Comment by corrral | Hacker News Reader

Comment by corrral | Hacker News Reader

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> The data on whether this works in general is very, very muddy.

My spouse, with about a decade of teaching experience at the time, once had a former student drop out of high school and start working at as a gas station clerk at a major chain.

The student was making almost as much as my spouse, and if she stuck with it she'd be out-earning my spouse in a year or two. Total comp, benefits included, not talking just wages (school worker benefits are not and have not for some time been that good, really, and at least in my area are now pretty poor compared to offerings in the private sector). Clerking at a gas station. As a high-school dropout.

I'm pretty confident teacher pay is so bad that this "raising pay will draw worse candidates" (where the fuck is that hand-wringing when CEO pay comes up at board meetings? Any pro sports teams worrying they might pay too much to attract good players?) thing is not a real effect worth worrying about, if we're talking pay increases for teachers that are anywhere in a remotely plausible range.

> Really, any job that lots of people are drawn to by the love of it gets crap compensation by default. It affects the supply curve too much.

Sure, and as is typical you get some good people who are semi-retired from a better-earning career or have a much higher-earning spouse, who don't really need the salary at all. You don't get the trust-fund kids as much, as in other careers that are similarly pro-social or artistic, since teacher social status is somewhere under the floor, but otherwise it's similar.

But that's not enough, and I don't think paying teachers 50-75% of what any decent teacher could make doing something else with a teaching degree—not even assuming some entirely different life-path—is a great way to get a good candidate pool. Enough bodies, based solely on some idealistic drive (check in again in 5 years, let alone 10, on how well that's doing sustaining them, and for the ones who do need the money, which is most of them, on how their financial situation is adding to the stress that's driving them out of teaching) sure, but not enough good candidates. And it's not enough to keep the good ones around.

> My spouse, with about a decade of teaching experience at the time, once had a former student drop out of high school and start working at as a gas station clerk at a major chain.

OK, I've already said I think this is unjust. Please read my comments and understand context. I just do not think this is a path to increase educational performance, particularly in the short to intermediate run.

> where the fuck is that hand-wringing when CEO pay comes up at board meetings? Any pro sports teams worrying they might pay too much to attract good players?

I feel like you're not understanding the distinction between:

A) paying a premium within a profession to get the top candidate

and

B) increasing pay broadly to get a higher level of performance from existing practitioners

and

C) to get more able candidates into a profession or retain them.

> you get some good people who are semi-retired from a better-earning career

[raises hand]

> since teacher social status is somewhere under the floor

IMO this is the biggest problem. And, indeed, teachers will take even lower pay to be in a private school situation with a parent community and student community that values education.

> IMO this is the biggest problem. And, indeed, teachers will take even lower pay to be in a private school situation with a parent community and student community that values education.

Lots of private schools pay worse than public schools, true, and do indeed draw teachers who are decent-to-good but sick of putting up with public school admin and parent bullshit—for reasons that are obvious if you think about it, but perhaps not intuitively obvious, private schools are less beholden to any one parent than public schools are, and are much better positioned to firmly tell them "no"—but once you start to get into actually-good private school territory[0] pay and appreciation (and to a some extent social status, at least within a certain circle) match or beat area public schools, typically.

[0] A very high percentage of private schools are not good, though—"how can that be? How do they keep getting enough students to stay open, in a competitive market that includes 'free' as an option?"—politics and religion, is the answer, and they can under-perform on academics year after year as long as they're delivering the message the parents want on those fronts. Incidentally, the teachers these schools draw with their lower pay aren't always leaving public education over legitimate bullshit, but often over perceived bullshit like "they wouldn't let me talk about Jesus as much as I'd like", and these are usually not good ones that the public schools are losing to private schools, but ones who we'd want to leave public education.

> but once you start to get into actually-good private school territory

This just isn't true of the SF Bay Area. When you look at the very top, like Harker, Nueva, etc-- salary may slightly edge above public school pay for some portions of the scale, but is still behind when you consider total comp.

> appreciation (and to a some extent social status, at least within a certain circle)

I feel appreciated and valued by our parent community, and I do not feel like there are many that look down their nose at me. (And, given my background, I'm just kinda amused by the group that do).

I also have total "easy mode" when it comes to behavior management. Students that don't even know me come into the room predisposed to think I have important things to say and to work hard.

> A very high percentage of private schools are not good, though

Oh, believe me, I know about the crummy sectarian schools, and the crummy for-profit "highly academic" academies. I am not talking about that. (I don't think many of these are very good teaching environments, either...)

> private schools are less beholden to any one parent than public schools are

This is very complicated and probably out of scope for this discussion.

> and are much better positioned to firmly tell them "no"

Once you have a wait list, this is true.

