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To recruit teachers, school districts are building homes

nytimes.com

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Re: To recruit teachers, school districts are building homes

#41

Post by anon291 »

wewewedxfgdf wrote: post #11

The core fabric of society - the deal that was offered by society to the people - to work in a job, own a house, raise a family, have a retirement - has decayed away entirely for many people.

Well states need home prices to increase because the majority of their pension funds for their employees is invested in hedge funds seeking outsized returns that use single family homes as an investment vehicle.

This can never be solved until we resolve the public pension crisis.

Lawmakers in my state of Oregon are soon going to debate how the state invests in hedge funds but the simple truth of the numbers says that there's no possible way Oregon can meet its pension obligations without their stated returns.

Re: To recruit teachers, school districts are building homes

#42

Post by apparent »

AvAn12 wrote: post #3

Could just, you know, pay more…

Or allow pay that is not lockstep/tied to mostly-useless degree completion. Unions fight this stuff like hell because the people in charge have gone through the current system and therefore benefit from it.

It is not that hard to do outcome-based pay over a multi-year period, but this is the main criticism. You can either track kids over a number of years and track their relative growth in each year, or you can use bargaining up-front whereby teachers can vote on a "multiplier" for each class before they know who will end up with which class.

Re: To recruit teachers, school districts are building homes

#43

Post by anon291 »

tptacek wrote: post #17
ReactiveJelly wrote: post #2

A land value tax would fix this

I know the Georgism joke here, but we don't need an LVT to fix this; we just need states to override home rule on minimum density requirements for residential and mixed-use zoning. The core problem here is in fact very simple!

Exactly. I have a plot of land in inner Portland and they won't let me build on it. I mean they will, but not at the density needed to satiate demand such that home prices fall to the proper amount a home should cost. Should be a simple proposition with someone trying to spend his own money to build housing but it's not because they make it as hard as possible.

Re: To recruit teachers, school districts are building homes

#45

Post by anon291 »

ninjalanternshk wrote: post #21
dpbriggs wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not make housing cost less instead?

Because we’ve been sold the story that your house has to appreciate in value 2-3 times over the period you live in it, consequently, homeowners vote against anything that lowers housing costs.

Except it's not much of a lie. The actual return on housing is basically not much higher than inflation

Re: To recruit teachers, school districts are building homes

#47

Post by analog31 »

apparent wrote: post #44

Teacher recruiting wouldn't be so hard if pay weren't lockstep, as it is in so many places. Unions demand this, and it keeps some potentially-effective teachers out of the profession (and keeps old lousy ones in, unfortunately).

Maybe we could use college teaching as a model. College teachers are for the most part non-unionized.

Disclosure: I was one of those teachers for a semester, many years ago.

Also, teacher pay is not as rigid as it seems. In my state, the good teachers advance by moving to better paying districts. Very few teachers stay in rural districts for more than a year or two.

Re: To recruit teachers, school districts are building homes

#48

Post by tptacek »

dragonwriter wrote: post #25
tptacek wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An LVT addresses the incentives underling zoning. The LVT imagined by Georgists would very probably result in radically altered zoning rules. Zoning, after all, exists primarily to prop up the finances of homeowners.

A Georgist LVT is based on the value of the bare land, which is constrained by permitted uses. Adopting it without first removing zoning restrictions would increase the incentive for homeowners to defend the existing zoning rules, since the removal of the rules would increase the scope of alternative uses of the land in ways which would make it economically impossible for most existing single family homeowners to aff…

I mean, I agree with you about zoning; we're fourth and inches from eliminating SFZ in my muni, and an LVT isn't going to happen anywhere, so the rest of the debate is kind of academic.

Re: To recruit teachers, school districts are building homes

#49

Post by bonsai_spool »

apparent wrote: post #44

Teacher recruiting wouldn't be so hard if pay weren't lockstep, as it is in so many places. Unions demand this, and it keeps some potentially-effective teachers out of the profession (and keeps old lousy ones in, unfortunately).

> Teacher recruiting wouldn't be so hard if pay weren't lockstep, as it is in so many places. Unions demand this, and it keeps some potentially-effective teachers out of the profession (and keeps old lousy ones in, unfortunately).

This is an unhelpful, anti-union sentiment with no actual relevance to the problem of teacher recruiting.

How would it be easier to recruit new, potentially-effective teachers if we had incentive pay based on meritocratic pay scales? There is no rational way to credit someone from a different area for their ability to run a classroom effectively until there's evidence on how that person runs a classroom.

Re: To recruit teachers, school districts are building homes

#50

Post by apparent »

analog31 wrote: post #47
apparent wrote: post #44

Teacher recruiting wouldn't be so hard if pay weren't lockstep, as it is in so many places. Unions demand this, and it keeps some potentially-effective teachers out of the profession (and keeps old lousy ones in, unfortunately).

Maybe we could use college teaching as a model. College teachers are for the most part non-unionized. Disclosure: I was one of those teachers for a semester, many years ago. Also, teacher pay is not as rigid as it seems. In my state, the good teachers advance by moving to better paying districts. Very few teachers stay in rural districts for more than a year or two.

I thought the same thing regarding professors not being unionized. However, in top universities they are paid as much based on research (or outside offers based on research) as they are on teaching capability.

One thing that is truly bonkers about K12 education is that they can get tenure in just a few years. This is much faster (and easier) than a professor getting tenure. But they both result in the near-inability to be fired.

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