13 ms·

How Much Is a Good Teacher Worth? (2011)

39 points by tokenadult 10y ago

cassieramen 10y ago
tl;dr The way to close the achievement gap between the US and stellar foreign nations (here compared to Finland) is by increasing the number of average and above teachers. Classroom size, homework, or any other measure is only weakly related to performance. Nothing beats a stellar teacher. Proposed fixes are a probationary period for new teachers and removing the fixed pay scale that dominates the teaching profession.
- actionwords 10y ago
  daily reminder that public schools almost exclusively cater to a below average target.
- gcatalfamo 10y ago
  Try to edit the TDLR: to tl;dr for the HN friendly crawlers out there :)
  - cassieramen 10y ago
    Thanks! Updated :)
- thaumasiotes 10y ago
  > Classroom size, homework, or any other measure is only weakly related to performance. Nothing beats a stellar teacher. I think you'll find that the impact of teacher quality on student achievement is dwarfed by the impact of student quality.
  - tokenadult 10y ago
    Do you have evidence for this statement? The author of the article submitted here is certainly aware of that claim (he has been researching education reform for many years), but his claim, with evidence shown, is that teacher quality matters more. I think so too, partly because good teaching can change student behaviors toward learning.
    - thaumasiotes 10y ago
      I don't see any claim in the article that teacher quality matters more than student quality. It's about interpreting teacher quality relative to the quality of other teachers as a dollar value. There are two paragraphs, early on, that address or interestingly fail to address student quality. The first fails to address it: > The quality of the teachers in our schools is paramount: no other measured aspect of schools is nearly as important in determining student achievement. The initiatives we have emphasized in policy discussions—class-size reduction, curriculum revamping, reorganization of school schedule, investment in technology—all fall far short of the impact that good teachers can have in the classroom. Moreover, many of these interventions can be very costly. Replacing the students with better students is an easy and effective way to see much larger gains in student achievement. It is not proposed as a policy reform for the obvious reason that it doesn't do anything to help current students; it serves the needs of the school, not the students. (Imagine giving some parents who are trying to get their son to pass calculus the advice "toss out your son and get a better one". This works if "your son" refers to "whoever happens to be the son of this fixed couple, which may vary day-to-day", but not if "your son" itself refers to a fixed person.) The following paragraph reports the range of teacher-to-teacher variation in quality (emphasis added): > Indeed, the magnitude of variation in the quality of teachers, even within each school, is startling. Teachers who work in a given school, and therefore teach students with similar demographic characteristics, can be responsible for increases in math and reading levels that range from a low of one-half year to a high of one and a half years of learning each academic year. That clause I've emphasized is an admission that the impact of student quality is high enough to make measuring the effect of a teacher difficult. Anyway, according to this article, the difference between getting the worst teacher at a school (-0.5 grade levels) and the best (+0.5 grade levels) is one grade level of achievement. Fifth graders differ among themselves by much more than five grade levels of achievement. > his claim, with evidence shown, is that teacher quality matters more [than student quality] What evidence are you referring to? I see several estimates of the size of the impact of teacher quality, and not even a mention of the size of the impact of student quality.
    - yummyfajitas 10y ago
      The chetty paper is a classic. They claim that raising a teacher from -2sigma to 0 adds 1% to a student's earnings. http://www.rajchetty.com/chettyfiles/value_added.pdf http://www.rajchetty.com/chettyfiles/value_added.pdf If you scroll to table 3, you'll see how huge an effect non-teacher quality factors have. Table 5 shows huge specific roles for parent income and minority vs non-minority status. Perhaps a simpler way to think of it: if teacher quality dominated everything else, then a teacher getting poor scores out of a class of poor black kids, relative to another teacher getting great scores out of a class of rich asian kids, would be entirely to blame. Do you really believe this?
- Moshe_Silnorin 10y ago
  Embryo selection would be cheaper and easier.
- MaysonL 10y ago
  Another fix would be to train teachers better: give them actual training in classroom techniques. See "Building a Better Teacher (NYT)[0] & Teach Like a Champion 2.0 [1] [0]http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html?ref=magazine&pagewanted=all&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html... [1]http://smile.amazon.com/Teach-Like-Champion-2-0-Techniques/dp/1118901851 http://smile.amazon.com/Teach-Like-Champion-2-0-Techniques/d...
- randyrand 10y ago
  Another fix would be to let parents choose who teaches their children. Let the bad teachers wither away.
- kaitai 10y ago
  Agree with much of first paragraph; will also point out that Finland (for instance) adds in -- time to run around every hour for littler kids -- hearty lunch cooked from scratch at school every day -- social services that ensure your family has health care no matter the parental job situation -- a school social worker and psychologist who will help you and your family. Examples: http://www.theguardian.com/education/2011/nov/21/finland-education-immigrant-children http://www.theguardian.com/education/2011/nov/21/finland-edu... http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/10/the-joyful-illiterate-kindergartners-of-finland/408325/ http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/10/the-joy...
mikekij 10y ago
