22 ms·

Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record

396 points by dpflan 8y ago

romeisendcoming 8y ago
Both parents were teachers and spoke strongly against the profession when they retired 15 years ago. My exit/retirement strategy from this IT circus was always teaching but I guess I could revisit that for midnight shift as a DC tech somewhere.
r00fus 8y ago
I sense the pressure of privatized education is making itself felt here through legislation (NCLB, ESSA bills) and money injected into campaigns.
nsriv 8y ago
https://outline.com/ZuA8TG https://outline.com/ZuA8TG
- sjroot 8y ago
  Last time I saw a paywalled article, someone commented and mentioned the idea of (1) prohibiting those sites or (2) automatically redirecting to an outlined version.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - shawn 8y ago
    Paywalled links with workarounds are allowed, because otherwise HN would miss out on good articles. (We've been thinking of mirroring that same guideline over at https://www.laarc.io/ https://www.laarc.io/)
  - chii 8y ago
    Personally, I rather just not read paywalled articles, or I would have paid if the publication is high quality enough. Using a workaround to circumvent the paywall seems too shady, because if the contents are worth reading, they should be worth paying the asking price.
    - derefr 8y ago
      > if the contents are worth reading, they should be worth paying the asking price How about if the facts the article communicates are worth knowing, but their treatment in the article isn't worth the (digital) paper it was printed on? I can see your argument applying to editorials, but not-so-much to raw journalism.
      - skj 8y ago
        Presumably an important part of journalism is research.
        derefr 8y ago
        You realize that other sources are free to take the facts from any article they read, and write those same facts (without doing any expensive, confirmatory investigation of their own) into a new piece, without paying any sort of a license for rebroadcast of those facts, or for creating a derivative work from those facts, right? You realize that 99% of the journalism you read, watch, or listen to every day is this kind of secondary "remixing" that deprives the original journalist-investigator of "their" reward for doing said research, right? You realize society is perfectly okay with that, for the same reason we're okay with e.g. used book stores depriving the original author of a sale, right? So then—having realized those things—what's the ethical argument in favor of avoiding a secondary source that happened to just plagiarize its text from the primary source, in favor of one that plagiarized its research but wrote its own paraphrase of the text? What does that get you, ethically? (Note that I'm not trying to equivocate these things in service of making plagiarism seem less bad. The conclusion I hope you to reach here is that society is seemingly perfectly okay with certain types of plagiarism, and that that's weird and shocking and terrible and people should really be more angry about it than they are.)
        skj 8y ago
        I've never heard the repackaging of facts referred to as "plagiarism". That said, the only difference between plagiarism and what you discuss is that plagiarism is, generally, detectable and stealing facts is not. If it were, I'm sure there would be different rules and provisions in effect.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - glenneroo 8y ago
    Why not just tag the titles with [Paywall] so users can avoid them? Granted, they tend to be from the same sites, but it would be one less thing to remember.
    - sjroot 8y ago
      I think this is the way to go. I should have clarified that in my OP.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- JacobJans 8y ago
  Copyright infringement.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  This attitude towards customer-funded journalism promotes bad content and ad-driven models. It’s a valid choice. But understand the trade-offs for convenience and tracking you’re promoting.
  - abc-xyz 8y ago
    How is he promoting tracking? The outline link has 3 cookies (0 third-party) and make 5 requests (the bad ones being Google Analytics and Doubleclick). Whereas the original article has 68 cookies (44 third party) and make 261 requests (which violates users privacy to a much greater extent).
    - JumpCrisscross 8y ago
      Outline doesn’t pay the journalist. If partial paywalls fail, full paywalls à la the FT or ad-driven models must succeed. I’m okay with Archive.org links. But a private company replicating somebody else’s work without compensation nudges the world towards rich people consuming via subscription and the rest of us through tracking and ads.
      - abc-xyz 8y ago
        The articles will always be available through websites like outline, so you'd be much better off encouraging these publishers to stop violating users privacy, stop making horrible sites that autoplay videos, automatically load new pages if scroll too far, etc. Do that and then people will be less inclined to share outline links/post content in comments, and more inclined to turn off ad blocking if doing so won't result in all sorts of nasty tracking.
sethammons 8y ago
I left teaching over 8 years ago. Elevated myself from programming for fun and sometimes pay to being a full time software developer. Best career move ever.
- lr4444lr 8y ago
  Same here. I confirm your experience. Teaching takes a certain temperament though, and I admit I just don't have it.
- ikeyany 8y ago
  Started out studying to become a secondary math teacher. Saw the writing on the wall and switched my major to engineering. One of the wisest decisions I've made in my life.
ancorevard 8y ago
“It’s a more boring place now, and they see their friends finding exciting opportunities,” Ms. Pollak said. So in other words, this is a healthy thing. If people are bored being teachers and they quit, that should be celebrated.
- yourbandsucks 8y ago
  No way. Teaching is really, really important for society. And we've made it low-status, because we are morons. If it were higher-status, you'd see fewer people being 'bored' and seeing the 'excitement' elsewhere. The fact that we've screwed this up should not be celebrated.
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    Pay more and treat teachers better. Market forces at work.
    - potbelly83 8y ago
      Depends where. In Westchester/Nassau counties (bordering NYC) teachers get a pretty sweet deal.
      - throwawaymath 8y ago
        It is extraordinarily difficult to move from a relatively low paying teaching job (such as in the NYC DOE) to a high paying job in Westchester. There is far, far more labor supply than there is demand. If you don't get in when you're young (and therefore cheap), it's most likely not going to happen. When I was growing up my father worked in an "elite" Westchester private school and my mother worked in the NYC DOE. The job fulfillment, administrative support and overall ease of working was like night and day between them.
    - robertAngst 8y ago
      My worst teacher bragged about how great of a teacher she was, and that she rightfully deserved 120k/yr. She had a PhD, Masters, etc... She would teach 2/5 days a week, and tell us to read the text book the other 3/5 days. And her answer to anything libertarian was- That's fine, you can just build your own road, and put out your own fire. Looking back on it, and believing her overly simplistic answers, I think a youtuber could have done a better job.
gammateam 8y ago
Thats because teaching was the fallback plan and all the students they work with daily already realize it. Every teacher that brags about their prior dream in their specialized trade is immediately shot down by middle schoolers asking "so why are you a teacher" "Well Jimbo, as you suspect, it's because something went horribly wrong and I've rationalized my acceptance of this low wage life teaching this nation's future"
- ineedasername 8y ago
  Many thousands of students entering directly into teacher ed programs when they get to college refute your unsuported (or only anecdotally supported) claims.
- sethammons 8y ago
  There are teachers who do it because they can't do anything else, and there are teachers who do it as a labor of love. As a student, the vast majority of my teachers struck me as the latter. When I was teaching, it felt kinda half and half in the inner city school I was at. Bless anyone who can do that gig in inner-city San Bernardino CA. As a teacher, I resigned myself to never owning a home and never paying off my student loans, meanwhile dealing with an overwhelming amount of disinterested students, and more than my fair share of problem students. As a software developer, I now hope to pay off my house in the next two to three years.
- jacobolus 8y ago
  A few of my teachers were wealthy enough from past jobs not to need to work for the rest of their lives, but then switched to teaching as a second career because they loved engaging with the next generation. Most others were career teachers who had known they wanted to teach since they themselves were young and took it up as a profession from the start despite having the talent and work ethic for some much higher paying alternative career. A few had the ambition of working as teachers for a decade and then moving up into school administration. A few of my teachers weren’t especially effective, but that’s true of workers in every other field and every other institution. I don’t think I had any teachers (in an above average public school system in a diverse, generally comfortable, but not outrageously wealthy suburb) who had washed out of other careers and turned to teaching as a fallback. Or if there were some like that, it wasn’t apparent to students. Maybe some of the high school sports coaches / PE teachers were like that.
smaili 8y ago
> The departures come alongside protests this year in six states where teachers in some cases shut down schools over tight budgets, small raises and poor conditions. Even as a child myself growing up in the US education system, this was a common topic where even the students knew teachers were underpaid and education in general had a lot less money in it -- but at the same time I don't ever recall schools shutting down because of it. I can't imagine what it must feel like to be a student now and being told school is closed because my teachers are protesting. Not really sure why I'm getting downvoted so much, just wanted to express empathy.
- perfmode 8y ago
  If I was a student right now, I’d be protesting with them.
- jacobolus 8y ago
  > I can't imagine what it must feel like to be a student now and being told school is closed because my teachers are protesting. Students should feel proud that their teachers care enough to stick around and fix things instead of quitting and finding another job. I know several people who have left the teaching profession in the face of poor pay and lack of autonomy and respect, or moved out of states where teacher pay is poor.
jseliger 8y ago
I believe we see this article every time we have a strong economy. When the economy is strong, teaching is unappealing. When the economy is weak, many people cannot find other gigs and so flood into the relative security of teaching. Teaching may also be less pleasant in the social media and smartphone age, for reasons enumerated in The Coddling of the American Mind (a highly recommended book). There may also be a gender dynamic at work; today, it would be hard for me to recommend that guys go into teaching: https://jakeseliger.com/2014/09/08/why-dont-more-men-go-into-teaching-fear-of-the-accusation https://jakeseliger.com/2014/09/08/why-dont-more-men-go-into....
