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

#381

Post by idiotsecant » Sun, Jun 20, 2021, 1:21 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

Its refreshing that there is somewhere left on the internet where someone can point out that a problem might have nuance and not get immediately down voted to oblivion. HN is great.

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

#382

Post by gpapilion » Sun, Jun 20, 2021, 1:22 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…

The board in sf is mostly former teachers.

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

#383

Post by ericd » Sun, Jun 20, 2021, 1:22 AM UTC

idiotsecant wrote: post #378

ericd wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that the opposite? At the high school level, I’m not looking for martyrs, I’m looking for subject matter experts to teach my kids. At the lower levels, maybe empathy is more important, but by the time they get to microbiology or stats, you literally cannot be a good teacher without having a deep understanding.

Soft skills ate essential, more so even than a deep understanding of the material.A basic competence is important but anyone who has ever had a genius level professor that angrily mumbles while scribbling incomprehensibly on the board for an hour and then you leave will understand this.

Sure, they can't be completely uninterested in teaching, since they're high school teachers - they're not being hired primarily for their research ability. Part of offering better salaries is also being able to be more selective with who you keep.

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

#384

Post by z3ncyberpunk » Sun, Jun 20, 2021, 1:23 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…

You, clearly, have never taught in your life.

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

#385

Post by Jondar » Sun, Jun 20, 2021, 1:23 AM UTC

Jondar wrote: post #372

> Even before the advent of the internets, catching students cheating was generally not particularly hard. ... Catching this sort of malfeasance has gotten even easier with the development of plagiarism detection software. > ...students use umlauts in place of quotation marks and acute accent marks in place of apostrophes Those students figured out a way around the plagiarism detection.

This "zoomers are so dumb" argument bothers me as much as the PC culture.

It's like generational differences are a new thing, do people really think your teacher back in the day thought progressive educational practices were effective. I mean capital punishment really worked wonders.

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

#386

Post by eldavido » Sun, Jun 20, 2021, 1:25 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…

I see this happen a lot, where we need to make some kind of practical decision in politics (how much to pay teachers, how to set water rates), and it inevitably descends into an ideology-driven discussion of fairness, the meaning of life, and other similarly non-answerable questions.

We have to reframe this for what it is, a person being paid to do a job.

The overall issue here is that when you let values guide decision-making, there's no "right" answer. There is no "right" answer to how much the US should spend on health insurance. Likewise there is no "right" answer to what to pay teachers.

The only way I see to solve this is to peg it to something set by a market. Markets operate under constraints. Maybe set pay (all-in including vacation, pension, benefits, etc) relative to a local private school that sets wages competitively based on what teachers can get vs what the school can afford to pay from fees. Modulate +/- 10% based on overall funding levels if you want to split hairs.

The alternative is much worse: a big slugging match between taxpayers and well-organized special interests (e.g. teacher unions), and news flash, the special interests usually win, because it matters much more for them than for the average taxpayer, and they're better at playing the long game (e.g. organizing member rolls, getting members to show up to meetings/vote, knowing relevant laws, developing relationships with city management/school board members). This is a big part of why secondary education in the US sucks. In any other business, software development, architecture, law, manufacturing, the management has discretion to manage -- set wages and salaries, hire, fire, supervise, and hand out bonuses. School managers (administrators) are absolutely handcuffed by collective bargaining agreements that restrict how they hire, fire, and promote.

You think I'm being hyperbolic? Tell me one other job, apart from a competitive process at a university, that gives people firing-proof "tenure". That's insane.

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

#387

Post by z3ncyberpunk » Sun, Jun 20, 2021, 1:25 AM UTC

thomastjeffery wrote: post #379

6f8986c3 wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, w…

> You could double teacher pay and it wouldn't make a lick of difference. I sincerely doubt that. Having a teacher who isn't struggling financially would be a huge improvement.

You're failing, like most of the crowd here on venture capital forum, is thinking that money is the most and only important factor.

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

#388

Post by Lammy » Sun, Jun 20, 2021, 1:26 AM UTC

muyuu wrote: post #367

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…

> for some reason, the US never mastered publicly run institutions

This is by design, sadly, because the "wrong people" might benefit from them. But hey we have MLK Day and Juneteenth now so we fixed racism :)))))

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

#389

Post by giantg2 » Sun, Jun 20, 2021, 1:27 AM UTC

thundergolfer wrote: post #352

giantg2 wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily. People who are really smart and great in industry are not necessarily great teachers. Frankly, if you are talking about making the salary competitive with one that allows FIRE will have the opposite effect that you want (ideology vs money).

Are you saying that FIRE type people are ill suited for teaching because their interest is in minimising retirement age and not being good teachers? The ideology of “earning to retire” vs. “living to teach”?

I'm saying that if you pay teachers a salary consistent with an MIT grad that was able to FIRE, that you will attract people solely for the money. If we are compensating teachers at 4-5x the median salary, then I would gladly quit my job and become a teacher even though I have no real interest in it. I believe that the best teachers enjoy their jobs and are not just looking for the money.

Now we could use a performance based pay system that could pay teachers more. Some of those systems fail to capture the right metrics. All of them are opposed by the teachers union. I think a slightly below average salary (factoring in benefits which are not typically seen in industry) with the potential to make more than average based on performance would be a good system.

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

#390

Post by Mehdi2277 » Sun, Jun 20, 2021, 1:27 AM UTC

giantg2 wrote: post #341

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…

Eh, I know a teacher in my state that is paid more than I am as a software dev, and that's not too unusual (I know other states might be different as we are in the top 10 for teacher salary). We also spend $14k per student per year at my district. The education is ok. I feel that the main issue is that the wrong things are being taught. How about things like personal finance, basic mechanical and electrical skills (l…

Most states in the US require a civics class in high school (normally called us government). Several states require personal financial literacy class. DIY is not one I know anywhere requiring.

But something being required and something being preserved is very different. It's very normal to lose a lot of that knowledge after a couple years so if your goal is they pass a civics test/know basic finance it'll probably continue to fail even with all states requiring it.