5 ms·

I am a teacher. Would you trust me more if you viewed my underpaid work as a charitable donation to the society in which I live? Would you pay 60% marginal ta

I am a teacher. Would you trust me more if you viewed my underpaid work as a charitable donation to the society in which I live? Would you pay 60% marginal tax to see class sizes halved, salaries doubled, but maybe also remove any sense of public duty from the role? (One more: would you like to see complete commercialization of eduction, with real salary competition driving up wages, but with the state rather than the parent picking up the bill. Compare this with college education, where student loan companies pick up the bill — you can see where I’m going with that analogy.)

inglor_cz 6y ago
Not the OP, but I would be happy with teachers earning twice as much IF it went hand to hand with removing the worst teachers from the system. Unions will fight that with tooth and claw. It is my experience that the worst 2-3 per cent of people can ruin entire institutions if left unchecked.
- vkou 6y ago
  > IF it went hand to hand with removing the worst teachers from the system. How will we decide who is the worst teacher? Peer review? Student review? Ask the parents which teacher's politics they dislike more? I'm not saying it can't be done, but I am saying that it's unlikely to be done right.
  - inglor_cz 6y ago
    That is a hard question, yes. There is no universal metric that would tell you that. That said, it is not unique to schooling alone. Bosses around the world have to address this problem as well. IDK how Elon Musk runs his "no assholes policy" in SpaceX, but he seems to be successful. Ofc, maybe his approach isn't scalable, who knows.
  - bananaface 6y ago
    Parental review sounds like the perfect way to judge teachers. Parents are the most invested and least affected by nepotism within the institution. They're also way more likely to be concerned about the outcome for the kids. In general though parents should be the ones making decisions about their children. Teachers being judged by arbitrary beurocrats i.e. what we have now sounds obviously worse to me. The whole political argument seems weak to me. I think most parents probably care about academics more than that to begin with, but if political homogeneity is important to a particular parent, why shouldn't that influence their vote?
    - Cederfjard 6y ago
      Least affected by nepotism within the institution, sure, but obviously affected by their relationship with their kids. Surely that would create a bias in favor of teachers who are likely to give students good grades? If the education is subpar, the particular skills and knowledge that were missed can probably be picked up later as needed, but poor grades can alter the trajectory of your life in ways that are harder to recover from. So I'd expect parents who care more about the best possible outcome for their children more than being conscientious (which I honestly assume is a majority) to prefer those.
      - bananaface 6y ago
        Ehh, I'm not convinced. It would probably happen to some degree but the important exams are graded independently.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
  - roenxi 6y ago
    Ideally you'd let the kids choose, but their brains are unformed and probably bad on average at long term planning. So I will say parents choice - they are the people most likely to be making good decisions on the child's behalf. Also - if it is impossible to detect bad teachers, then it is impossible to hire good teachers and therefore they are hiring at random. And parental choice can't be worse than random or that would be a signal we could use to pick the best teachers.
    - bananaface 6y ago
      It's extremely easy to detect bad teachers if you're a child or a parent (or another teacher). It's hard to detect bad teachers if you're a beurocrat looking at grade tables.
      - derwiki 6y ago
        I had a chemistry teacher who loved the school athletes and was confrontational to the nerds. So the first set of parents thought she was great and the second didn’t. I will give you that teachers know who the other bad teachers are.
        bananaface 6y ago
        I don't think that's typical. Most bad teachers are just bad, across the board, and everyone knows it.
        vkou 6y ago
        > I will give you that teachers know who the other bad teachers are. Unless teachers happen to spend their days sitting around in other teachers' classrooms, I highly doubt that's the case. Teaching is not collaborative work, and I would not be comfortable giving a peer review to someone who I never interacted with, outside my lunch break. They do, however, have a pretty good idea of which other teachers they personally don't like.
        pewpew_ 6y ago
bananaface 6y ago
I think if teachers were paid more they would feel a stronger sense of public duty. I don't think being paid less makes people feel more duty to their work.
surge 6y ago
That emotional passion for charity fades, it becomes another job, then you have burn out. Most professions that pay well, when the passion fades, you at least get paid enough to pursue other things in your free time to fill that lack of fulfilment. The best teachers IME have always been retired professionals who are doing it kind of like a Walmart greeter, that to me is a great time to give back your time. But they seem to be better teachers because they've been something other than a teacher and also know their subject matter outside of theory assuming they teach in the same field they practiced professionally. There's already enough money, and each additional tax I pay towards education, gets redirected a few years later. This is what happened with lottery money. Any additional taxes for education need to come with the caveat the taxes I'm already paying that going towards education now, don't get reassigned in the next budget and the money going towards education remains the same, and it was really a backdoor way to raise taxes for other things under the guise of "education". Personally, I think we need to buy less bombs or pay less taxes on the federal level and more on the local level, pay teachers more but make it easier to fire the bad ones, the problem will solve itself. But most additional money seems to find its way going to the administration in public schools and universities, so I'd probably start by taking money away from administration.
- gorgoiler 6y ago
  What is your background to this comment, if you don’t mind me asking? (I‘m “old”. I have a masters in CS, was a SWE for 15 years, took early retirement, then came out of retirement to teach.)
  - surge 6y ago
    All my best teachers, including college, had practiced in the field. Actually your scenario is exactly what I was thinking about doing in old age given my CS teacher was math teacher that had done punch cards once in college. By the end of the class, I knew the programming language better than she did and was the one going around helping students with debugging.

