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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

#321

Post by jdmtheNth »

dividefuel wrote: post #302
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…

It's a bit of both, right? Look at doctors, a highly-paid and highly-qualified position. Even with all the training that they go through, you can still have a doctor who seems incompetent or, more commonly, who doesn't know how to work well with patients. But the high pay and social status is a big carrot that pulls in a lot of smart people who are willing to put in the effort. You want the job to appeal to smart peo…

It's worse now that they are lowering the standards to enter medical school.

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

#322

Post by SauciestGNU »

HEmanZ wrote: post #308
tsgagnon wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know a few people who are teachers, or related fields like librarians, and I would say they all are smart, hard working and care quite a bit about their students. 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 evapo…

(Totally unrelated to topic at hand) Do you consider librarians in the same category as teachers? They seem like completely different things to me. Like, I don’t really care if my local librarian thinks the world is flat and wants to tell everyone about it. Just keep the library well run and organized. I do care very much if the 3rd grade science teacher is a hardcore flat-earther.

Not who you're replying to, and the circumstances are different, but at many university in the US, librarianships are a tenure-track professorial position. I believe that being a librarian is by all reasonable measures a type of teaching.

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

#323

Post by enkid »

sokoloff wrote: post #220
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…

Raising pay moves the bell curve a little bit to the right. It allows people to stay a teacher even though they could get a higher paying job instead of having a large percentage of them being someone who couldn't get another job. It won't fix everything, but it will help.

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

#324

Post by shagie »

juancampa wrote: post #312

How about we align incentives instead? Here's an idea: when a student graduates, they allocate 1% of their yearly salary to their favorite 5-10 teachers for the next 5 years. I call it the "thankfulness tax". Incentives aligned: the most impactful teachers make the most money.

In the "give this a read" category... The Unincorporated Man. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unincorporated_Man // https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4025200-the-unincorporat...

It has some intriguing ideas that... bear thinking about. I'll note that this is a social / political / economic paper with a story more than a good story with interesting ideas.

From one of the Goodreads reviews which spells out the basics of society:

> This novel offers a really interesting and innovative SF concept: in the future, every person is incorporated upon birth. Twenty percent of the shares go to the parents, five percent goes to the government, the rest can be sold by the owner for education, possessions and so on. You can buy and sell someone's shares as an investment, for charity, even as a hostile act. Reaching "self-majority" - owning the majority of your own shares - is similar to becoming independently wealthy in today's world. The entire future society is based on this basic economic concept. I thought it was a fantastic idea and was really excited about the novel.

> Unfortunately the brothers Kollin ruined this inventive idea with some really poor writing and plotting. It's a classic example of great concept, poor execution.

---

The "sold by the owner for education" - gets into a "you want to go to college? Sell 5% of your shares to the college."

I'm not going to claim it's a good idea, just an interesting point for discussion to think about and bring up when political discourse is acceptable late at night at a party or other social event.

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

#325

Post by ethbr0 »

option wrote: post #309
ethbr0 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> at will employment with school district This is thorny, because it gets into the problems tenure was created to combat: school administration's goals aren't always student success. Especially now, they can be myopically assessment-focused or political. Subordinating teachers to the whim of administration wouldn't help this. Jury-of-their-peers is slightly better, but has its own issues.

school boards are (and should be) elected positions. So theoretically they are accountable to parents.

Parents definitely shouldn't be the primary source of authority.

If you want to know how badly otherwise seemingly mature adults can behave, come to a local school board meeting in Florida.

"For the kids" + average parent = asshole with no holds barred

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

#326

Post by juancampa »

shagie wrote: post #324
juancampa wrote: post #312

How about we align incentives instead? Here's an idea: when a student graduates, they allocate 1% of their yearly salary to their favorite 5-10 teachers for the next 5 years. I call it the "thankfulness tax". Incentives aligned: the most impactful teachers make the most money.

In the "give this a read" category... The Unincorporated Man. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unincorporated_Man // https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4025200-the-unincorporat... It has some intriguing ideas that... bear thinking about. I'll note that this is a social / political / economic paper with a story more than a good story with interesting ideas. From one of the Goodreads reviews which spells out the basi…

What an interesting concept. Thanks for sharing this!

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

#327

Post by r00fus »

Anecdotally, I spent a two separate days leading a single hour of my mom's class (about a single topic each time) as a guest instructor.

Both times it exhausted the hell out of me. At the time I was incredibly fit (ran 4x a week for 3mi+) but the attention requirements of teaching 1st and 3rd graders was INTENSE.

I was amazed at how my mom could do this day in and day out. Plus she dug into her own pocket to supplement the classroom supplies.

Teachers should be paid well north of $60K.

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

#328

Post by jdmtheNth »

candiddevmike wrote: post #204
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 would love to retire and become a public school teacher, but I will not go back to college for a bachelors degree in teaching. Make it easier to become a teacher and you'd see more people consider it, IMO.

I've always though it was absurd to have a kid get his or her teachers certificate and just start teaching. I'd rather see someone mature, with life experience teaching because they know things outside the narrowly-delineated curriculum. My son came home a couple of weeks ago and showed me a picture he took of his class. One or two were reading, most were on their phones, and I asked "what were you supposed to be doing?" He said "nothing" - the teacher didn't have anything for them to do. I was literally speechless. How could an adult have nothing to teach a bunch of kids?

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

#329

Post by r00fus »

nohuck13 wrote: post #280
mempko wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you rate a good teacher with a bad one? Education is a bit different than most professions. Testing kids solves for the wrong thing as teachers are forced to "teach to the test" instead of educate children. I recommend the work of Alfie Kohn to learn more.

How do you rate a good software developer with a bad one? Software development is a but different than most professions. Counting completed Jira tickets solves for the wrong thing as developers are forced to game the ticket system rather than optimize for business value. /s And yet somehow we continue to hire and manage software developers, evaluating their performance holistically. What is it about teaching that sup…

Software development is a far more evaluable profession than teachers. Most of the "problems" that bad teachers create don't show up for a few years.

Contrast that with code that doesn't compile/link or requires way more QA. Or personality issues that are sorted quite easily by a functional team/leader.

Teachers are more like naval vessel commanders than software engineers.

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

#330

Post by ticviking »

Justsignedup wrote: post #259

Teachers are such a fucked up system that its hard to visualize just how bad it is. Having worked in teacher support orgs in the past, I can tell you... its bad. - There are definitely bad teachers out there. The older the get the worse they get. But what's really counter-intuitive is that the teacher filter is absolutely backwards. The teachers who are smart, tallented, and trully exceptional... they end up leaving…

Or perhaps we could try asking schools to do less. Based on my experience in education burnout in "Bad schools" comes from a handful of terror students, and in "good schools" from a handful of overly demanding parents.

Students who cannot behave in an appropriate manner shouldn't be the schools problem, they should be the parents problem. Ultimately they are the communities problem, but schools aren't the appropriate place to solve it.

Demanding parents is a different problem but is much easier to manage if you are treated as a professional(on par with a Lawyer, or Accountant) and have the ability to make professional decisions that require formal steps to challenge.

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