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If it’s insanely overfunded, how come a career in tech is many multiples of income vs teaching? Good luck buying a decent home on a teacher’s salary in attracti

If it’s insanely overfunded, how come a career in tech is many multiples of income vs teaching? Good luck buying a decent home on a teacher’s salary in attractive areas. Inspire and grow the intelligence of the next generation? Nah, let’s sell ads and figure out how to make people spend more time on social media, getting rich in the process.

conanbatt 5y ago
When you find out that one of the biggest investors in tech is the CA teacher pension fund
- antishatter 5y ago
  When you consider if you were good at math in the 80’s being a math teacher wasn’t a bad job but now if you’re good at math you make double in tech….
  - actually_a_dog 5y ago
    Try more like triple, if this link is correct about starting teacher salary in SF: https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/Entry-Level-Teacher-Salary-in-San-Francisco,CA https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/Entry-Level-Teacher-Sa... They're claiming an average of about $40k, and $63k at the 90th percentile, for an "entry level teacher." However, note, the shape of the distribution is really, really freaking weird, so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
908B64B197 5y ago
> If it’s insanely overfunded, how come a career in tech is many multiples of income vs teaching? Good luck buying a decent home on a teacher’s salary in attractive areas. Engineers ship results. Pretty sure many parents would be ok with a result based comp for their kids teacher.
chrisco255 5y ago
Because inefficient bureaucracies like education systems waste capital. They have no signaling mechanisms for success or failure. Notably, a teaching degree is the same price as a computer science degree, and some colleges are able to charge six figures in tuition even if they provide no better job prospects than community college or less. As to why software devs make so much, it's a simple matter of revenue per employee. Software is insanely scalable. While it is capital intensive to produce software, it is nearly free to distribute. A handful of developers can produce multi-billion dollar software programs, because the market is the entire internet (billions of people). A grade school teacher can at most teach 30 or so kids at a time.
jollybean 5y ago
Teachers salaries are mostly about right, and the 'problem' in America is generally not the education system to which most people who achieve to any degree have access ... it's social conditions. This thing about 'amazing teachers vs. terrible teachers' is a really, really bad mythology. Most teachers are decent and as long as they are paid reasonably well, the quality will not rise, they are not motivated by income. The very notion implies a lack of understanding of communitarian values. In the worse neighbourhoods, kids don't show up, they are years behind, their kids are making money in gangs, they face violence and threats, they have no peers into academic stuff, they have no role models, they have no money, they see no reason to finish. But the same school and teachers magically transplanted into an upper middle class neighbourhood will flourish. America invests more as a % of GDP in education than most nations, even raw $ per student [1] The other thing that nobody wants to contend with, is that America has a giant community of migrants, often undocumented, from very poor countries with a different culture that live in more segregated isolated communities, and form a kind of 'working class backbone', but which makes it harder for their kids to break into the middle class. The surpluses from this labour are immesurable. California and Texas are rich at least in part because they have millions of people willing to work very cheaply in addition to millions who will work 'off the books' even more cheaply - and who do the work well because they are 'happy to be living the dream'. PISA (OECD) standardized testing (see: 2018 and historical) shows this stark difference: Asian and White kids have done consistently well for decades. Black and Latino kids are consistently 'doing a bit better' (i.e. closing the gap), but the increase in their population offsets the net improvement and drags the average down. The 'education' issue in the US is a giant canard. If you can get kids into good families, with good parents, stable jobs, no violence i.e. 'what you and I would normally expect in life' - those kids will do just fine in the current system as it is. [1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > Most teachers are decent and as long as they are paid reasonably well, the quality will not rise, they are not motivated by income. The very notion implies a lack of understanding of communitarian values. > In the worse neighbourhoods, kids don't show up, they are years behind, their kids are making money in gangs, they face violence and threats, they have no peers into academic stuff, they have no role models, they have no money, they see no reason to finish. These two paragraphs are mutually contradictory. A high-quality, community-minded teacher is not going to want to deal with "gang violence and threats" if they aren't being paid enough to make it worthwhile for them. They've got plenty of alternatives, after all.
michaelt 5y ago
Strange, isn't it? According to [1] the American people spend $14,891 per public school pupil per year. So if a single classroom has 30 students, that classroom gets $446,730 of funding. And yet, as I understand things, American classrooms don't look like they've had $440k per year spent on them. [1] https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66 https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66