inglor_cz 6y ago

Not the OP, but I would be happy with teachers earning twice as much IF it went hand to hand with removing the worst teachers from the system. Unions will fight that with tooth and claw. It is my experience that the worst 2-3 per cent of people can ruin entire institutions if left unchecked.

vkou 6y ago
> IF it went hand to hand with removing the worst teachers from the system. How will we decide who is the worst teacher? Peer review? Student review? Ask the parents which teacher's politics they dislike more? I'm not saying it can't be done, but I am saying that it's unlikely to be done right.
- inglor_cz 6y ago
  That is a hard question, yes. There is no universal metric that would tell you that. That said, it is not unique to schooling alone. Bosses around the world have to address this problem as well. IDK how Elon Musk runs his "no assholes policy" in SpaceX, but he seems to be successful. Ofc, maybe his approach isn't scalable, who knows.
- bananaface 6y ago
  Parental review sounds like the perfect way to judge teachers. Parents are the most invested and least affected by nepotism within the institution. They're also way more likely to be concerned about the outcome for the kids. In general though parents should be the ones making decisions about their children. Teachers being judged by arbitrary beurocrats i.e. what we have now sounds obviously worse to me. The whole political argument seems weak to me. I think most parents probably care about academics more than that to begin with, but if political homogeneity is important to a particular parent, why shouldn't that influence their vote?
  - Cederfjard 6y ago
    Least affected by nepotism within the institution, sure, but obviously affected by their relationship with their kids. Surely that would create a bias in favor of teachers who are likely to give students good grades? If the education is subpar, the particular skills and knowledge that were missed can probably be picked up later as needed, but poor grades can alter the trajectory of your life in ways that are harder to recover from. So I'd expect parents who care more about the best possible outcome for their children more than being conscientious (which I honestly assume is a majority) to prefer those.
    - bananaface 6y ago
      Ehh, I'm not convinced. It would probably happen to some degree but the important exams are graded independently.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
- roenxi 6y ago
  Ideally you'd let the kids choose, but their brains are unformed and probably bad on average at long term planning. So I will say parents choice - they are the people most likely to be making good decisions on the child's behalf. Also - if it is impossible to detect bad teachers, then it is impossible to hire good teachers and therefore they are hiring at random. And parental choice can't be worse than random or that would be a signal we could use to pick the best teachers.
  - bananaface 6y ago
    It's extremely easy to detect bad teachers if you're a child or a parent (or another teacher). It's hard to detect bad teachers if you're a beurocrat looking at grade tables.
    - derwiki 6y ago
      I had a chemistry teacher who loved the school athletes and was confrontational to the nerds. So the first set of parents thought she was great and the second didn’t. I will give you that teachers know who the other bad teachers are.
      - bananaface 6y ago
        I don't think that's typical. Most bad teachers are just bad, across the board, and everyone knows it.
      - vkou 6y ago
        > I will give you that teachers know who the other bad teachers are. Unless teachers happen to spend their days sitting around in other teachers' classrooms, I highly doubt that's the case. Teaching is not collaborative work, and I would not be comfortable giving a peer review to someone who I never interacted with, outside my lunch break. They do, however, have a pretty good idea of which other teachers they personally don't like.
        pewpew_ 6y ago

bananaface 6y ago

I think if teachers were paid more they would feel a stronger sense of public duty. I don't think being paid less makes people feel more duty to their work.

surge 6y ago

That emotional passion for charity fades, it becomes another job, then you have burn out. Most professions that pay well, when the passion fades, you at least get paid enough to pursue other things in your free time to fill that lack of fulfilment. The best teachers IME have always been retired professionals who are doing it kind of like a Walmart greeter, that to me is a great time to give back your time. But they seem to be better teachers because they've been something other than a teacher and also know their subject matter outside of theory assuming they teach in the same field they practiced professionally. There's already enough money, and each additional tax I pay towards education, gets redirected a few years later. This is what happened with lottery money. Any additional taxes for education need to come with the caveat the taxes I'm already paying that going towards education now, don't get reassigned in the next budget and the money going towards education remains the same, and it was really a backdoor way to raise taxes for other things under the guise of "education". Personally, I think we need to buy less bombs or pay less taxes on the federal level and more on the local level, pay teachers more but make it easier to fire the bad ones, the problem will solve itself. But most additional money seems to find its way going to the administration in public schools and universities, so I'd probably start by taking money away from administration.

gorgoiler 6y ago
What is your background to this comment, if you don’t mind me asking? (I‘m “old”. I have a masters in CS, was a SWE for 15 years, took early retirement, then came out of retirement to teach.)
- surge 6y ago
  All my best teachers, including college, had practiced in the field. Actually your scenario is exactly what I was thinking about doing in old age given my CS teacher was math teacher that had done punch cards once in college. By the end of the class, I knew the programming language better than she did and was the one going around helping students with debugging.