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Comment by crumpets | Hacker News Reader

>how society decides salaries. It seems pretty arbitrary from my perspective.

Society doesn't "decide". It's a decided by the labor market. Nobody wants to pay programmers six figures.

It's a myth that we think teachers are less important than programmers because they make less on average. There is just a larger supply of qualified teachers willing to work at lower prices.

Wait until you find out how little art history masters holders make. Amount of training is irrelevant to how much money you get.

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The word "qualified" is pulling a lot of weight in your argument.

You can absolutely hire a programmer for $70k if you're willing to significantly relax your standards. On the other hand, you probably wouldn't be able to hire enough teachers at existing teacher salaries if you significantly raised your standards for what counts as "qualified".

Tech companies have to use a relatively high bar, because bad developers will drive them out of business, but such market forces don't apply to schools. Unless you want to completely privatize education (which has its own set of issues) we have to use the political process to drive schools to raise their both their salaries and hiring standards.

Or you happen to be in middle of nowhere, or there are other incentives like equity that you can use to make up for the subpar base salary.

Another thing to consider is that the quality of the teacher might not map to improved results in the same way it does in tech. A programmer tends to have a lot more choice in how they go about solving the problem, whereas teachers tend to have very little leeway. Furthermore, it's very difficult to quantify how well a teacher is doing as well.

>>Tech companies have to use a relatively high bar, because bad developers will drive them out of business

Most work in Tech companies even the top FAANG ones these days is crud work.

These people can only afford to pay well, because they make their money through advertising scale. Companies which depend on paying users, can't afford to pay that kind of salaries, nor waste their time interviewing people on rounds and rounds for proxy skills which have nothing to do with the job on hand.

In short only VC companies without profit pressure or web advertising companies pay well. Others don't have this luxury.

> ...you probably wouldn't be able to hire enough teachers at existing teacher salaries if you significantly raised your standards for what counts as "qualified".

Anecdata: Schools that won't hire more qualified candidates (e.g. graduate degrees complete) instead preferring more green applicants because the latter are contractually cheaper.

That is, in some instances schools could hire better for the same money but cannot because of labor contracts.

I'm not sure how much that holds with the government running public schools and the primary stakeholders being children.

For example if you didn't really care the much about building a software project, but had to do it, you could probably find some 'developers' who would do the work for the same salary that teachers work at.

I'm not sure how the outcome would compare to that of public schools.

You're describing every project where its been outsourced to a foreign contracting firm for bottom-dollar really.

The labor market is a tool of society. It's like any other tool: it can be fixed or supplemented or even swapped out with something else if it doesn't perform its function effectively.

It's true, and while I also believe teachers should be paid more relative to other occupations, labor market has one thing going for it that makes it hard to replace - it's a very simple process that doesn't require any central coordination.

How much would a 10% teacher pay bump improve educational outcomes?

Teacher pay is not correlated to outcome. The US pays more for its teachers than Finland and other counties with much better outcomes.

I think the challenge is just measuring and comparing education. If we could, reliably, then we’d likely pay tons more for teachers.

>>Teacher pay is not correlated to outcome. The US pays more for its teachers than Finland and other counties with much better outcomes.

I do want to point out that these two points aren't actually related. Just because the US pays more for lesser outcomes does not mean that teacher pay is anti-correlated or uncorrelated to outcome.

Some public schools can't find a decent calculus teacher at the prices they're paying. On the other hand, if they paid a janitor to sit in the classroom while AP Calc students teach themselves, in many places that would work out great.

Thank you, I was trying to show by pointing out an example of low pay and high outcomes that pay is not corrected. But I don’t want to say that there’s a negative correlation.

I do think it’s fair, unless I see data that shows it, that pay is not correlated to outcome.

I think there are multiple factors for outcomes and I think further research will help figure this out. But for now, I think it’s false to say that we will get better outcomes if we increase pay. I can think of a few outcomes, but have no data, that would result in higher pay with worse outcomes (eg, higher pay crowds out more passionate but less credentialed teachers who aren’t in it for the money).

>>There is just a larger supply of qualified teachers willing to work at lower prices.

Add to this, demand for teachers is directly tied to population growth rates. If more teachers are being produced compared to growth of class rooms the pay falls further.

Society decides the laws which regulate the labor market.

What laws are supressing teacher wages?

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