I was a physics teacher immediately after undergrad. I think I was a good teacher,as my students seemed to enjoy class, and excelled in physics later, in college. When I left after year 3 I was making $42k a year. While that is a good salary, I didn't see myself able to support a family on that salary. So I left, went to grad school, and now work in industry. It may sound vain or materialistic, but had I made $80k, I likely never would have left teaching. I really enjoyed being in the classroom. In order to get great teachers, you don't necessarily need to make teaching lucrative, but you do need to be able to provide a salary that enables the teacher to support a family.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  I strongly suggest reading Adam Smith on wages. First: all work must support raising a family. Second: he enumerates a set of five factors, remarkably enduring, which should account further for wages paid various sorts of work, based on the pleasurability, training, regularity, risk, and trust required. https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_I/Chapter_8 https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_... https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_I/Chapter_10 https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_...
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - bumbledraven 10y ago
    > First: all work must support raising a family. Really? What about the work of a Twitch streamer? Or a rock musician?
    - mordocai 10y ago
      Neither of those are standard work.
      - tnecniv 10y ago
trowawee 10y ago
The fundamental issue I see with the conclusions/recommendations is that the primary blocker preventing raising teacher salaries isn't the union. From my own time as a grade school teacher and the friends I still have in the profession, I can comfortably say that there are very few teachers who wouldn't cheerfully toss out the entire tenure and pension systems (and honestly, probably the whole union) if they were offered a pay scale comparable to that of coders in their area. The unions aren't powerful because teachers are ideologically attached to unions, they're powerful because teachers have been screwed over and over again and unions are literally the only protection they have. The unions took lower and lower salaries over the years in exchange for pensions and tenure; now everyone still wants to pay poverty wages and they want to strip away the other benefits. Teachers know who's good and who sucks, and for the most part, they hate the bad ones as much or more than anyone else. But the actual solution (a flat trade of salary in exchange for giving up their protections) will never happen, because too many people would rather nickel and dime the education system and then whine about why the ranks of a job that requires a college degree and pays below minimum wage aren't full of the best and brightest.
- entee 10y ago
  Good post. I'm curious about something else in addition. I've heard from friends in teaching that there has been a massive increase in administrative overhead and concentration of power both at the school district (superindents, sub-superintendent, deputy-sub-superintendent) and the school level (increased power and poorly targeted accountability for principals+other school officials). These friends have told me that this has made their job less fulfilling and that the union gives them a way to advocate for themselves in the face of these developments. Is that something you've heard as well and do you think pay increases would be attractive enough to alleviate those issues? Also, I keep hearing that we're spending more per pupil than ever and yet none of that money seems to end up with the people who most deserve it: the teachers. How come? Is it all going to that administrative overhead? Or are things like operating costs for school facilities going through the (literal and figurative) roof?
  - schismsubv 10y ago
grownseed 10y ago
The advice in the article talks specifically about the US, but I've seen the exact same issues come up in a lot of other countries (and to an extent other jobs too). Good teachers need to be paid more, and for that to happen, normalized salaries should simply disappear. They look nice on the surface because you can pretend everybody is getting equal treatment, but the harsh reality is that people don't perform equally. I see the same issue first-hand in public healthcare: no matter how well (or poorly) you perform, you get compensated the same, which can considerably reduce incentives. Since this is generally organized through unions and collective agreements, there's also quite often considerable overheads associated with managing all of this. I think there should be base salaries that can then be re-evaluated based on performance, as a lot of other professions have done for a long time. (not saying unions themselves should go away, but I believe they should definitely rethink the approach) At least in public settings, a lot of parents need to stop acting like they're customers ("always right"). It always baffles me to see parents offload absolutely everything on teachers, including responsibilities that should at least be shared (e.g. sex education) or downright theirs (e.g. manners). I've seen parents blame teachers for their kid having a foul mouth or for beating up other kids and whatnot, if we expect teachers to do actual education, we can't have them also play cops, it's your responsibility as a parent. Parents who fail at this should also be educated, as part of the overall education program (I'll admit that identifying failure can be a hard one, though a lot of social programs do similar things). Not everybody needs to go to school until 18+, seriously. It doesn't help anybody, it spreads resources thin and it perpetuates the same stupid incentives (e.g. by extension, not everybody needs a college degree to end up being a manager at Starbucks...). Stop trying to push normalized education, it's a complete disaster. Not all teachers teach the same way, not all students learn the same way (and combinations thereof), not all regions have the same culture or the same needs, etc. and it's fine, let each class adapt as it needs to, just make sure you provide equal opportunities. I get the point of systematization for assessing grades on country-wide and international levels and such, but when we get to the point that tests have become the end-goal rather simply a control, we've messed up, badly. And I could go on... The state of Education as it is saddens me: the general population seems to assume schools will just take care of everything, teachers either end up simply not caring, burnt out or depressed (not necessarily exclusively) and many politicians have forgotten that there are actual people behind the numbers they've worked so hard to game. I firmly believe Education, once essential needs are met[0], is the biggest factor in a successful and caring society. If we spent a fraction of the money currently spent on fixing the after-effects of bad education (e.g. policing), we'd all be better off for it, on all fronts. [0] One could argue that basic education is essential to covering basic needs in the first place.
