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Nobody wants to teach anymore

jessicalexicus.medium.com

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Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#511

Post by meetingthrower »

azinman2 wrote: post #488
meetingthrower wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You say that like we’re overspending on spending ed. I don’t understand that position. Of course they require more resources than the average student - they’re special cases, literally! To take that away would be devastating for society’s most vulnerable, as most parents aren’t equipped with the skills or resources to be able to do any different with their children. Some cases are extreme. Should we just let them eit…

It's said without (much) judgement. In the abstract, it seems exactly right to spend on it.

But the reality is it a) very expensive and b) very disruptive. As some siblings mention, you will often have a class with 3-4 adults, only one of which is a teacher. And then several students who (through no fault of their own) can barely hold it together. For the 90% of kids in class, this is not helpful. And distributing it amongst many classes vs a more centralized special ed delivery system compounds the cost.

We have aggressively used the school system as a distribution point of social services. Again, this seems logical. But this takes focus away from what the main intent is for the school system.

There are pros and cons to this approach. I don't exactly know the answer, but instead of blaming administrators or teachers, we should be looking at what else we are asking schools to do besides educate. I know personally that the principals and superintendents spent less than 20% of their time thinking about how to make education better for the 90%.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#512

Post by tppiotrowski »

"Every single teacher I know has a second or third source of income, even professors. They’re either married to a banker, or they work a conventional second job. They have side hustles."

My anecdote: My sister is a professor and my partner a 3rd grade teacher. Neither ever worked summer jobs but it sounds like they're outliers.

I will say that having a classroom full of kids whose parents want to apply their individual moral philosophy on everyone is a challenge.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#513

Post by justsocrateasin »

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, and when accounting for benefits and pension, quite impressive.

I'd disagree. Some anecdotal evidence - I'm from a HCOL suburban area with a nationally ranked public school system. Teachers here are generally considered "well-paid" by teacher salary standards. Many of the teachers in my area literally cannot afford to live here, and have to commute 30-40 minutes in.

My mom was a teacher there. She was making about $80k a year at the end of her career, with 2 masters degree and 20 years of experience teaching (so she was pretty much maxed out on her salary). Her pension is something like $20k a year (also maxed out due to her YOE). My dad was in between jobs for some time in there, and my parents, who are frugal people, struggled to make ends meet on just my moms salary, borrowing against their mortgage for the year while my dad was unemployed.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#514

Post by jedberg »

andrewprock wrote: post #448
throw0101a wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Counterpoint: teachers' pay is great, it's just backloaded in pension plans. Counter-points to that: You still have to pay the bills before retirement. And this even assumes they get a good pensions, because a lot of states don't bother funding their public employee pensions properly (using current-year tax income for splashy announcements instead, kicking the liability down the road for the next politician): * htt…

Teachers in the US get decent salaries and good pensions. It may be different from from state to state, but in California you can work for 25 years and retire without ever having to work again by the age of 50. You'll have to learn to live on a low salary for the first 5-10 years of your career. But pensions are paid based on your terminal salary, not your average salary. For elementary school teachers in my district…

> without ever having to work again by the age of 50.

While that may be true, it's important to note that the pension is only salary (and usually only 80% of your terminal salary) and not benefits.

So you'd spend a significant part of that money on getting health insurance.

Most teachers who have earned full pensions wait to retire until 67 anyway so they can get Medicare (and not Social Security, because they don't qualify for it since they have their pension unless they worked another job as well).

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#515

Post by downboots »

randomdata wrote: post #151
candiddevmike wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Parasitic administration salaries 2. Depending on the state you may not even need one 3. It's the parents, not the kids that make them feel this way. Kids typically love their teachers 4. 100% 5. Building a new school is 10-100s of millions typically. Why it costs so much is worthy of debate, but plunking down new schools these days is far more costly than in the past.

1. Automation. Teaching in its rawest form has been automated away, leaving it to be a valueless human endeavour. “Teaching” in the context of children survives because it has become a childcare service. But babysitting is not able to charge much as its cost must remain under the income potential of parents, else parents will take the responsibility themselves.

> Teaching in its rawest form has been automated away

Wishful thinking. If kids magically taught themselves there would be no schools. Some do. Most don't.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#516

Post by azemetre »

acjohnson55 wrote: post #500
jedberg wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, the engineer who thinks everything can be solved with software. To automate grading you first must create a general AI, because if you just do multiple choice exams, you aren't really testing or measuring someone's ability to perform the task, you're just measuring their ability to make a good guess. And some teachers do that. But not the good ones. As for planning, some senior teachers have filing cabinets label…

> Ah, the engineer who thinks everything can be solved with software. Just as a bit of feedback, starting your comment like this may have turned off the original poster to the rest of your thoughts, which I agree with.

Sometimes we all need to be slapped with a fish in the face in order to see how credulous we are with our biases.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#517

Post by notch656a »

varjag wrote: post #496
Cupertino95014 wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good data, but it's static. How has it changed over the last, say, 30 years? I'm guessing "special ed" costs have increased the most. Why is that?

The society used to care a lot less about special needs people.

There's a finite amount of tax money available, so disproportionately allotment to a few special children effectively robs the other children of resources.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#518

Post by randomdata »

pessimizer wrote: post #510
randomdata wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teaching as a career basically doesn't exist anymore outside of schools for children. It is not that teachers are using automated tools, but students are using automated teachers instead of hiring human teachers. When was the last time you hired a human teacher instead of consulting an automated teacher when you wanted/needed to learn something new? Like I said before, we don't even recognize the existence of general…

I've never heard of an automated teacher. I've heard of tutors and I've heard of books.

Books provide a primitive form of automated teaching, although we've expanded on the concept considerably since the advent of the book.

You have not heard of automated teaching as a thing because we invent names for automation. The automated kitchen servant isn't called an automated kitchen servant, it's called a dishwasher (among others).

Likewise, automated teachers are not called automated teachers. They are given names, depending on the teaching method at play. Automated teacher is used here as a generalization as the specific automation is immaterial.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#519

Post by krony »

seibelj wrote: post #10

People do want to teach and get paid to do it. It’s called private schools. They charge what the market will bear for their quality and location, and they pay what the market rate is for teachers of the requisite quality that let them charge the rates they need. What confuddles people in education is the same thing that causes endless articles about housing, healthcare, inflation… it’s called “basic economics”. Just…

That depends on where you live. In the Midwest, most (if not all) parochial private schools pay teachers substantially less than the public schools pay teachers. And it isn’t like the public school teachers are making enough either. But to say private school teachers get paid well is very incorrect for the large midwestern cities

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#520

Post by zdragnar »

jedberg wrote: post #514
andrewprock wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teachers in the US get decent salaries and good pensions. It may be different from from state to state, but in California you can work for 25 years and retire without ever having to work again by the age of 50. You'll have to learn to live on a low salary for the first 5-10 years of your career. But pensions are paid based on your terminal salary, not your average salary. For elementary school teachers in my district…

> without ever having to work again by the age of 50. While that may be true, it's important to note that the pension is only salary (and usually only 80% of your terminal salary) and not benefits. So you'd spend a significant part of that money on getting health insurance. Most teachers who have earned full pensions wait to retire until 67 anyway so they can get Medicare (and not Social Security, because they don't…

Unless you're married and your partner continues to work and covers benefits for you.

My aunt did exactly above, and felt it was a moral duty to let new younger teachers have the spot (nevermind it meant that she was going to draw a pension from the system for more years than she'd actually worked).

Plenty of other teachers feel the same way, though obviously not all.

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