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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

#391

Post by beej71 »

threatofrain wrote: post #362
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…

There are some disciplines in teaching which are easier to improve than others. There are some local Bay Area schools with an excellent standard for performance, with a near-majority of students in the fastest math track and with about half the math faculty as Calculus teachers. I can't imagine any teacher who enjoys math who'd want to join a school district where the kids don't like learning and where the teacher ha…

What about a billion dollars a year? I'll bet you get the #1 teacher in the world for those conditions who performs near miracles and wants to be in that environment, as well.

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

#392

Post by friend_and_foe »

beej71 wrote: post #371
friend_and_foe wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely if underperforming teachers were all fired, the bar was raised along with pay I'd be happy. Now, that's hard and I get that, just deciding how to measure teacher performance is difficult, but if it can be done it should be done.

There seem to be a lot of people here who know an underperforming teacher when they see one. :)

As someone who spent their formative years primarily interacting with teachers I think I can say that I do. Most teachers underperform, so even if you have a hard time, just assuming that one is not a good one will have you right more often than not.

The few teachers I had that left a lasting impression on me I value greatly, I wish more teachers were like that. And that's a teachers job, isn't it? Without a lasting impression most of what was learned is lost, so then it's not really teaching, just busywork.

I will say that there are probably a good number of teachers with the drive just beaten out of them by the bureaucracy. When you go into your profession to educate and you spend more time dealing with authorities, paperwork and silly requirements, that has a tendency to drag your performance down. The flip side of that though is ofc that that bureaucracy was largely created by teachers, probably the ones who would get fired without it protecting them.

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

#393

Post by mattmcknight »

monocasa wrote: post #129
mattmcknight wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The claim was that school teacher salaries were low "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. reply".

Since private schools are not subject to these attacks, their salaries would not be lowered by these attacks, making them relatively higher.

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

#394

Post by [deleted] »

Justsignedup wrote: post #384
ticviking wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

my ex wife worked in a nyc school. She had a lot of troubled kids she dealt with. all her complaints were about administration and travel time. i reject your assessment. And she dealt with an illiterate high school kid.

[deleted]

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

#395

Post by tptacek »

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

Cite a source on Chicago schools being "the worst in the nation"? Chicago is a huge city, and large tracts of it are locked into generational poverty as a result of redlining, which sets up a vicious cycle with low-performing schools in those areas. It does not follow that the whole CPS system is the worst in the nation, and given state rankings and the population distribution of Illinois, that in fact seems very unlikely to be true.

But maybe you have a source that says otherwise.

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

#396

Post by tptacek »

hammock wrote: post #70

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...

That's a right wing site that runs tabloid stories about "black on black" crime and the criminal history of Ja'Mal Green (who was arrested at a protest). The 2019 outcome it claims are apparently the opposite of the truth; the overwhelming majority of CPS students met or exceeded standards in 2019.

(The pandemic kicked the shit out of those statistics, but we're not debating whether remote schooling was a good policy; it wasn't.)

Even if the statistics were true (again: looks like no), the conclusion that it's drawing is unsupported. The very best teachers in the nation would have a hard time putting up New Trier stats teaching in Lawndale or Englewood. And the very best teaching is probably what it actually takes to eke out any kind of performance from the lowest-performing schools in Chicago, which serve students locked into generational poverty by redlining.

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

#398

Post by AlgorithmicTime »

monocasa wrote: post #119
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.

I mean, we already have massive teacher shortages. Class sizes keep going up, and many school systems are switching to four day schedules because of staffing issues. Not everything can be looked at from a macro econ 101 supply and demand take; the real world is much more complicated than that.

[dead]

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

#399

Post by rayiner »

tptacek wrote: post #389
rayiner wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do others have similar experiences with teachers or do I just have a bad selection My sixth grade science teacher called on me and asked “if the freezing point of water is 0C and 32F, and the boiling point is 100C, what’s the boiling point in F?” I answered “212F” but she said “132F.” Then the class laughed at me which was very embarrassing. Most teachers are very nice, very dedicated, but not intellectually gifted…

Your HVAC technician might be better at math and science than your accountant, your estate lawyer, your real estate attorney, your corporate contract review attorney, and probably 2/3rds of everyone else that works in an office building. At least in major urban school districts, I don't generally think teachers are underpaid (every OPRF teacher makes 6 figures; the median CPS teacher makes something like 70k, and the…

> But calling them "not intellectually gifted" is mean spirited, reductive, and unhelpful.

Only if you think there’s something wrong with being of average or modestly above average intelligence.

I’m simply pointing out that—insofar as our society accords higher compensation to intellectually gifted people or intellectually demanding jobs—the credential inflation in teaching creates a false signal about the nature of the job and most of the people who work in it.

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

#400

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

throwaway6734 wrote: post #358
Volundr wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uhhh... If you think rich kids are well behaved I've got some bad news for you. The rich parent is the one who is going to show up after the teacher disciplines a kid insisting their little darling would never do such a thing.

Yes and the poor student is aggressive and violent because they've been bounced around foster homes because their mom is a junkie and their dad has never been in the picture. Rich parents can be bad, but it's not the same stress as dealing with students raised in environments that have completely normalized violence

The solution is obvious from where I, a happily childless person, is sitting: The federal government takes over the school system from the states and makes every school a boarding school. Ban private schools.

No children are all in a controlled environment with the same access to after-hours resources as all their peers. They do not have to deal with whatever home life fate dealt them and can focus on their education. They will all have access to the same nutritional standards. They will have access to counseling. They will have shelter. Move them around the country randomly every year or two to minimize local influences.

Of course, aside from parents not being particularly happy with the idea of not seeing their kids all year, the biggest problem with this is that it is far too meritocratic and equal for most of the wealthy to stomach, and they'd be the ones largely paying for it.

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