zer00eyz 10y ago
As the child of two teachers, my parents always told me "do whatever you want in life, don't be a teacher". Both of them got into the profession out of a desire to teach, both ended up in administration roles out of a desire not to be poor. The problem isn't just we "under pay" it is that we "over ask". For those of you who haven't visited a school recently, getting into the building is more of a hassle than getting on a plane. Want to volunteer at your school, go get fingerprinted and give up your SSN to and underfunded and over worked staff and hope they don't let that amount of personal information out. Want to send your kid to school in CA, well you need to get them vaccinated, and tracking that has fallen to schools (what ever your position about this, shoving it into the department of education makes NO sense). Hell the paperwork to just enroll your kids is monstrous, its easier to register to vote, than it is to register your kids. I won't even cover sports > art(s) when it comes to budget: http://thinkprogress.org/education/2013/08/05/2412381/public-schools-slash-arts-education-relying-more-on-private-arts-funding/ http://thinkprogress.org/education/2013/08/05/2412381/public... is a good read if your interested. Meanwhile, how much of a teachers job has become acting as an extension of an overzealous CPS/child saver environment? Well the leadership at institutions is doing stuff like this: http://www.fox26houston.com/news/117783912-story http://www.fox26houston.com/news/117783912-story and if you think insanity at this level is isolated, you just haven't looked. There are schools who have gone so far as to "ban peanut butter", for the safety of other students: your more likely to get hit by lightning than die from peanut butter. You want to fix pay, and quality of education... give more money to hiring teachers to do NOTHING BUT TEACH. Lets pass a law that says you have to spend as much on students as you do on prisoners: http://money.cnn.com/infographic/economy/education-vs-prison-costs/ http://money.cnn.com/infographic/economy/education-vs-prison... Schools are now a direct path to jail: https://www.aclu.org/fact-sheet/what-school-prison-pipeline https://www.aclu.org/fact-sheet/what-school-prison-pipeline
- meric 10y ago
  >> your more likely to get hit by lightning than die from peanut butter. In a school of 1000 students, there are students who could die by eating a shared peanut butter sandwich[1]. It's not many, but more than would be killed by lightning...I wouldn't say that warrants a ban, but I could see how some would think that. I'm glad I'm not going to be raising kids in the U.S. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peanut_allergy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peanut_allergy
maus42 10y ago
Note: Interestingly enough, teachers in Finland (the country US is being compared against in the article) are fully unionised: 95 % of teacher workforce are members in the main union, OAJ. source: http://www.oaj.fi/cs/oaj/Tietoja%20OAJsta http://www.oaj.fi/cs/oaj/Tietoja%20OAJsta (in Finnish)
randyrand 10y ago
This article makes a fundamental error, and its sad they never even acknowledge it. You can't talk about the value of a good teacher without mentioning supply or demand. Yes, I know, here we go again. But this is basic economics. If the United States decided to train 100,000,000 good teachers, you can bet that the 100,000,000th teacher will not add the same value to the country as the first. There likely won't even be anyone for the 100,000,000 teacher to teach! Yet this is what the author here assumes. That the value add of a good teacher is constant. No mention of supply or demand whatsoever. Fortunately, there's a clever trick we use to incorporate supply and demand into value-determination. It's called the market. Unfortunately for students, teachers unions have done their best to destroy a free market for teachers, school are usually not even allowed to pay better (in the schools eyes) teacher more as per union contracts. And this country has no doubt suffered for it. All for a few extra thousand in the average teacher's pockets, its sickening.
- zevets 10y ago
  If this was the case, then why do private school teachers get paid less? Private schools are the free-market and are ununionized. In case you're curious, the reason is that teaching at a private school is easier, so people who love teaching are willing to take the pay cut.
  - randyrand 10y ago
    Your reasoning about why private teachers make less is completely wrong, im afraid. First, realize that if teachers were not unionized, their salaries would without a doubt go down. Unions function very similar to monopolies in that regard. So just intuitively we would expect in a freeer market that teachers salaries would go down. That said, even in the private sector teachers are still unionized --its hardly a free market -- so why haven't private teachers been able to negotiate as high of a pay as public sector teachers? > why do private school teachers get paid less? Because public sector unions have much more negotiating power. It's really that simple. Unions don't have infinite power, the can only negotiate as much as the 'pot' allows. In the public sector, the pot size is all tax revenue. There are almost no limits on how much public sector teachers can ask for. This is exactly why FDR opposed public sector unions. In the private sector, schools have to deal with remaining solvent. Teachers can only ask for at most -- the whole pot of revenue. And that pot is smaller in the private sector. The national average private school tuition is approximately $9,518 in 2015. Way less than the public sector at $12,922 per pupil in 2008. As such, private sector teachers cannot demand as high wages as the public sector teachers can.
randyrand 10y ago
As others have said, the problem is union contracts. Unions, have negotiated to not pay teachers based on performance. And unless we reduce union rights, I'm not sure that's ever going to change....
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

