The myth of the teacher pay gap? • Hacker News Board

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#261

Post by Vinnl » Thu, Oct 03, 2019, 9:23 AM UTC

IkmoIkmo wrote: post #114

> (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…

Not sure where you're from, but I can at least confirm that in the Netherlands, we're really bad at estimating the amount of time teachers work - erring towards underestimating it.

There are some additional reasons for this. The first is that there's not a 1-on-1 correlation between number of classes to teach and hours of work. It is assumed that teachers spend, IIRC, 30 minutes before a lesson to prepare it. The time it requires in practice, though, strongly depends on your schedule: if you have to teach five different levels of students, that means you're preparing five different lessons. If you teach five different classes, but all of them at the same level, you'll be able to spread the preparation time over all five of them, greatly lowering the average time spent.

The other complicating factor is that there are seasons: summer holiday is relatively calm (you'll have nothing to do for most of the time), whereas exam weeks can be enormously stressful. So while on average a teacher might be working close to a regular, full-time job, it's practically impossible to maintain a 1fte job, since there will regularly be weeks in which the work is simply too overwhelming.

Edit: And one additional point: teachers are really bad at negotiating. They can demand higher wages or fewer working hours, but once push comes to shove, most of them will simply put up with it for fear of harming the students.

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#262

Post by prepend » Thu, Oct 03, 2019, 10:27 AM UTC

cmendel wrote: post #214

prepend wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>>Teacher pay is not correlated to outcome. The US pays more for its teachers than Finland and other counties with much better outcomes. 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.

Thank you, I was trying to show by pointing out an example of low pay and high outcomes that pay is not corrected. But I don’t want to say that there’s a negative correlation.

I do think it’s fair, unless I see data that shows it, that pay is not correlated to outcome.

I think there are multiple factors for outcomes and I think further research will help figure this out. But for now, I think it’s false to say that we will get better outcomes if we increase pay. I can think of a few outcomes, but have no data, that would result in higher pay with worse outcomes (eg, higher pay crowds out more passionate but less credentialed teachers who aren’t in it for the money).

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#263

Post by bpt3 » Thu, Oct 03, 2019, 10:38 AM UTC

bakuninsbart wrote: post #259

IkmoIkmo wrote: post #114

> (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…

Wait a second, are American teachers only paid for the hours they are spending in the classroom? Here in Germany, 20 hours is what you spent teaching, but it is a full-time job, as it is expected that you spent at least an hour preparing for every class.

They're generally salaried so they're paid a fixed amount no matter how much they work, with that amount normally negotiated by their union.

All data indicates that teachers are working less than 40 hours a week on average, which makes me believe that the ones putting in 50+ hours are a vocal, tiny minority.

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#264

Post by barry-cotter » Thu, Oct 03, 2019, 10:42 AM UTC

smogcutter wrote: post #159

defertoreptar wrote: post #27

> From the fall of 1987 through the fall of 2015, the number of public-school students increased by 20%, but the number of public-school teachers increased by 64%. More recently, in the four years leading up to the 2015-16 school year, teacher employment grew by 400,000, even as the number of students barely changed. The effect of supply and demand has on job markets gets mentioned too little when discussing whether…

I couldn’t find a citation in the article for those statistics, but they don’t smell right as an argument for teachers being oversupplied: - If the argument is that teacher pop growth outpaced student pop growth, therefore there’s an oversupply of teachers, that includes an implicit assumption that the 1987 ratio was correct. There’s no reason to assume that’s the case. - There’s been a great deal more attention paid…

> If the argument is that teacher pop growth outpaced student pop growth, therefore there’s an oversupply of teachers, that includes an implicit assumption that the 1987 ratio was correct. There’s no reason to assume that’s the case.

Yes there is. Total cost in K-12 is up 180% since 1970 and results in Math, Science and Reading are basically flat. Employees are up almost 100%. If you almost triple inputs while outputs stay the same you’re probably just wasting money.

https://fee.org/thinkecon/articles/the-problem-with-educatio...

https://www.cato.org/blog/public-school-spending-achievement...

