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Nobody wants to teach anymore

• uniqueuid 4y ago
  As a European, it has always been perplexing to me how little the US invests in teachers and schools, given that we know how huge the benefits are down the road (educational attainment, income, pro-social behavior, life satisfaction). Watching how large parts of the political spectrum embrace hardship as a societal teaching tool, I begin to understand that the expectation may always have been that kids ought to figure it out by themselves. It's almost as if our "invention of childhood" (as a protected phase in life) is being rolled back. Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't believe kids can until they are quite old. On the contrary, I expect the emotional and psychological scars to demand a significant toll in the future. [edit] PS: There have been quite a few very heated recent discussions where dang sternly warned against incisive political scorn. I agree, and my comment is intentionally worded carefully and as objectively as possible.
  • GiorgioG 4y ago
    "K-12 schools spend $666.9 billion or $13,185 per pupil annually." - https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statistics https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti... We invest plenty. We just don't get a great return on our investment.
    • kevingadd 4y ago
      By what standard is that actually "plenty"? Is that $13185 enough to properly fund all the services a child needs for a proper education? And if it's not, why not? How much do you believe we should be spending per student? You can point at a big number and say 'that's enough' but we spend large amounts of money on all sorts of things, the number being large doesn't mean it's sufficient. There are tons of children in need of an education out there and they're frequently crammed into overcrowded schools in buildings badly needing maintenance, while teachers have to buy supplies out of pocket. Maybe the answer is that all that money is being siphoned away and we would be fine if we redistributed it correctly, but the premise that we're already investing enough seems pretty questionable to me without proof.
      • hotpotamus 4y ago
        I mean, if you have a class of 20 students (which seems on the smaller end), that would be a "revenue" of over a quarter million per teacher, right? I feel like we should be able to do a pretty good job with that while paying a teacher a decent salary.
        • mattkrause 4y ago
          Not really. That class of twenty needs a building to take place, which in turn needs upkeep. It needs supplies and equipment (workbooks, computers, dodgeballs), and it needs some level of administration[0]. The teachers presumably want benefits too. At a university, the “overhead” costs of research [1] are on the order of 50%: doing $100k worth of research require another $50k to keep the lights on, the building clean, and the library stocked. A fully-loaded salary with benefits is also about 30-50 percent higher than the take-home amount. Similar math gets you to about $100k, which would be a massive improvement but nowhere near the quarter-mil you might expect. However, the average also hides the fact that student spending usually isn’t uniform: it’s not the case that each student costs $13k; it might be more like 9k for 19/20 students and a lot more for the one student with special needs (who might require a FTE on their own). This doesn’t scale nearly as well, but it’s important if you want to give everyone a fair shot at success. [0] The right amount of admin is obviously debatable, but you clearly need some level of management and organization: somebody needs to make class schedules, run payroll, etc. [1] These rates are negotiated with the federal government, and so theoretically reflect the actual costs pretty well. It’s not obvious how well they translate to a K-12 environment: researchers need more specialized services…but also are a lot less likely to draw on the walls.
          • hotpotamus 4y ago
            I did use the word revenue in scare quotes for a reason - I don't expect that all that money could be given directly to the teacher. On the other hand, the state should be able to achieve quite high economies of scale on administration and purchasing (whether they actually do is something else), and there's no profit to make at the end of the day. I was actually thinking 50% would make the math easy but probably be a bit unrealistic, but I arrive at about the same place as you I think. Also I'd imagine that most classes are larger than 20, but hopefully smaller than 30.
    • SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
      I don’t think it’s fair to assume the money is evenly split. Public schooling must also support students who need much more support, ranging from ESL to a variety of disabilities with a variety of severity. If you think of specialized needs students the 13k number looks ridiculous. 13k is an alarmingly low amount of support for dyslexia, or autism, or diabetes.
      • nyokodo 4y ago
        > If you think of specialized needs students the 13k number looks ridiculous. You’re comparing an average per student spend to a high needs minority. Average spend should be compared to the average student who does not have dyslexia etc. A larger than average portion will be spent on kids with special needs due to special facilities, smaller class sizes, and specialist teachers etc.
        • Wowfunhappy 4y ago
          But I think the $13K number includes those outliers, no? If I understand GP, they're arguing the average for 90% of students is probably significantly lower.
    • Wowfunhappy 4y ago
      I'd argue $13K per student is quite low relative to the services expected. I mean, compare that to the price of college tuition. Now, college is too expensive and I certainly wouldn't want to replicate that problem in K-12 schools. But... well, in some ways colleges have it easier, because the students are older and can be expected to be more independent. You can't have a 100-person lecture in a K-12 setting (not that I love classes like that at the college level either).
      • lr4444lr 4y ago
        Fine, compare it to portion of GDP. Like healthcare, we spend a lot and get poor return if you measure objectively by things like standardized tests, unemployment, imprisonment, etc.
        • deleted 4y ago
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      • mattkrause 4y ago
        Yup. $13k/year works out to about $10 per pupil-hour, and even less once you include costs like the building and work done out-of-hours (grading, lesson planning). I’m pretty sure I made something like that babysitting in junior high!
        • deleted 4y ago
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        • prirun 4y ago
          "Pupil-hour" makes no sense in a classroom environment. When you were babysitting, they didn't pay you $10/hr per kid.