39 points by tokenadult 10y ago

tl;dr The way to close the achievement gap between the US and stellar foreign nations (here compared to Finland) is by increasing the number of average and above teachers. Classroom size, homework, or any other measure is only weakly related to performance. Nothing beats a stellar teacher. Proposed fixes are a probationary period for new teachers and removing the fixed pay scale that dominates the teaching profession.

actionwords 10y ago
daily reminder that public schools almost exclusively cater to a below average target.
gcatalfamo 10y ago
Try to edit the TDLR: to tl;dr for the HN friendly crawlers out there :)
- cassieramen 10y ago
  Thanks! Updated :)
thaumasiotes 10y ago
> Classroom size, homework, or any other measure is only weakly related to performance. Nothing beats a stellar teacher. I think you'll find that the impact of teacher quality on student achievement is dwarfed by the impact of student quality.
- tokenadult 10y ago
  Do you have evidence for this statement? The author of the article submitted here is certainly aware of that claim (he has been researching education reform for many years), but his claim, with evidence shown, is that teacher quality matters more. I think so too, partly because good teaching can change student behaviors toward learning.
  - thaumasiotes 10y ago
    I don't see any claim in the article that teacher quality matters more than student quality. It's about interpreting teacher quality relative to the quality of other teachers as a dollar value. There are two paragraphs, early on, that address or interestingly fail to address student quality. The first fails to address it: > The quality of the teachers in our schools is paramount: no other measured aspect of schools is nearly as important in determining student achievement. The initiatives we have emphasized in policy discussions—class-size reduction, curriculum revamping, reorganization of school schedule, investment in technology—all fall far short of the impact that good teachers can have in the classroom. Moreover, many of these interventions can be very costly. Replacing the students with better students is an easy and effective way to see much larger gains in student achievement. It is not proposed as a policy reform for the obvious reason that it doesn't do anything to help current students; it serves the needs of the school, not the students. (Imagine giving some parents who are trying to get their son to pass calculus the advice "toss out your son and get a better one". This works if "your son" refers to "whoever happens to be the son of this fixed couple, which may vary day-to-day", but not if "your son" itself refers to a fixed person.) The following paragraph reports the range of teacher-to-teacher variation in quality (emphasis added): > Indeed, the magnitude of variation in the quality of teachers, even within each school, is startling. Teachers who work in a given school, and therefore teach students with similar demographic characteristics, can be responsible for increases in math and reading levels that range from a low of one-half year to a high of one and a half years of learning each academic year. That clause I've emphasized is an admission that the impact of student quality is high enough to make measuring the effect of a teacher difficult. Anyway, according to this article, the difference between getting the worst teacher at a school (-0.5 grade levels) and the best (+0.5 grade levels) is one grade level of achievement. Fifth graders differ among themselves by much more than five grade levels of achievement. > his claim, with evidence shown, is that teacher quality matters more [than student quality] What evidence are you referring to? I see several estimates of the size of the impact of teacher quality, and not even a mention of the size of the impact of student quality.
  - yummyfajitas 10y ago
    The chetty paper is a classic. They claim that raising a teacher from -2sigma to 0 adds 1% to a student's earnings. http://www.rajchetty.com/chettyfiles/value_added.pdf http://www.rajchetty.com/chettyfiles/value_added.pdf If you scroll to table 3, you'll see how huge an effect non-teacher quality factors have. Table 5 shows huge specific roles for parent income and minority vs non-minority status. Perhaps a simpler way to think of it: if teacher quality dominated everything else, then a teacher getting poor scores out of a class of poor black kids, relative to another teacher getting great scores out of a class of rich asian kids, would be entirely to blame. Do you really believe this?
