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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

#211

Post by Gh0stRAT »

HEmanZ wrote: post #128

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…

I think pay is one part of the problem of attracting the best teachers. Potentially an even bigger problem is just how much of the curriculum is dictated by fiat. We require them to get a Masters degree but then give them almost no autonomy. I'm not a teacher, but I feel like that's gotta hurt job satisfaction and be a big contributor to high teacher turnover/burnout. (quick Google says 8%/year leave the field entirely[0])

[0] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/slc

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

#212

Post by mempko »

HEmanZ wrote: post #128

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…

Ungifted? Strange, I can say the same thing about highly paid tech people I know. It's rather easy to say such things. We are, after all, on HN, all above average in giftedness. Or so we think.

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

#213

Post by kube-system »

hammock wrote: post #182
kube-system wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a significant race and religion component to school choice.

What do you mean?

2/3 of private schools are religious. And many private schools were literally founded as a response to brown vs board. Parents are not choosing schools based on academic success alone.

An extremely significant part of how parents choose schools is based on the social groups they want their kids associating with.

99% of the academic success of private schools is attributable to their ability to exclude poorly performing students, not some magical pedagogical secret.

It’s the same exact reason why homes of equivalent quality in two different districts of the same school system may have 2x or 3x price differentials. Because parents pay hundreds of thousands so their kid doesn’t sit next to a kid with parents who can’t afford the same.

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

#214

Post by aisengard »

aaronyarborough wrote: post #75
jvmfjvfjvf wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you value education, why does your state have unions that force pay based on seniority and not outcome?

How is outcome measured?

Well, if you get to teach a lot of well-off kids who have a lot of extra support at home and you can siphon off the undesirables onto others, you get good marks when most of them inevitably "succeed".

If you have to teach the kids who need help, you get poor marks when some of them inevitably fail.

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

#215

Post by kimbernator »

kneebonian wrote: post #176
kimbernator wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

> this is an obvious downside of modern capitalism; Value is defined as what brings in money, And in communism value is defined as what will get you promoted. And in autocracy value is loyalty to the party line And in Neo-Nazism value is what kills the most Jews And so on and so forth, let's not pretend that people making short sighted decisions for personal gain is limited to a single economic system it may be more…

The problem I'm trying to highlight is that the capitalism and focus on the short-term of business is leaking a bit too much into the operation of government. Instead of directing resources in a thoughtful way, it seems more like we're trying to check boxes for the lowest price and forget about the purpose of that funding.

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

#216

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

hammock wrote: post #137
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps because $60k is not actually that much for what we ask of our public school teachers. HN: $100k/yr to write webshit is a poverty wage! Also HN: $60k/yr is too much for the people we expect to educate our children!

I don't believe there is a strong or even weak correlation between teachers' salaries and educational outcomes. Chicago teachers get paid the most yet their schools are among the worst in the nation. Private school teachers get paid less than public but produce better outcomes. Etc. There are other, far more important factors we ought to be paying attention to

> Private school teachers get paid less than public but produce better outcomes.

I'd like a citation for that. I can't help but imagine that private schools game the numbers, because when I worked for a school district that's what I saw: private schools can easily get rid of underperforming students and pretty much never take any with disabilities.

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

#217

Post by adenozine »

Hard agree! Time to strip some of the administrators and get some talent in the classrooms.

I heard Florida was letting people in classrooms after just a few hours of supervision.

If the education crisis isn’t addressed, this country will be absolutely decimated in another thirty years. A level of brain drain hitherto unwitnessed in modern times.

If I was raising a young child now (mine are in their late twenties) I’d be strongly weighing the pros and cons of suggesting they go abroad for higher education, and I’d certainly be hiring a tutor rather than trusting the K12 system. Not everybody can afford all of that, despite the money being taxed already. We could lower the military budget by a percentage point and fix all this tomorrow, if we really wanted to…

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

#218

Post by cityofdelusion »

HEmanZ wrote: post #128

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 mind just goes to the teachers I had growing up. After elementary school, the quality went down, and in high school, it plummeted. I was a very bored student in high school and the only teachers I actually enjoyed learning under were a couple of AP classes. As I look to the future with my children, I can't say I am very eager to put them through the same gauntlet of mediocrity that I went through.

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

#219

Post by roughly »

chitowneats wrote: post #174
blamazon wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those teachers aren't burning the money. It goes back to the community around them as they spend it, generally.

We gave out a bunch of free money during the pandemic. What was the result of that?

We didn’t have a fucking depression.

Also, there was some inflation.

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

#220

Post by sokoloff »

HEmanZ wrote: post #128

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…

Both of my parents were math teachers, so I got to experience growing up around a lot of teachers and hearing their compliments and complaints about their peers. There are about 4 million K-12 teachers in the US; it's one of the most common professions and isn't immune to having the resulting distribution of talent.

My brother had a high-school math teacher who could only explain "the reason we say the square root of 2 is irrational is because it says so on page 79". I had a physics teacher who marked an answer wrong on my exam because she didn't know how to do the problem.

Most every one of us has an experience like this, but it's also seeing the teachers at one of their -3σ moments and focusing on that. If you looked at my -3σ coding results or personal decisions, you'd probably conclude I was a mouth-breathing idiot as well. (I would expect an Algebra II teacher to be able to explain what a rational and irrational number meant, though.)

I doubt that the pay of teachers can be raised sufficiently to fundamentally change the makeup of people in the profession. It's just too many people and too expensive to change from any amount of pay difference that the taxpaying public could sustain. There are some great teachers. There are many good teachers. There are millions and millions of completely unexceptional teachers.

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