          • mattkrause 4y ago
            Many people did, actually. The amount of work/responsibility definitely scales with the number of kids, and it's not exactly linear either: one will color quietly, two might play together--or fight, and three or more...yikes. I mentioned the rate because it surprised me it was so close. I'd expect that it costs more to actually educate a kid, and of course, the parents provided the house (and often ice cream and HBO), whereas that rate includes everything.
    • horsawlarway 4y ago
      I'm not actually sure that's "plenty". For comparison - we currently pay more per year to keep our 1 year old child in daycare (roughly ~15,000/yr) and for daycare we literally only expect them to keep him alive & clean. And this is considered a "cheap" daycare. Most places in our area (the much cheaper south-west side of Atlanta) still charge more than 1600/m or almost 20k/yr. We certainly don't expect them to be significantly enriching his education experience (although the simple exposure to other kids will likely do that at this age). We also don't expect the employees to have any sort of educational/vocational training to excel at teaching, or expect them to perform any sort of off-the-clock work (ex: grading, class prep, parent-teacher meetings, etc). I expect them to be mostly high-school graduates with a background check. So I look at that number, and while it's certainly a large number if you're making 1 teacher manage 30 kids, I don't really know that it's a number that results in viable conditions to truly "educate" children. I strongly suspect that education is highly dependent on the family at home, and that's becoming harder to meaningful do as more and more families are forced to have both parents work full time.
      • millzlane 4y ago
        >I strongly suspect that education is highly dependent on the family at home, and that's becoming harder to meaningful do as more and more families are forced to have both parents work full time. This is a big part of it. Education doesn't stop when the school bell rings.
        • deleted 4y ago
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        • notch656a 4y ago
          But I was told by HN the state is responsible for providing an education for children. If the parent is responsible instead, then I'd like to be able to opt out of paying taxes for schools and instead send my kid to a private school.
      • lotsofpulp 4y ago
        >For comparison - we currently pay more per year to keep our 1 year old child in daycare (roughly ~15,000/yr) and for daycare we literally only expect them to keep him alive & clean You cannot compare the per child costs of taking care of a kid who cannot go to the toilet themselves or eat by themself with a kid who is much more self sufficient. The person taking care of a baby (or 4 babies) might need to be much less qualified than an AP physics teacher in high school, but the labor (and liability) costs do not necessarily scale exactly with the minimum qualifications needed to be an AP physics teacher versus a daycare teacher.
    • _hcuq 4y ago
      And yet a teacher with 30 kids in the class gets maybe 80k in a better paying state. 30 x 13k is $390k…. Something isn’t adding up. What are all the overheads?
      • GiorgioG 4y ago
        Every rinky dink town has their own school system, superintendent, administrative overhead…
  • mantas 4y ago
    It's not much better in many parts of europe... :(
    • paganel 4y ago
      Especially the teacher-pupil relationship, which has been transformed into a teacher-parent relationship where the teacher is seen as a service-worker and the parent sees him/herself as a client/customer. I've heard this first-hand from a close friend of hours who works in the education system for French expats' kids.
      • mantas 4y ago
        One of the issues in my country is „student's money“ where public schools get paid per-student. „2nd year“ if student performs very poorly vanished as a result. 3 decades ago it was pretty common for kids to repeat the curriculum. Now parents just threaten to transfer the kid to another school. Administration lets the kid move on to the next grade for the sake of €€€. At the end of the day, kid never catches up academically..
  • tinsmith 4y ago
    When you're actually from the US as a Millennial or Gen Z'er, it's not hard to see what happened. The previous two generations taught us nothing, but expected us to know everything they did, as though by virtue of being a living human this knowledge is just granted. Our parents never had the time to show us how to budget, care for a home, etc, so we had to learn from the Internet. But why? I posit that Boomers and Gen X had such an easy go of it, they assumed we would, too. Born to an economy that was thriving, they had to know relatively little themselves because there was always someone else who could do it. In short, that translates, over time, to less value placed on teaching the next generation to thrive and looking at things like school milages as "my tax dollars not benefiting me directly." These previous generations also operate under the illusion that they somehow had it harder than we do now. This is perpetuated by the "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" attitude that most of them seem to have adopted while having to ask for help operating a smart fridge or iPhone. It's really a failure of self-awareness, if we remove all the fictional swagger they've built their lives around, and it has left us a nation that is crumbling under its own ignorance and stupidity. Now people my age (late 30's - early 40's) are living paycheck to paycheck, trying to figure out how we can afford to fix the problem so our children can do better than us, and we are utterly failing to find a solution because we are operating in a system that was designed to cater only to the selfishness of our parents and grandparents.
    • gedy 4y ago
      > Gen X had such an easy go of it Please, economy and real estate prices has been boom and bust for Gen X too, 3-4 serious recessions, pensions lost before 401k were a thing, etc. Maybe look at who you vote for and blame them, not normal people 10-20 years older than you.
