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Emergency-hired teachers without degrees as effective as licensed educators

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Re: Emergency-hired teachers without degrees as effective as licensed educators

#191

Post by Ekaros »

peterfirefly wrote: post #169
zdragnar wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Entire states are like this, and it doesn't work out that way at scale. Teachers get degrees to teach, and are buried under a mountain of debt while not being paid for it. On top of that, they need to take "continuing education" credits, which ostensibly is a way to stay on top of teaching trends but is really a racket for the teaching-adjacent industry. I don't think my state required the masters degree, but pay sca…

Entire countries do this. Seems to work fine for them.

Finland has generalist with special degrees doing Elementary school. After that the teachers have degree in subject or adjacent subject. Plus pedagogy. On other hand education is state paid so there isn't huge loans to pay off.

It did not do badly in past. But less resources and more non-natives have taken a toll on results.

Re: Emergency-hired teachers without degrees as effective as licensed educators

#192

Post by peterfirefly »

Ekaros wrote: post #191
peterfirefly wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Entire countries do this. Seems to work fine for them.

Finland has generalist with special degrees doing Elementary school. After that the teachers have degree in subject or adjacent subject. Plus pedagogy. On other hand education is state paid so there isn't huge loans to pay off. It did not do badly in past. But less resources and more non-natives have taken a toll on results.

Mostly the "non-natives", as you so politely call them... and we are not really talking about Germans and Swedes...

Re: Emergency-hired teachers without degrees as effective as licensed educators

#193

Post by Corrado »

dan-robertson wrote: post #118
derefr wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teacher pay is too low for anyone to want to take a teaching job when they have professional qualifications that would allow them to work a much better-paid job. (Especially when getting those skills also involved paying hundreds of thousands in student loans to a university. You need to earn your way out of that hole, and not working the best-paying job you can would be prolonging that debt!) But I think the article…

How much approximately do you think a teacher gets paid? Obviously it depends on specifics so maybe say whether you’re imagining a city centre / suburban / rural school, and whether the state/district is wealthy and whether it’s a high school or whatever. I have some guesses in my head for something like ‘high school teacher in moderately wealthy Chicago suburb’ (I haven’t written the number here because I don’t want…

Almost my entire family are educators (wife, children, etc.) and we all agree that teacher pay is very low. Specifically, when you break it down at an hourly rate the pay is comically low. I think my wife calculated her pay several years ago at something like $2.00 / hour.

Interestingly, during the height of the pandemic everyone seemed to come around to the fact that teachers didn't get paid enough for the amount of work that they do. This was because parents and caregivers got first hand experience in what teachers go through on a day-to-day basis. However, that sentiment has faded with time and with it the value of a good teacher.

Re: Emergency-hired teachers without degrees as effective as licensed educators

#194

Post by paulcole »

reducesuffering wrote: post #188
paulcole wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never said anything about calculus or math. I said that HN is mostly average students and I haven’t heard anything that changes my mind, regardless of whether you think a lot of people here are good at calculus. How do you think HN readers fared in art/literature/English classes?

Pretty fucking good, actually. That's why we're here writing copious amounts of text, more Bachelor's (a big general education) than average, reading articles, and upvoting ACX posts, someone who was top of the top in English class writing competency.

Agree to disagree, I guess.

I’d give you a B- or so if you turned in your comment as an essay, given the easy-to-spot sloppy error and other issues.

• Bachelor shouldn’t be capitalized unless it’s the full degree title like Bachelor of Arts

• Copius writing doesn’t mean good writing

• ACX should be explained the first time you use it

Re: Emergency-hired teachers without degrees as effective as licensed educators

#195

Post by readthenotes1 »

germinalphrase wrote: post #97
readthenotes1 wrote: post #66

"Because most did not teach tested grades and subjects, the researchers also looked at evaluation ratings. Both groups of teachers received similar marks from their supervisors." That is, they cannot speak to how effective the teachers were as educators, only how disruptive they were as employees.

Assessing educator effectiveness is not a solved problem. For instance, the Gates Foundation made a full throated effort to research and develop a quantifiable measure and failed. In the end, they released a set of holistic, observable behaviors/practices that they believe are associated with teacher effectiveness. It’s a hard problem.

I completely agree. For one thing, they're probably looking at the wrong things since student effectiveness will dominate teacher effectiveness, and that is where the hard problems come (knowing what to look at, what to measure, proxy measurement error, and measurement distinction)

Re: Emergency-hired teachers without degrees as effective as licensed educators

#196

Post by KAKAN »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #39

I am very close to obtaining an elementary school teaching degree (46 of 49 credits completed), and as of this year I am a full time teacher at a private school (which doesn't have to care whether I officially have a license). My masters program is considered among the best in the state. Unfortunately, I don't have many good things to say about my masters program. The majority of my classes have been interesting but…

Is that a choice question? Or does it require a subjective answer? If it's the latter, then the question is reasonable to some degree, I guess?