Moshe_Silnorin 10y ago
Embryo selection would be cheaper and easier.
MaysonL 10y ago
Another fix would be to train teachers better: give them actual training in classroom techniques. See "Building a Better Teacher (NYT)[0] & Teach Like a Champion 2.0 [1] [0]http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html?ref=magazine&pagewanted=all&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html... [1]http://smile.amazon.com/Teach-Like-Champion-2-0-Techniques/dp/1118901851 http://smile.amazon.com/Teach-Like-Champion-2-0-Techniques/d...
randyrand 10y ago
Another fix would be to let parents choose who teaches their children. Let the bad teachers wither away.
kaitai 10y ago
Agree with much of first paragraph; will also point out that Finland (for instance) adds in -- time to run around every hour for littler kids -- hearty lunch cooked from scratch at school every day -- social services that ensure your family has health care no matter the parental job situation -- a school social worker and psychologist who will help you and your family. Examples: http://www.theguardian.com/education/2011/nov/21/finland-education-immigrant-children http://www.theguardian.com/education/2011/nov/21/finland-edu... http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/10/the-joyful-illiterate-kindergartners-of-finland/408325/ http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/10/the-joy...

mikekij 10y ago

I was a physics teacher immediately after undergrad. I think I was a good teacher,as my students seemed to enjoy class, and excelled in physics later, in college. When I left after year 3 I was making $42k a year. While that is a good salary, I didn't see myself able to support a family on that salary. So I left, went to grad school, and now work in industry. It may sound vain or materialistic, but had I made $80k, I likely never would have left teaching. I really enjoyed being in the classroom. In order to get great teachers, you don't necessarily need to make teaching lucrative, but you do need to be able to provide a salary that enables the teacher to support a family.

dredmorbius 10y ago
I strongly suggest reading Adam Smith on wages. First: all work must support raising a family. Second: he enumerates a set of five factors, remarkably enduring, which should account further for wages paid various sorts of work, based on the pleasurability, training, regularity, risk, and trust required. https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_I/Chapter_8 https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_... https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_I/Chapter_10 https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_...
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- bumbledraven 10y ago
  > First: all work must support raising a family. Really? What about the work of a Twitch streamer? Or a rock musician?
  - mordocai 10y ago
    Neither of those are standard work.
    - tnecniv 10y ago

trowawee 10y ago

The fundamental issue I see with the conclusions/recommendations is that the primary blocker preventing raising teacher salaries isn't the union. From my own time as a grade school teacher and the friends I still have in the profession, I can comfortably say that there are very few teachers who wouldn't cheerfully toss out the entire tenure and pension systems (and honestly, probably the whole union) if they were offered a pay scale comparable to that of coders in their area. The unions aren't powerful because teachers are ideologically attached to unions, they're powerful because teachers have been screwed over and over again and unions are literally the only protection they have. The unions took lower and lower salaries over the years in exchange for pensions and tenure; now everyone still wants to pay poverty wages and they want to strip away the other benefits. Teachers know who's good and who sucks, and for the most part, they hate the bad ones as much or more than anyone else. But the actual solution (a flat trade of salary in exchange for giving up their protections) will never happen, because too many people would rather nickel and dime the education system and then whine about why the ranks of a job that requires a college degree and pays below minimum wage aren't full of the best and brightest.