    • jleyank 4y ago
      Did this happen because the kids didn’t listen or because the parents were overly protective or some combination of the two? Helicopter parents denied their children the chance to fail safely and so calibrate the good and bad portions of life. By scheduling their kids time and removing all risk they prevented growth. You never did chores for your spending money? Had to help out with minor repairs or maintenance of a domicile? Never had a part time job? I suspect not, again, as the now revealed as misguided effort to give their kids the best (“better than we had it”) was crippling. It’s not hard to do what is mentioned in the first paragraph. Look up the shit that went down in 1968 before you repeat that previous generations had it easier. There’s no draft, although the Cold War and risk of nukes are coming back. You have computer and communication resources that exceed st:tos (damn near), uni has toys that were inconceivable in the 70’s, …. Google what opscan forms and #2 pencils were - that’s years of organizing courses and drop/add. The only thing that really sucks now is that std’s can kill.
  • GiorgioG 4y ago
    Seems like US spending is slightly higher than European countries. We're not getting our money's worth here. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-expenditures-by-country https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp...
    • tiahura 4y ago
      That would assume the educational capabilities are relatively equal. The US has large demographic segments that have historically been difficult to educate. I wonder what the comparison would look like if limited to native born with two parent households?
    • mattkrause 4y ago
      These cross-national comparisons are tricky. For example, US spending on education includes a bunch of healthcare costs, as the employers are paying something (as a benefit) and employee salaries need to cover the rest. Somewhere with single-payer healthcare will directly allocate the money to healthcare instead.
      • astrange 4y ago
        There’s also the cost for land and building maintenance, which are both unreasonably expensive in cities.
  • starkd 4y ago
    It's not about money. Avg salaries are plenty above the OECD average. The U.S. has a strong tendency to just throw money at a problem. There are many urban school districts that have trouble getting 50% attendance rates ON THE FIRST DAY. And that's with going door to door to remind parents the day before. How can you even address it when the people don't even believe in the institution anymore? Let parents have some real choice of different school to attend. This will allow some experimentation from the ground up to happen organically. Parents who are the most invested in their child's success can have real agency in their future. This will also give teachers more flexibility in the kind of environment they want to work in. They could even start their own homeschooling pods and take in a set number of students from the area. Once again, the teachers union stands in the way of real progress. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_cmd.pdf https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_cmd.pdf
    • uniqueuid 4y ago
      Do you mean cost of living-adjusted salaries are about OECD average? And do you think above-average salaries are required for above-average returns? Just curious.
      • starkd 4y ago
        The stats on the page are from 2018, before inflation became problematic. It also does not include the pandemic-related problems that have made things worse. However, the main point about comparable funding still stands. We are not getting above average returns. The question should be where is all that money going.
    • idontpost 4y ago
      None of what you describe is progress. It's simply a selfish desire to abandon poor children to poverty.
  • csa 4y ago
    > As a European, it has always been perplexing to me how little the US invests in teachers and schools, given that we know how huge the benefits are down the road (educational attainment, income, pro-social behavior, life satisfaction). You may or may but know this, but the funding of K-12 education varies by locality and has quite a bit of variability (typically paid for by local taxes). If you go to the upper-middle class neighborhoods in the US, and certainly in the nicer private schools, you will see a high or very high level of investment in teachers and facilities. These investments typically have good to great returns. There is also often quite a bit of structured parental involvement (which is usually a good thing). There are a lot of interesting levels of inquiry into this phenomenon: - Do we need high quality mass education as it is found in these higher quality upper middle class schools? As in, if you magically made these types of schools appear in low SES neighborhoods, would the outcomes/benefits be similar? If not, how would they differ? - If you take a few low SES students and place them into these better schools, do they get the same benefits as the locals? - To what extent do better schools and school districts get better results due to the schools, due to the inputs, and/or due to the values of the local community? People who are looking for good K-12 education in the US can find it, but it’s not universal. Imho, this is due to the fact that the value of education in the US is not perceived similarly across communities. The article mentions that many parents see schools as child care while the adults do “real work”, and I think that that is the dominant perspective in most communities (note, not most HN communities, not most upper middle class communities — statistically most communities are low or mid-low SES where people are living paycheck to paycheck). As such, the community is sort of getting what it wants when it gets mediocre education results. I think that many people like the idea of a having a better school or school district, but they are not able or willing to do what it takes to make that happen on an individual or community level to make that happen (e.g., through parental involvement in schools, school boards, creating a good learning environment in the home, etc.). If you ever need a good litmus test for how this looks different across communities and across different SES levels, ask the parents if they read books with their children, and if they did/do, at what age. In most communities, they don’t at all or very little. In the communities with better schools, it’s almost always early and often. There are obviously exceptions (both positive and negative), but this heuristic is extremely telling in aggregate.
  • 627467 4y ago
    "as european"... Just like teachers/teaching situations in federal US is hard to generalize so is in confederal Europe. You should probably read about the yearly teachers strikes in many southern European countries. Teaching is a precarious job - particularly in early career in public sector schools. And just like many comments already mentioned: There's a global social trend expecting teachers to be some kind of social workers. And older teachers in many countries public sectors are basically grandfathered into previledged conditions that Young professionals will never attain.
