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

Places like Singapore have a different attitude toward this that's worth understanding (not saying it's right, just different and worth understanding, like comparing OSX to Windows). There are parts of the US government that operate this way, like the Federal Reserve.

One interesting proposal from the book is having congress pass a tax law that's very simple, something like "the top 10% of income-earners should pay 15% of all revenue" and giving the IRS (career tax experts) much more leeway to write the tax code, in a way that complies with the stated (democratically accountable) objectives, but maximizes simplicity and ease of enforcement. I think there's something to that.

There's a place for technocrats. But in today's extremely "power to the people" moment that gives us Trump and Sanders, it seems like a harder sell.

School choice effectively allows increased wages for good teachers and yes there's competition so you'll have lower end schools as well. However, it'll be a rising ship, which raises all boats IMO. You can also audit the schools and shutdown poorly run ones, etc.

The used to have shop or home economics as required classes.

I do agree that it is up to the student to maintain proficiency. I just feel like many of the tests and classes are ridiculously easy, like to the point of being geared to passing people rather than teaching. But I do also acknowledge that I forget about stuff I don't use, like complex fractions and fraction multiplication.

SF schools went to all-remote education starting in March 2020 and by the end of the 2020-2021 school year, did not yet return for in-person instruction. The effect on children's education has been devastating. [0]

The teacher's union refused to entertain in-person teaching even though SF has reportedly reached herd immunity as of May 2021. Negotiations have yielded almost no progress and well-meaning high-earning parents dedicated to the public school system have been stymied despite organizing as a group. [1]

As a former college professor, I understand low wages are a problem for most teachers. Even as a tenure-track professor, my salary in 2009 was less than 50% of what I was (and am) able to command as a front-end developer in the Bay Area.

Teaching K-12 in public schools in the US is difficult. There are nigh insurmountable problems which, in my opinion, are the product of so few financial resources dedicated to the project of educating children in the US.

The behavioral problems less-endowed schools encounter among their students is an outgrowth of poor funding and poverty economics.

Public school education in wealthy communities (famously Stuyvesant High School [2]) is a different story altogether.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/16/opinion/remote-learning-f...

[1] https://decreasingthedistance.org

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuyvesant_High_School

This would imply that education degrees make their recipients better educators. There is no strong evidence of that.

https://www.brookings.edu/research/who-profits-from-the-mast...

> The fact that teachers with master’s degrees are no more effective in the classroom, on average, than their colleagues without advanced degrees is one of the most consistent findings in education research. In a study published in 2011, Paul Peterson and I confirmed this finding by comparing the student achievement of the same teachers before and after they earned master’s degrees, and found no impact.[1]

> This finding may be non-controversial among researchers, but it has largely been ignored by policymakers.

[1] It's easier to pick a good teacher than to train one: Familiar and new results on the correlates of teacher effectiveness

Neither holding a college major in education nor acquiring a master's degree is correlated with elementary and middle school teaching effectiveness, regardless of the university at which the degree was earned. Teachers generally do become more effective with a few years of teaching experience, but we also find evidence that teachers may become less effective with experience, particularly later in their careers. These and other findings with respect to the correlates of teacher effectiveness are obtained from estimations using value-added models that control for student characteristics as well as school and (where appropriate teacher) fixed effects in order to measure teacher effectiveness in reading and math for Florida students in fourth through eighth grades for eight school years, 2001–2002 through 2008–2009.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02727...