Sorry, by the way, if I've misunderstood or misread some of your posts. I'm truly not trying to be argumentative for the sake of it, and expect we agree much more than we disagree, overall. Also: yes, I'm sure you're right about your local market, and part of the problem discussing these things is that the situation in schools varies greatly state-by-state and region-by-region, so it's easy to get wrong ideas about things—teachers unions might be so powerful they're part of the problem, in some places, but in others they barely have any power at all so those very-common "teacher's unions are out of control and that's the main problem with education!" takes come off as something from another universe, or teacher comp might be borderline-OK in some places, but really, really isn't in others. Some places, there are five private schools in a 30-minute drive that charge $40+k/yr and are all pretty good or even excellent—others, there are five private schools in a 30-minute drive and they all charge $12k/yr or less and are all terrible (but do cater to religious and/or political preferences). It's a highly heterogenous field.

Likewise --- I understand you're passionate about the issue and feel your spouse has been ripped off. I think we should pay teachers much more. I just don't think it is likely to improve education much, and most of the benefit will be in the far future. [I do think improving working conditions will have an immediate benefit, though].

> Some places, there are five private schools in a 30-minute drive that charge $40+k/yr and are all pretty good or even excellent

Far, far in excess of that here.

> there are five private schools in a 30-minute drive and they all charge $12k/yr or less and are all terrible (but do cater to religious and/or political preferences)

And we have a bunch of those, too.

There's a huge selection effect: when you choose the students A) who can earn a scholarship, or B) whose parents will sacrifice to pay tuition at a non-sectarian school, you're basically selecting for the families who value education.

I'm reminded of research that shows that students at lottery charter schools outperform students at neighboring public schools... but then the students who enter but lose the lottery also outperform the general student population at those schools.

I believe we have very good educators and we have a whole lot of things we're doing right. But we also have a whole lot of things that are just fundamentally easier or better in our environment. Almost entirely, the behavior problems I confront are students getting a little excessively exuberant or otherwise out of hand, not wanting to misbehave.

> I understand you're passionate about the issue and feel your spouse has been ripped off.

It's not just that we're personally harmed by the current system—we're in the "has a high-earning spouse" group so we don't need to both be adequately paid, though of course it'd be nice—but I've watched one good, experienced teacher after another bail on the profession over the years, because they do not get paid enough to put up with the shit they're subjected to, and at some point they see an opportunity outside education, realize just how badly they're under paid, and decide they're done with it. It seems to be getting worse, too, even before recent inflation started screwing with everything (I suspect the rest of this decade is going to be a slow-motion disaster for education hiring and retention, in excess of how bad it already was). I have kids, too, and they're in school, and I hate knowing that a bunch of the best teachers they might have will leave before they get them, because the work-conditions/comp ratio is so badly messed up that it's not only asking some sacrifice of teachers, but is practically abusive.

> There's a huge selection effect: when you choose the students A) who can earn a scholarship, or B) whose parents will sacrifice to pay tuition at a non-sectarian school, you're basically selecting for the families who value education.

Yeah, agree that the factors that make a "good school" versus a "bad school" are complex and that you can't just look at student outcomes to decide whether the quality of a school's instruction is actually above-average—especially with private schools, but also with public schools. Solutions to those problems that aren't actually related to school quality per se are hard to come by, without deliberately leaving some kids behind and/or increasing staffing levels dramatically (so, also significantly increasing district spending/budget). Lots of the problems, effective solutions start to look like "solve poverty", so... good luck. :-(

Didn't mean to be flippant with the good vs. bad school distinction—looking at various measures of student outcomes definitely doesn't give a full picture of how good a job a school, or a teacher, is doing, and selection bias is a major confounder in attempts to do that.

> because they do not get paid enough to put up with the shit they're subjected to

Yah. And the crap is a primary concern, too. We need to figure out how to make things better. Especially on the things that teachers complain about that are demoralizing because they can be expected to negatively affect student outcomes.

I think improving comp has a distant and uncertain effect, but fixing a lot of the crap could be more impactful. Right now we incent administrators not to hold students accountable; how can we do the opposite?

Also, how can we systemically study interventions in a way that we can draw meaningful conclusions-- instead of leaping from educational trend to educational trend because they seem like they sound like they'll do something.

> and selection bias is a major confounder in attempts to do that.

It's got a huge indirect impact that is difficult to control for, too. If I have a student who wants to be disruptive, other students will call him or her out, and they won't find much social validation from it. So, it's not just the attitudes of individual students affecting their own outcomes, but everyone else around them.

And even second order things. I would probably be a below average educator in a difficult public school classroom. And instead, I'm an extraordinary one in the environment I'm in. Horses for courses.

To be fair, I don't think your posts are making the distinction between A B and C.

I would say A and C are both reasonable. To get higher performance out of existing candidates, you would need a metric for performance... I am unfortunately not aware of one that is robust enough to be used.

To do A you need a good metric, which as you point out we don't have. Of course, it's also zero-sum.

You might be able to do B with pay for performance if you had a good metric.

C might make things significantly better 10 years from now-- increasing the size of the candidate pool. Of course, this requires you be able to adequately measure candidates, too.

I think we should increase teacher pay. I don't think it changes much soon in the quality of education. I do think improving teacher working conditions--- especially the ones that infuriate teachers because they have well articulated justifications of worsening student outcomes--- can improve all of the above.

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