entee 10y ago
Good post. I'm curious about something else in addition. I've heard from friends in teaching that there has been a massive increase in administrative overhead and concentration of power both at the school district (superindents, sub-superintendent, deputy-sub-superintendent) and the school level (increased power and poorly targeted accountability for principals+other school officials). These friends have told me that this has made their job less fulfilling and that the union gives them a way to advocate for themselves in the face of these developments. Is that something you've heard as well and do you think pay increases would be attractive enough to alleviate those issues? Also, I keep hearing that we're spending more per pupil than ever and yet none of that money seems to end up with the people who most deserve it: the teachers. How come? Is it all going to that administrative overhead? Or are things like operating costs for school facilities going through the (literal and figurative) roof?
- schismsubv 10y ago

grownseed 10y ago

The advice in the article talks specifically about the US, but I've seen the exact same issues come up in a lot of other countries (and to an extent other jobs too). Good teachers need to be paid more, and for that to happen, normalized salaries should simply disappear. They look nice on the surface because you can pretend everybody is getting equal treatment, but the harsh reality is that people don't perform equally. I see the same issue first-hand in public healthcare: no matter how well (or poorly) you perform, you get compensated the same, which can considerably reduce incentives. Since this is generally organized through unions and collective agreements, there's also quite often considerable overheads associated with managing all of this. I think there should be base salaries that can then be re-evaluated based on performance, as a lot of other professions have done for a long time. (not saying unions themselves should go away, but I believe they should definitely rethink the approach) At least in public settings, a lot of parents need to stop acting like they're customers ("always right"). It always baffles me to see parents offload absolutely everything on teachers, including responsibilities that should at least be shared (e.g. sex education) or downright theirs (e.g. manners). I've seen parents blame teachers for their kid having a foul mouth or for beating up other kids and whatnot, if we expect teachers to do actual education, we can't have them also play cops, it's your responsibility as a parent. Parents who fail at this should also be educated, as part of the overall education program (I'll admit that identifying failure can be a hard one, though a lot of social programs do similar things). Not everybody needs to go to school until 18+, seriously. It doesn't help anybody, it spreads resources thin and it perpetuates the same stupid incentives (e.g. by extension, not everybody needs a college degree to end up being a manager at Starbucks...). Stop trying to push normalized education, it's a complete disaster. Not all teachers teach the same way, not all students learn the same way (and combinations thereof), not all regions have the same culture or the same needs, etc. and it's fine, let each class adapt as it needs to, just make sure you provide equal opportunities. I get the point of systematization for assessing grades on country-wide and international levels and such, but when we get to the point that tests have become the end-goal rather simply a control, we've messed up, badly. And I could go on... The state of Education as it is saddens me: the general population seems to assume schools will just take care of everything, teachers either end up simply not caring, burnt out or depressed (not necessarily exclusively) and many politicians have forgotten that there are actual people behind the numbers they've worked so hard to game. I firmly believe Education, once essential needs are met[0], is the biggest factor in a successful and caring society. If we spent a fraction of the money currently spent on fixing the after-effects of bad education (e.g. policing), we'd all be better off for it, on all fronts. [0] One could argue that basic education is essential to covering basic needs in the first place.

