Hacker News Reader

Comment by Spooky23 | Hacker News Reader

I strongly disagree. It’s one of the few tools available that ensures that qualified, well educated teachers are available everywhere.

The program is a great example of the power of the federal government to lift all boats, even when the local governance doesn’t care at all. We see lots of examples of mostly red-state governance where passing costs off to other jurisdictions is essentially government policy. (Example: https://www.thedailybeast.com/nevada-sued-for-greyhound-ther... )

This doesn’t let them do that for several professions.

View on HN

Or, ya know, you could pay teachers more across the board and do away with the loan tomfuckery.

Good luck getting your local school-board to fund $90k starting salaries for teachers!

Well, they certainly find such salaries for administration. (Something about paying market rates.)

Fire one administrator and suddenly you have the budget to bring two teachers up to 90k.

Not so easy to do when the administrators can influence which positions to keep.

> they certainly find such salaries for administration

This is one of those claims that in a way has become 'common wisdom', but that I've seen no actual evidence of. I wonder if it's just one of those talking points of people who want to cut taxes that has never been challenged or at least defined, like "government waste". It's like an end-user saying 'my computer's software is buggy' - that doesn't tell me anything, and for all I know it's your power supply, monitor, or a million other possibilities, or even a matter of perception by a user in a bad mood or with a bias.

Especially we don't know the problem definition: Which administrators are overpaid? How frequently? Is it certain administrative jobs? In certain size districts? Is it due to some other problem? And which administrators are underpaid?

Finally, while we should pay attention to these issues, let's not catastrophize every problem into a organizational disaster. I know plenty of administrators in business who are overpaid; the perfect human institution doesn't exist.

I think it's a meme that has carried over to k12 from stories about massive administration growth in higher ed relative to teaching staff.

It also is challenging to make apples:apples comparison between teacher and administrator salaries as the contracts are structured very diferently. That said - anecdotally, admin salaries are commonly 2x+ average teacher salaries in districts that I have had experience teaching within.

And even in higher-ed, it's largely a false narrative as well. Overall spending per student at state schools is down. Here are the numbers for UC: http://dailybruin.com/2014/11/18/tuition-rises-despite-decli...

Administrative salaries are up, but generally in line with increases in research funding (research funding has a lot of administrative overhead. Read OMB Circular A-21 if you want to see some example details.) Yes, there are reports of some over-payments at the top executive levels, but just like in a corporation, overpaying the C-Level executives by $10/mil a year just doesn't move the needle for companies with 10's of billions of dollars a year in revenue.

A lot of CEOs are overpaid.

My personal pet peeve here is that school superintendents get to negotiate with the board and get all sorts of premium benefits (ie free healthcare for life, second pensions, etc) with minimal transparency. Other similar jobs, like police chiefs, are civil service positions with standardized deals.

Administration is growing because compliance requirements are growing.

Local school boards are something you can influence much more effectively than national policy. Yes, you can convince your neighbors that they should pay teachers more; I would bet that the best place to start would be a district with a high proportion of families with school-age children, and with a high proportion of teachers living there. I'm not saying it's easy, but lots of progress in the world begins with things that are hard or nobody has done.

The average cost of the average teacher has to be approaching $90k a year already. In Arizona, a state not known for education spending, spends close to $15k per teacher on pension contributions. Add in medical and other benefits, 3 months vacation, tenure, payroll taxes and the typical teacher is near there.

You do NOT want to suggest to a teacher that their salary isn't that bad, for working 3/4 of the year. Especially if there are any throwable objects at hand...

Whether they are or not, many firmly believe they are underpaid.

> The average cost of the average teacher has to be approaching $90k a year already.

It would be interesting to know where you got that. This is an area where people feel free to spread disinformation so I'd be careful.

> In Arizona, a state not known for education spending, spends close to $15k per teacher on pension contributions. Add in medical and other benefits, 3 months vacation, tenure, payroll taxes and the typical teacher is near there.

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_211.60.a...

The interesting thing about Arizona is that salaries - which aren't great - are trending downward.

Everybody I know who isn't completely saddled with student loan debt burns out of teaching in five to ten years and moves on to something else. Almost all the rest of them are just as burned out, their options are just more limited, for one reason or another.

And yet, the teachers that taught me while I was a child (In BC) spent anywhere between 2 and 30 years on the job.

What has changed? Why is teaching in America such a terrible job?

"No child left behind" and similar initiatives that lead to perverted incentives that the teachers bear the brunt of. Also low pay and no respect.

Teachers are doing fine.

Three months off a year, government level medical benefits, and lucrative pensions after only 25 years (sometimes only 20). Not to mention tenure.

Schools are paying enough to not have any lack of candidates for open positions. Their real problem is to equate “teaching certificates’ and credentials with teaching ability.

> Teachers are doing fine.

Great!

> Three months off a year.

This is like saying that ski instructors get nine months off a year. It's not paid leave.

I don't think he's quibbling with the intent of the program, which is what you're defending. He's objecting to the implementation.

What if the program had provided an on-time payment bonus (say $500 per payment) on each payment made by people in a qualifying job? The financing of the program would have been continual, so no 10-year budget time bomb. The loan forgiveness would be fixed rather than 100%, encouraging borrowers to borrow responsibly. And it would still accomplish the goal of encouraging people to work in those kinds of jobs.

And, more importantly to the man in the article, the loan balance would be front and center, so he would have realized there was a problem immediately when he didn't see it going down fast enough.

That’s not how I read that comment.

There are 1000 different ways that you could improve this situation. Getting rid of the servicer middleman, or making said middleman accountable for mistakes made would be a good start.

The current scenario is a breeding ground for problems — nobody is accountable.

“Took out too many loans to pay for your education? Become and indentured servant and we’ll forgive them after 10 years!”

Sounds less than ideal to me.

> It’s one of the few tools available that ensures that qualified, well educated teachers are available everywhere.

No, it isn't, because it doesn't.

Have you considered approaches that achieve your goal of qualified teachers without the downsides mentioned above?

These programs were cooked up in the 1980s where many districts were unable to hire and retain teachers.

NYC was paying $10k bonuses iirc.

If your only concern is teachers, then why does loan forgiveness apply to all kinds of government jobs, and not just teachers? Why is it all-or-nothing?

All-or-nothing only makes sense because you can avoid accounting for the costs today, which is convenient for politicians. It's not convenient for teachers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com