- yourbandsucks 8y ago
  A friend of mine, male teacher, randomly met Obama back in like 2006 at some function. In their 5 second conversation, Obama was ecstatic that he was a teacher, saying specifically that 'we need more male teachers'.
- tomjakubowski 8y ago
  Do you have any evidence other than a Reddit thread of anecdotes (about students "seducing" their teachers - ugh) that male teachers routinely have their lives ruined by false accusations of molestation? Here's some evidence on the "other side" of the issue: Chicago public schools routinely broke the law by failing to report credible accusations of molestation of students by teachers and staff. https://graphics.chicagotribune.com/chicago-public-schools-sexual-abuse/index.html https://graphics.chicagotribune.com/chicago-public-schools-s...
  - klipt 8y ago
    I think most male teachers in the US will tell you that they have to be careful never to be alone in a room with a student, and careful never to hug a crying student. Meanwhile female teachers either don't have to worry about this much, or will even be applauded for comforting a crying student by hugging them.
    - tomjakubowski 8y ago
shados 8y ago
Articles like these, while only loosely related, always make me think that the software engineering bubble has to pop. You have people with ton of education busting their behind dealing with little brats all day to try to make sure they have a future... During that time, some bro who read a couple of books and hammered on his keyboard, and MAYBE did a 3 months bootcamp gets bummed if he can't pull in 100k in one of the coasts with a flex schedule and free lunches/coffee/smoothies/whatever. God forbid they get paged in the middle of the night, they'll scream bloody murder. Same contrasts with trade workers: hiring qualified carpenters/plumbers/painters/whatever is becoming incredibly difficult. Obviously I'm only considering the extremes here, but those extremes are...very common. Society can't go very far if the ONLY thing people do is write keywords in a text editor all day. We need to properly value other professions too.
- capdeck 8y ago
  This is a very valid point. While I don't have all the answers, but it seems like if a person is pulling an honest 40 hour week they should afford at the very least a real minimum standard of living, regardless of what that person does. I know this sounds hairy and anti-capitalist and "who is going to pay for this", etc. But this is what real value is in my opinion.
  - pault 8y ago
    What if I spend 40 hours a week making paper hats? Should I be entitled to a living wage?
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - krapp 8y ago
      Yes. If you choose to dedicate the bulk of your waking life to creating wealth for your employer, you should be compensated, at a minimum, well enough to feed, clothe and house yourself. or there should be something like UBI in place to allow employers to decouple the cost of keeping their employees alive from the cost of doing business.
wallflower 8y ago
It is not mentioned in this particular article and my teacher friends say that dealing with parents is a constant pain. Of course, not all parents are a pain. Only a few. Teachers are not in the profession to listen to why little high school age Johnny did not get an A on his paper, not the least because you, the parent, helped him write that paper.
- allcentury 8y ago
  I just commented the same thing - parents are a major problem right now.
  - wallflower 8y ago
    Hope your mother can hang in there until her well-deserved retirement, she is almost there!
- Gibbon1 8y ago
  My teacher friends mention parents are a pain because the administration doesn't have teachers backs.
- labster 8y ago
  Teachers should stop assigning tasks that necessitate parent participation, then. I was assigned to write a novella in sixth grade, for crying out loud. I like creative writing now, but I didn't back then, and the assignment sure didn't help.
  - wallflower 8y ago
    It wasn't clear in the original comment but the paper that the high school student did was not supposed to be written by the parent or receive assistance from the parent in any form. The student was in high school!
    - labster 8y ago
      I've never had assignments that were supposed to have parental assistance after preschool, yet many of them needed it to get a non-failing grade. Perhaps 1% of middle school kids can do a science fair project on their own with all the research tracking and results board and all. But still if you failed that, you failed the class. Utterly ridiculous. Kids that age should be exploring and apprenticing, not coming up with original research. Not implying there aren't exceptional students, but they are exceptions. And for everyone else, we train them to be good factory workers for the disappearing industries of America. The one thing we all agree on is that the system is broken.
skilled 8y ago
I was a right prick at school, can't imagine being a teacher and having to do deal with 30 or more of others like me.
allcentury 8y ago
There's much more to this story. My mother, a high school calculus teacher for the last 22 years is so ready to retire. I didn't think my mom would ever retire, she spends countless hours coming up with unique lesson plans for the kids - they usually involve games, real world use cases and many ah-ha moments. She lives for those moments when a kid lights up when they understand the value of what their learning. Now though, over the last 8 years, she told me that parents have ruined the job she loves. Especially now that she has to post everyone's grades online, instantly emails roll in when a student didn't perform as well as the parent expected. She told me of an email she received that said "X is trying to get into Princeton - an A- isn't going to get her in. What extra credit can she do to make this an A?". It's endless and my mom, for fear of a lawsuit, doesn't know what to do. The teachers union in Massachusetts made all the teachers sign liability waivers and arbitration waivers if a lawsuit happens. My mom is scared stiff and either bends over, or doesn't and let's the vice principal or principal take the heat, ultimately it leading to an extra credit assignment. My mom's job sounds miserable and if you were to ask me 15 years ago, what I might do in my retirement - I would have said taught CS at a disadvantaged high school. Now though, I'm seconding guessing that retirement plan.
- Balgair 8y ago
  My SO quit HS STEM teaching recently, so I have at least some idea of the modern teaching environment. The issue, for my SO, was pay and benefits vs. hassle. My SO has a PhD and decided to give back to the community at an 'impoverished' school. Ho boy, was that a mistake. The first school was a terrible experience and my SO went gray from the place. Though there are a few parents that are as described in the parent comment, the vast majority of parents were all but useless. The HS my SO taught at, and I am not making this up, has a mandatory grading format for every single test/HW given: multiple choice only, only 4 choices are allowed. Combining that with the faux-restorative-justice [0] grading scale, where a 25% score in a class was considered 'passing', and even a goldfish could pass the classes. Yet still, the graduation rate was ~30%, only because of the Air Force Base nearby. Just trying to get the kids to even take the test was impossible, let alone the truancy. The teacher drop-out rate by December was ~50%. Neighboring schools had teacher drop-out rates near 90%. Yes, teacher drop-out rates. Thing is, poverty and racism and violence suck really bad. The many of the parents were desperately poor, ~80% of the children were on free and reduced lunch, and many of those would not eat all weekend long, let alone the apple vs Cheetos 'food desert' debate. Then the physical abuse of the children comes in, and 'home' is not a safe place at all. Then the sexual abuse kicks in, and home is REALLY not a safe place for a some of the teen girls my SO taught. Then you have the flagrant use of phones, the sexting, the porn use, the gore, etc. in the middle of 40+ child classrooms. It was/is a mad-house. It's no wonder all the more well off folks refuse to send their kids to public schools. God knows we would/will. And my SO, with a PhD and therefore 'top' level seniority in the union pay-scale, made ~40k in a large, expensive US city with median houses at ~0.5 million. The benefits were, otherwise, ok-ish. No dental, no vision. The pension (yes, they still have one!) has been gutted since 2008 and is massively underfunded, so a total-write off. Now my SO works in the field that the PhD was/is in and pulls ~80k with amazing benefits/401k. Teaching, like my SO had to do, was in no way worth any of it. My SO did time in 'service' to the local community and now considers the dues paid. [0] Actually, restorative justice models are pretty brilliant, if implemented properly. I think they should be the norm.
neom 8y ago
One of my favourite hypotheticals to play out is what would be like if we somehow paid public school teachers and emergency services/law enforcement professionals an extreme of today, a million usd a year, and increased the difficulty to attain this work. I usually end up in a pretty good place but I'd be curious what others think/why this couldn't work?
- throwawaymath 8y ago
  Where do you usually end up with that hypothesis? Walk us through it and we might be able to explain why it couldn't work.
- lr4444lr 8y ago
  This was tried in NYC by The Equity Project - a charter school (125K base salary, very demanding qualifications). I'm sure that it works well in niche markets and test scores aren't everything, but results (test scores) were not that stellar as you might imagine when compared with similar Charter schools to suggest it could scale.
- rayiner 8y ago
  > I usually end up in a pretty good place but I'd be curious why this could not work? It would be fantastically expensive. Chicago has 21,000 teachers. Paying them $1 million per year would cost $21 billion, dwarfing the city's current $3.8 billion budget. Even paying them $100,000 per year on average would cost half the city's budget. And there is little reason to believe it would yield better results. American teachers are well paid compared to other OECD countries where students do better: https://www.businessinsider.com/teacher-salaries-by-country-2017-5#elementary-school-teachers-best-and-worst-1 https://www.businessinsider.com/teacher-salaries-by-country-....
  - tptacek 8y ago
    If the fully loaded headcount cost of a CPS teacher isn't north of $100,000 I'll be pretty surprised. CPS teachers are well-compensated. Their median salary is $71,000, and they get good health insurance and a defined-benefit pension plan. I live in Oak Park, just on the outskirts of Chicago, and the median teacher cash comp at my kids' high school is something like $120,000.
stupidbird 8y ago
You mean no one's lining up to get low pay and frequent parental abuse? You don't say.
lr4444lr 8y ago
Lots of comments to the tune of "pay teachers more." Teachers in large urban areas with strong unions tend to be paid quite well, especially factoring in benefits, and it doesn't necessarily correlate that well with various metrics of "success" in education (standardized test scores, on-time graduation rate, fewer violent incidents) once you look into individual cases and see through the administrative means by which those numbers can be rigged. Of course, there are markets where teachers make very little, with many needing to take second jobs, and I don't mean higher salary wouldn't help in those districts. I think the comments that speak to the respect for the profession, unreasonable accountability, and increasingly risky liability are more on the mark about why people jump ship when their career prospects improve in a strong economy.
