Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021 • Hacker News Board

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#361

Post by mattkrause » Sun, Jun 20, 2021, 1:02 AM UTC

barry-cotter wrote: post #317

glitchc wrote: post #291

In North America, teachers are grossly underpaid and their ability to discipline poor performance has been entirely eviscerated. It’s not just SF, look at what’s happening in Vancouver: https://nationalpost.com/opinion/rex-murphy-cutting-honours-... The problem is the administration: The board that sets the standards and the parents and politicians who sit on those boards. The solution is this: Ban anyone without a m…

https://www.heritage.org/education/report/assessing-the-comp... > Workers who switch from non-teaching jobs to teaching jobs receive a wage increase of roughly 9 percent. Teachers who change to non-teaching jobs, on the other hand, see their wages decrease by roughly 3 percent. This is the opposite of what one would expect if teachers were underpaid. https://www.heritage.org/education/report/critical-issues-as... > O…

The analysis is harder than that.

I would imagine education degrees are not particularly versatile: they’re meant to train you to become a teacher, more or less. Given that, it is not particularly surprising that teaching is one of the better-paying options once you commit to that pathway. However, there are plenty of other, career tracks: potential teachers might become accountants or engineers instead.

Zooming in a bit…the big “fringe benefit” is obviously summer vacation. Valuing that correctly is tricky, and the assumption used in that report is that it’s linear in the amount of time off: one week off is worth $X, so the summer vacation must be worth $15X. I would bet that’s not really true and it has declining marginal value like everything else.

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#362

Post by makeitdouble » Sun, Jun 20, 2021, 1:02 AM UTC

barry-cotter wrote: post #317

glitchc wrote: post #291

In North America, teachers are grossly underpaid and their ability to discipline poor performance has been entirely eviscerated. It’s not just SF, look at what’s happening in Vancouver: https://nationalpost.com/opinion/rex-murphy-cutting-honours-... The problem is the administration: The board that sets the standards and the parents and politicians who sit on those boards. The solution is this: Ban anyone without a m…

https://www.heritage.org/education/report/assessing-the-comp... > Workers who switch from non-teaching jobs to teaching jobs receive a wage increase of roughly 9 percent. Teachers who change to non-teaching jobs, on the other hand, see their wages decrease by roughly 3 percent. This is the opposite of what one would expect if teachers were underpaid. https://www.heritage.org/education/report/critical-issues-as... > O…

From the same report, the bullet point above your first quote:

> The wage gap between teachers and non-teachers disappears when both groups are matched on an objective measure of cognitive ability rather than on years of education.

That “objective measure” is based on human capital model of wages, and it seems to me pretty biased to apply to such a specialized profession.

Being wonderful at making a group of 6 years old engaged in your teaching and making them progress seems pretty hard to directly transfer to any other non teaching job.

I feel it’s like asking a pro sax player to transfer skills in another domain and ponder they lose a lot of market value.

Which is also part of the other quote you bring in. If I were to move to a teaching position, I’d look damn hard to be better paid or I wouldn’t move. And it’s not like an Amazon factory worker could just move into teaching tomorrow when he can’t take it anymore. So the pool going into teaching is extremely self selected and also biased.

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#363

Post by giantg2 » Sun, Jun 20, 2021, 1:03 AM UTC

BeFlatXIII wrote: post #349

chrisseaton wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ban anyone without a minimum teaching experience of x years from participating on boards Why do you think you need to be a teacher to direct how our schools are run? Seems technocratic and anti-democratic. The same way we have civilian control of the military, we should have civilian control of our schools. Did you know in the UK there is actually a structure called governors to ensure that schools are being direct…

The problem with civilian control of schools is that it leads to asinine arguments over things like whether to teach sex ed at all or whether creationism belongs in the science classroom. Even in less extreme examples, it will lead to parents pushing for counterproductive and unnecessary reforms that make sense to the layman.

"it will lead to parents pushing for counterproductive and unnecessary reforms that make sense to the layman."

This is basically what happens in all areas when practicing democracy, right? For example, the president is only elected because a substantial portion of the population agree with their positions, or more likely the positions/identity of their party, from their prospectives as a laymans.

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#364

Post by 6f8986c3 » Sun, Jun 20, 2021, 1:03 AM UTC

thundergolfer wrote: post #348

barry-cotter wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.heritage.org/education/report/assessing-the-comp... > Workers who switch from non-teaching jobs to teaching jobs receive a wage increase of roughly 9 percent. Teachers who change to non-teaching jobs, on the other hand, see their wages decrease by roughly 3 percent. This is the opposite of what one would expect if teachers were underpaid. https://www.heritage.org/education/report/critical-issues-as... > O…

Regarding the first quote, it’s not the opposite of what you’d expect if teaching was a low-status profession that could only attract weaker, lower paid labourers. Teaching doesn’t attract highly paid workers because in addition to a big pay cut those workers would be considering likely worse working conditions as well. If teaching is low-status it is no wonder that education standards are low and thus educational ac…

> Teaching doesn’t attract highly paid workers because in addition to a big pay cut those workers would be considering likely worse working conditions as well.

You could double teacher pay and it wouldn't make a lick of difference.

As a teacher, you have no control over your classroom.

Disruptive students that destroy everybody else's learning environment? Too bad. No Child Left Behind! Wait, that's the old slogan, what's the new one? Equity Uber Alles? Equity Macht Frei?

It changes so often, I keep forgetting.

Assaulted by the kids? Suck it up, we don't want to be sued! Better to have a battered teacher -- the Unions will keep them in check -- than a lawyered-up parent.

I have seen this first-hand.

Want to actually teach kids things they need to learn to succeed? This is the wrong job for you.

