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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 professiona

• 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.
  • danbolt 8y ago
    I’m not an expert in the matter, but I can imagine it could attract individuals that desire high wages or high-status work. Regardless of how genuinely invested or enthusiastic they are about the impact of being a teacher. Not that we shouldn’t compensate teachers well (as they deserve it) but I can imagine that a high compensation with strict requirements could introduce a “measure becoming a target and no longer a measure” situation.
  • lovich 8y ago
    A point of contention, the charts in those articles dont take into account cost of living, so its difficult to compare real salaries
    • harryh 8y ago
      If you dig into the actual report, you can see that the data is PPP (purchasing power parity) adjusted as is typical for these types of comparisons.
  • deleted 8y ago
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  • randomdata 8y ago
    > And there is little reason to believe it would yield better results. This is an important point. $100,000+ per year is not unheard of for teachers in Ontario (conveniently public sector incomes >$100,000 are required to publicly disclosed[1]), and they have problems with graduates not having even basic literacy and numeracy skills[2]. [1] https://www.ontario.ca/page/public-sector-salary-disclosure https://www.ontario.ca/page/public-sector-salary-disclosure [2] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-one-in-four-ontario-university-students-lack-basic-literacy-numeracy/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-one-in-four-o...
    • Scoundreller 8y ago
      It's a very recent thing for teachers to be able to reach that, usually by hitting the top of the seniority scale and qualifications scale, or having some extra paid work (e.g. being a department head).
    • WoodenChair 8y ago
      $100,000 Canadian is $75,000 American, which is about the average teacher salary in my wealthy US city ($70,000 to be exact).
• claydavisss 8y ago
  Firefighters already have platinum-plated benefits 95% of people in tech can only fantasize about. Unless you are in the top tier of tech, your lifetime earnings will be much lower than a firefighter who has a pension. As a result, firefighting positions are already very difficult to obtain. In any case, they are paid with taxes so you will have to explain to everyone in the private sector why they should become impoverished to pay people who already receive benefits unavailable in the private sector. HN also seems to forget that teachers get three months off per year, every year.
• baddox 8y ago
  I think a million bucks is too hyperbolic to make for a plausible thought experiment. How about just a 50% raise?
• xamuel 8y ago
  If it were done universally, then you'd have the exact same zero-sum parent game: parents would continue to pester the $1m/yr rockstar teacher about why their kid got an A- instead of an A.
• Spooky23 8y ago
  You have to pay people enough, and not much more. Excessive pay doesn’t motivate performance.
• zackbloom 8y ago
  I think a generally cheaper and easier way to manage it would be to require all children, rich and poor, go to the same schools. The economic factors would change pretty dramatically for being a public school teacher.
  • whatshisface 8y ago
    What if the rich parents disagree with the poor parents about how the school should be run?
    • jonathankoren 8y ago
      That's what school board elections are for.
    • bittercynic 8y ago
      They might have to compromise, and find solutions that work for both.
  • barry-cotter 8y ago
    Yeah, individuals should be subordinate to the state. They should do what the government tells them to, when it tells them to, how it tells them to. Everything for the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state. Mussolini
  • ntsplnkv2 8y ago
    Seems to me that private school tuition should be taxed to provide benefits to public schooling. The rich would still afford private school. Public schools get more funding.
    • tomschlick 8y ago
      People paying for private schools still pay school taxes for the public district they reside in. You'd basically be double taxing which would probably fail in a court challenge.
  • 8y ago
• dominotw 8y ago
  why would i need someone so insanely talented to teach 5th grade algebra.