Next Test - Value of $125,000-a-Year Teachers

state regulation of government funded day care is pretty brutal. public school.

well, if they are gonna get paid 125k some quantitative accountability seems in order.

> Parents complaining about grades and/or teachers.

Time magazine "Why Teachers Hate Parents" (2005)

"Ask teachers about the best part of their job, and most will say how much they love working with kids. Ask them about the most demanding part, and they will say dealing with parents. In fact, a new study finds that of all the challenges they face, new teachers rank handling parents at the top. According to preliminary results from the MetLife Survey of the American Teacher, made available exclusively to TIME, parent management was a bigger struggle than finding enough funding or maintaining discipline or enduring the toils of testing. It's one reason, say the Consortium for Policy Research in Education and the Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy, that 40% to 50% of new teachers leave the profession within five years. Even master teachers who love their work, says Harvard education professor Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, call this "the most treacherous part of their jobs."

"At the most disturbing extreme are the parents who like to talk about values but routinely undermine them. "You get savvier children who know how to get out of things," says a second-grade teacher in Murfreesboro, Tenn. "Their parents actually teach them to lie to dodge their responsibilities." Didn't get your homework done? That's O.K. Mom will take the fall. Late for class? Blame it on Dad."

http://forums.atozteacherstuff.com/showthread.php?t=8834&...

In my opinion, the solution to all this is free school choice through a voucher program: http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Stossel/story?id=1500338

Also, for anyone who's really interested, I believe you can watch this report if you search 'Stupid in America' on youtube.

Indeed: if this is repeatable, it is repeatable in private and charter schools.

The problem?

A little less ideology and a little more clear thinking, please. You could certainly convince me that unions are a problem, but setting them up as the source of all badness is just your way of scoring points for your political/ideological team, rather than doing anything to contribute to the discussion.

So, onto your 2nd paragraph. How many "good" programmers are there, out of all programmers? One out of ten? (And that's being incredibly generous from my experience.) How well would these superstar volunteer for-the-love-of-it teachers do with 10x increased class sizes?

(And let's not forget all those who are thoroughly passionate about programming (/teaching) yet suck at it.)

Not all teachers' unions are created equal. Nor do they evolve equally. Your claims reminded me of Wikipedia's fantastic list of logical fallacies. Please refer to:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judgmental_language

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_the_single_cause

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasty_generalization

(Toronto, ON biased response)

I agree with you 100%. Correlation is not causation, I know, but look at every major organization that has unions: GM, The Ontario Government, The Toronto Transit Commission, our hospitals. The service is terrible, the quality average at best, and the money never ceases to drain from the public purse.

Why would we expect anything else from our unionized public schools? Why does it cost more than $10k per kid for a 10 month period just to educate them? For $1k per kid per month I could give 15 kids a way better education than they could get from a public system.

The reason I can't get a voucher for $10k is that the system is about social engineering, not education. If India can get their students doing calculus at grade 9 then we can too, our politicians just don't want us to. They would rather have conformist idiots than questioning geniuses.

So, a base cost of $125K/30 kids. Add in benefits for the teacher and you're at $150K. Liability insurance is another $50K. Rent per year for 1500 sq ft to house the 30 kids (the classroom is smaller, but you also need to amortize the cost the space needed for admins, gyms, halls, locker rooms, cafeterias, etc) is at least $30K. Supplies (books, sports equipment, etc) conservatively cost about $10K for the 30 students. And, realistically, you'll always have some administrative overhead (tech guys, librarians, lawyers, principal, secretaries, etc) which I can't imagine being less than $50K (amortized over a sufficiently large school).

That brings our total cost to, at least, $290K - which is about 10K per student. Still not too bad (although I'm still probably missing/underestimating some expenses ...), but at least marginally more realistic than your made up $4K/student number.

I like the idea of school vouchers and private schools too. But you have to be realistic.

"Many private schools succeed because the don't have to deal with the same types of children as do public schools."

Or with the same types of parents. A private school can always tell parents to take their tuition dollars and go somewhere else, if the trouble they are causing exceeds the value of the tuition they are paying.

Agreed with the question of scaling. It is easy to poach all of the best teachers and put them into one school, and you should get good results. But is this a solution to raising the level of education nation wide, or even in one city?

Well, you could start by founding a school that pays teachers $125 000 a year and then getting a press hit in the New York Times.

Teaching has very strong unions. Actually that's the main problem. Teachers here in the UK are effectively unsackable, yet at the same time their jobs are hell because the unions insisted on all sorts of trendy Marxist nonsense being taught at teacher training colleges.

Teachers in many areas do not get paid well. What is good for NYC/SF/DC does not represent the rest of the country. I believe teachers make 35k on average. I had a friend teach a high school in the Appalachians and they started him at 24k. And they really had to scrimp, save, and beg the feds to pay him considering the avg income for his area was less than half of that.

If you are a teacher with degrees and certificates, then 100k in a major metro, plus 10 years would be about correct.

Additionally you didn't specify what she teaches. Science and math teachers are harder to come by and their salary reflects that. My middle school science teacher was plucked from a high school, which had plucked her from a local college. She was one of the highest paid teachers in the school because she had experience and a load of degrees. She was working towards her doctorate when I left. She didn't come right at and tell me what she made, but the Benz in parking lot and the neighborhood she lived in gave me a clue.

Also, this was a magnet school so the teachers tend to be of higher qualifications than a typical high school.

Plus people seem to confuse the union with government a lot. In government you get paid in bands. Bands are based on the type of job, your accreditation, and your seniority. You can do the bare minimum and stay at the bottom of your band, until you are pushed up to the next band based on some formula, or you can do more and constantly stay in the top of your band and get pushed through quickly. The union probably doesn't have a lot of say in how much teachers get paid. They do have a big influence on how the workplace is run (ie. how late they must stay, when breaks can be done, etc).

Your friend may be a good teacher, but I bet the reason she's getting $100k is because she's been there 10 years - and possibly because she has a masters in education (which has been shown to have little or no correlation to being an effective teacher).

The quote from the article that struck me was this one:

“This is the first time in 30 years of teaching that anybody has been really interested in what I do.”

That's the really terrible combination of teacher's unions and the public school bureaucracy. Bad teachers can't be fired, good teachers aren't paid more, and the way you get ahead is by sticking around for your automatic raises and early retirement.

I agree. Some people argue that if we raise teacher salaries, we'll have people become teachers for the money instead of for the love of teaching. However, many teachers that teach solely for the love of teaching just suck at it. I know because I have had many of these teachers. I would much rather have a teacher who is good at teaching, whether they love it or just like it, than a teacher who loves teaching but is bad at it.

There are x number of brilliant and dynamic students that graduate from universities across the US every year. Before the bust, did > 50% of these students want to become investment bankers because of their love for working in Excel all day? No, they wanted to do investment banking because of the high salaries and solid career footing it provided. It's basic economics; the higher the salary and job prestige, the more qualified the applicants will be due to increased competition for the job.

The main problems that cause education to under-perform in the US (I think) are bad parenting, a non-education oriented culture, and poor teacher quality. Of these three, poor teacher quality is the only one that is most easily affected. So how can one say that it's not logical that increasing teacher salaries can be a solution to helping improve education in the US?