  • logicalmonster 4y ago
    > As a European, it has always been perplexing to me how little the US invests in teachers and schools, given that we know how huge the benefits are down the road (educational attainment, income, pro-social behavior, life satisfaction). 1) European perspectives on a lot of American problems miss one of the biggest differences between us: you have a lot more of a homogeneous population. There's numerous differences between designing a school system for basically all Hungarian or all Norwegian kids, for example, and figuring out what the hell you can do with a school mixed with Latinos, Asians, Blacks, and Whites with all different levels of interests, drive, and ability. 2) You've made a few statements of objective fact here without backing them up. Does the US actually invest little in education? I suspect that a lot of the money is of course wasted, but they do spend a crapload of money, and I'd bet dramatically more than many other countries. As another thing, does increasing spending (as the only variable that changes) lead to dramatic differences in educational outcomes? To a point, I'm sure it helps, but at some point, I think it doesn't. As an example, a young Forest Gump might be able to pass Basic Arithmetic in his elementary school if given a private tutor who gave him their full attention and effort, but there's no universe in which Forrest Gump gets an A+ in Advanced Calculus even if he's given 1,000 of the best teachers in the world to personally tutor him 24/7. 3) There's an age old debate about Nature vs. Nurture, which of course will not be settled here today. But I'd like to point out that if "Nature" is generally the most important variable in success, then beyond a certain point, there's a level of diminishing returns with education spending and simply throwing money at schools is not a wise course. Just throwing more money at a problem is, I suspect, the path we've taken up until now.
    • Ekaros 4y ago
      1) Do those really have that big difference? Should they? I could see a point if we were discussing first or second generation immigrants. Specially not those from highly educated parents. Coming from Finland which did rather well with much less hours spend it might as well be systematic issue. Maybe process of the teaching itself has something wrong.
      • rr808 4y ago
        Are Finland's schools like my city? 30% of its children descendants of slaves? + 10% illegal immigrants? A good few percent homeless, parents in jail and/or hard drug addicts. 20% with both parents working 100 hours between them. Some bring guns to school. Teaching isn't all about teaching.
• ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  Teaching/training is quite difficult. I've done quite a bit of training (but not true teaching -there's a difference), over the years. My family is full of teachers. I have many friends that are teachers. It's amazing how "solutions" never seem to actually get around to simply paying teachers more, and maybe not expecting them to be child-rearers, in lieu of parents.
  • ekianjo 4y ago
    paying teachers more is not going to solve the problem that most people do not appreciate teachers whether its kids or parents. It is certainly not a job for those who cannot stand being criticized the whole time.
    • a-dub 4y ago
      there is a way of expressing respect in market economies, it's called money.
      • sidlls 4y ago
        Money will not overcome the "those who can't, teach" sentiment that runs quite strongly in the US. There is a very strong anti-intelligence (not merely anti-intellectual) sentiment in this country. It will help, and we should certainly pay teachers more, but it isn't the whole solution.
        • Retric 4y ago
          “Those who can’t teach” is a direct result of the low pay. A software developer might semi retire and start teaching, but it’s a hobby at that point not a viable alternative. It’s more complicated than paying more money automatically means better workers, but higher pay does let an industry be more selective.
        • gbear605 4y ago
          More money will encourage more of “those who can” to switch to teaching, which will help to undermine the stereotype. There are already many “who can” who already teach, but they’re almost exclusively the ones who also intrinsically value teaching highly. A higher pay will help bring the ones who would be good teachers but are in a situation where they need to prioritize money.
• GiorgioG 4y ago
  Great, let's move forward with some real online learning initiatives. The current system is antiquated and no longer makes sense from a purely educational perspective. For too long the US has used the school system as a baby-sitting service while both parents (or single parents) are at work.
  • sidlls 4y ago
    This isn't a problem software can fix.
  • quickthrower2 4y ago
    And turn back the inflation and hedonistic clock to when a single labourers salary could support the family. Freeing up the other person to teach.
  • polypodiopsi 4y ago
    What do you know about it?
• ekianjo 4y ago
  A teacher should know better than making blanket statements every 2 lines with "Americans think..". What a bad article.
  • kcplate 4y ago
    While I don’t necessarily disagree with many of her points, the overly dramatic and staccato style made this irritating to read. She succeeded in having me walk away from the article frustrated, not with the problem, but with her article.
  • justin66 4y ago
    It’s not a paper, it’s a blog post that was meant to be provocative. It appears to have worked.
• bell-cot 4y ago
  s/to Teach/to be treated like shit for crap wages/g Not exactly news, these days. In much of America, local school districts still have quite a bit of autonomy. As thing keep getting worse, there might be a district or few, here & there, where a different approach gets an honest try. Might.
  • throwaway9870 4y ago
    People keep saying crap wages, but put some real numbers up here. What do you consider crap wages?
    • justin66 4y ago
      Let’s just go with crap wages == whatever isn’t sufficient to keep enough people in the profession, such that you need to start recruiting wildly unqualified people just to fill the spot.
      • throwaway9870 4y ago
        You make the job bad enough, no wages will keep people in it.
      • AlbertCory 4y ago
        You almost had me at "whatever isn’t sufficient to keep enough people" but then dammit, you lost at "wildly unqualified people" If you mean "having an education degree" or "getting a grossly irrelevant teacher's certificate" then no, those are not "qualifications." Those are just the teacher's union contract provisions.
        • justin66 4y ago
          There are some problems with the system you're objecting to, but the "veterans and random college students" qualification some places are moving to is... worse.
          • 4y ago
• jmclnx 4y ago
  I think it depends upon what US State the teachers are in. Some states, if a teacher says some phrases they could, get fined, loose their job or maybe in rare cases face jail time. This may even spread across the Teacher's life style. Not to mention in many places the pay is not worth it. Forgot to mention, some states also require a Masters Degree even to teach very young children, the expense of getting that degree is not worth it.
