The myth of the teacher pay gap?

> A good old prisoners dilemma. If you got more resources to spend on education, you don't want to sit in the same class as someone who can only contribute little to the course. Just like worse graduates will ruin the prestige of the school and thus value of your degree. Outcome-base exclusion can be fine, unless it ends up as proxy to select for socio-economic factors and thus make society offer less equal opportunity.

Let's trace that out a little more. Are you implying that private/charter schools have more dollars to spend per student? Because that's certainly not true for Charter schools. It's probably true for some private schools, but also not all. And if that's not what you're saying, then i'm not sure I understand your argument.

> I'd like a source on that. I do understand culture will have a significant influence, especially on what value people place on education. But your statement seems to go a lot further into "school doesn't matter" territory. This directly contradicts with earlier statements and e.g. many chines studying in the US.

I can no longer find the source where I originally read it, but we can reconstruct the data. I'm going to show it for math, but the results are similar for other subjects.

PISA Rankings by country:

https://www.businessinsider.com/pisa-worldwide-ranking-of-ma...

As you can see, the US looks pretty abysmal, given how rich it is. However, if you look at the math PISA scores for whites and asians, you see this:

https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2015/pisa2015highlights...

Now, the US doesn't jump to the very top, but it does jump to just below Norway and right above Austria. Certainly a solidly high quality education. You'll see the same results across other subjects too.

Of course, that doesn't mean our educational system doesn't have room for improvement. It most certainly does. But the idea that we're severely lagging the rest of the developed world is mostly false, when you adjust for this confound.

I've never worked in an actual restaurant, but I did give up programming for a couple of years recently and after a while got a job delivering pizzas (in my car).

It was pure bliss. Most of my time was spent relaxing in my own car with my own music, or socializing with other employees in the pizza shop. Some (very few) customers were dicks, but who gives a fuck? All I do is deliver it, I was neither expected nor in any way able to help them with anything else. There is no concept of "oh, here's a bunch of work I didn't expect to have to do today." Show up, drive around, ???, profit, leave.

Since then I've accidentally stumbled back into software development and while it certainly has its upsides, I am infinitely more stressed. I miss the pizza gig almost daily.

> Grading a multiplication test in grade school might be quick and mechanical but grading trig and calculus is not.

I gravely disagree. I spent a lot of time grading calculus exams at universities, and it is a quick and fairly mechanical procedure. A group of five can churn through three hundred final exams in a working day.

Answers in maths are quite uniform and contain a few sentences which can be quickly judged by how correct they are. Calculus and trigonometry might be difficult for the students, but for someone who has taught it a few years, it is absolutely straight forward to recognise correct solutions.

Grading say, English short stories or essays is a completely different thing. There are a lot more sentences, which have to be analysed grammatically and semantically. You have to judge how coherent the student is, which is a non-local property. Does the end match the beginning? What is the student trying to say? Do they use a clear language? If not, what feed-back can you give that will improve it. What literary effects does the student command? Allusions? Irony? Foreshadowing? Contrast?

The answers are highly personal and even using rubric grading every one is a non-trivial judgement call.

I believe that the nature of the tasks and subjects have a bigger impact on how much time it takes to grade it, than how efficient the individual grader is. I have experience correcting in groups where I have been able to compare grading speed. Yes there are differences between how fast people grade, but they are minor, and often speed is inversely correlated with quality (of feedback given to the student).

> Some people are more effective/efficient/faster than others.

Learning takes time. Students learn by doing different activities related to the topic. Sometimes listening to the teacher explaining, sometimes working on problems of their own. In mathematics, it is easy to find good examples to demonstrate and problems for the students to work with. Other subjects, it is much more difficult, and requires prep work.

Taking less time to prepare will usually mean worse teaching. For instance I had a history teacher who would just put on recordings from History Channel. He thus had to spend little time preparing the lessons. But the learning outcome was not the best.

My point is that public primary and secondary schooling seems to have been more effective (anecdotally) than private higher education. This is a strike against the idea that the government shouldn't be paying for it, in that in at least this one case the government paying for it seems to be working better than a non-government organization doing that doing so. Since educational institutions aren't going to disappear altogether, those are the alternatives.