Live data from Hacker News

Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record

wsj.com

211–220 of 420 posts

Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record

#212
post #25

One of my favourite hypotheticals to play out is what would be like if we somehow paid public school teachers and emergency services/law enforcement professionals an extreme of today, a million usd a year, and increased the difficulty to attain this work. I usually end up in a pretty good place but I'd be curious what others think/why this couldn't work?

I think a generally cheaper and easier way to manage it would be to require all children, rich and poor, go to the same schools. The economic factors would change pretty dramatically for being a public school teacher.

This is only possible if school is no longer a physical place (i.e. everyone does school online). So long as school is in a physical space, it needs to be one relatively close to you, and then you're not close to giving everyone the same experience, as prosperity and educational attainment differ in granularity by more than a school bus can travel every day.

Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the area I taught, median pay was about $60k/yr. After 20 years and getting more advanced degrees, you could get to $80k/yr. Most of the teachers I worked with worked more hours per year than just about any software engineer I know. Only very lazy or very tenured teachers were getting the fabled summer vacation or winter break. I have more income, more vacation, and better hours as a developer than I ever did as a…

https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/EDFP_a_0013... > Using data from the American Time Use Survey, I find that teachers work an average of 34.5 hours per week on an annual basis (38.0 hours per week during the school year and 21.5 hours per week during the summer months).

I don't understand the numbers. A typical highschool teacher is on campus from 7am to 3pm minimum. That is 40 hr/wk. That allows a 30min break for lunch and typically one hour "planning period" that is insufficient for handling all lesson planning, grading, and assessment stuffs. I'm left questioning the validity of the responses to the ATS. Multiple teachers I've talked with report earning less than minimum wage after counting all the everything they do. For the ATS responses to be counted, the "households that have completed all eight months of the Current Population Survey (CPS)." That feels like a pool of respondents that will self select out very busy people.

Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record

#214

Apologies for the wall of text, as a programmer, turned high school teacher, turned programmer once more. Throwaway account. I was about to graduate with a CS degree from a top 20 program in 2006 when it occurred to me that I really, really loved my time as an undergrad TA running the labs for the intro to computer science course. From a kid up till then, I'd always received the complement that I had a way of explain…

Ouch, that's rough. If you've graduated college, you can learn the high school level material on your own; no need to be taught it explicitly. But not to cover classroom management and lesson planning?? One of my friends is an elementary school teacher and that's basically all she does. She's been at it for most of a decade now so she's good at it now, but I was living with her during her first years of being a teacher and being thrown into the deep end of that was rough.

Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the real deal world, sure you do: ever not get something right the first try at work? Ever have to work longer hours because a project ran over the expected time? The real world doesn't have all of the arbitrary limits we see in the modern education system.

In the real world there are lots of drop-dead deadlines with no possibility of extension, usually imposed by external constraints.

Sure, and in school, even within the confines of the flexibility I offer, there's still a drop-dead deadline: the end of the semester, and test dates. I don't give infinite chances, but I do set up a system that prioritizes maximum learning opportunities over strict cut offs for when that learning occurs.

Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record

#216
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was tempted to agree when I read this, but then I thought that this creates an unfair advantage for parents who can afford to pay for extra time from the teacher.

So the parent with more money pay for a different tutor. What's the difference? Or are suggesting the parents with more money should not be allowed to pay for there kids to do anything a parent with less money can't afford?

The problem isn’t with the parent paying for tutoring, but with the teacher receiving pay for tutoring. It creates a perverseincentive for the teacher to grade students harshly until/unless they pay up for tutoring.

Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record

#217
post #98
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I usually end up in a pretty good place but I'd be curious why this could not work? It would be fantastically expensive. Chicago has 21,000 teachers. Paying them $1 million per year would cost $21 billion, dwarfing the city's current $3.8 billion budget. Even paying them $100,000 per year on average would cost half the city's budget. And there is little reason to believe it would yield better results. American teac…

A point of contention, the charts in those articles dont take into account cost of living, so its difficult to compare real salaries

If you dig into the actual report, you can see that the data is PPP (purchasing power parity) adjusted as is typical for these types of comparisons.

Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record

#218
post #195
post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if the contents are worth reading, they should be worth paying the asking price How about if the facts the article communicates are worth knowing, but their treatment in the article isn't worth the (digital) paper it was printed on? I can see your argument applying to editorials, but not-so-much to raw journalism.

Presumably an important part of journalism is research.

You realize that other sources are free to take the facts from any article they read, and write those same facts (without doing any expensive, confirmatory investigation of their own) into a new piece, without paying any sort of a license for rebroadcast of those facts, or for creating a derivative work from those facts, right?

You realize that 99% of the journalism you read, watch, or listen to every day is this kind of secondary "remixing" that deprives the original journalist-investigator of "their" reward for doing said research, right?

You realize society is perfectly okay with that, for the same reason we're okay with e.g. used book stores depriving the original author of a sale, right?

So then—having realized those things—what's the ethical argument in favor of avoiding a secondary source that happened to just plagiarize its text from the primary source, in favor of one that plagiarized its research but wrote its own paraphrase of the text? What does that get you, ethically?

(Note that I'm not trying to equivocate these things in service of making plagiarism seem less bad. The conclusion I hope you to reach here is that society is seemingly perfectly okay with certain types of plagiarism, and that that's weird and shocking and terrible and people should really be more angry about it than they are.)

Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the real deal world, sure you do: ever not get something right the first try at work? Ever have to work longer hours because a project ran over the expected time? The real world doesn't have all of the arbitrary limits we see in the modern education system.

Schools very rarely have 1 test per semester, and if you fail you fail. Often times there is homework, multiple tests, projects, etc. If you fail your job multiple times I highly doubt you will be progressing in your career. Just because you aren't fired doesn't mean you aren't losing out in some way.

Right: you don't get infinite chances at work, and what I'm talking about isn't infinite chances either. If you want to compare school & work, then consider what I offer students to be a Performance Improvement Plan (PIP).

Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The teacher isn't obliged to work for free - I didn't write that. I wrote that a teacher whose worst problem is a too high fraction of overachievers trying to get into Princeton among his or her pupils has no reason to complain.

An actual overachiever would do everything possible to get an A on the first try - get feedback on assignments and projects before submitting them, ask lots of questions to understand the material, pay attention in class, come to office hours, study harder etc. I think most teachers would welcome that variety of overachiever. This is just wasting the teacher's time with whining and grumbling.

Er, you are clearly failing to take into account unforeseen circumstances. Perhaps the pupils knowledge actually warranted an A grade but he or she had a cold and weren't able to perform at top level during the exam? Maybe he or she misunderstood some task description? Etc.
Post reply on HN