Comment by Locke1689 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Locke1689 | Hacker News Reader

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As technology improves we should expect costs to decline.

Only if you assume labour isn't the prime mover. Assuming that technology improvements help education at all (I'm skeptical -- I learned more about logarithms in math by using an abacus than I did using a calculator), we would ideally want education quality to increase, not decrease. Therefore, we should probably assume costs will stay approximately the same percentage over the years.

One thing I've been thinking about lately is education as related to teacher salaries. In general teacher salaries are pretty poor, but they've always been pretty crappy. However, the civil rights movement has had a big impact since the 50's and there's a big difference. Teaching was and is a female dominated profession -- what's interesting are the opportunities for women since the civil rights act. Now, instead of teaching, the brightest women are more likely to hold more prestigious, higher paying jobs that were previously reserved for white men. In effect, it's as though we were placing a restriction on women that said "If you're smart you can work -- but you can only work as a teacher." I'm not sure how much of a difference this makes, but it seems like it could make quite a bit.

In general teacher salaries are pretty poor,...

Yes, but they get great fringe benefits (early retirement, defined benefit pensions) and easy hours. The salaries aren't even that bad if you multiply by (12 months of pay / 9-10 months of work). The underpaid teacher is a myth.

http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf

http://web.missouri.edu/~podgurskym/articles/files/fringe_be...

I guess, but in that case a fringe benefit of my job is that I don't have to deal with shitty kids. ;)

well for what its worth, a lot of studies suggest that you actually get better teachers if you exchange these "fringe benefits" for higher salaries.

Year-round school also appears to have positive educational effects. (Not that the Unions would care.)

[citation wanted]

Not to be wikipedia-style passive aggressive, I'm just genuinely curious and unfamiliar with these studies.

no direct sources off the top of my head but http://fora.tv/2009/07/05/Transforming_the_System_An_Intervi... is a good start

"The salaries aren't even that bad if you multiply by (12 months of pay / 9-10 months of work)."

Huh, I never thought of that, but you're right. If we just pretend that we pay teachers more than we do, they have great salaries.

Salary is time traded for money. Teachers trade 10 months for a certain amount of money, while most other professionals trade 12 months for a greater amount of money. The calculation I propose accounts for this.

You think that teachers have easy hours? Have you ever known any teachers?

When you just look at hours in the classroom it doesn't look that hard. But add in the time for grading and preparing classes, and you find that teachers work long hours.

I don't have any statistics on it, but http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_hours_per_week_do_teacher... is in line with the anecdotes that my mother and sister have given me about how much work teaching is.

I've been a teacher. Teaching sucks.

The hours in the classroom are the hard part. You have to be on your feet actually interacting with kids who don't want to be there for 6-7 hours a day. God help you if you are teaching them something they instinctively hate, like math. The grading and prep is time consuming but not a big deal, you can just do it at home while doing something else. It's low prestige, and the pay is lousy. The pay becomes tolerable if you can stand doing it for 15 years while paying for bogus master's degree classes during the summers. I decided to abandon my bleeding heart and go back to graduate school in computer science. Note: if you want to get paid more off the bat, the trick is to get a master's degree right away and become a special-ed teacher.

In contrast, at almost every programming job I've had there were weeks where I spent 6-7 hours a day doing fuck-all, going to meetings, reading websites, chatting with friends and checking in 10 lines of code and updating the ticket tracker. For this service to humanity I get paid 4 times as much as I did educating the nation's youth.

I've known a few teachers and I used to be a professor myself [1]. Prep takes up very little time after you've already taught a class.

But I'll certainly take your 2 secondhand anecdotes and some random internet guy over a scientific survey done by the BLS.

Incidentally, your random internet guy is pretty obviously exaggerating. He claims 30 min putting grades into the computer. If he has 40 students in his class, then it takes him 45 seconds to type one number into a spreadsheet! (Entering grades took me 3-4 minutes back when I had students.)

[1] Postdoc, actually. A moot distinction for the purposes of this conversation, but I'm not into self aggrandizement.

I've known a few teachers and I used to be a professor myself [1]. Prep takes up very little time after you've already taught a class.

I'll echo this: I'm a grad student in English lit and entering my third year. I've taught Engl 101, 102, and 109 (the honor version); the first year I taught, I spent a lot of time in preparation, thinking about activities, and so on. My second year, somewhat less. Ditto for this year.

That isn't to say I'm not changing things from year to year, because I am, but the big hurdle is at the beginning.

The differences between teaching secondary school and higher education are like night and day. I say this as someone who was definitely a little shit in middle school.

Teachers are only paid for days they work. But school districts are allowed to take that pay and stretch it out over a year.

Not sure why you are multiplying their pay.

Also, I don't know a single teacher who only works their contracted hours each day. My wife works 10 hour days as a teacher, spends unpaid days cleaning her classroom after the school year ends and unpaid days preparing her classroom for the new school year.

Not sure why you are multiplying their pay.

Bakery A charges $9 for 9 muffins. Bakery B charges $12 for 12 muffins. Which bakery is more expensive?

It seems like it would be testable, at least: where do today's teachers stand vis-a-vis their non-teacher classmates? Where did they stand 50 years ago?

A very good idea. I'm not sure those statistics exist at the moment.

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