  • etempleton 4y ago
    This is the real issue. Most states require a master’s or credit hour equivalent to retain your teaching credentials, but the pay is bad, laughably bad in some areas. So bad that someone who has been teaching 10 years will make more doing almost anything else at an entry level position elsewhere. A lot of teachers are being recruited to do sales because they can speak well extemporaneously. Should I get paid less and get kicked, bit, and punched all day and then be told it is my fault for not properly simulating their angel child? Or should I just get a job where I can work from home and make more money?
    • orzig 4y ago
      Can you point to an area where a teacher with 10 years of experience, working full-time, earns less than an entry-level position? Teacher contracts are mostly public and you can use $15/hr for entry level, shouldn’t be hard to find and example if it exists.
      • etempleton 4y ago
        Many entry-level sales jobs, which often require no specific college degree, though typically a college degree is preferred, earn 50-70k /year. Entry level sales, specifically, can easily net over 100k a year if you are good at what you do as you work at least partially on commission. Teachers, companies are discovering, are desirable sales reps because they are experienced at being high energy, talking extemporaneously, and may have some domain specific knowledge that is valuable, such as a chemistry teacher going into pharmaceutical sales. Most teachers will never make 100k in their entire career. Some districts pay well in high COL areas, but this is the exception not the rule. Entry level pay for teachers is actually pretty good, but your salary does not scale as it does in most other careers. It typically takes 20+ years to get to six figures if you can at all.
• mhb 4y ago
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• lr4444lr 4y ago
  I realize this piece is more of a rant, and I won't hold it to a data accuracy standard it never pretended to have, but they pay issue is really misconstrued. Salaries in large urban districts are often well above area median, and when accounting for benefits and pension, quite impressive. In South Dakota and a number of states in the south and rural districts, yes it is another story, and it is bad. Also, teachers NEVER want to discuss pay differentials by anything but years of service. I'm sorry, but most qualified high school physics teachers have way differently valued skillsets in the labor force by alternate employers than most kindergarten teachers.
  • taneq 4y ago
    However much they're paying teachers, it's clearly not enough, because not enough people are willing to do the job for that amount of money. Assuming you had all the skills required to be an effective teacher, would YOU put up with everything they put up with for that salary? Because I sure as hell wouldn't. (As an aside, it's different depending on where you are but in Australia, comparing teacher salary can be difficult because "they get 12 weeks of holiday a year" and "they only work 6 hours a day" but also they do 3+ hours of unpaid marking and lesson planning a day, they're expected to show up at the end of those 'holidays' prepared for whatever courses they've been assigned for the next term, etc. A close relative is a teacher and it's insane what they have to deal with.)
    • throwaway9870 4y ago
      > However much they're paying teachers, it's clearly not enough, because not enough people are willing to do the job for that amount of money. The problem is that the scope of the job has changed and you can't pay people enough to do it. Here are some issues, straight from teachers I was talking to last week: * Admin who constantly wants teachers to do more with no additional resources so they can get credit for it and advance their career. They were very frustrated by this. * Teaching evaluation based on absolute standardized scores rather than relative. So you can have a bad class, lift them a lot, but still be viewed poorly because on absolute terms, they are still weak. You might say that evens out over time, but it doesn't because some teachers are better with difficult students, so they get more than their share of these issues. * Special needs students mainstreamed - kids with emotional issues that flip desks and yell out constantly, physical issues such as seizures if they bump their head, but parents will not let them wear protective gear because they will stand out, elementary school kids who are constantly in physical altercations with other kids. * Kids come to school not having eaten since the day before, cloths that haven't been washed in days, etc. * Unable to give accurate grades because parents fight back and so teachers are forced to pass kids even though they know they are just pushing a big problem on the next teacher. * Zero support from parents and in many cases, outright hostility. * The classroom is a minefield regarding what can be discussed and cannot be discussed. Everyone has an opinion on how it should be done, but almost none of them have ever actually taught.
• SamuelAdams 4y ago
  > Demoralization is what happens when you spend years becoming an expert in a subject area, and nobody cares. They’d rather hire another MBA to make all the important decisions, while they stick us on committees writing reports for ghosts. That’s when teachers start to withdraw from their jobs, when we realize it doesn’t matter what we think, and it definitely doesn’t matter how amazing we are at what we do. This was really well put, and applies to any profession, not just teaching. Consider software security experts, who know all the ins and outs of making systems secure. They advise, the offer guidance and best practices on very complex material. And yet at the end of the day all that work gets thrown out by some PM’s that think it only adds complexity, or worse yet users simply don’t use the more secure features of an application.
  • zmgsabst 4y ago
    I think we need to admit managerialism fails at knowledge fields — perhaps Taylorism entirely. I’m not sure what’s better, though.
    • sul_tasto 4y ago
      I wholeheartedly agree. I think a critical examination of the MBA degree, and the values it embodies, is long overdue.
      • jaybrendansmith 4y ago
        Any MBA or Product Manager telling a security expert what's important and what's not is absolutely doing it wrong. What they teach in an MBA is simply the larger picture of a business, it's complex systems, it's architecture. Anyone that writes code should be fairly good at it because it's essentially the same thing one does as an engineer: Determine the interfaces and contracts between the teams, understand the 'organs of the body' and the processes therein, understand the inputs and the outputs and governing systems such as cash flow and income. What often happens is prioritization and risk assessment ... the needs of the customers are many and there is only so much room in the backlog. What the security expert needs to do is to make the risks clear to the manager in business terms that they can understand, which to be honest, often comes down to probable loss of money, or customers, or brand.
