161–170 of 410 posts
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Why? The idea that everyone is forced to go to the same place and be educated the same way is dystopian, IMHO. What ever happened to diversity?
You can have diversity without turning education into a for-profit hellscape.
I'm in NJ where we value public education, for the most part. According to National Center for Education Statistics our average teacher pay was $77,489 in 2022. This is excluding benefits/pension. Well worth it.
If you value education, why does your state have unions that force pay based on seniority and not outcome?
Teaching jobs don't exist in a vacuum, and the reason to have pay based on seniority is simple. If you want competent people to go into the profession from the start, they need to know they have a steady and worthwhile career. If you can provide that, like NJ does, (and where I live in NY does) then you might actually get good teachers. If instead you make it unappealing and difficult because of uncertainty, you will only get people who are incompetent and have no other options.
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?
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Not American, so a couple of questions: 1. Is it normal for teachers to have alternative income for the days they don't work? 2. Sounds like the term "six figures" has a special meaning other than just being in the range 100.000 - 999.999? It appears like there is a connotation that it is a special things to achieve in your life. 3. Taking inflation into account, shouldn't it soon be normal to earn that amount (when…
1. Yes a lot of teacher have different summer jobs. 2. Means at least 100,000 3. Yes, it should be normal.
Teachers don’t work year round. So that 60k salary if adjusted to days worked + pension benefits is equivalent to six figures in the private sector.
Teachers do more work outside of their standard hours than most other professions. I dated a teacher for a long time and she worked much harder for her public school salary (waking up at 6am, prepping, lesson planning, grading, chasing up kids who aren't making it to school, dealing with social workers, etc.), than I do for my cushy six-figure tech job salary. Besides, why shouldn't teachers make six-figures? Why are…
The U.S. has a large contingent of free-market maximalists. These groups are opposed to public services like education and health care across the board. They are allied with right-wing religious groups who oppose public schools on religious grounds (they want a religious curriculum and that’s unconstitutional).
Their tactic is called “starve the beast.” They believe that underfunding and neglect will drive the best teachers out of the public school system and into private schools. Their goal is to bring about the collapse of the public school system and then ultimately convince voters to abolish public schools altogether.
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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.
What demand though? Nobody “buys” what public teachers produce - it’s a public service. It’s up to the state (and ultimately, voters) to decide what teachers make. And it’s even harder for teachers to advocate for themselves in states where teacher unions are banned.
The voters are the customers.
The minimum starting salary for a teacher in Chicago is $60,000 (cost of living adjusted), the highest in the country. It hasn't solved Chicago Public Schools' problems. Source: https://wirepoints.org/chicago-teachers-are-paid-some-of-the...
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…
They are all underpaid and reaching the point of burnout of the entire system and they are only in their 30's.
I'm honestly concerned that we'll see education in the US quite literally falling apart as people willing to work in education effectively evaporate.
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> It hasn't solved Chicago Public Schools' problems. sure but it probably has solved many financial problems for Chicago teachers, which is a good enough reason to implement a tool like this.
Companies (and governments) never raise wages to solve problems for employees. They raise wages to solve problems for themselves. Maybe that’s the stated reason, and maybe it’s used to drum up political support, but it’s never the real reason.
I'm in NJ where we value public education, for the most part. According to National Center for Education Statistics our average teacher pay was $77,489 in 2022. This is excluding benefits/pension. Well worth it.
If you value education, why does your state have unions that force pay based on seniority and not outcome?
However, pay based on outcome is really hard to get right, especially for something like teaching. What is the outcome? Well, what we really want is adults who can contribute to society. But that's too hard to measure and would take too long, so we need a proxy. Anything to do with tests is tough: not only do you have to (somehow -- this isn't a solved problem) calibrate for the students themselves to suss out what the teacher's contribution is, but there's immense pressure to teach to the test and prep for the test specifically, even at the expense of actual education. Not nothing, but imperfect. Other measures suffer from the same basic problem: any measure that becomes a goal ceases to be a useful measure because people optimize for that.
So what's an alternative? Maybe it's to make teaching a respected, well-paid profession where you have stability and advancement. One good way of doing that is by having clear seniority-based pay, not because it reflects how good at the job you are, but because that attracts teachers who are serious about making it a career and establishes it as a mainstream, lucrative profession.
But I don't know. This stuff is all extremely hard, and I don't think anywhere has figured it all out.