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Comment by jaxtapose | Hacker News Reader

a) Coaches can pick and choose their players. b) They get paid for the risk. Many schools pay more for a football coach than they do for the school principle.

Imagine if each class had to have academic try outs? Now imagine that teachers got massive wages and bonuses for winning academic competitions? Now reflect on the number of deadshits in your classes that never, ever, would have passed an academic try out for anything.

That's right, it's a stupid comparison.

The only good thing is that most people would know they have a second or third rate education. Because they never met the cut to get into schools who used such a stupid system.

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That's the reason you can't compare charter to regular schools in a lot of cases. In all 3 of the states that I've lived in, charter schools have competitive entry, or at least an opt-in lottery.

If you took only the students who can pass a test or whose family cares enough about their education to enter a lottery for a charter school and put them in one room, and of coruse they are going to do better than a group of randomly selected kids.

Charter schools really only count when the student population is equivalent to the school it is being compared to, which is a lot less common.

> b) They get paid for the risk. Many schools pay more for a football coach than they do for the school principle.

Some good points in your comment, but this one is off - coaches aren't getting paid for the risk. They're getting paid because talented ones bring in immense amounts of revenue and are in short supply - thus, the wages/price of coaches sets in at a high equilibrium.

There's not the same scarcity of organizational administrators as there are sports coaches, which requires an extremely specialized skillset that's in high demand. Thus the, hmm, "increased revenue over alternative candidates" number is lower for principles than coaches. A lot lower. Thus, they get paid less.

Rest of your comment has some good points though.

Excuse my ignorance and lack of better knowledge with regard to American school system but what is the thing with high-paid coaches in school? What is the connection between a school and (semi?)professional sports?

A lot of schools charge admission to watch the sporting event, so even though the kids don't earn any money (and many times have to pay to play) the school makes a fair amount of money from the sports. The better the coach, the better the team. The better the team, the more people will come and watch. The more people that watch, the more money for the school.

The kids are not paid directly[1], but the kids that go to the schools that you see on TV are paid indirectly in the form of scholarships and other perqs.

Depending on the school, a full ride scholarship has a value in the range of $10,000 to $50,000 and up.

[1] "Gifts" do happen, but there are severe penalties for both the kids and the schools when caught.

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