I know a lot of motivated folks that went into teaching, with big salary bonuses, full scholarships for their degrees, everything. None of them lasted more than four years.

Public education in the US selects for Dolores Umbridge, and against Remis Lupin.

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#365

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Jun 20, 2021, 1:03 AM UTC

otterley wrote: post #331

glitchc wrote: post #291

In North America, teachers are grossly underpaid and their ability to discipline poor performance has been entirely eviscerated. It’s not just SF, look at what’s happening in Vancouver: https://nationalpost.com/opinion/rex-murphy-cutting-honours-... The problem is the administration: The board that sets the standards and the parents and politicians who sit on those boards. The solution is this: Ban anyone without a m…

> The solution is this: Ban anyone without a minimum teaching experience of x years from participating on boards, bring all teacher salaries up to comfortable middle-class in every district and give them back their authority in the classroom. "There is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong." -- H. L. Mencken

[deleted]

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#366

Post by saagarjha » Sun, Jun 20, 2021, 1:04 AM UTC

paulpauper wrote: post #261

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is heartbreaking when all a child has is public school. All I had was public school in a small town and I was a National Merit Scholar. I don’t understand this line of reasoning that you need more teaching from parents or for profit tutoring etc. I got a great education at my public school. Now are some schools not great? Yes. But a blanket statement that all public schools aren’t enough seems incorrect, in my e…

>National Merit Scholar Given how rare this is, this is much more of a function of IQ than school quality. If you fill a school, regardless of quality, with smart kids, grades, ratings, other other benchmarks of quality will probably all go up.

I went to a school where National Merit Scholars were a dime a dozen: student performance there was almost independent of the teaching that they got.

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#367

Post by muyuu » Sun, Jun 20, 2021, 1:04 AM UTC

mindvirus wrote: post #64

One of the most radical beliefs I have is we should get rid of private schools, because it lets the people most capable of forcing change to opt out of an increasingly broken system, and so it doesn't get fixed. Of course I say this as I seriously consider sending my kids to a private school because of articles like this.

people cannot opt out of the DMV and I hear it's still garbage

for some reason, the US never mastered publicly run institutions and they seem to attract the kind of people who run them into the ground

I do agree that the fact that lobbyists and major donors being able to remove themselves from the social consequences of the policies they help implement is a major problem in the American political system; cronyism is out of control and the political funding system is a scandal

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#368

Post by WalterBright » Sun, Jun 20, 2021, 1:05 AM UTC

diamond559 wrote: post #254

WalterBright wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The most important thing you can to to prepare for the SAT is do lots of practice tests. Oh phooey. I never prepared for the SATs, and nobody I knew did, either. (Back in the 70s.) Wanna know how to do well on the SATs? Pay attention in school to readin, ritin, and rithmetic. As for SAT prep books, I see them all the time in the thrift store for a couple bucks. The notion that only the wealthy have access to them i…

A lot has changed since then, college acceptance rates are plummeting and competition is absolutely cutthroat. I graduated ~10 years ago in an affluent Bay Area neighborhood and basically everyone took at least one SAT class, multiple practice test and many had coaches to help them with the entire admissions process.

Caltech's freshman class size is also about 50% larger than in my day. These days I also hear that people shotgun out applications (much easier to do with a computer rather than a typewriter!) which increases the rejection rate even with the exact same number of students.

I have no idea if the relative quality of today's Caltech freshman body is better or the same as in my day.

I flipped through an SAT vocabulary builder book the other day. I knew nearly all the words in it already. Vocabulary is something that happens organically, by reading a lot and looking into complex things. I suspect that memorizing word lists builds a fake vocabulary. Some people have told me they recognize when someone sprinkles their language with the daily word they memorized. It comes off as pretension, not education.

I suspect that if SAT training involves learning fake knowledge and test taking tricks, anyone who gets into Caltech via that method is going to find they're in the wrong place. Students there like to sit in the halls and talk about ways to build a warp drive. Students who don't belong will be watching the game on TV.

One of my good friends there had an apartment off campus. He'd regularly make his special chicken wings and invite all comers (this was not to be missed). The apartment manager would come, too, and he'd just quietly sit off in a corner by himself, munching on chicken wings.

I asked him once why he was there - he didn't participate, and he was way way older. He replied, "oh, this is incredibly fun. I've never ever heard people talk like this before. I just like to listen."

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#369

Post by saagarjha » Sun, Jun 20, 2021, 1:06 AM UTC

muyuu wrote: post #333

I've read somewhere that the affluent don't send their kids to public school in SanFran or anywhere in the Bay Area, is that true? I assume there are a lot of locals browsing this.

Cupertino and Palo Alto have some of the best public schools in the entire state. Of course, some still choose to send their children to private schools, but the public schools in the suburban south Bay Area are good enough to drive up housing prices by their own right.

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#370

Post by tptacek » Sun, Jun 20, 2021, 1:06 AM UTC

glitchc wrote: post #291

In North America, teachers are grossly underpaid and their ability to discipline poor performance has been entirely eviscerated. It’s not just SF, look at what’s happening in Vancouver: https://nationalpost.com/opinion/rex-murphy-cutting-honours-... The problem is the administration: The board that sets the standards and the parents and politicians who sit on those boards. The solution is this: Ban anyone without a m…

Are they grossly underpaid? I don't think that's necessarily true. I think it's true in rural areas, but Chicago Public School teachers are paid above-average, and suburban Chicago teachers make as much as Chicago-area software developers do. And that's without taking into account defined-benefit pension plans and huge amounts of vacation time.

I think the meme about teachers being underpaid is mostly unuseful in conversations like these.