• dd36 4y ago
  nobody can afford to teach anymore. That said, I couldn’t have installed solar on my home, built a deck, replumbed my house, etc. without Youtube.
• mkl95 4y ago
  Currently turnover is high for many jobs with great working conditions, so it shouldn't be news that people don't want a stressful job with relatively mediocre pay. I don't have the data to back it up, but I would expect a few European countries to be the only exception, and only those that have moved on from older educational models.
  • judge2020 4y ago
    Not just mediocre pay, but nowadays unlivable pay with the current rent trends in suburban and city environments.
    • nobody9999 4y ago
      >Not just mediocre pay, but nowadays unlivable pay with the current rent trends in suburban and city environments. Not just "nowadays." I recall (I've looked around, but can't find it archived) an article from 2000 in the San Jose Mercury News about full-time public school teachers living in homeless shelters because they couldn't afford housing in San Jose. So, no. Not new. Still a big problem, but not a new one.
      • judge2020 4y ago
        But that’s San Jose - I think we’re seeing the problem spread to more reaches of the US. For example, Savannah, GA is a mostly stagnant area with only 4,000 population growth since 2017 and not much job growth. Meanwhile, the average rent for a 2 bedroom was stuck under $1100 until 2018, and after Covid the expiration of the CDC moratorium enabled a rent boom to $1500. I can guarantee you income has not risen to match that, so anyone already in an apartment is simply dedicating more of their income to paying the rent. https://www.zumper.com/rent-research/savannah-ga https://www.zumper.com/rent-research/savannah-ga
        • nobody9999 4y ago
          >But that’s San Jose - I think we’re seeing the problem spread to more reaches of the US. For example, Savannah, GA is a mostly stagnant area with only 4,000 population growth since 2017 and not much job growth. Meanwhile, the average rent for a 2 bedroom was stuck under $1100 until 2018, and after Covid the expiration of the CDC moratorium enabled a rent boom to $1500. I can guarantee you income has not risen to match that, so anyone already in an apartment is simply dedicating more of their income to paying the rent. You won't get an argument about that from me. I wasn't trying to deride or minimize the issues you mentioned. At all. Rather, I was pointing out that low pay for K-12 teachers isn't a new phenomenon. I wholeheartedly agree that this is a pressing issue right now, and in lots more places than Silicon Valley.
• eric4smith 4y ago
  Because the old way of teaching has been broken for decades now - by broken I mean not applicable to todays world. One good thing about C19 is that it forced us to re-examine how we taught and what we taught. And I think we clearly see that we are spending too many hours in classrooms with boring teachers. Looking back many years at my schooling I can see that much of it was impractical and unnecessary. Things like math were not tied into the real world so I was never really taken with it. It Was very boring and when I became a teacher years later, I burned out after a year of following the curriculum. I could not really grok chemistry and physics in high school because it was mostly just theory completely divorced from the normal word. On the other hand our biology teacher gave me a lifelong start in that subject because she really tied it into our daily lives and we could relate. And I was not the only one. There are very very few teachers who teach like that - and so, most people just finish school and promptly forget everything they learned. Can this be fixed? Not now. We are more focused on culture wars that improving the way how we teach. It would take a really serious event (not any politician) to make changes. And that’s why as more parents wake up, home schooling has increased from about 50,000 to well over 500,000 as of last year in the USA.
  • quacked 4y ago
    Here, check this out:. https://www.unschooling.com/t/the-seven-lesson-schoolteacher/266 https://www.unschooling.com/t/the-seven-lesson-schoolteacher...
• throwaway9870 4y ago
  The problem with teaching is that the role has expanded way beyond what it used to be and teachers are expected to do FAR too much in the classroom and they get minimal support from admin who are more worried about their careers than supporting teachers. I just had this conversation last week with a couple teachers. If this matters to you, I suggest you find some older teachers who have been around long enough to actually see how the job has changed and ask them what they think. It has become an impossible job for any amount of money.
• seibelj 4y ago
  People do want to teach and get paid to do it. It’s called private schools. They charge what the market will bear for their quality and location, and they pay what the market rate is for teachers of the requisite quality that let them charge the rates they need. What confuddles people in education is the same thing that causes endless articles about housing, healthcare, inflation… it’s called “basic economics”. Just because education is heavily regulated by the government and full of people ideologically predisposed to pretending economic rules don’t apply, doesn’t mean supply and demand is false and the normal rules of gravity are suspended. I myself have children and live in Boston, Massachusetts. The per-student funding here is $25,000 per year. Yet excluding a few meritocratic public schools that you have to test into (which they are making ever harder for my Asian children to get into as they reduce the seats allocated to tests and give away to “underprivileged” races, aka not Asians or whites) the schools are dog shit and anyone with a few bucks avoids them like the plague. So money is not the problem in Boston, it’s the horrible nature of the public school system.
  • lr4444lr 4y ago
    There's an unspoken benefit of private schools though: kids of teachers get to attend for free or at a hugely discounted rate. When I was at one, just about every teacher left after their kids graduated. The ones who stayed either had some nice admin role, or their spouse was the main breadwinner.
