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Sanders calls for minimum salary of $60000 for public school teachers

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Re: Sanders calls for minimum salary of $60000 for public school teachers

#121

Post by stefan_ »

endisneigh wrote: post #82

The only way teachers would ever be able to make a lot of money is if some metrics apparatus was created by the United States and income outcomes were traced back to individual schools and teachers in said schools got some portion of that as part of their salary. Of course, the USA would have to bootstrap the first "cohort" of this. Otherwise, the point is simple - good teachers don't get paid more, because there's n…

Funny, this doesn't seem to be in place for other government employees yet they make much more. Nor in the "meritocratic" "free economy".

Re: Sanders calls for minimum salary of $60000 for public school teachers

#122

Post by birdymcbird »

not sure this really fix any problem. $60k good salary in arkansas maybe. if you in expensive city..not go very far.

have kids in public america school system. government spending money in my opinion uncompetitive and wasteful. but public education must all support. it still good in america.

national minimum salary ok but need states or cities to tune to living cost. $60k only work maybe in central us.. cheaper state or city.

Re: Sanders calls for minimum salary of $60000 for public school teachers

#123

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

mwint wrote: post #60
news_to_me wrote: post #44

My first “real” job after college (2013) I started at $60k. It was more than my mom, an elementary school teacher, ever made. It felt embarrassing. Teachers are at least as valuable as software developers (probably more), given their impact on society. Why do they make so little?

Supply and demand, like always. The market cares not one bit about what someone “should” be paid, it cares about the price where no one is left willing to do the same job for less. If you want teachers to be paid more, increase the requirements to be a teacher. I’m a proponent of requiring at least n years experience in real world work, plus education in a hard science or trade.

> Supply and demand, like always.

Not everything follows the rules of capitalism, especially when public school teachers are paid by the government. There are giant teacher shortages across many locales in the US, so according to you we should see skyrocketing teacher pay, but that hasn't happened (pay has gone up in some locales but nowhere near the amount needed to fix teacher shortages).

Re: Sanders calls for minimum salary of $60000 for public school teachers

#124

Post by throwaway5959 »

davidmichael wrote: post #57
PaulHoule wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then they get a summer job. I remember an elementary school teacher from when I was a kid who was a park ranger in the summer.

Attempting to get a seasonal job, year after year, for just 2-3 months a year would be difficult. My wife is a former school teacher and she spent a considerable amount of time planning and working on things for the next school year. If teachers are expected to all work over summer break to make ends meet then their performance will suffer. I'd argue that a better approach for teachers and education in general would…

What does your wife do now?

Re: Sanders calls for minimum salary of $60000 for public school teachers

#125

Post by bick_nyers »

fafafuf wrote: post #78

I know this is crazy but: Recently I was thinking about opening a foundation that will create a universal multimedia "product" (combination of software, movies, games, maybe vr) that will teach kids around the world in schools subjects that all nations agree upon like mathematics, physics, chemistry, informatics etc. This is extremely challenging to convince governments to impose this in the schools but the gains are…

I'm in the camp that believes individualized education is best solved using AI. Not ChatGPT, something better.

Likely will need in-person teacher facilitation as well, setting up kids alone with a laptop and an AI feels very wrong and dystopian to me.

Edit: Also getting all nations to agree will be impossible, if not then you will probably a curriculum that suffers death by committee.

Re: Sanders calls for minimum salary of $60000 for public school teachers

#126

Post by kimbernator »

mwint wrote: post #60
news_to_me wrote: post #44

My first “real” job after college (2013) I started at $60k. It was more than my mom, an elementary school teacher, ever made. It felt embarrassing. Teachers are at least as valuable as software developers (probably more), given their impact on society. Why do they make so little?

Supply and demand, like always. The market cares not one bit about what someone “should” be paid, it cares about the price where no one is left willing to do the same job for less. If you want teachers to be paid more, increase the requirements to be a teacher. I’m a proponent of requiring at least n years experience in real world work, plus education in a hard science or trade.

Ideological divides aside, this is an obvious downside of modern capitalism; Value is defined as what brings in money, which I would wager 99% of people would generally agree is not the best definition for the public interest. It is the easiest to measure, though.

Trite as it may be to say, there's an obvious value to attracting a larger amount of people to teaching, it's just hard to quantify and takes longer than most politicians' term limits to see the larger benefits.

Re: Sanders calls for minimum salary of $60000 for public school teachers

#127

Post by RajT88 »

news_to_me wrote: post #44

My first “real” job after college (2013) I started at $60k. It was more than my mom, an elementary school teacher, ever made. It felt embarrassing. Teachers are at least as valuable as software developers (probably more), given their impact on society. Why do they make so little?

Impact is huge, but they don't generate revenue for the organization which pays them. Therefore - their pay is a function of the budget that is available.

Public school budgets are set of course by property taxes. If you teach in a rich district, you get paid more. If you teach in a poor district, you get paid less. The way public schools are funded helps keep the rich rich, and the poor poor.

Unfortunately, the political clout is held by the rich who want their tax money to go only to their children and not those other children (or "those othered children" if you like). Even though, if we switched to a more equal funding model for public schools, we'd see improvements in the wealth gap and society in general within a generation or two.

Re: Sanders calls for minimum salary of $60000 for public school teachers

#128

Post by HEmanZ »

This is loosely related, but every time I think of public school teacher salaries my mind goes to the public school teachers I know. As a group they are… exceptionally ungifted. As just one example, I lived with two middle school teachers in Texas for a few years. They probably couldn’t pass the grade they were teaching. I have never met two professionals with so many credentials (MS in Education) and so little sense. My memories of friends in college who became elementary school teachers fall into the same bucket. Do others have similar experiences with teachers or do I just have a bad selection?

I think as a society, if increasing teacher pay gets us better teachers and therefore better educational outcomes then we should do it, hands down. But if that increase in pay gets us more of the same thing at higher cost to the public…?

I’m not sure which of these outcomes is more likely. The optimist in me says more smart people see educating the youth as a viable career and we get more competent educators. The cynic in me says it never works like that in a system as bureaucratic as education.

I don’t know what to think.

Re: Sanders calls for minimum salary of $60000 for public school teachers

#129

Post by monocasa »

mattmcknight wrote: post #100
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because of targeted propaganda and attacks by an organized political group that holds, as an ideology, that public institutions should not exist and everything should be done by the private sector.

If this were true, wouldn't private school teachers be paid considerably more? In my area, they are paid considerably less.

Why would that follow that private school teachers would be paid more?

Re: Sanders calls for minimum salary of $60000 for public school teachers

#130

Post by ethbr0 »

endisneigh wrote: post #82

The only way teachers would ever be able to make a lot of money is if some metrics apparatus was created by the United States and income outcomes were traced back to individual schools and teachers in said schools got some portion of that as part of their salary. Of course, the USA would have to bootstrap the first "cohort" of this. Otherwise, the point is simple - good teachers don't get paid more, because there's n…

Later life success over median replacement value seems like a nice bonus structure for retirement.

E.g. statistically normalize cohort (income, etc.), measure their median outcomes, and then see how the teacher's cohort does

It'll be dirty, given the small sample size and number of variables, but it'd be a nice bonus +/- to retirement.

I'd also hazard prior student reviews, sampled when they turn 30 & 40 would be very interesting.

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