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Nobody wants to teach anymore

jessicalexicus.medium.com

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Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#421

Post by zmgsabst »

MerelyMortal wrote: post #374
zmgsabst wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would non-resident apply to the comparison of local schools? My understanding is that you have non-residents subsidize things such as scholarship programs — but that in-state is fairly close to costs. State money appears to be a relatively small fraction of their incomes — and is smaller than the increase in their financial position. https://finance.uw.edu/uwar/annualreport2021.pdf

Because that's the "actual" cost, not the tax-subsidized cost. For in-state, the state is paying approx $27k and the student pays approx $13k, versus in k-12 the state is only paying $13k and that's all they get.

I posted their financial report which makes it clear that state funding is not doing that.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#422

Post by prepend »

vostok wrote: post #66
lr4444lr wrote: post #15

I realize this piece is more of a rant, and I won't hold it to a data accuracy standard it never pretended to have, but they pay issue is really misconstrued. Salaries in large urban districts are often well above area median, and when accounting for benefits and pension, quite impressive. In South Dakota and a number of states in the south and rural districts, yes it is another story, and it is bad. Also, teachers N…

> Salaries in large urban districts are often well above area median Is the median the correct benchmark? The median household income in NYC was $67k in 2021 [0]. Why would someone choose to be a teacher making around the median [1] when you could be a software engineer and make 3x as much? It's not just a matter of trinkets and baubles. That difference allows you to comfortably afford a nice family sized apartment […

> Why would someone choose to be a teacher making around the median [1] when you could be a software engineer and make 3x as much?

Isn’t the answer to this quite obvious? It’s harder to be a software engineer. And there’s more risk to the profession.

Programming is interesting as you can be self-taught and be great. And it doesn’t require any formal training. I started as a college dropout (from a different major nothing to do with programming) and there’s lots of boot camps.

Anyone with the inclination can do what you suggest. But I think programming is hard so many are incapable.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#423

Post by bobthepanda »

amelius wrote: post #294
_vdpp wrote: post #98

A few random thoughts: 1. For as much as we spend on education, teachers seem to be grossly underpaid - to be getting robbed of their share of the budget. Where does that money go? 2. It seems that education degrees are seen as easier to achieve than others. 3. Teachers frequently complain about how they are unappreciated, yet children spend _12 years_ in their care. Why do people come up to them and say they hated s…

The main problem with teachers is that the price for them is not controlled by quality. A teacher who performs better than other teachers (e.g. a 10x teacher) will not be worth more in the current system. And with the quality/price relation missing, there is nothing a teacher can do about the price, and consequently their wages will be as low as possible.

Even at the high level, teacher salaries aren’t very high compared to industry.

Couple that with high licensing requirements and bad working conditions, neither of which are secret, and of course the best and brightest do not consider it a real option.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#424

Post by meetingthrower »

tristor wrote: post #391
_vdpp wrote: post #98

A few random thoughts: 1. For as much as we spend on education, teachers seem to be grossly underpaid - to be getting robbed of their share of the budget. Where does that money go? 2. It seems that education degrees are seen as easier to achieve than others. 3. Teachers frequently complain about how they are unappreciated, yet children spend _12 years_ in their care. Why do people come up to them and say they hated s…

1. Administrators. We have insane administrative bloat, especially in higher ed. In some institutions there is nearly a 1:1 count of administrators to faculty. Ironically, given the social politics implied by the author, a significant amount of administration bloat is specifically tied to DEI. 2. Well, they are. A teaching certification used to only require two years of higher learning compared to typical 4 for other…

Re #1) I was a school board member and did exhaustive analysis of our budget. For primary education through high school, admin is NOT the root cause.

If you take any school budget, and strip away everything that is not an actual classroom teacher, you will find that ~1/3 or less goes to "frontline" teaching costs.

Another 1/3 goes to special ed and all that is attendant with that. I mean, my district BOUGHT a car and hired a FULLTIME driver for one student who had to be taken to special programs. You have 1:1 class aids for many kids. Special ed is Then you have the last 1/3 which is everything else. Food, facilities, sports, admin, transportation, etc. Admin is actually a leaner slice than most unless you are getting into really small schools where you have a principal on top of the teachers and that adds significant salary. In bigger schools this fades away with scale.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#425

Post by prepend »

bee_rider wrote: post #238
pnf wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That assumes someone qualified to be a teacher is also qualified to be a software engineer. Have you met a lot of urban public school teachers?