- sethammons 8y ago
  In the area I taught, median pay was about $60k/yr. After 20 years and getting more advanced degrees, you could get to $80k/yr. Most of the teachers I worked with worked more hours per year than just about any software engineer I know. Only very lazy or very tenured teachers were getting the fabled summer vacation or winter break. I have more income, more vacation, and better hours as a developer than I ever did as a teacher
  - dorchadas 8y ago
    Yeah, the pay is an issue. Sure, I make great money for a single young male living in an low COL area, but there's no room to scale. My mom retired from teaching in the same district I'm currently in with 31 years experience. She was only making 15k more than I started at. There's no chance to increase pay apart from going administration (and even then it's not a huge increase) or getting more degrees (and there's a limit to those).
  - sopooneo 8y ago
    Similar situation. After leaving teaching for development I spent the first two years in something like a state of grace. I loved teaching, but my gosh, the stress levels weren't even in the same universe.
  - 8y ago
dominotw 8y ago
parents have wayyy to much power over you. No thanks.
tranced 8y ago
Haha, I just finished quitting my job teaching high school computer science today. I went from private tutoring CS to teaching in an afterschool program to this because I really enjoyed helping students break through conceptual blocks and mental ones. The work is emotionally exhausting but satisfying. Only recently have I wondered whether or not this was the right thing to do instead of going to industry(maybe it's because a lot of my interviewers have been asking me that exact question) but it seems blatant now that my friends are senior engineers who have almost infinite job opportunities. The real crux of it is that teachers get put into this triangle of pressures between students, administration, and their parents which almost takes away all agency from the job. I got so tired of getting put into difficult situations that were almost always juggling acts. At the end of the day, if you want to fix anything as a teacher it's almost like going against an institution. You risk your pension, your 401k, or maybe just your potential future in industry for what? I wasn't in it for the money and I would imagine most teachers aren't either... but what happens when your hands are too tied to actually teach? sigh maybe I could've done everyone justice if I had some tech money to fall back on.
- snarf21 8y ago
  Even worse is the whole 'no child left behind' structure where schools lose funding if they don't meet certain numbers. The administrators live in fear so the kids spend half the semester taking practice tests so the school district doesn't lose funding. It is such a shame and there seems to be no appetite to expend political capital on these issues.
- reilly3000 8y ago
  "The real crux of it is that teachers get put into this triangle of pressures between students, administration, and their parents which almost takes away all agency from the job. I got so tired of getting put into difficult situations that were almost always juggling acts." I think that is also happening today with medical doctors and it is an absolute travesty; the opposite of progress.
  - jeklj 8y ago
    Yes, I can see how doctors’ struggles with students, parents, and school administrations is highly relevant to this topic.
kumarski 8y ago
It is harder and harder to be a blue to gray collar worker in the USA than ever before. 66 jobs have bigger licensure requirements than EMT's. Cosmetologists spend ~400 days training, EMT's - 33. https://www.adamtownsend.me/regulating-licensing-gig-workers/ https://www.adamtownsend.me/regulating-licensing-gig-workers...
- robertAngst 8y ago
  Wrong place to post this. HN loves their government regulations.
alistairSH 8y ago
My anecdote... My mother recently retired after teaching ESOL (English for non-native speakers) at the elementary/primary school level for decades. She was getting burned out and was at retirement age, so no real need to keep working. Now, she happily goes back to volunteer several days/week. She still enjoys teaching; it was the administrative tasks that wore her out.
partycoder 8y ago
tl;dr: Education rant. If you don't like rants don't read this comment. 7 hour a day have no motivation other than preparing kids for 9 to 5 jobs and depriving kids of their valuable time and potential. Software used in education has a lot of room for improvement. A 1 man operation like 3Blue1Brown has done more for education than man-centuries of work in education software. Kids spend years learning inefficient arithmetic algorithms. An 8 year old abacus user wipes the floor with an American teacher in mental math. With respect to civics, kids learn about democracy in Ancient Greece but don't learn about corporations and lobbying, which nowadays has more weight than democracy. A lot of adults today don't remember that Americans were given free land grants in the Mexican states of Alta California and Tejas (now California and Texas respectively, top American states by GDP) and then revolted against the Mexicans to later be annexed by the US. Similar story in Hawaii. The US set a shitty precedent in terms of respecting borders, sovereignty and immigration, creating the crisis that is now being weaponized today by corporations to transfer their blame to laborers that spend all their money in food rather than the true reason for our economic situation: trillions of dollars taken from taxpayers to pay "Quantitative easing" to the financial mafia and more trillions wasted in wars that achieved nothing other than make private defense contractors richer. Kids won't learn about how the US Chinese exclusion act started the opium poppy planting industry in Mexico that later evolved into the humanitarian clusterfuck that is the War on drugs. Kids won't learn about mass incarceration and its legal foundations like the loopholes that are possible by the 13th amendment to the US constitution. Kids won't learn about mass surveillance by corporations and governments and how their privacy is being taken away. Kids won't spend a lot of time thinking about compound interest and how it can make or break their lives, or how population doubles every 63 years and what will happen to us if this keeps happening.
- dorchadas 8y ago
  Got any good recommendations for some of these? I'd love to recommend some books to my students who actually care (and for myself, on some topics I'm unaware of)... Unfortunately many don't care, which is another problem in and of itself.
- reilly3000 8y ago
  Of course they will learn, eventually. Or like me, they will learn at a young age but struggle to apply the concepts in adulthood in a meaningful way, because we're all learning these lessons as we go, but we haven't learned effective antidotes yet to concentrations of power that become destructive.
cs2teach2cs 8y ago
Apologies for the wall of text, as a programmer, turned high school teacher, turned programmer once more. Throwaway account. I was about to graduate with a CS degree from a top 20 program in 2006 when it occurred to me that I really, really loved my time as an undergrad TA running the labs for the intro to computer science course. From a kid up till then, I'd always received the complement that I had a way of explaining things and I figured if I could do this every day for my career I'd never work a day in my life. So I went on to enroll at Illinois State University, the program that produces the most teachers in the state, to get a second bachelor's degree in secondary education and get certified in teaching Math and Computer Science. My time there involved taking a few additional math courses, a course about unions, a handful of pre-student teaching type courses where you go and sit in on real high school classes and observe, and a couple classes where I learned everything there is to know about social justice, which I and my peers were all about and ate up whole-heartedly (and I still believe in). Fast forward to our last semester when we're about to graduate and someone finally asks our well liked professor, "Is now the time when you'll teach us about classroom management?" Which, over the course of three years had been drilled into our heads as the #1 reason that teachers quit early on in their career. Our professors, people that spoke at the conferences we attended, and the teachers we shadowed all told us the same thing over, and over, and over. The answer we got from our professor was "Ahhhh, well, you know, that's something everybody needs to work out on their own." And that was it. We graduated and were left to fend for ourselves. I should also say, there were no courses on lesson plan writing either, at all. Which is strange because it is something a new teacher spends a huuuuuge amount of time on, since tomorrow is going to come, and there’s nothing to present until you make one. And this is on top of grading papers. Also strange is that there is no central repository for celebrated lesson plans. The assumption is that every teacher should come up with their own unique take on things and design their own version of a given lesson from first principles. It came from a place of "Boy, It'd sure stink if we were forced to teach a prescribed lesson plan when I've come up with a better way, one that fits my delivery style better and would truly be better for my students". Which are real concerns. But to not give brand new teachers at least a starting point of 'best practices', which they could then iterate on as they go, and perhaps even contribute their improvements upstream, is absolutely criminal in my book. You graduate and you start with nothing. So that was me, a Computer Science grad at heart with the best of intentions, plunged into teaching nothing but low level math (because I would have to work at least five years before I’d have enough seniority to teach anything else) at an inner city high school where students would get up and start dancing in the middle of class to music played on their phones, throw skittles at me when I’m at the board, and if you send them to the dean then you can’t manage your classroom. And I certainly couldn’t! When it came time for parent teacher conferences, it was a total of 4 student's parents that came. And those were the 4 parents that I didn't need to talk to because their sons and daughters were doing just fine. It was the other 116 parents that I really needed to talk to :-( The people I saw succeed were the children of parents who were also teachers. I assume they grew up with their parents telling them the little nuggets of wisdom that are so crucial, but left out of the formal education process. Such basics as, “It’s easier to relax rules later than to institute more strict rules down the road”. And many others. I really, really hope other schools are better. And that Illinois State University has improved. But based on the experience I had by enrolling in 2006, it’s really seems like it's just a sham, and you had better have some way of gaining actual knowledge of how things work in the classroom from elsewhere if you want to succeed.
drawkbox 8y ago