    • nkingsy 4y ago
      This is no longer the case in the two schools I’m familiar with. I went for cheap 20 years ago, but my younger siblings did not. Not even a discount
  • mnd999 4y ago
    That’s a societal decision we have to make. Should all children have access to good education - i.e. should we invest in public schooling? Or should it be dependent on your parents ability to pay in which case lets go all in on private.
• 8jef 4y ago
  That's a great thing happening. No one knows how to teach anyway anyhow. It's a lost art, a forgotten knowledge, which have given way to formatting, somewhere in the last Century. Preparing young souls for Life: _teaching_ is very different from telling people how to do things and stuff: _formatting_. We are forced to go full circle now. Throwing out garbage, as we can't keep up. That's a good thing.
  • mantas 4y ago
    The garbage is education system, not teachers. The art is not lost. But people who want to be Teachers get forced out of the system. Too much paperwork, too strict rules, too much content, too many students... No place left for performing the art of teaching. Some private schools (many focus on making parents happy in short term..) and tutoring is the last refuge of the art of Teaching.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• zarzavat 4y ago
  The problem/solution is YouTube. There is prestige in being a YouTube super-teacher like 3B1B, teaching millions of people. There is no prestige in teaching kids at a local high school who don't even want to learn. The smart people who once might have found their vocation in teaching, now prefer to set up YouTube channels. The role of teacher is splitting into content makers and babysitters.
  • seydor 4y ago
    And that is good
  • areoform 4y ago
    Believe it or not, YouTube is not good pedagogy. A YouTube video doesn't help you to fill in the gaps of your understanding by re-working a difficult concept with you. A YouTube video, nor an app, doesn't go through the steps of solving a problem with you, and watch how you do it to give you constructive criticism. Educational content is amazing, but it's not teaching. It's a resource. It's like saying that the existence of books negates the need for teaching and that all the clever people are now writing books.
    • ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago
      "A YouTube video, nor an app, doesn't go through the steps of solving a problem with you, and watch how you do it to give you constructive criticism."—neither will 99.9% of teachers. Most of them out of sheer incompetence, impatience, and general inadequacy to be around children, some due to the fact that there are 30+ children in the classroom and they literally don't have the time and energy for that kind of effort. I am not speaking about American schools with 25K+/year tuition fee in NYC, I am speaking about teachers in a general classroom in Punta Arenas, Chile or a general classroom in Kruševac, Serbia.
    • zozbot234 4y ago
      > A YouTube video doesn't help you to fill in the gaps of your understanding by re-working a difficult concept with you. A YouTube video, nor an app, doesn't go through the steps of solving a problem with you, and watch how you do it to give you constructive criticism. Video is a replacement for teacher-centered lectures, that don't do these things either. Of course the tutoring part of education is also important.
• rr808 4y ago
  Here in NJ we invest a lot in education. Most school districts spend 20-30k per student. Senior teachers earn over 100k. The results are good, low income students have far higher grades that most of the country. It is expensive though, both our income taxes and property taxes are famously high. Lots of people leave the state because of this.
• jleyank 4y ago
  Superb article. Perhaps covid has let people learn that they could survive without doing something they didn’t like just to get some money. There’s many ways to make or get money, and the hassle level is quite variable. But when people choose, say, an Amazon warehouse over their former position ya gotta wonder about what they gave up. If they know stem at all, why teach? If they can handle foreign languages or wield words, why teach? If they can work with their hands, there are trades and the like dying for people…. The buzz from a success has to be balanced against all of the issues discussed here in, and now the risk of physical harm is quite high.
• p4bl0 4y ago
  The very same problem exists in other countries. We have been having an outrageously similar situation in France for years already, so much that this article does a really good job at depainting the situation here in France too.
  • Felger 4y ago
    Yep. Wanted to write the exact same thing.
• tlogan 4y ago
  And teachers here in San Francisco refused to teach for one full year. I do not blame them: it is really a crappy job. And as result of that only very bad are still teaching: the ones that hate the job, hate the kids and, in general, not nice people. I think the only way we can sole this is the following: - clamp down on union: it should easier to fire bad teachers - class size should be less than 10. Expensive yeah…
  • bushbaba 4y ago
    Class size should be less than ten for disruptive students. In California the other problem is that 10%+ of the students are ESL. With a large undocumented immigrant impact to school resources.
• barrysteve 4y ago
  It's clear everything is falling and people are trying to jack up the wages to compensate. Yet nobody mentions how to fix the horrific management that allowed this to happen in the first place and won't solve the crisis. My last job wanted me to replace the existing management. They tried to sell this to me by complaining about all the different bosses they had to report to, how difficult the job was and how they want to retire and stop doing the job. Combined with all the other structural issues and tribalism within the workplace, having a management team that is happy to spell out their own doom is criminally incompetent. You can pretty up the teacher or management role with money and pride, but it's still going to fall apart if you're hellbent on overworking your staff and killing the golden goose. Everyday the terrible management continues, the more and more relatable Anakin looks. Disappointment is a weekly reality.
