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Few thoughts: 1) expensive areas have a proportional amount more to spend on teachers. If they actually were short teachers and needed to pay teachers more, th

Few thoughts: 1) expensive areas have a proportional amount more to spend on teachers. If they actually were short teachers and needed to pay teachers more, the easily could and would. 2) teachers are generally easy to find. Open teaching positions routinely have hundreds of applicants. It is a very desirable job despite the 'low' wages. Working with kids, month long holidays, and tenure appeal to a lot of people. 3) 45% of your income on housing is not that extreme. I pay 30% and I'm in LA on a CS wage I'm not convinced this is a problem, just your typical heart throb emotional piece.

dangrover 11y ago
Normally, expensive areas would have a proportional amount more to spend. But California's Proposition 13 locked the land values that property taxes are based on to 1978 levels. And in SF specifically, rent control laws lock tenants into the same rent price as when they started renting (for pre-1978 apartments, which is most of them). Therefore the seemingly "expensive" rent of rentable apartments in SF is not an indicator of the actual rent being paid by most renters, much less of the taxes the owners pay to fund things like schools. So even if open apartments are rented for $4k/month, the level of service residents are able to fund could be more like that of a poorer city where apartments rent for $1.5k/month.
cafard 11y ago
1) Maybe. I remember an associate professor years ago who applied for a job teaching English in Aspen, Colorado. It would have meant a considerably larger paycheck than he got at the university. It would also have definitely taken him out of the academic world he aspired to. However, the size of the school system must have been vastly smaller than San Francisco's. 2. Yes, but good teachers? My impression from childhood, matched by what I could see of my son's experience, was that one can expect to have a good teacher every other year in the primary grades, and that the mix of good and bad doesn't change that much in middle and secondary schools when one has different teachers for different subjects. 3) 45% seems pretty steep to me.

dangrover 11y ago

Normally, expensive areas would have a proportional amount more to spend. But California's Proposition 13 locked the land values that property taxes are based on to 1978 levels. And in SF specifically, rent control laws lock tenants into the same rent price as when they started renting (for pre-1978 apartments, which is most of them). Therefore the seemingly "expensive" rent of rentable apartments in SF is not an indicator of the actual rent being paid by most renters, much less of the taxes the owners pay to fund things like schools. So even if open apartments are rented for $4k/month, the level of service residents are able to fund could be more like that of a poorer city where apartments rent for $1.5k/month.

cafard 11y ago

1) Maybe. I remember an associate professor years ago who applied for a job teaching English in Aspen, Colorado. It would have meant a considerably larger paycheck than he got at the university. It would also have definitely taken him out of the academic world he aspired to. However, the size of the school system must have been vastly smaller than San Francisco's. 2. Yes, but good teachers? My impression from childhood, matched by what I could see of my son's experience, was that one can expect to have a good teacher every other year in the primary grades, and that the mix of good and bad doesn't change that much in middle and secondary schools when one has different teachers for different subjects. 3) 45% seems pretty steep to me.