They spend all day herding children, so they are at least qualified to be Project Managers.

You jest, but this is my suggestion to anyone who wants a career change. You can study and get a PMP or Scrum certificate and get an entry level job fairly easily. And, if successful, can be making 100k within a few years.

Of course you have to be a PM, so there’s that. I’d rather literally herd cats or manage a kindergarten class.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#426

Post by prepend »

vostok wrote: post #138
pnf wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That assumes someone qualified to be a teacher is also qualified to be a software engineer. Have you met a lot of urban public school teachers?

This post doesn't assume that, but I have met urban public school teachers who could have been software engineers since you asked. My post does assume that the career would attract more highly qualified candidates if the pay was higher.

I’ve met some too, but I’d say that most are incapable. Or they are the same proportion of the population that is capable. I don’t think teachers are any more or less likely than a typical person.

I’d guess I’ve met and spend significant time with 100 teachers. And a handful were capable of being a professional programmer.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#427

Post by munificent »

prepend wrote: post #412
tristor wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Administrators. We have insane administrative bloat, especially in higher ed. In some institutions there is nearly a 1:1 count of administrators to faculty. Ironically, given the social politics implied by the author, a significant amount of administration bloat is specifically tied to DEI. 2. Well, they are. A teaching certification used to only require two years of higher learning compared to typical 4 for other…

Administration seems to be entirely manually based and has lots of positions that should be consolidated or automated. For example, each school in my county has at least one person dedicated to managing iPads and tech equipment. This isn’t the networking and server support or even desktop support, that’s done centrally. This is just a human who hands them out, collects them, and processes warranty claims. The person…

In many schools, the librarian is also the ad hoc asset manager. But that's yet another symptom of the problem the article talks about. Managing tech equiment takes a lot of time, and foisting that problem onto the librarian means they either do a shittier job being a librarian (recommending books to kids, etc.) or they work longer hours for no additional pay.

You might argue that managing inventory should be automated but... that's just not how systems involving lots of random people work. The reason it's a full-time job to keep track of iPads and laptops is because the people using those things are kids and distracted parents. Stuff gets lost, power adapters get yanked and broken, etc. A parent stuffs an iPad in a random bin in the teacher's classroom. They think they "returned" it, but no one knows it's in there. Someone has to do actual communication and legwork to sort all that out. It's a real job.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#428

Post by prepend »

gumby wrote: post #181
pnf wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That assumes someone qualified to be a teacher is also qualified to be a software engineer. Have you met a lot of urban public school teachers?

What has “urban” to do with it?

There are more urban teachers than rural. And pay is more for urban than rural.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#429

Post by rayiner »

rainsford wrote: post #317
rayiner wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2. It seems that education degrees are seen as easier to achieve than others. Here is the problem. Teachers in America compare themselves to professionals, but their test scores are below the average for college educated people generally: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2017/... . Now 40% of college graduates don’t even get a job that requires a college degree. Disproportionately, those are p…

That's not what that link says. In fact the source explicitly states that they are not looking at SAT scores by major, they are just looking at average SAT scores for a given college and weighting those scores by the percentage of education majors at that college. That led to their conclusion that: "Graduates with education majors are disproportionately found at schools where students have lower SAT scores." That doe…

> That led to their conclusion that: "Graduates with education majors are disproportionately found at schools where students have lower SAT scores." That doesn't mean the graduates with education majors themselves have lower scores unless you make some unsupported assumptions about distribution of SAT scores at any given college.

It assumes that education majors have similar SAT scores to other majors in a given school. That’s an assumption, sure, but I think a pretty reasonable one.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#430

Post by munificent »

CharlesW wrote: post #419
elforce002 wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true in almost every country. Education is a money pit.

> Education is a money pit. How exactly do you mean this? The U.S. spent $90.5 billion for "Elementary, Secondary, and Vocational Education" in 2021* (a subset of "Education, Training, Employment, and Social Services"), which is 1.3% of $6.82 trillion in total 2021 government expenditures. Compare to $696.5B for Medicare, $754.8B for National Defense, etc. If anything, this illustrates how relatively unimportant a ba…

You're only looking at federal funding here. Most public school funding in the US comes from states.

My state of Washingon spent $17.5 billion on schooling this year, on top of that federal funding.

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