Some solutions to education and teacher/parent/difficulty: - Teacher rotation or a couple teachers + tutors rotating to help as more of a team effort, could be larger classes to offset costs but it would help take pressure off the sole teacher. Students can be involved in teaching as well, teaching you learn the most from. Finland uses this in their leading education system [1][2]. - Separate teaching from grading, have grading be a teacher/tutor committee where teachers are only part of it, so when parents complain there is more information and it also eliminates errors, is more fair and teachers can't just dislike some kids. - Allow superstar teachers to be virtually/online accessible to students and teachers for teaching certain curriculum with the class and teachers as helpers to go over it. Basically a team based approach to teaching and more access to winning learning strategies and teachers/methods, especially with so much information online available. We also need more project based teaching (individual and team) and curriculum like Finland [1] which will help in many ways, they also do more open plan learning i.e. not in one classroom [2]. A big problem is the legacy/current model we use with one teacher, bunch of students, one room, curriculum that is memory based but not even good memory learning like spaced repetition and very little interesting subjects while students/teachers have to get up too early and are on too much of a schedule while learning/teaching. Finland has it right, and more like the real world, project based, with more time to be free and explore what you are learning in concrete project examples with teams of people/teachers/tutors to help you learn it. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-39889523 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-39889523 [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/av/education-45727843/finland-s-schools-ditch-traditional-classrooms-for-open-plan-learning https://www.bbc.com/news/av/education-45727843/finland-s-sch...
mikekij 8y ago
I loved teaching high school physics, but couldn’t see owning a home and raising a family on $47k a year. Went to grad school and work in the medical device field now. While I’m happy in my current role, I would likely have stayed in education for my entire career if I had been paid $75k a year. I would love to see 5% of the US military budget diverted to increasing teacher salaries by 50%. I think you’d see a rush of qualified people entering the field.
jameslite 8y ago
really what happened. https://liteblueusps.online/category/tracking-number/ https://liteblueusps.online/category/tracking-number/
jstewartmobile 8y ago
Articles like this never come as a surprise to a Gatto fan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto https://archive.org/details/WeaponsOfMassInstruction https://archive.org/details/WeaponsOfMassInstruction https://archive.org/details/DumbingUsDown-TheHiddenAgendaOfCompulsoryEducation https://archive.org/details/DumbingUsDown-TheHiddenAgendaOfC...
blitmap 8y ago
I'm going to state a couple of strong opinions and hope it doesn't backfire on me: 1) Teachers should be paid more. 2) Teachers shouldn't be pressured to work so many hours off the clock (after school). 3) Teachers may continue to make their own lesson plans, but they should always have available lesson plans available to them. 4) School administrations should protect teachers from harassing parents. 5) The number of administrative employees & administrations in general should be reduced or consolidated. You have some school districts with over 100 schools, and others shepherding just a few. The differences between districts can be very big (especially when it comes to lesson plans). 6) Politics is f-cking us hard here. Education should be easy to fund and a non-issue. The current situation is under-serving our children, and will create a feedback loop of underfunded/undervalued education. I personally believe a lot of allocated funds are spent wastefully on the administration and not teachers. 7) I wish we had online examinations that students could take over and over from day #1 of the school year to improve on over the year. There could be material that requires teachers be present to administer, and others that students can do on their own at home (and possibly cheat on). It would have helped me immensely to be familiar with what we were going to learn about "next month". I first encountered a syllabus with a month-to-month plan in community college. 8) Can't forget this: F-ck zero tolerance policies. Schools need a lawyer on-site looking out for the rights of students. 9) You shouldn't need a masters degree to teach 5th grade algebra. It should be easy to hire someone off the street who can pass a background check and exams against the course they might teach. 10) And then easier ways to account for students so it doesn't take 15 minutes to 'start class'. Longer days that start later (8am) & less/no homework.
- cheez 8y ago
  I'm going to state a very strong opinion here and know that it will backfire: families should be educating their kids themselves, and society should make this financially possible (let's start off with eliminating the dual-income family). Teachers, as they are currently qualified, should be adjuncts to the family school.
  - andrei_says_ 8y ago
    I really like this concept, possibly combined with unschooling. Expert tutors, on demand, to provide help where needed.
arrty88 8y ago
They are also retiring at an alarming rate due to baby boomers. Wonder what % of teachers are baby boomers vs millennials / gen x / gen y
ilitirit 8y ago
As a "previously disadvantaged" South African whose mother was quite "high" in the education hierarchy - she set the final year national exams for high-school students one year in one subject and moderated examiners' marks for many years before and after that - I find this quite interesting. Well, interesting is perhaps not the right word. Disgusting. Not at America, but toward my country's own education system. My mother never cared about the money. In fact, she was offered huge salaries from so-called private schools (the wording/nomenclature is a story for another time). She never took it. Her main goal was always education for students who she felt were disenfranchised. Growing up, I'd often see her very sad about a bright student who got killed because of their surroundings or something else regarding their upbringing. But she always remained determined! It breaks my heart these days to see that she is unhappy not because she is not able help the same students from the same backgrounds, but because she simply REFUSES to. She does not believe my country's education system is equipped to give them what they need. So, instead of taking a big salary from government (she is officially retired, btw) to teach "previously disadvantaged" students in government-endorsed programmes, she does it gratis when the students approach her personally. I just realised why I never mentioned why she doesn't sign up for "government-sponsored" initiatives in terms of education. She - as do I - simply believes the standard they expect is not of the quality that should be given to the youth. So she will rather offer her standard "for free". I hope I don't have to explain why her method is not compatible with the paid-for alternative...
- erikpukinskis 8y ago
  You are presenting a false choice. Your mother had to choose between getting paid a fair wage and teaching the kids who need it most. In a healthy community she should get both: a fair wage for teaching kids who need her.
mista_duval 8y ago
I can personally relate to this story. My wife has been working in education for the past 6 years. She frequently complains about the rediculous workload, byzantine regulations and red tape and the rediculosly low pay she gets to deal with it all. But she’s not alone. I frequently hang out with her and her co-workers and they all seem to be feeling the same way. Many are wondering if all their efforts are making a diffrence at all. Some of them have left and found jobs in the corporate world where they can work a steady 9 to 5 while receiving better benifits and compensation. Many of them found jobs in corporate training where they can put their education expertise to good use. I’m not sure what it’s going to take but something has to be done to stop this trend. The education brain drain is going to have serious reprocusions in a few short years. What’s going to happen when there just isn’t anyone willing to take on the workload? Sure, raising pay would help but that just seems to be the tip of the iceberg. Educator need more resources to do the job right and it seems they’re just not getting them right now.
drewmol 8y ago
Suggestion to rename 'Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate since 2001' as that's when this record was started.
pojzon 8y ago
Teaching is hard, unfortunetely we dont value good teachers as much as we should. Thus they quit. My mom is a teacher and she loved her work, her students also loved her. But the atmosphere in schools is now so bad, not many can take it.
sys_64738 8y ago
Grade inflation and extra credit are the two big items which let American schools down. A class should have a bell shaped curve after the final exam and extra credit should never be given as it's form of cheating the system.
- thatfrenchguy 8y ago
  Bell curves are a lie though. What if you taught well and everyone understood your lesson and they fared well on the test ? The French way of grading without a curve is much better in that aspect.
  - sys_64738 8y ago
    Generally bell curves are applications of the material together that make it hard to attain higher grades. Otherwise the exam is too easy.
colechristensen 8y ago
Good. Unemployment is at a local minimum for the last couple of decades. Schools have to exist and teachers leaving raises demand for teachers so schools will actually have to compete, maybe a mass exodus will get the shitty school situation in the US fixed a little bit. The most powerful form of protest is to leave for something better.
libraryatnight 8y ago
One of my friends was a teacher. He enjoyed it, but the money was so bad it was frequently a point of stress for his family. He asked about raises, they said no - but that they could pay more to teachers that have a masters. So he went back to school and got one (a difficult choice since that also costs money, but it seemed worth it). After he received it, there was a wage freeze. Long story short, he now works in corporate training. We treat teachers badly.
revskill 8y ago
The best teacher i've learnt with is an engineer, though i've studied through countless teachers. Which made me ask myself, you couldn't just graduate a Pedagogy School to teach other effectively.
charliebrownau 8y ago
Anyone got a link to the """" article """ without a paywall ?
RikNieu 8y ago
I have three friends who were teachers for a decade who changed careers within the last 5 years. One moved into banking, another became a tatoo artist, and the last teaches dancing privately. They all quit because of low pay and long hours, litigious threats from parents, and being faced with constant accusations of being abusive/racist/whatever-other-random-excuse students could come up with to deny their own failures and behaviour. The schools always side with the accusers by default. This is in South Africa, not the USA, so it seems to be a world-wide phenomena - at least maybe in the English speaking world.
- barry-cotter 8y ago
  Teaching has always had quite a high outflow. More than half of people with qualified teacher status in England and Wales don’t teach. Most people can’t do it. Of those who can plenty decide they can’t do it any more. Long holidays and a fantastic pension aren’t worth a job you hate. I doubt South Africa is worse than the U.K. The Guardian’s Secret Teacher is awful. https://www.theguardian.com/profile/the-secret-teacher https://www.theguardian.com/profile/the-secret-teacher

