number of passenger miles per day spent transporting kids to far-flung schools.

It creates constitutional issues that end up raising costs. Essentially, a school that is parochial, in order to take the vouchers, have to do crazy things like run as 2 separate corporations under the same roof, with all the headache that involves

What essentially ends up happening is long term refusal of the vouchers, private school prices go up, or you see alternatives that are even less constitutional (I'm looking at you Kirat Yoel) in order to replicate the same extra funds without the voucher headache on the private school school side.

Interestingly, in order for them to actually compete, you actually have to massively fund the school district as a public school, a la Great Neck North/South, or some of the suburbs of San Francisco, where you regularly hear about crazy good private and public schools with about equally good outcomes for their students

competition improves the gambling skills of administration it strangles those free spirits by forcing them to train the entrusted to perform under "circus-conditions" useless tricks.

Allow for a earning of teaching freedom by performance of student in reallife (aka student-tests, work-archievments). Allow teachers to take risks, aka bend the rules (skip circus-tests) by betting parts of there paycheck/benefits on there late-game-performance.

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