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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

#341

Post by hammock »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #216
hammock wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The most recent NAEP data shows what other research has found: Private school students score better in almost all subjects.

https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/dashboards/schools_dashboa...

On college entry tests such as the SAT, NAIS found that students in private schools consistently out-performed their public school peers in all subject areas.

https://www.nais.org/magazine/independent-school/spring-2016...

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

#342

Post by PaulHoule »

Loughla wrote: post #153
russh wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I too work 12 months of the year.

Yes, but you do the work of your main profession that you are an expert in, and are compensated appropriately. You don't do a side job bagging groceries or lifeguarding in the summers to be able to maintain living in a home you own. Legitimate question, do you not see the difference?

I'll say that elementary school teacher who worked as a park ranger in the summer got a good deal as he still had a government job and instead of paying for a gym membership he got paid to walk around in a beautiful place all summer.

I'm sure most teachers don't have it so good but if one were trying to improve the current system you might try to create jobs that are complementary with teaching jobs.

Teaching is one of those areas like software development where the social contradictions are intense because it is a labor intensive practice with very little capital spending (think how the final assembly people on a car have a huge "gun" that hangs from the ceiling and looks like something out of Doom that screws all 5 nuts for a wheel with perfect torque in one shot.) Schools are also funded out of property taxes which are rather regressive and limit the ability of schools to be funded by people who have a huge amount of money and instead pits teachers against people who don't make $60,000 a year and who don't get a few months off in the summer.

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

#343

Post by tombert »

candiddevmike wrote: post #294
tombert wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you heard of WGU? You can knock out bachelors degrees much faster if you already know the material. After about a decade of software engineering, I was able to knock out a CS degree in about six months. Feel free to email me for more info. https://www.wgu.edu/

That's a big if! My issue with college degrees is all the BS classes unrelated to the degree that you have to take. Looking at WGU's catalog for a secondary math education degree, I have to take classes on US history, biology, natural science, and composition. I think these are the classes that you allude to skipping, but it seems like WGU and other colleges are incentivized to make the skipping process quite difficu…

When I did the degree in CS, I was able to almost immediately test out of nearly every "fluff" class. There's no "minimum time" required or anything like that; if you know the material you can schedule the exam and test out of it.

For example, I enrolled in the history class on Tuesday morning. I went through the per-assessment and got a 90%, so Tuesday afternoon, I took the exam, and got an 85%, which was high enough to pass. I knocked out a class in about a day.

This of course won't apply to all classes, but I didn't think it was so bad; the "BS classes" were also my initial hesitation to going back to school, but I was able to whip through them pretty quick.

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

#344

Post by chitowneats »

blamazon wrote: post #295
chitowneats wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

One small part of the complicated answer to that question - a huge portion of that free money went to businesses in the form of PPP loans in a top-down kind of approach, which resulted in a dramatically high amount of fraud and misdirected public funds that will take tens of years to unravel. To ask another question: (presuming our hands were to be tied to give out that free money) Had we instead given that money dir…

"Had we instead given that money directly to teachers"

You mean the people who went to great lengths to be considered non-essential, so they could work remotely? We know the result of that was historic learning loss for American children. They don't deserve another dime.

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

#345

Post by chitowneats »

roughly wrote: post #219
chitowneats wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, aren't you lucky that the rising cost of basic and essential goods isn't a strain on your personal finances.

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

#346

Post by kristopolous »

kimbernator wrote: post #126
mwint wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

"brings in money" is so specious. The whole system is subject to how the accounting is structured.

Education certainly produces community value. Moving around what column the cost and benefits should be attributed to is a kind of social gerrymandering.

It's a function of ideology and power asymmetry. A well educated populace will of course be better off.

You're not going to find out why police make twice as much as teachers with neoliberal economics. Fabulists depict things this way to remove human agency and make specific legislative and policy decisions take on the authority of natural law, as if it's a scientific absolute.

It's just a slight of hand. All these things can be changed and the sky will not fall.

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

#347

Post by sokoloff »

enkid wrote: post #323
sokoloff wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, but because there are so many teachers (about 1 for every 30 households), every $250/yr raise per teacher is over a billion dollars per year and $8/yr per household.

If it will take $20K/yr more to meaningfully nudge the competency curve, that’s ~$700/yr extra for every household. It’s probably even worse than that, though, because in wealthy areas (who might be better able to weather a $700/yr tax increase), teachers are probably already paid more than the average, meaning the lowest paid teachers, the ones most in need of a raise, are likely working in an area with lower income residents in the tax base.

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

#348

Post by roughly »

chitowneats wrote: post #345
roughly wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We didn’t have a fucking depression. Also, there was some inflation.

Well, aren't you lucky that the rising cost of basic and essential goods isn't a strain on your personal finances.

It can be possible that two things are true at the same time: the current situation is bad, and the alternative was worse.

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

#349

Post by astura »

jacobr1 wrote: post #285
AndrewGaspar wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all of the teachers I know regularly work nights and weekends There's a difference between difficulty and exertion. > how important is the outcome It's pretty damn important that the garbage man comes and collects the trash every week, but we don't pay him the marginal value of trash collection to the county. > another assertion I have issues with - there are rampant teacher shortages nationwide I actually agree th…

Note we tend to pay garbagemen more than teachers! I think that probably seeks to the job desirability. More people are willing to be teachers than haul garbage and that is reflected in the pay, net of other impacts.

Where are people getting this shit from?

According to the BLS garbage collectors have a median annual wage of $ 42,780[1] whereas elementary school teachers have a median annual wage of $61,400[2].

[1]https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes537081.htm

[2]https://www.bls.gov/ooh/education-training-and-library/kinde...

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

#350

Post by valarauko »

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…

> 50k salaries in NYC. Even at 60k its basically poverty pay, and you need a Masters!!!

While I agree with you, I would suggest there are plenty of people in NYC who are just as qualified and get paid even less. For example, grad students (who have a Masters) working in biomedical sciences in NYC are paid on avg 40K. You could argue that grad students as students aren't a fair comparison, in that case look to postdocs - they have literal PhDs - and make something like 55K in NYC. With the academic job market the way it is, many people end up as postdocs for over 5 years, if not more.

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