396 points by dpflan 8y ago

Both parents were teachers and spoke strongly against the profession when they retired 15 years ago. My exit/retirement strategy from this IT circus was always teaching but I guess I could revisit that for midnight shift as a DC tech somewhere.

r00fus 8y ago

I sense the pressure of privatized education is making itself felt here through legislation (NCLB, ESSA bills) and money injected into campaigns.

nsriv 8y ago

https://outline.com/ZuA8TG https://outline.com/ZuA8TG

sjroot 8y ago
Last time I saw a paywalled article, someone commented and mentioned the idea of (1) prohibiting those sites or (2) automatically redirecting to an outlined version.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- shawn 8y ago
  Paywalled links with workarounds are allowed, because otherwise HN would miss out on good articles. (We've been thinking of mirroring that same guideline over at https://www.laarc.io/ https://www.laarc.io/)
- chii 8y ago
  Personally, I rather just not read paywalled articles, or I would have paid if the publication is high quality enough. Using a workaround to circumvent the paywall seems too shady, because if the contents are worth reading, they should be worth paying the asking price.
  - derefr 8y ago
    > if the contents are worth reading, they should be worth paying the asking price How about if the facts the article communicates are worth knowing, but their treatment in the article isn't worth the (digital) paper it was printed on? I can see your argument applying to editorials, but not-so-much to raw journalism.
    - skj 8y ago
      Presumably an important part of journalism is research.
      - derefr 8y ago
        You realize that other sources are free to take the facts from any article they read, and write those same facts (without doing any expensive, confirmatory investigation of their own) into a new piece, without paying any sort of a license for rebroadcast of those facts, or for creating a derivative work from those facts, right? You realize that 99% of the journalism you read, watch, or listen to every day is this kind of secondary "remixing" that deprives the original journalist-investigator of "their" reward for doing said research, right? You realize society is perfectly okay with that, for the same reason we're okay with e.g. used book stores depriving the original author of a sale, right? So then—having realized those things—what's the ethical argument in favor of avoiding a secondary source that happened to just plagiarize its text from the primary source, in favor of one that plagiarized its research but wrote its own paraphrase of the text? What does that get you, ethically? (Note that I'm not trying to equivocate these things in service of making plagiarism seem less bad. The conclusion I hope you to reach here is that society is seemingly perfectly okay with certain types of plagiarism, and that that's weird and shocking and terrible and people should really be more angry about it than they are.)
        skj 8y ago
        I've never heard the repackaging of facts referred to as "plagiarism". That said, the only difference between plagiarism and what you discuss is that plagiarism is, generally, detectable and stealing facts is not. If it were, I'm sure there would be different rules and provisions in effect.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- glenneroo 8y ago
  Why not just tag the titles with [Paywall] so users can avoid them? Granted, they tend to be from the same sites, but it would be one less thing to remember.
  - sjroot 8y ago
    I think this is the way to go. I should have clarified that in my OP.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
JacobJans 8y ago
Copyright infringement.
JumpCrisscross 8y ago
This attitude towards customer-funded journalism promotes bad content and ad-driven models. It’s a valid choice. But understand the trade-offs for convenience and tracking you’re promoting.
- abc-xyz 8y ago
  How is he promoting tracking? The outline link has 3 cookies (0 third-party) and make 5 requests (the bad ones being Google Analytics and Doubleclick). Whereas the original article has 68 cookies (44 third party) and make 261 requests (which violates users privacy to a much greater extent).
  - JumpCrisscross 8y ago
    Outline doesn’t pay the journalist. If partial paywalls fail, full paywalls à la the FT or ad-driven models must succeed. I’m okay with Archive.org links. But a private company replicating somebody else’s work without compensation nudges the world towards rich people consuming via subscription and the rest of us through tracking and ads.
    - abc-xyz 8y ago
      The articles will always be available through websites like outline, so you'd be much better off encouraging these publishers to stop violating users privacy, stop making horrible sites that autoplay videos, automatically load new pages if scroll too far, etc. Do that and then people will be less inclined to share outline links/post content in comments, and more inclined to turn off ad blocking if doing so won't result in all sorts of nasty tracking.

sethammons 8y ago

I left teaching over 8 years ago. Elevated myself from programming for fun and sometimes pay to being a full time software developer. Best career move ever.

lr4444lr 8y ago
Same here. I confirm your experience. Teaching takes a certain temperament though, and I admit I just don't have it.
ikeyany 8y ago
Started out studying to become a secondary math teacher. Saw the writing on the wall and switched my major to engineering. One of the wisest decisions I've made in my life.

ancorevard 8y ago

“It’s a more boring place now, and they see their friends finding exciting opportunities,” Ms. Pollak said. So in other words, this is a healthy thing. If people are bored being teachers and they quit, that should be celebrated.

yourbandsucks 8y ago
No way. Teaching is really, really important for society. And we've made it low-status, because we are morons. If it were higher-status, you'd see fewer people being 'bored' and seeing the 'excitement' elsewhere. The fact that we've screwed this up should not be celebrated.
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  Pay more and treat teachers better. Market forces at work.
  - potbelly83 8y ago
    Depends where. In Westchester/Nassau counties (bordering NYC) teachers get a pretty sweet deal.
    - throwawaymath 8y ago
      It is extraordinarily difficult to move from a relatively low paying teaching job (such as in the NYC DOE) to a high paying job in Westchester. There is far, far more labor supply than there is demand. If you don't get in when you're young (and therefore cheap), it's most likely not going to happen. When I was growing up my father worked in an "elite" Westchester private school and my mother worked in the NYC DOE. The job fulfillment, administrative support and overall ease of working was like night and day between them.
  - robertAngst 8y ago
    My worst teacher bragged about how great of a teacher she was, and that she rightfully deserved 120k/yr. She had a PhD, Masters, etc... She would teach 2/5 days a week, and tell us to read the text book the other 3/5 days. And her answer to anything libertarian was- That's fine, you can just build your own road, and put out your own fire. Looking back on it, and believing her overly simplistic answers, I think a youtuber could have done a better job.

gammateam 8y ago

Thats because teaching was the fallback plan and all the students they work with daily already realize it. Every teacher that brags about their prior dream in their specialized trade is immediately shot down by middle schoolers asking "so why are you a teacher" "Well Jimbo, as you suspect, it's because something went horribly wrong and I've rationalized my acceptance of this low wage life teaching this nation's future"

ineedasername 8y ago
Many thousands of students entering directly into teacher ed programs when they get to college refute your unsuported (or only anecdotally supported) claims.
sethammons 8y ago
There are teachers who do it because they can't do anything else, and there are teachers who do it as a labor of love. As a student, the vast majority of my teachers struck me as the latter. When I was teaching, it felt kinda half and half in the inner city school I was at. Bless anyone who can do that gig in inner-city San Bernardino CA. As a teacher, I resigned myself to never owning a home and never paying off my student loans, meanwhile dealing with an overwhelming amount of disinterested students, and more than my fair share of problem students. As a software developer, I now hope to pay off my house in the next two to three years.
jacobolus 8y ago
A few of my teachers were wealthy enough from past jobs not to need to work for the rest of their lives, but then switched to teaching as a second career because they loved engaging with the next generation. Most others were career teachers who had known they wanted to teach since they themselves were young and took it up as a profession from the start despite having the talent and work ethic for some much higher paying alternative career. A few had the ambition of working as teachers for a decade and then moving up into school administration. A few of my teachers weren’t especially effective, but that’s true of workers in every other field and every other institution. I don’t think I had any teachers (in an above average public school system in a diverse, generally comfortable, but not outrageously wealthy suburb) who had washed out of other careers and turned to teaching as a fallback. Or if there were some like that, it wasn’t apparent to students. Maybe some of the high school sports coaches / PE teachers were like that.

smaili 8y ago

> The departures come alongside protests this year in six states where teachers in some cases shut down schools over tight budgets, small raises and poor conditions. Even as a child myself growing up in the US education system, this was a common topic where even the students knew teachers were underpaid and education in general had a lot less money in it -- but at the same time I don't ever recall schools shutting down because of it. I can't imagine what it must feel like to be a student now and being told school is closed because my teachers are protesting. Not really sure why I'm getting downvoted so much, just wanted to express empathy.

perfmode 8y ago
If I was a student right now, I’d be protesting with them.
jacobolus 8y ago
> I can't imagine what it must feel like to be a student now and being told school is closed because my teachers are protesting. Students should feel proud that their teachers care enough to stick around and fix things instead of quitting and finding another job. I know several people who have left the teaching profession in the face of poor pay and lack of autonomy and respect, or moved out of states where teacher pay is poor.

jseliger 8y ago

I believe we see this article every time we have a strong economy. When the economy is strong, teaching is unappealing. When the economy is weak, many people cannot find other gigs and so flood into the relative security of teaching. Teaching may also be less pleasant in the social media and smartphone age, for reasons enumerated in The Coddling of the American Mind (a highly recommended book). There may also be a gender dynamic at work; today, it would be hard for me to recommend that guys go into teaching: https://jakeseliger.com/2014/09/08/why-dont-more-men-go-into-teaching-fear-of-the-accusation https://jakeseliger.com/2014/09/08/why-dont-more-men-go-into....

