211–220 of 308 posts
I want to do an analysis of the number of upvotes on a HN post versus the number of comments. I have a hunch that if the number of comments greatly exceeds the number of upvotes it's a politically charged post.
> (2) Annual wages have been calculated by multiplying the hourly mean wage by a "year-round, full-time" hours figure of 2,080 hours; for those occupations where there is not an hourly wage published, the annual wage has been directly calculated from the reported survey data. See, this is where things go wrong. So they've got mean wage figures which are constructed both on a fact (hourly wage) and an assumption (work…
Issue is that BLS data consistently shows teachers working 40 hours per week or less. For example: https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf (PDF). Anecdotes consistently run one way, while data consistently runs another.
Why do teachers have such an elevated standing in society anyways? If we're being honest, schools are, for the most part, daycare centers. Secondary education is, for the most part, completely useless. Yet, unlike with most other professions, the government guarantees that those glorified daycare jobs will continue to exist. Why should these jobs pay well?
And besides, we have that old HN saw: "If you can't hire anyone, you aren't paying enough.". Well, that coin has another side: "If you're hiring lots of people, you're paying enough.".
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How much would a 10% teacher pay bump improve educational outcomes?
Teacher pay is not correlated to outcome. The US pays more for its teachers than Finland and other counties with much better outcomes. I think the challenge is just measuring and comparing education. If we could, reliably, then we’d likely pay tons more for teachers.
I do want to point out that these two points aren't actually related. Just because the US pays more for lesser outcomes does not mean that teacher pay is anti-correlated or uncorrelated to outcome.
Why not just go directly to the source? https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm#25-0000 Secondary School Teachers: annual mean wage: $64,230 If we zoom in on a particular type of teacher, you get ranges: Middle school teachers https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes252022.htm bottom 10% earn 39k or less. bottom 25% earn 46k 50% earn 58k 75% earn 74k 90% earn 93k Based on these metrics, it seems like a fine occupation…
She also works a lot more than 40 hour weeks and has to deal with some pretty intense stuff.
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I used to work in fast food. I would gladly get paid less per hour for my current software development job than I was back then (as long as it was above making rent). It was a much more draining job and it's effects consumed every waking minute during work days and spending off-days just recovering. That kind of job should have risk bonuses. Significant ones. Most people just can't do that and pursue anything else. G…
Its relative, I have plenty of friend who work in restaurant, they wouldn't want to trade with my software job. True that software development job is physically lot less demanding but for them its mentally exhausting.
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> Ultimately, teaching education, even graduate education, is not difficult and mostly a joke, which is what is reflected in their salaries. Flip side: not enough people would put up with going through a "serious" teacher ed program to fill the demand, unless pay went way up. Not even close to enough.
Flip side: intellectuals tend to like intellectual pursuits. Having a dumbed down teaching curriculum means turning these people away, not for monetary reasons, but for lack of stimulation that is easily accessible in the private sector. My mother, and many other people I know who wanted to go into teaching, wanted to do so because they wanted to be teachers, not the pay. What turned them off to the profession is the…
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I've never known a decent teacher that puts in less than fifty hours per week, and a typical week is more demanding than all but the most stressful weeks I've worked in software.
I've always wanted to be a teacher, still do. But their job is like 10x harder than mine and pays 1/10th the price, so as much as I'd enjoy it and I think I'd be good at it, it just seems insane. Good thing there's always a budget to build newer fancier schools, but not to pay teachers livable wages, cause that makes sense.
My favorite teacher was my AP calc teacher in high school. She only graded during her planning session, never worked overtime, let us not only fix a broken classroom computer that the school basically abandoned but we also take turns playing GTA on it during lectures. Almost everyone in the class passed the AP exam. She was in MENSA and left a lucrative career fixing math for defense contractors because she just wanted to teach. There just aren't enough people with those kinds of chops to go around, regardless of the salary we are willing to pay.
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>how society decides salaries. It seems pretty arbitrary from my perspective. Society doesn't "decide". It's a decided by the labor market. Nobody wants to pay programmers six figures. It's a myth that we think teachers are less important than programmers because they make less on average. There is just a larger supply of qualified teachers willing to work at lower prices. Wait until you find out how little art histo…
Society decides the laws which regulate the labor market.