conanbatt 5y ago

When you find out that one of the biggest investors in tech is the CA teacher pension fund

antishatter 5y ago
When you consider if you were good at math in the 80’s being a math teacher wasn’t a bad job but now if you’re good at math you make double in tech….
- actually_a_dog 5y ago
  Try more like triple, if this link is correct about starting teacher salary in SF: https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/Entry-Level-Teacher-Salary-in-San-Francisco,CA https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/Entry-Level-Teacher-Sa... They're claiming an average of about $40k, and $63k at the 90th percentile, for an "entry level teacher." However, note, the shape of the distribution is really, really freaking weird, so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

908B64B197 5y ago

> If it’s insanely overfunded, how come a career in tech is many multiples of income vs teaching? Good luck buying a decent home on a teacher’s salary in attractive areas. Engineers ship results. Pretty sure many parents would be ok with a result based comp for their kids teacher.

chrisco255 5y ago

Because inefficient bureaucracies like education systems waste capital. They have no signaling mechanisms for success or failure. Notably, a teaching degree is the same price as a computer science degree, and some colleges are able to charge six figures in tuition even if they provide no better job prospects than community college or less. As to why software devs make so much, it's a simple matter of revenue per employee. Software is insanely scalable. While it is capital intensive to produce software, it is nearly free to distribute. A handful of developers can produce multi-billion dollar software programs, because the market is the entire internet (billions of people). A grade school teacher can at most teach 30 or so kids at a time.

jollybean 5y ago

Teachers salaries are mostly about right, and the 'problem' in America is generally not the education system to which most people who achieve to any degree have access ... it's social conditions. This thing about 'amazing teachers vs. terrible teachers' is a really, really bad mythology. Most teachers are decent and as long as they are paid reasonably well, the quality will not rise, they are not motivated by income. The very notion implies a lack of understanding of communitarian values. In the worse neighbourhoods, kids don't show up, they are years behind, their kids are making money in gangs, they face violence and threats, they have no peers into academic stuff, they have no role models, they have no money, they see no reason to finish. But the same school and teachers magically transplanted into an upper middle class neighbourhood will flourish. America invests more as a % of GDP in education than most nations, even raw $ per student [1] The other thing that nobody wants to contend with, is that America has a giant community of migrants, often undocumented, from very poor countries with a different culture that live in more segregated isolated communities, and form a kind of 'working class backbone', but which makes it harder for their kids to break into the middle class. The surpluses from this labour are immesurable. California and Texas are rich at least in part because they have millions of people willing to work very cheaply in addition to millions who will work 'off the books' even more cheaply - and who do the work well because they are 'happy to be living the dream'. PISA (OECD) standardized testing (see: 2018 and historical) shows this stark difference: Asian and White kids have done consistently well for decades. Black and Latino kids are consistently 'doing a bit better' (i.e. closing the gap), but the increase in their population offsets the net improvement and drags the average down. The 'education' issue in the US is a giant canard. If you can get kids into good families, with good parents, stable jobs, no violence i.e. 'what you and I would normally expect in life' - those kids will do just fine in the current system as it is. [1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd

zozbot234 5y ago
> Most teachers are decent and as long as they are paid reasonably well, the quality will not rise, they are not motivated by income. The very notion implies a lack of understanding of communitarian values. > In the worse neighbourhoods, kids don't show up, they are years behind, their kids are making money in gangs, they face violence and threats, they have no peers into academic stuff, they have no role models, they have no money, they see no reason to finish. These two paragraphs are mutually contradictory. A high-quality, community-minded teacher is not going to want to deal with "gang violence and threats" if they aren't being paid enough to make it worthwhile for them. They've got plenty of alternatives, after all.

michaelt 5y ago

Strange, isn't it? According to [1] the American people spend $14,891 per public school pupil per year. So if a single classroom has 30 students, that classroom gets $446,730 of funding. And yet, as I understand things, American classrooms don't look like they've had $440k per year spent on them. [1] https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66 https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66