yourbandsucks 8y ago
A friend of mine, male teacher, randomly met Obama back in like 2006 at some function. In their 5 second conversation, Obama was ecstatic that he was a teacher, saying specifically that 'we need more male teachers'.
tomjakubowski 8y ago
Do you have any evidence other than a Reddit thread of anecdotes (about students "seducing" their teachers - ugh) that male teachers routinely have their lives ruined by false accusations of molestation? Here's some evidence on the "other side" of the issue: Chicago public schools routinely broke the law by failing to report credible accusations of molestation of students by teachers and staff. https://graphics.chicagotribune.com/chicago-public-schools-sexual-abuse/index.html https://graphics.chicagotribune.com/chicago-public-schools-s...
- klipt 8y ago
  I think most male teachers in the US will tell you that they have to be careful never to be alone in a room with a student, and careful never to hug a crying student. Meanwhile female teachers either don't have to worry about this much, or will even be applauded for comforting a crying student by hugging them.
  - tomjakubowski 8y ago

shados 8y ago

Articles like these, while only loosely related, always make me think that the software engineering bubble has to pop. You have people with ton of education busting their behind dealing with little brats all day to try to make sure they have a future... During that time, some bro who read a couple of books and hammered on his keyboard, and MAYBE did a 3 months bootcamp gets bummed if he can't pull in 100k in one of the coasts with a flex schedule and free lunches/coffee/smoothies/whatever. God forbid they get paged in the middle of the night, they'll scream bloody murder. Same contrasts with trade workers: hiring qualified carpenters/plumbers/painters/whatever is becoming incredibly difficult. Obviously I'm only considering the extremes here, but those extremes are...very common. Society can't go very far if the ONLY thing people do is write keywords in a text editor all day. We need to properly value other professions too.

capdeck 8y ago
This is a very valid point. While I don't have all the answers, but it seems like if a person is pulling an honest 40 hour week they should afford at the very least a real minimum standard of living, regardless of what that person does. I know this sounds hairy and anti-capitalist and "who is going to pay for this", etc. But this is what real value is in my opinion.
- pault 8y ago
  What if I spend 40 hours a week making paper hats? Should I be entitled to a living wage?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - krapp 8y ago
    Yes. If you choose to dedicate the bulk of your waking life to creating wealth for your employer, you should be compensated, at a minimum, well enough to feed, clothe and house yourself. or there should be something like UBI in place to allow employers to decouple the cost of keeping their employees alive from the cost of doing business.

wallflower 8y ago

It is not mentioned in this particular article and my teacher friends say that dealing with parents is a constant pain. Of course, not all parents are a pain. Only a few. Teachers are not in the profession to listen to why little high school age Johnny did not get an A on his paper, not the least because you, the parent, helped him write that paper.

allcentury 8y ago
I just commented the same thing - parents are a major problem right now.
- wallflower 8y ago
  Hope your mother can hang in there until her well-deserved retirement, she is almost there!
Gibbon1 8y ago
My teacher friends mention parents are a pain because the administration doesn't have teachers backs.
labster 8y ago
Teachers should stop assigning tasks that necessitate parent participation, then. I was assigned to write a novella in sixth grade, for crying out loud. I like creative writing now, but I didn't back then, and the assignment sure didn't help.
- wallflower 8y ago
  It wasn't clear in the original comment but the paper that the high school student did was not supposed to be written by the parent or receive assistance from the parent in any form. The student was in high school!
  - labster 8y ago
    I've never had assignments that were supposed to have parental assistance after preschool, yet many of them needed it to get a non-failing grade. Perhaps 1% of middle school kids can do a science fair project on their own with all the research tracking and results board and all. But still if you failed that, you failed the class. Utterly ridiculous. Kids that age should be exploring and apprenticing, not coming up with original research. Not implying there aren't exceptional students, but they are exceptions. And for everyone else, we train them to be good factory workers for the disappearing industries of America. The one thing we all agree on is that the system is broken.

skilled 8y ago

I was a right prick at school, can't imagine being a teacher and having to do deal with 30 or more of others like me.

allcentury 8y ago

There's much more to this story. My mother, a high school calculus teacher for the last 22 years is so ready to retire. I didn't think my mom would ever retire, she spends countless hours coming up with unique lesson plans for the kids - they usually involve games, real world use cases and many ah-ha moments. She lives for those moments when a kid lights up when they understand the value of what their learning. Now though, over the last 8 years, she told me that parents have ruined the job she loves. Especially now that she has to post everyone's grades online, instantly emails roll in when a student didn't perform as well as the parent expected. She told me of an email she received that said "X is trying to get into Princeton - an A- isn't going to get her in. What extra credit can she do to make this an A?". It's endless and my mom, for fear of a lawsuit, doesn't know what to do. The teachers union in Massachusetts made all the teachers sign liability waivers and arbitration waivers if a lawsuit happens. My mom is scared stiff and either bends over, or doesn't and let's the vice principal or principal take the heat, ultimately it leading to an extra credit assignment. My mom's job sounds miserable and if you were to ask me 15 years ago, what I might do in my retirement - I would have said taught CS at a disadvantaged high school. Now though, I'm seconding guessing that retirement plan.

Balgair 8y ago
My SO quit HS STEM teaching recently, so I have at least some idea of the modern teaching environment. The issue, for my SO, was pay and benefits vs. hassle. My SO has a PhD and decided to give back to the community at an 'impoverished' school. Ho boy, was that a mistake. The first school was a terrible experience and my SO went gray from the place. Though there are a few parents that are as described in the parent comment, the vast majority of parents were all but useless. The HS my SO taught at, and I am not making this up, has a mandatory grading format for every single test/HW given: multiple choice only, only 4 choices are allowed. Combining that with the faux-restorative-justice [0] grading scale, where a 25% score in a class was considered 'passing', and even a goldfish could pass the classes. Yet still, the graduation rate was ~30%, only because of the Air Force Base nearby. Just trying to get the kids to even take the test was impossible, let alone the truancy. The teacher drop-out rate by December was ~50%. Neighboring schools had teacher drop-out rates near 90%. Yes, teacher drop-out rates. Thing is, poverty and racism and violence suck really bad. The many of the parents were desperately poor, ~80% of the children were on free and reduced lunch, and many of those would not eat all weekend long, let alone the apple vs Cheetos 'food desert' debate. Then the physical abuse of the children comes in, and 'home' is not a safe place at all. Then the sexual abuse kicks in, and home is REALLY not a safe place for a some of the teen girls my SO taught. Then you have the flagrant use of phones, the sexting, the porn use, the gore, etc. in the middle of 40+ child classrooms. It was/is a mad-house. It's no wonder all the more well off folks refuse to send their kids to public schools. God knows we would/will. And my SO, with a PhD and therefore 'top' level seniority in the union pay-scale, made ~40k in a large, expensive US city with median houses at ~0.5 million. The benefits were, otherwise, ok-ish. No dental, no vision. The pension (yes, they still have one!) has been gutted since 2008 and is massively underfunded, so a total-write off. Now my SO works in the field that the PhD was/is in and pulls ~80k with amazing benefits/401k. Teaching, like my SO had to do, was in no way worth any of it. My SO did time in 'service' to the local community and now considers the dues paid. [0] Actually, restorative justice models are pretty brilliant, if implemented properly. I think they should be the norm.

neom 8y ago

One of my favourite hypotheticals to play out is what would be like if we somehow paid public school teachers and emergency services/law enforcement professionals an extreme of today, a million usd a year, and increased the difficulty to attain this work. I usually end up in a pretty good place but I'd be curious what others think/why this couldn't work?

throwawaymath 8y ago
Where do you usually end up with that hypothesis? Walk us through it and we might be able to explain why it couldn't work.
lr4444lr 8y ago
This was tried in NYC by The Equity Project - a charter school (125K base salary, very demanding qualifications). I'm sure that it works well in niche markets and test scores aren't everything, but results (test scores) were not that stellar as you might imagine when compared with similar Charter schools to suggest it could scale.
rayiner 8y ago
> I usually end up in a pretty good place but I'd be curious why this could not work? It would be fantastically expensive. Chicago has 21,000 teachers. Paying them $1 million per year would cost $21 billion, dwarfing the city's current $3.8 billion budget. Even paying them $100,000 per year on average would cost half the city's budget. And there is little reason to believe it would yield better results. American teachers are well paid compared to other OECD countries where students do better: https://www.businessinsider.com/teacher-salaries-by-country-2017-5#elementary-school-teachers-best-and-worst-1 https://www.businessinsider.com/teacher-salaries-by-country-....
- tptacek 8y ago
  If the fully loaded headcount cost of a CPS teacher isn't north of $100,000 I'll be pretty surprised. CPS teachers are well-compensated. Their median salary is $71,000, and they get good health insurance and a defined-benefit pension plan. I live in Oak Park, just on the outskirts of Chicago, and the median teacher cash comp at my kids' high school is something like $120,000.

stupidbird 8y ago

You mean no one's lining up to get low pay and frequent parental abuse? You don't say.

