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The myth of the teacher pay gap?

nationalaffairs.com

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Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#271

Post by humanrebar »

claudeganon wrote: post #197
darawk wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Teacher’s unions don’t opposes “school competition.” They oppose school privatization, How would one have meaningful 'competition' without privatization?

It’s entirely possible within a publicly funded framework to have different models and observation of outcomes. Schools just have to be allowed the leeway to experiment without threat of privatization. State universities and community colleges do this across the country. And it’s not as if high-performing countries arrived at their (almost exclusively public) systems without this kind of iteration.

Teachers on the whole aren't particularly threatened by the funding model of a school. Unions, school boards, and administration certainly are.

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#272

Post by cowsandmilk »

mehhh wrote: post #182
femto113 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seattle has hundreds of private schools, I doubt more than a handful have anything like the morality clause you cite, and most that I am aware of are explicit about their support of LGBTQ+. Do you have some source for your claim?

Kings School, all Catholic run schools (which are the majority of the private schools in the region) and the other various religious schools have this clause. My neighbor was fired over it and had trouble finding work at other private schools as there are just a handful of Montessori and language immersion schools, with everything else that isn't SPS having a Morals clause. Edit: The GSBA directory only lists 2 schoo…

Why would anyone believe the GBSA is a comprehensive list?

The Seattle Academy isn't on the list and literally held the state conference for GLSEN this year ( https://sites.google.com/glsenwa.org/2019-conference/home ).

> Catholic run schools (which are the majority of the private schools in the region)

Going to various directories that let you filter by religious affiliations shows that catholic schools are probably ~20% of the private schools in Kings County and ~15% across Washington State. Christian schools make up another ~25% in Seattle and ~20% statewide. So, while a significant portion, Catholic is definitely not the majority and the combination of Catholic+Christian might approach 50%.

I went to the first two schools alphabetically in NWAIS's directory of members for Seattle and they both had nondiscrimination policies that included sexual orientation and gender identity. Neither is Montessori or language immersion.

Bertschi (admittedly on the GBSA list also): https://www.bertschi.org/jobs

Billings: http://billingsmiddleschool.org/employment

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#273

Post by darawk »

claudeganon wrote: post #197
darawk wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Teacher’s unions don’t opposes “school competition.” They oppose school privatization, How would one have meaningful 'competition' without privatization?

It’s entirely possible within a publicly funded framework to have different models and observation of outcomes. Schools just have to be allowed the leeway to experiment without threat of privatization. State universities and community colleges do this across the country. And it’s not as if high-performing countries arrived at their (almost exclusively public) systems without this kind of iteration.

> It’s entirely possible within a publicly funded framework to have different models and observation of outcomes.

Possible, yes. Practical? No. Democratic bureaucracies are effectively incapable of learning and adapting. Schooling is basically implemented identically today as it was 100 years ago.

> Schools just have to be allowed the leeway to experiment without threat of privatization

This is a strange statement to me. In what sense is privatization a threat to public schools? If public schools were so great and privatization were so bad, why would people want to send their kids to privately run schools? Wouldn't public schools invite the challenge if they believed their model was superior?

The fact that they even view it as such an existential threat tells you basically all you need to know. Even they believe they'd be outcompeted almost immediately.

> And it’s not as if high-performing countries arrived at their (almost exclusively public) systems without this kind of iteration.

Firstly, the idea of differential country performance of schools is largely a myth. When you disaggregate by ethnicity, most of that disappears. Japanese kids in the US do about as well here as they do in Japan. Which is to say that differential performance between countries is more about who is in those countries than how it is those countries educate.

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#274

Post by RhysU »

praxulus wrote: post #110
crumpets wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

The word "qualified" is pulling a lot of weight in your argument. You can absolutely hire a programmer for $70k if you're willing to significantly relax your standards. On the other hand, you probably wouldn't be able to hire enough teachers at existing teacher salaries if you significantly raised your standards for what counts as "qualified". Tech companies have to use a relatively high bar, because bad developers w…

> ...you probably wouldn't be able to hire enough teachers at existing teacher salaries if you significantly raised your standards for what counts as "qualified".

Anecdata: Schools that won't hire more qualified candidates (e.g. graduate degrees complete) instead preferring more green applicants because the latter are contractually cheaper.

That is, in some instances schools could hire better for the same money but cannot because of labor contracts.

