4 ms·

In the same vein, the fact that teachers are paid orders of magnitude less than lawyers boggles my mind. I don't think lawyers are overpaid considering the supp

by xmprt 6y ago

In the same vein, the fact that teachers are paid orders of magnitude less than lawyers boggles my mind. I don't think lawyers are overpaid considering the supply and demand but given the amount of value that teachers provide to society, it's surprising that teachers are so undervalued and that the people who would make good teachers never end up teaching.

barry-cotter 6y ago
> I don't think lawyers are overpaid considering the supply and demand but given the amount of value that teachers provide to society, it's surprising that teachers are so undervalued I’m a teacher. I’ve never seen any evidence teachers are undervalued. Teachers don’t get paid more when they leave teaching for other jobs. Difficulties in hiring can be fully explained by having the same pay scale for those teaching subjects in demand in the outside world like Computer Science or Mathematics and those with either less demand or greater supply like Physical Education or English. Paying primary school teachers and secondary school teachers on the same scale is distortionary in the same manner. Teachers in the government sector get very, very good job security and benefits for doing a hard job but plenty of people do hard jobs for much poorer compensation. And teachers aren’t magic. They come in a very distant third in their effects on student achievement behind student characteristics and family characteristics. > By almost all objective measures, teachers don’t actually seem to be underpaid in the traditional sense. “Nationwide, the average teacher salary was $60,477 during the 2017–18 school year.” And teachers work around 2 hours less a week than the average profession (“ 40.6 hours during the work week, compared to 42.4 hours for private-sector professionals”). BLS Occupational Information Network studies found that teaching isn’t a particularly stressful job relative to other professions, and teachers typically have pretty solid relative job security. In addition to all of this, teachers don’t make a lot when they leave teaching and education majors have the lowest standardized test scores of any major. Although teachers have extraordinarily high social prestige, it looks like we are paid close to what we are worth on the actual job market. https://medium.com/@coreykeyser/why-conventional-wisdom-on-education-reform-is-wrong-a-primer-f6c0361a48d1 https://medium.com/@coreykeyser/why-conventional-wisdom-on-e...
- Balgair 6y ago
  > Teachers don’t get paid more when they leave teaching for other jobs. I think this depends highly on the subject of the teacher and private v. public schools. My SO was a public school teacher in a STEM discipline and at the very top of the district payscale. My SO now makes three times as much in industry. And we have much better healthcare.
  - barry-cotter 6y ago
    Should have specified on average. Total compensation for public school teachers is higher than for private school teachers. Pensions that generous are no longer available in the private sector for rank and file employees.
- fpig 6y ago
  What do you think would be the solution for, for example, CS teachers being incredibly unqualified? I'm asking because based on my country, I think there literally is no solution and we just have to live with the fact that CS education cannot be good (it might also happen to some other fields over time). Paying CS teachers more than PE or English teachers is not politically viable as teachers and their unions wouldn't accept it, and paying all teachers a salary based on the market value of the most in-demand field is too expensive, bound to be unacceptable to taxpayers (who are already jealous of the incredible benefits and job security teachers have), and creates unacceptable incentives in education choices (ie even more people will try to become English teachers because the demand is the same, but the salaries are increased, so the oversupply of labor in those fields would increase even further, and the labor supply in in-demand fields would actually go down, because even though they also now get paid more for teaching positions, their relative attractiveness actually went down). So is it even possible to solve this problem?
  - ulucs 6y ago
    > Paying CS teachers more than PE or English teachers is not politically viable as teachers and their unions wouldn't accept it, It looks like you have already identified your problem. You could give CS teachers double appointments with the IT department if you have absolutely no wiggling space on money/conditions. Or maybe you could gather some programmers who are eager to reach out to kids and let them work part-time as teachers after they obtain the necessary qualifications.
pram 6y ago
Most lawyers are actually paid like shit though, if they can even get a job in law. They routinely have like 200k in student debt, as well. It's not the ivory tower people seem to believe it is (and hasn't been since well before 2008)

by xmprt 6y ago

barry-cotter 6y ago

> I don't think lawyers are overpaid considering the supply and demand but given the amount of value that teachers provide to society, it's surprising that teachers are so undervalued I’m a teacher. I’ve never seen any evidence teachers are undervalued. Teachers don’t get paid more when they leave teaching for other jobs. Difficulties in hiring can be fully explained by having the same pay scale for those teaching subjects in demand in the outside world like Computer Science or Mathematics and those with either less demand or greater supply like Physical Education or English. Paying primary school teachers and secondary school teachers on the same scale is distortionary in the same manner. Teachers in the government sector get very, very good job security and benefits for doing a hard job but plenty of people do hard jobs for much poorer compensation. And teachers aren’t magic. They come in a very distant third in their effects on student achievement behind student characteristics and family characteristics. > By almost all objective measures, teachers don’t actually seem to be underpaid in the traditional sense. “Nationwide, the average teacher salary was $60,477 during the 2017–18 school year.” And teachers work around 2 hours less a week than the average profession (“ 40.6 hours during the work week, compared to 42.4 hours for private-sector professionals”). BLS Occupational Information Network studies found that teaching isn’t a particularly stressful job relative to other professions, and teachers typically have pretty solid relative job security. In addition to all of this, teachers don’t make a lot when they leave teaching and education majors have the lowest standardized test scores of any major. Although teachers have extraordinarily high social prestige, it looks like we are paid close to what we are worth on the actual job market. https://medium.com/@coreykeyser/why-conventional-wisdom-on-education-reform-is-wrong-a-primer-f6c0361a48d1 https://medium.com/@coreykeyser/why-conventional-wisdom-on-e...

Balgair 6y ago
> Teachers don’t get paid more when they leave teaching for other jobs. I think this depends highly on the subject of the teacher and private v. public schools. My SO was a public school teacher in a STEM discipline and at the very top of the district payscale. My SO now makes three times as much in industry. And we have much better healthcare.
- barry-cotter 6y ago
  Should have specified on average. Total compensation for public school teachers is higher than for private school teachers. Pensions that generous are no longer available in the private sector for rank and file employees.
fpig 6y ago
What do you think would be the solution for, for example, CS teachers being incredibly unqualified? I'm asking because based on my country, I think there literally is no solution and we just have to live with the fact that CS education cannot be good (it might also happen to some other fields over time). Paying CS teachers more than PE or English teachers is not politically viable as teachers and their unions wouldn't accept it, and paying all teachers a salary based on the market value of the most in-demand field is too expensive, bound to be unacceptable to taxpayers (who are already jealous of the incredible benefits and job security teachers have), and creates unacceptable incentives in education choices (ie even more people will try to become English teachers because the demand is the same, but the salaries are increased, so the oversupply of labor in those fields would increase even further, and the labor supply in in-demand fields would actually go down, because even though they also now get paid more for teaching positions, their relative attractiveness actually went down). So is it even possible to solve this problem?
- ulucs 6y ago
  > Paying CS teachers more than PE or English teachers is not politically viable as teachers and their unions wouldn't accept it, It looks like you have already identified your problem. You could give CS teachers double appointments with the IT department if you have absolutely no wiggling space on money/conditions. Or maybe you could gather some programmers who are eager to reach out to kids and let them work part-time as teachers after they obtain the necessary qualifications.

pram 6y ago

Most lawyers are actually paid like shit though, if they can even get a job in law. They routinely have like 200k in student debt, as well. It's not the ivory tower people seem to believe it is (and hasn't been since well before 2008)