lr4444lr 8y ago

Lots of comments to the tune of "pay teachers more." Teachers in large urban areas with strong unions tend to be paid quite well, especially factoring in benefits, and it doesn't necessarily correlate that well with various metrics of "success" in education (standardized test scores, on-time graduation rate, fewer violent incidents) once you look into individual cases and see through the administrative means by which those numbers can be rigged. Of course, there are markets where teachers make very little, with many needing to take second jobs, and I don't mean higher salary wouldn't help in those districts. I think the comments that speak to the respect for the profession, unreasonable accountability, and increasingly risky liability are more on the mark about why people jump ship when their career prospects improve in a strong economy.

sethammons 8y ago
In the area I taught, median pay was about $60k/yr. After 20 years and getting more advanced degrees, you could get to $80k/yr. Most of the teachers I worked with worked more hours per year than just about any software engineer I know. Only very lazy or very tenured teachers were getting the fabled summer vacation or winter break. I have more income, more vacation, and better hours as a developer than I ever did as a teacher
- dorchadas 8y ago
  Yeah, the pay is an issue. Sure, I make great money for a single young male living in an low COL area, but there's no room to scale. My mom retired from teaching in the same district I'm currently in with 31 years experience. She was only making 15k more than I started at. There's no chance to increase pay apart from going administration (and even then it's not a huge increase) or getting more degrees (and there's a limit to those).
- sopooneo 8y ago
  Similar situation. After leaving teaching for development I spent the first two years in something like a state of grace. I loved teaching, but my gosh, the stress levels weren't even in the same universe.
- 8y ago

dominotw 8y ago

parents have wayyy to much power over you. No thanks.

tranced 8y ago

Haha, I just finished quitting my job teaching high school computer science today. I went from private tutoring CS to teaching in an afterschool program to this because I really enjoyed helping students break through conceptual blocks and mental ones. The work is emotionally exhausting but satisfying. Only recently have I wondered whether or not this was the right thing to do instead of going to industry(maybe it's because a lot of my interviewers have been asking me that exact question) but it seems blatant now that my friends are senior engineers who have almost infinite job opportunities. The real crux of it is that teachers get put into this triangle of pressures between students, administration, and their parents which almost takes away all agency from the job. I got so tired of getting put into difficult situations that were almost always juggling acts. At the end of the day, if you want to fix anything as a teacher it's almost like going against an institution. You risk your pension, your 401k, or maybe just your potential future in industry for what? I wasn't in it for the money and I would imagine most teachers aren't either... but what happens when your hands are too tied to actually teach? sigh maybe I could've done everyone justice if I had some tech money to fall back on.

snarf21 8y ago
Even worse is the whole 'no child left behind' structure where schools lose funding if they don't meet certain numbers. The administrators live in fear so the kids spend half the semester taking practice tests so the school district doesn't lose funding. It is such a shame and there seems to be no appetite to expend political capital on these issues.
reilly3000 8y ago
"The real crux of it is that teachers get put into this triangle of pressures between students, administration, and their parents which almost takes away all agency from the job. I got so tired of getting put into difficult situations that were almost always juggling acts." I think that is also happening today with medical doctors and it is an absolute travesty; the opposite of progress.
- jeklj 8y ago
  Yes, I can see how doctors’ struggles with students, parents, and school administrations is highly relevant to this topic.

kumarski 8y ago

It is harder and harder to be a blue to gray collar worker in the USA than ever before. 66 jobs have bigger licensure requirements than EMT's. Cosmetologists spend ~400 days training, EMT's - 33. https://www.adamtownsend.me/regulating-licensing-gig-workers/ https://www.adamtownsend.me/regulating-licensing-gig-workers...

robertAngst 8y ago
Wrong place to post this. HN loves their government regulations.

alistairSH 8y ago

My anecdote... My mother recently retired after teaching ESOL (English for non-native speakers) at the elementary/primary school level for decades. She was getting burned out and was at retirement age, so no real need to keep working. Now, she happily goes back to volunteer several days/week. She still enjoys teaching; it was the administrative tasks that wore her out.

partycoder 8y ago

tl;dr: Education rant. If you don't like rants don't read this comment. 7 hour a day have no motivation other than preparing kids for 9 to 5 jobs and depriving kids of their valuable time and potential. Software used in education has a lot of room for improvement. A 1 man operation like 3Blue1Brown has done more for education than man-centuries of work in education software. Kids spend years learning inefficient arithmetic algorithms. An 8 year old abacus user wipes the floor with an American teacher in mental math. With respect to civics, kids learn about democracy in Ancient Greece but don't learn about corporations and lobbying, which nowadays has more weight than democracy. A lot of adults today don't remember that Americans were given free land grants in the Mexican states of Alta California and Tejas (now California and Texas respectively, top American states by GDP) and then revolted against the Mexicans to later be annexed by the US. Similar story in Hawaii. The US set a shitty precedent in terms of respecting borders, sovereignty and immigration, creating the crisis that is now being weaponized today by corporations to transfer their blame to laborers that spend all their money in food rather than the true reason for our economic situation: trillions of dollars taken from taxpayers to pay "Quantitative easing" to the financial mafia and more trillions wasted in wars that achieved nothing other than make private defense contractors richer. Kids won't learn about how the US Chinese exclusion act started the opium poppy planting industry in Mexico that later evolved into the humanitarian clusterfuck that is the War on drugs. Kids won't learn about mass incarceration and its legal foundations like the loopholes that are possible by the 13th amendment to the US constitution. Kids won't learn about mass surveillance by corporations and governments and how their privacy is being taken away. Kids won't spend a lot of time thinking about compound interest and how it can make or break their lives, or how population doubles every 63 years and what will happen to us if this keeps happening.

dorchadas 8y ago
Got any good recommendations for some of these? I'd love to recommend some books to my students who actually care (and for myself, on some topics I'm unaware of)... Unfortunately many don't care, which is another problem in and of itself.
reilly3000 8y ago
Of course they will learn, eventually. Or like me, they will learn at a young age but struggle to apply the concepts in adulthood in a meaningful way, because we're all learning these lessons as we go, but we haven't learned effective antidotes yet to concentrations of power that become destructive.

cs2teach2cs 8y ago

Apologies for the wall of text, as a programmer, turned high school teacher, turned programmer once more. Throwaway account. I was about to graduate with a CS degree from a top 20 program in 2006 when it occurred to me that I really, really loved my time as an undergrad TA running the labs for the intro to computer science course. From a kid up till then, I'd always received the complement that I had a way of explaining things and I figured if I could do this every day for my career I'd never work a day in my life. So I went on to enroll at Illinois State University, the program that produces the most teachers in the state, to get a second bachelor's degree in secondary education and get certified in teaching Math and Computer Science. My time there involved taking a few additional math courses, a course about unions, a handful of pre-student teaching type courses where you go and sit in on real high school classes and observe, and a couple classes where I learned everything there is to know about social justice, which I and my peers were all about and ate up whole-heartedly (and I still believe in). Fast forward to our last semester when we're about to graduate and someone finally asks our well liked professor, "Is now the time when you'll teach us about classroom management?" Which, over the course of three years had been drilled into our heads as the #1 reason that teachers quit early on in their career. Our professors, people that spoke at the conferences we attended, and the teachers we shadowed all told us the same thing over, and over, and over. The answer we got from our professor was "Ahhhh, well, you know, that's something everybody needs to work out on their own." And that was it. We graduated and were left to fend for ourselves. I should also say, there were no courses on lesson plan writing either, at all. Which is strange because it is something a new teacher spends a huuuuuge amount of time on, since tomorrow is going to come, and there’s nothing to present until you make one. And this is on top of grading papers. Also strange is that there is no central repository for celebrated lesson plans. The assumption is that every teacher should come up with their own unique take on things and design their own version of a given lesson from first principles. It came from a place of "Boy, It'd sure stink if we were forced to teach a prescribed lesson plan when I've come up with a better way, one that fits my delivery style better and would truly be better for my students". Which are real concerns. But to not give brand new teachers at least a starting point of 'best practices', which they could then iterate on as they go, and perhaps even contribute their improvements upstream, is absolutely criminal in my book. You graduate and you start with nothing. So that was me, a Computer Science grad at heart with the best of intentions, plunged into teaching nothing but low level math (because I would have to work at least five years before I’d have enough seniority to teach anything else) at an inner city high school where students would get up and start dancing in the middle of class to music played on their phones, throw skittles at me when I’m at the board, and if you send them to the dean then you can’t manage your classroom. And I certainly couldn’t! When it came time for parent teacher conferences, it was a total of 4 student's parents that came. And those were the 4 parents that I didn't need to talk to because their sons and daughters were doing just fine. It was the other 116 parents that I really needed to talk to :-( The people I saw succeed were the children of parents who were also teachers. I assume they grew up with their parents telling them the little nuggets of wisdom that are so crucial, but left out of the formal education process. Such basics as, “It’s easier to relax rules later than to institute more strict rules down the road”. And many others. I really, really hope other schools are better. And that Illinois State University has improved. But based on the experience I had by enrolling in 2006, it’s really seems like it's just a sham, and you had better have some way of gaining actual knowledge of how things work in the classroom from elsewhere if you want to succeed.