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#275

Post by intpx »

kungito wrote: post #253
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…

My friend works as a full time teacher. Has 24 * 45min=16h of classes each week which is above the norm which is 20 * 45min. He spends 2-3 more hours each week on grading things in case they have exams that week and about 2-3 hours each week in case he needs to prepare some materials. Most exams are already prepared and so are lessons. He doesn't call up parents (lol wtf) and students don't really ask questions on th…

I taught for 3 years before entering private sector and this largely jives with my experience. So many teachers had only ever been teachers and had only ever developed their classroom and subject matter skills. spending hours a week being unproductive or marginally productive on grading, grade entry because they were scared to or refused to learn more productive ways of accomplishing the same tasks. I would watch teachers spend hours a week grading, calculating and manually inputting informal daily comprehension checkouts-- a mini pop quiz to get a check on daily comprehension of the learning objectives for that day. These made up 10% or LESS of the students grade, and while they were very important information for the teacher to know where there were deficiencies ahead of formal assessment, the act of manually grading and inputting the information represented 90% of their work in this area. it was a complete inverse of effort on the teachers part vs impact on the students grade. I used technology to make these nearly completely automated. My first year all we had were smart clickers so I was limited to multiple choice but by my last year students had chromebooks and if I took the 3 minutes to put together an online assessment ahead of time, I could make it anything i wanted and have it auto score. I then made a choice to not even count the daily assessments in the student grades because apart from a classroom discipline perspective, they did not serve the student learning nearly so much as they gave me immediate data to judge how well I had presented the material. I spent maybe a half hour a week on this and it freed me up to use my planning time to assess critical thinking assignments, adjust to near real time assessment data, and plan more interesting and dynamic lessons. I did leave education because while i was not laid off, my fourth year fell in 2009 and there was a chance of being laid off (my tenure would have begun the first work day of my fourth year) and the projected retirement pool was smaller (retirement accounts took a big hit that spring) than the number of cuts needed to achieve full staffing. I do not know If I would have had a job come august but its irrelevant. I went from teaching science, engineering and technology to working in science, engineering and technology, and while not adjusting for 190 work days vs 240 work days a year, I make about double what I would make on negotiated pay scale, but this is the exception that proves the rule-- my pay was bound to a rate lower than private sector because demand and compensation in my field was so much higher than other fields. I do miss teaching, but I don't miss how tunnel visioned and inflexible it could be. I do not think that dramatically increasing compensation will achieve any gains in student learning but I do think that dramatically increasing student to teacher ratios, introducing the modern knowledge worker workflow to the profession, differential compensation and programs to better engage parents and communities (look at how horribly the transition to common core math has gone-- a much better way to teach numeracy that was atrociously communicated and taught to communities, parents and even many teachers to the point of becoming a political issue) will all improve outcomes, and really the only metric that really matters at the end of the day is increasing student learning, everything else is ancillary to that.

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#276

Post by bumby »

mattbreeden wrote: post #236
sjg007 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teachers should just work their contractual hours. Now that would be a protest!

Part of my wife's contract includes wording like 'any duties', so they can add as much arbitrary work as they want

"and other duties as assigned" is pretty common contractual verbiage nowadays it seems

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#277

Post by brianwawok »

intpx wrote: post #275
kungito wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My friend works as a full time teacher. Has 24 * 45min=16h of classes each week which is above the norm which is 20 * 45min. He spends 2-3 more hours each week on grading things in case they have exams that week and about 2-3 hours each week in case he needs to prepare some materials. Most exams are already prepared and so are lessons. He doesn't call up parents (lol wtf) and students don't really ask questions on th…

I taught for 3 years before entering private sector and this largely jives with my experience. So many teachers had only ever been teachers and had only ever developed their classroom and subject matter skills. spending hours a week being unproductive or marginally productive on grading, grade entry because they were scared to or refused to learn more productive ways of accomplishing the same tasks. I would watch tea…

It's weird right? In the same way that programmers seem to like to brag about working all weekend or till 10pm on some killer bug, teachers like to brag about grading papers all week.

Online school stuff isn't perfect (looking at you blackboard and friends), but they can sure take a lot of this drudgery away if you are willing to learn a platform.

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#278

Post by breakbread »

bpt3 wrote: post #263
bakuninsbart wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think it depends on the grade and/or subject you're teaching. My wife has taught HS English for a decade and the 45-50+ hr weeks has been the norm for her and her colleagues.

I have the impression (from my wife and her coworkers) that it's much easier for elementary and middle school teachers to work the contracted hours and not bring their work home with them.

High school just comes with a lot of extra baggage too.

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#279

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

learnstats2 wrote: post #251
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about one side arbitrarily adjusting the terms; it's about both sides realizing that they have a shared interest in keeping the organization running. It's just not feasible to write an employment contract that fully encompasses the work needing to get done.

If you are not sure in advance what you are going to want teachers to do, then this might just be an excuse to exploit them.

Ensuring that a class gets taught well isn't just a matter of standing up in front of them from 8 to 3; any teacher can tell you about the amount of random surprise work that needs to get done at a school. You can call that work exploitation if you want, but the bottom line is still that someone has to do it.

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#280

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

ikeyany wrote: post #231
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about one side arbitrarily adjusting the terms; it's about both sides realizing that they have a shared interest in keeping the organization running. It's just not feasible to write an employment contract that fully encompasses the work needing to get done.

Feasible for whom?

For anyone, which is why work to rule strikes are such a well-known concept. Nobody in any industry can do it.
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