zer00eyz 10y ago

As the child of two teachers, my parents always told me "do whatever you want in life, don't be a teacher". Both of them got into the profession out of a desire to teach, both ended up in administration roles out of a desire not to be poor. The problem isn't just we "under pay" it is that we "over ask". For those of you who haven't visited a school recently, getting into the building is more of a hassle than getting on a plane. Want to volunteer at your school, go get fingerprinted and give up your SSN to and underfunded and over worked staff and hope they don't let that amount of personal information out. Want to send your kid to school in CA, well you need to get them vaccinated, and tracking that has fallen to schools (what ever your position about this, shoving it into the department of education makes NO sense). Hell the paperwork to just enroll your kids is monstrous, its easier to register to vote, than it is to register your kids. I won't even cover sports > art(s) when it comes to budget: http://thinkprogress.org/education/2013/08/05/2412381/public-schools-slash-arts-education-relying-more-on-private-arts-funding/ http://thinkprogress.org/education/2013/08/05/2412381/public... is a good read if your interested. Meanwhile, how much of a teachers job has become acting as an extension of an overzealous CPS/child saver environment? Well the leadership at institutions is doing stuff like this: http://www.fox26houston.com/news/117783912-story http://www.fox26houston.com/news/117783912-story and if you think insanity at this level is isolated, you just haven't looked. There are schools who have gone so far as to "ban peanut butter", for the safety of other students: your more likely to get hit by lightning than die from peanut butter. You want to fix pay, and quality of education... give more money to hiring teachers to do NOTHING BUT TEACH. Lets pass a law that says you have to spend as much on students as you do on prisoners: http://money.cnn.com/infographic/economy/education-vs-prison-costs/ http://money.cnn.com/infographic/economy/education-vs-prison... Schools are now a direct path to jail: https://www.aclu.org/fact-sheet/what-school-prison-pipeline https://www.aclu.org/fact-sheet/what-school-prison-pipeline

meric 10y ago
>> your more likely to get hit by lightning than die from peanut butter. In a school of 1000 students, there are students who could die by eating a shared peanut butter sandwich[1]. It's not many, but more than would be killed by lightning...I wouldn't say that warrants a ban, but I could see how some would think that. I'm glad I'm not going to be raising kids in the U.S. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peanut_allergy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peanut_allergy

maus42 10y ago

Note: Interestingly enough, teachers in Finland (the country US is being compared against in the article) are fully unionised: 95 % of teacher workforce are members in the main union, OAJ. source: http://www.oaj.fi/cs/oaj/Tietoja%20OAJsta http://www.oaj.fi/cs/oaj/Tietoja%20OAJsta (in Finnish)

randyrand 10y ago

This article makes a fundamental error, and its sad they never even acknowledge it. You can't talk about the value of a good teacher without mentioning supply or demand. Yes, I know, here we go again. But this is basic economics. If the United States decided to train 100,000,000 good teachers, you can bet that the 100,000,000th teacher will not add the same value to the country as the first. There likely won't even be anyone for the 100,000,000 teacher to teach! Yet this is what the author here assumes. That the value add of a good teacher is constant. No mention of supply or demand whatsoever. Fortunately, there's a clever trick we use to incorporate supply and demand into value-determination. It's called the market. Unfortunately for students, teachers unions have done their best to destroy a free market for teachers, school are usually not even allowed to pay better (in the schools eyes) teacher more as per union contracts. And this country has no doubt suffered for it. All for a few extra thousand in the average teacher's pockets, its sickening.

zevets 10y ago
If this was the case, then why do private school teachers get paid less? Private schools are the free-market and are ununionized. In case you're curious, the reason is that teaching at a private school is easier, so people who love teaching are willing to take the pay cut.
- randyrand 10y ago
  Your reasoning about why private teachers make less is completely wrong, im afraid. First, realize that if teachers were not unionized, their salaries would without a doubt go down. Unions function very similar to monopolies in that regard. So just intuitively we would expect in a freeer market that teachers salaries would go down. That said, even in the private sector teachers are still unionized --its hardly a free market -- so why haven't private teachers been able to negotiate as high of a pay as public sector teachers? > why do private school teachers get paid less? Because public sector unions have much more negotiating power. It's really that simple. Unions don't have infinite power, the can only negotiate as much as the 'pot' allows. In the public sector, the pot size is all tax revenue. There are almost no limits on how much public sector teachers can ask for. This is exactly why FDR opposed public sector unions. In the private sector, schools have to deal with remaining solvent. Teachers can only ask for at most -- the whole pot of revenue. And that pot is smaller in the private sector. The national average private school tuition is approximately $9,518 in 2015. Way less than the public sector at $12,922 per pupil in 2008. As such, private sector teachers cannot demand as high wages as the public sector teachers can.

randyrand 10y ago

As others have said, the problem is union contracts. Unions, have negotiated to not pay teachers based on performance. And unless we reduce union rights, I'm not sure that's ever going to change....

deleted 10y ago

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