drawkbox 8y ago

Some solutions to education and teacher/parent/difficulty: - Teacher rotation or a couple teachers + tutors rotating to help as more of a team effort, could be larger classes to offset costs but it would help take pressure off the sole teacher. Students can be involved in teaching as well, teaching you learn the most from. Finland uses this in their leading education system [1][2]. - Separate teaching from grading, have grading be a teacher/tutor committee where teachers are only part of it, so when parents complain there is more information and it also eliminates errors, is more fair and teachers can't just dislike some kids. - Allow superstar teachers to be virtually/online accessible to students and teachers for teaching certain curriculum with the class and teachers as helpers to go over it. Basically a team based approach to teaching and more access to winning learning strategies and teachers/methods, especially with so much information online available. We also need more project based teaching (individual and team) and curriculum like Finland [1] which will help in many ways, they also do more open plan learning i.e. not in one classroom [2]. A big problem is the legacy/current model we use with one teacher, bunch of students, one room, curriculum that is memory based but not even good memory learning like spaced repetition and very little interesting subjects while students/teachers have to get up too early and are on too much of a schedule while learning/teaching. Finland has it right, and more like the real world, project based, with more time to be free and explore what you are learning in concrete project examples with teams of people/teachers/tutors to help you learn it. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-39889523 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-39889523 [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/av/education-45727843/finland-s-schools-ditch-traditional-classrooms-for-open-plan-learning https://www.bbc.com/news/av/education-45727843/finland-s-sch...

mikekij 8y ago

I loved teaching high school physics, but couldn’t see owning a home and raising a family on $47k a year. Went to grad school and work in the medical device field now. While I’m happy in my current role, I would likely have stayed in education for my entire career if I had been paid $75k a year. I would love to see 5% of the US military budget diverted to increasing teacher salaries by 50%. I think you’d see a rush of qualified people entering the field.

jameslite 8y ago

really what happened. https://liteblueusps.online/category/tracking-number/ https://liteblueusps.online/category/tracking-number/

jstewartmobile 8y ago

Articles like this never come as a surprise to a Gatto fan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto https://archive.org/details/WeaponsOfMassInstruction https://archive.org/details/WeaponsOfMassInstruction https://archive.org/details/DumbingUsDown-TheHiddenAgendaOfCompulsoryEducation https://archive.org/details/DumbingUsDown-TheHiddenAgendaOfC...

blitmap 8y ago

I'm going to state a couple of strong opinions and hope it doesn't backfire on me: 1) Teachers should be paid more. 2) Teachers shouldn't be pressured to work so many hours off the clock (after school). 3) Teachers may continue to make their own lesson plans, but they should always have available lesson plans available to them. 4) School administrations should protect teachers from harassing parents. 5) The number of administrative employees & administrations in general should be reduced or consolidated. You have some school districts with over 100 schools, and others shepherding just a few. The differences between districts can be very big (especially when it comes to lesson plans). 6) Politics is f-cking us hard here. Education should be easy to fund and a non-issue. The current situation is under-serving our children, and will create a feedback loop of underfunded/undervalued education. I personally believe a lot of allocated funds are spent wastefully on the administration and not teachers. 7) I wish we had online examinations that students could take over and over from day #1 of the school year to improve on over the year. There could be material that requires teachers be present to administer, and others that students can do on their own at home (and possibly cheat on). It would have helped me immensely to be familiar with what we were going to learn about "next month". I first encountered a syllabus with a month-to-month plan in community college. 8) Can't forget this: F-ck zero tolerance policies. Schools need a lawyer on-site looking out for the rights of students. 9) You shouldn't need a masters degree to teach 5th grade algebra. It should be easy to hire someone off the street who can pass a background check and exams against the course they might teach. 10) And then easier ways to account for students so it doesn't take 15 minutes to 'start class'. Longer days that start later (8am) & less/no homework.

cheez 8y ago
I'm going to state a very strong opinion here and know that it will backfire: families should be educating their kids themselves, and society should make this financially possible (let's start off with eliminating the dual-income family). Teachers, as they are currently qualified, should be adjuncts to the family school.
- andrei_says_ 8y ago
  I really like this concept, possibly combined with unschooling. Expert tutors, on demand, to provide help where needed.

arrty88 8y ago

They are also retiring at an alarming rate due to baby boomers. Wonder what % of teachers are baby boomers vs millennials / gen x / gen y

ilitirit 8y ago

As a "previously disadvantaged" South African whose mother was quite "high" in the education hierarchy - she set the final year national exams for high-school students one year in one subject and moderated examiners' marks for many years before and after that - I find this quite interesting. Well, interesting is perhaps not the right word. Disgusting. Not at America, but toward my country's own education system. My mother never cared about the money. In fact, she was offered huge salaries from so-called private schools (the wording/nomenclature is a story for another time). She never took it. Her main goal was always education for students who she felt were disenfranchised. Growing up, I'd often see her very sad about a bright student who got killed because of their surroundings or something else regarding their upbringing. But she always remained determined! It breaks my heart these days to see that she is unhappy not because she is not able help the same students from the same backgrounds, but because she simply REFUSES to. She does not believe my country's education system is equipped to give them what they need. So, instead of taking a big salary from government (she is officially retired, btw) to teach "previously disadvantaged" students in government-endorsed programmes, she does it gratis when the students approach her personally. I just realised why I never mentioned why she doesn't sign up for "government-sponsored" initiatives in terms of education. She - as do I - simply believes the standard they expect is not of the quality that should be given to the youth. So she will rather offer her standard "for free". I hope I don't have to explain why her method is not compatible with the paid-for alternative...

erikpukinskis 8y ago
You are presenting a false choice. Your mother had to choose between getting paid a fair wage and teaching the kids who need it most. In a healthy community she should get both: a fair wage for teaching kids who need her.

mista_duval 8y ago

I can personally relate to this story. My wife has been working in education for the past 6 years. She frequently complains about the rediculous workload, byzantine regulations and red tape and the rediculosly low pay she gets to deal with it all. But she’s not alone. I frequently hang out with her and her co-workers and they all seem to be feeling the same way. Many are wondering if all their efforts are making a diffrence at all. Some of them have left and found jobs in the corporate world where they can work a steady 9 to 5 while receiving better benifits and compensation. Many of them found jobs in corporate training where they can put their education expertise to good use. I’m not sure what it’s going to take but something has to be done to stop this trend. The education brain drain is going to have serious reprocusions in a few short years. What’s going to happen when there just isn’t anyone willing to take on the workload? Sure, raising pay would help but that just seems to be the tip of the iceberg. Educator need more resources to do the job right and it seems they’re just not getting them right now.

drewmol 8y ago

Suggestion to rename 'Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate since 2001' as that's when this record was started.

pojzon 8y ago

Teaching is hard, unfortunetely we dont value good teachers as much as we should. Thus they quit. My mom is a teacher and she loved her work, her students also loved her. But the atmosphere in schools is now so bad, not many can take it.

sys_64738 8y ago

Grade inflation and extra credit are the two big items which let American schools down. A class should have a bell shaped curve after the final exam and extra credit should never be given as it's form of cheating the system.

thatfrenchguy 8y ago
Bell curves are a lie though. What if you taught well and everyone understood your lesson and they fared well on the test ? The French way of grading without a curve is much better in that aspect.
- sys_64738 8y ago
  Generally bell curves are applications of the material together that make it hard to attain higher grades. Otherwise the exam is too easy.

colechristensen 8y ago

Good. Unemployment is at a local minimum for the last couple of decades. Schools have to exist and teachers leaving raises demand for teachers so schools will actually have to compete, maybe a mass exodus will get the shitty school situation in the US fixed a little bit. The most powerful form of protest is to leave for something better.

libraryatnight 8y ago

One of my friends was a teacher. He enjoyed it, but the money was so bad it was frequently a point of stress for his family. He asked about raises, they said no - but that they could pay more to teachers that have a masters. So he went back to school and got one (a difficult choice since that also costs money, but it seemed worth it). After he received it, there was a wage freeze. Long story short, he now works in corporate training. We treat teachers badly.

revskill 8y ago

The best teacher i've learnt with is an engineer, though i've studied through countless teachers. Which made me ask myself, you couldn't just graduate a Pedagogy School to teach other effectively.

charliebrownau 8y ago

Anyone got a link to the """" article """ without a paywall ?

RikNieu 8y ago

I have three friends who were teachers for a decade who changed careers within the last 5 years. One moved into banking, another became a tatoo artist, and the last teaches dancing privately. They all quit because of low pay and long hours, litigious threats from parents, and being faced with constant accusations of being abusive/racist/whatever-other-random-excuse students could come up with to deny their own failures and behaviour. The schools always side with the accusers by default. This is in South Africa, not the USA, so it seems to be a world-wide phenomena - at least maybe in the English speaking world.

barry-cotter 8y ago
Teaching has always had quite a high outflow. More than half of people with qualified teacher status in England and Wales don’t teach. Most people can’t do it. Of those who can plenty decide they can’t do it any more. Long holidays and a fantastic pension aren’t worth a job you hate. I doubt South Africa is worse than the U.K. The Guardian’s Secret Teacher is awful. https://www.theguardian.com/profile/the-secret-teacher https://www.theguardian.com/profile/the-secret-teacher