“Company 4 might be the best in terms of naive computer-calculated average, but anything that doesn't meet a particular standard generally should not be allowed by law to be used/built. So Company 1 is the only choice, and perhaps the best, subjectively.”

I think this is a good question for discussion, because a child might answer “Company 4” at first just by looking at it and averaging it as anyone without any context would, but then you could say something more about it. But, I don't think it was intended to be analysed or answered this way. Either way, dumb question to ask for a qualification exam IMO.

Re: Emergency-hired teachers without degrees as effective as licensed educators

#197

Post by tptacek »

germinalphrase wrote: post #130
dan-robertson wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much approximately do you think a teacher gets paid? Obviously it depends on specifics so maybe say whether you’re imagining a city centre / suburban / rural school, and whether the state/district is wealthy and whether it’s a high school or whatever. I have some guesses in my head for something like ‘high school teacher in moderately wealthy Chicago suburb’ (I haven’t written the number here because I don’t want…

I taught in a moderately wealthy suburb of Minneapolis. With ten years of experience, my comp was about 50k. While I have heard stories of teachers from prior generations receiving somewhat lavish defined benefit pensions, I don’t believe that has been an option for new teachers in decades. With regard to vacations, we had the school calendar vacations (which is fine), but otherwise I accrued about 8 days of PTO per…

Oak Park, IL is wealthy but not like Kennilworth wealthy, or Lincoln Park wealthy. OPRF, our public high school, has zero teachers making less than six figures.

Lane III (bachelor's degree) CPS teacher entry comp --- year 1 --- is over $80k/yr, including benefits (a defined-benefit pension) and 10 weeks vacation.

Re: Emergency-hired teachers without degrees as effective as licensed educators

#198

Post by AlexeyBelov »

khzw8yyy wrote: post #99
lolinder wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't intend to get the parent's comment downvoted to hell—two anecdotes is fine for illustrating the complexity, but these threads usually devolve from there into enormous flame wars nested tens of comments deep. I was just trying to preempt that after one round of anecdotes.

It's OK :) This place became a cesspool quite a while ago. I switched to using throwaways so I'm unphased by karma.

Then you're contributing to the decline. Most of the negative, off-putting or outright insane comments I read come from <6mo old accounts. It's easy to troll when you can just make a new account and continue, without factoring in the long term reputation at all.

Re: Emergency-hired teachers without degrees as effective as licensed educators

#199

Post by Wowfunhappy »

KAKAN wrote: post #196
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #39

I am very close to obtaining an elementary school teaching degree (46 of 49 credits completed), and as of this year I am a full time teacher at a private school (which doesn't have to care whether I officially have a license). My masters program is considered among the best in the state. Unfortunately, I don't have many good things to say about my masters program. The majority of my classes have been interesting but…

Is that a choice question? Or does it require a subjective answer? If it's the latter, then the question is reasonable to some degree, I guess? “Company 4 might be the best in terms of naive computer-calculated average, but anything that doesn't meet a particular standard generally should not be allowed by law to be used/built. So Company 1 is the only choice, and perhaps the best, subjectively.” I think this is a go…

It's multiple choice, I posted screenshots of the real thing downthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39073974

Re: Emergency-hired teachers without degrees as effective as licensed educators

#200

Post by germinalphrase »

tptacek wrote: post #197
germinalphrase wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I taught in a moderately wealthy suburb of Minneapolis. With ten years of experience, my comp was about 50k. While I have heard stories of teachers from prior generations receiving somewhat lavish defined benefit pensions, I don’t believe that has been an option for new teachers in decades. With regard to vacations, we had the school calendar vacations (which is fine), but otherwise I accrued about 8 days of PTO per…

Oak Park, IL is wealthy but not like Kennilworth wealthy, or Lincoln Park wealthy. OPRF, our public high school, has zero teachers making less than six figures. Lane III (bachelor's degree) CPS teacher entry comp --- year 1 --- is over $80k/yr, including benefits (a defined-benefit pension) and 10 weeks vacation.

The equivalent starting pay in my former district would by 37k/yr. I have relative living the Chicago suburbs that teaches. The difference in comp between her and I supports the numbers you have provided. I have also heard anecdotes about teachers that retired about 10 years ago and are provided 110+/yr on their pensions; however, the Illinois pension system seems to have crossed into "too big to fail" territory.
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