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#265

Post by bpt3 » Thu, Oct 03, 2019, 10:53 AM UTC

smogcutter wrote: post #159

defertoreptar wrote: post #27

> From the fall of 1987 through the fall of 2015, the number of public-school students increased by 20%, but the number of public-school teachers increased by 64%. More recently, in the four years leading up to the 2015-16 school year, teacher employment grew by 400,000, even as the number of students barely changed. The effect of supply and demand has on job markets gets mentioned too little when discussing whether…

I couldn’t find a citation in the article for those statistics, but they don’t smell right as an argument for teachers being oversupplied: - If the argument is that teacher pop growth outpaced student pop growth, therefore there’s an oversupply of teachers, that includes an implicit assumption that the 1987 ratio was correct. There’s no reason to assume that’s the case. - There’s been a great deal more attention paid…

I believe the point is not that 1987 was an ideal ratio of teachers to students, but the relative increase in supply is limiting wage growth.

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#266

Post by bpt3 » Thu, Oct 03, 2019, 10:54 AM UTC

defertoreptar wrote: post #27

> From the fall of 1987 through the fall of 2015, the number of public-school students increased by 20%, but the number of public-school teachers increased by 64%. More recently, in the four years leading up to the 2015-16 school year, teacher employment grew by 400,000, even as the number of students barely changed. The effect of supply and demand has on job markets gets mentioned too little when discussing whether…

Who is encouraging more students to become teachers?

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#267

Post by bpt3 » Thu, Oct 03, 2019, 11:11 AM UTC

IkmoIkmo wrote: post #114

> (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…

What would happen if your girlfriend worked her contracted hours only? Specifically, would there be a negative impact on student outcomes?

A school where almost all the teachers are working part time sounds unusual to me, and I wonder if that contributes to what sounds like an unpleasant environment. Most schools are staffed by full time employees with nowhere near the burnout rate you stated would occur here.

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#268

Post by barry-cotter » Thu, Oct 03, 2019, 11:17 AM UTC

p4bl0 wrote: post #98

The article is completely US-centric, but the subject isn't. Teacher's pay in France is quite low, from primary school to university. I'm an associate professor of compsci in France and, after 4 years, I make less than 2200€/month (it starts under 2000€ at the beginning). I should get to 3000€ 15 years from now. A typical mid- and high-school teacher is paid less than that and can only hope to get to 3000€ by the ver…

Why do you do it?

You could work at Google for a year and take a year off to do research and repeat indefinitely and still come off a lot better than you do now. There are contractors in London with no degree whatsoever who work six months a year and spend the rest in Thailand who make more than that, never mind Google.

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#269

Post by barry-cotter » Thu, Oct 03, 2019, 11:26 AM UTC

iamalexm wrote: post #6

planetzero wrote: post #2

One of my relatives retired from teaching a couple of years ago. She had guaranteed raises every year and ended up making close to $100,000/year.

Still low for required education. Also, the raises haven't matched inflation; but that's a larger problem across all jobs.

The required education doesn’t help the students so why reward it? Education degrees and continuing professional education have no reliably detectable effect on teacher effectiveness. Experience does, up to six years, and subject matter expertise does, so teachers with a Master’s in Chemistry get better results than ones with just a Bachelor’s but the qualifications most people are talking about are in pedagogy, which has no effect. And it’s not like it’s a secret that the average Ed school degree is a joke, even if you don’t count the bloated Master’s degree that is an Ed.D.

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#270

Post by humanrebar » Thu, Oct 03, 2019, 11:53 AM UTC

claudeganon wrote: post #223

humanrebar wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what ways do teachers' unions campaign to give agency to students' families and career choice to in-demand faculty? Seems like the incentives are mostly oriented around getting teachers to stay in one place and grind out another year of experience, round of continuing education, and extra degrees whether they are wise or not. Otherwise, why don't teachers just quit schools with poor safety records, working conditi…

>In what ways do teachers' unions campaign to give agency to students' families and career choice to in-demand faculty? I’m not sure what you mean by agency here or how many teachers you actually know. But unions have regularly campaigned for more resources for students outside of themselves, including access to things nurses, counselors, and libraries. Schools in many cities are highly racially and economically segr…

> Schools in many cities are highly racially and economically segregated in the US because of the country’s broader history of redlining and corresponding deprivation

But also because of the public school system that ties zip codes to affluence and introduces artificial geographical barriers to integration. Something teachers unions have a vested interest in, at least indirectly.

> ...most people tend to live in the regions they’re actually from...

One can switch schools and districts without switching regions. But it should be much easier than that, even.

> Applying some sort of rational actor economic heuristic to civil servants in a service profession seems a foolhardy endeavor.

I'm just saying it's counterintuitive that teachers unions in particular are for teachers without being especially for empowering individual teachers to have leverage with respect to their employment agreements and conditions.