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

adamcadre.ac

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

#451

Post by plow-tycoon »

swinnipeg wrote: post #432
kickout wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that a location thing? Like, do places like Saskatoon have problems attracting people (weather)?

Nope. Teachers salaries would be similar to that across Canada. Software dev salaries would be very close, with some exceptions. Winnipeg/Calgary/Edmonton are all very similar to Saskatoon. There would be some higher paying opportunities in Van/Tor/Mtl. But an $200K individual contributor software dev is a truly a Unicorn in Canada. Lots of reasons, but the biggest is that simply don't have the ultra profitable FAANG…

Hey look at that, another Winnipeger. Winnipeg, as well as the other small prairie cities I'd imagine, also have the disadvantage of just not that much competition and not that much in terms of newer rentals. When I moved to Vancouver 6 years ago, I doubled my salary from ~42k to ~80k. Most of the well paying jobs from that time were for Java devs at the big 3 or 4 insurance companies. If I wanted to work there, there weren't really many nice apartments nearby. Some were built way out in burbs, and now there's a few downtown and in Osbourne, but it's slow going.

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

#452

Post by megameter »

lubujackson wrote: post #150
mmarq wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know anything about this particular Lowell High School, but selective admissions at the high school level achieve excellency by filtering out "bad" students, which are usually students from disadvantaged backgrounds. If a public school is of very high quality, selecting 10 year olds at random is not much less fair than choosing them based on their grades or extracurricular activities or an essay. Unless we as…

This kind of narrow thinking is what has caused schools in SF to suck for everyone. Because Lowell doesn't exist in a vacuum and the arguments that privileged people have a leg up doesn't really make a difference - it is similar logic to burning libraries because some folks can't read. So what happens when you dumb down the only decent public high school for students to aim for? The parents have three options: send y…

As a graduate of the high school in question, I support the idea of selectivity everywhere, not just as a "magnet school" or "honors track".

There is a major downside to selectivity as it's done right now, which is that you end up with a competitive pressure cooker in that program since the student body will mostly consist of kids with highly driven parents who demand top-of-class academic results, every assignment perfect. It makes kids anxious-to-suicidal depending on how much pressure they experience, but it doesn't make them uniformly better at the material; depending on the subject and the student, either they're way ahead or they are really struggling, and if they are already doing some work to think about the material, "study harder, do more homework" doesn't really increase that rate, it just makes them more performative and "grade-grubbing". And this doesn't change when you look at secondary education either; there are many "tough" and "competitive" colleges, but they don't turn out graduates that are of equivalently greater skill.

But that does not mean that dumbing down is a good idea! Selectivity within each school, and making greater use of online learning to offer advanced, fine-grained tracking, gets to the good part of selectivity, which is that learning becomes more focused on individual student needs. "Staying with the class" is in many ways the worst part of school and absolutely shouldn't be the thing to emphasize, whether we're talking about high-flying academics or troubled delinquents and special ed students.

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

#453

Post by bnj »

hypnoscripto wrote: post #435
kickout wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP is correct. double your salary at your job, but have to take verbal abuse and berated from your 'boss' and see how that paycheck affects your life

If your salary is high enough that you can save some money then you aren’t required to put up with bullshit in order to keep eating food.

Do you mean that by saving money people can leave the profession sooner or at least move to a school with more favorable working conditions?

If so, maybe you’ve hit on a kernel of truth: we can’t risk paying teachers enough that they’d have the financial security to leave a bad work situation.

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

#454

Post by codemonkey-zeta »

spangry wrote: post #424
ALittleLight wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a big oversimplification. There are many differences in education between Finland and the US. Pointing to a single one and declaiming it as the cause is unjustified. As a counter example, the OECD PISA ranking for education puts Estonia as just barely ahead of Finland[1]. Estonia has public and private schools[2]. So, it is at least possible to have Finland quality schools while maintaining a public and priva…

Any idea what Massachusetts is doing to achieve such results, and could it be replicated in other states?

It's cultural. A school system can only be effective up to a point, but depends mostly on the stock of students/parents involved in the system.

You'll see MA scores among the top states in most forms of human development, so it shouldn't be surprising that the schools reflect that trend. The MA school system is likely not doing anything particularly unique that will be the antidote to failing systems in other states. It's likely the best way to replicate their success in other states lies in policy not directly related to school systems.

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

#456

Post by bpodgursky »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #419
fallingknife wrote: post #25

> Another initiative headed for mandate status is a school policy that no assignment can receive a grade of less than 50% > And my direct supervisor repeatedly demanded that I pace my classes for the benefit of the single student in each section who was struggling the most I don't understand school. Why do they do things like this? Who actually thinks this is a good idea? I've never met anyone who does. How have we g…

The problem is that parents make a stink when their special little snowflake is given a bad grade, or sent to the principal, or whatever. But parents don't make a stink when their kid doesn't learn, because the teacher is too busy dancing around the kids that s/he can't do anything about because their parents would make a stink. One disruptive kid can prevent 20 kids from learning. Look, the kid may have reason. His…

In SF, the parents are absolutely not the cause here. The issue is a top-down mandate from the school board focus on equity to the detriment of all other objectives.

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

#457

Post by zthrowaway »

tptacek wrote: post #370
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 con…

It has basically become a political talking point. My aunt is in rural Ohio making 80k per year as a HS history teacher. She is tenured but money wasn’t ever a struggle for her.

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

#458

Post by strken »

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…

Teaching (in Australia, but the pattern in the US is similar although lower[0]) is known to have okay starting pay that doesn't scale with experience. I'd expect some interesting effects around tenure, because those who leave or enter teaching probably do so when they're at the start of their career, when their pay is most competitive.

[0] As per https://theconversation.com/three-charts-on-teachers-pay-in-..., the US starts out below the bar for tertiary-educated workers and gets even lower

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

#459

Post by throwaway894345 »

strken wrote: post #458
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…

Teaching (in Australia, but the pattern in the US is similar although lower[0]) is known to have okay starting pay that doesn't scale with experience. I'd expect some interesting effects around tenure, because those who leave or enter teaching probably do so when they're at the start of their career, when their pay is most competitive. [0] As per https://theconversation.com/three-charts-on-teachers-pay-in-... , the U…

> that doesn't scale with experience

Is this true? I have several friends who are teachers in the US and they say they get pay raises for experience and for any extra accreditation they pursue. Which isn’t to remark on whether the pay is satisfactory, but I get the impression that the pay does increase and can do so pretty significantly.

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

#460

Post by ihsw »

mmarq wrote: post #145
yonran wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read the article? Yes, selective admissions filter out “bad” students including the type of students who don’t care about school who hold back students who do care; the problems of the article are virtually nonexistent at Lowell. I don’t think Lowell was particularly selective (I think something like 50% of applicants get in) and there were plenty of poor students (including myself) who benefited from an acad…

> Did you read the article? Yes, selective admissions filter out “bad” students including the type of students who don’t care about school who hold back students who do care What do we do about these 10 year olds? We assume they are not "high school" material and we put them in the school for dumb kids? Do these 10 year old not care about school because there is something intrinsically wrong about them and so the sch…

Disparities in outcome is not evidence of discrimination.
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