• swinnipeg 4y ago
  In Canada each province has a fairly strong teacher union. In Manitoba for example a teacher with 10 years experience will earn approximately $95K CAD (more than most software developers here). This with strong pension benefits that can be collected at 55. I know teachers that retired in their late 50s, and will continuing making 70% of their inflation adjust salaries until they die. Relatively speaking this salary/benefits has higher expected lifetime earnings than a software developer. One negative is that the unions are also strong enough that teachers can't be fired/replaced for performance (this is similar to Police...etc). As with any profession the worst of the bunch is very bad, and unfortunately they keep doing it until their fifties at the cost of the children.
  • gedy 4y ago
    I think this applies to the US as well, at least California.
    • enragedcacti 4y ago
      It varies significantly by state. Five states explicitly outlaw collective bargaining by teachers and 32 states require it with various limitations on the scope of items that can be negotiated. Some states also have restrictions on striking. https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/research/how-strong-are-us-teacher-unions-state-state-comparison https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/research/how-strong-ar...
  • anthonyskipper 4y ago
    • ipaddr 4y ago
      Why it doesn't lead to better educational outcomes?
    • pnf 4y ago
      Some of the worst educational outcomes in the US are in deep blue states and deep blue cities. Meanwhile, suburban communities in the US tend to vote more "red" and are also the places people go to raise families because of the better public schools.
• imglorp 4y ago
  I'd like to introduce a sensitive subject as neutrally as possible. For root causes, the morale environment is largely politically induced in a coordinated attack on public education that goes back to the 80's. For some examples... * cuts on school lunches https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketchup_as_a_vegetable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketchup_as_a_vegetable * voucher programs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_voucher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_voucher * vast finanical aid cuts http://tech.mit.edu/V105/N2/budget.02n.html http://tech.mit.edu/V105/N2/budget.02n.html These policies have persisted off and on since then.
  • aninteger 4y ago
    Well on school lunches, California is at least trying to make things better: https://www.schoolmealsforall.org/ https://www.schoolmealsforall.org/
  • JustSomeNobody 4y ago
    Exactly. They want to replace public education with a for-profit system. Once that transition is in place, the vouchers will become harder for certain people to get, then eventually vouchers will go away and people will be solely responsible for their children's education. This means, yet again, the poor and middle class get the shaft.
• _vdpp 4y ago
  A few random thoughts: 1. For as much as we spend on education, teachers seem to be grossly underpaid - to be getting robbed of their share of the budget. Where does that money go? 2. It seems that education degrees are seen as easier to achieve than others. 3. Teachers frequently complain about how they are unappreciated, yet children spend _12 years_ in their care. Why do people come up to them and say they hated school rather than “thank you”? 4. Many school problems are caused by disruptive children. Disruptive children are caused by parents who frankly just don’t give a shit. Throwing more money into schools won’t ever fix this problem. 5. Schools are just too darn big. Thousands of kids in a big prison-shaped building and we wonder why everyone is alienated, miserable and dehumanized?
  • borski 4y ago
    I agree with the rest of your post, but: > Disruptive children are caused by parents who frankly just don’t give a shit. This isn’t necessarily true; sometimes the parents simply don’t have the proper info or education themselves. Example: parent of a kid with ADHD who has no understanding of what ADHD is or how it presents, and thus that their kid even has it.
    • millzlane 4y ago
      This goes back to the parents who aren't taking their child to doctors for health checkups for any myriad of reasons. Early and often checkups should catch these issues. In your example I wouldn't say parents don't give a shit. But as someone who had ADHD but didn't cut up in school or wasn't a class clown, I had discipline at home. Sure I would talk during class and my mind would wander. But I wasn't being so disruptive class couldn't be taught. Almost always in the examples of why teachers don't want to teach anymore. The focus is always on pay, testing, and administration. But who wants to come to work and teach children that are so disrespectful and so disruptive that class can't be taught. My salary wouldn't be the deciding factor here.
    • troelsSteegin 4y ago
      As a parent, you can be well very well informed on the issue, and still not be able to solve it in your kid. I'd venture that this kind of futility is more prevalent than ignorance.
• mensetmanusman 4y ago
  Teacher’s lives were taken over by bureaucrats and regulations that are updated yearly requiring new ‘training’. Ever seen the pages long bullet points of sub-sub-sub topics supposed to be covered in kindergarten? Know how much stress that would add…
• mensetmanusman 4y ago
  Increase the child tax credit and let schools compete on strategy. Having multiple strategies is actually super useful for preventing monocultures and increasing diversity of thought.
• brohoolio 4y ago
  Undervaluing education is another sign that society is shifting to rent seeking. Extracting short term wealth by burning the future.
• politelemon 4y ago
  The title makes it sound like the fault or some problem lies with teachers, and that doesn't help in spreading the issue. Similar to "nobody wants to work anymore" sounds like a fault with workers, but actually is a symptom. Title should be, nobody wants to support teachers anymore.
• scythe 4y ago
  This blog post touches on a lot of topics. I'm laying in bed and groggy, so I'm just going to highlight one thing: >They’re lucky if they have air conditioning. LKY: "Air conditioning was a most important invention for us, perhaps one of the signal inventions of history. It changed the nature of civilization by making development possible in the tropics. Without air conditioning you can work only in the cool early-morning hours or at dusk. The first thing I did upon becoming prime minister was to install air conditioners in buildings where the civil service worked. This was key to public efficiency." You can't think properly if you're hot. This isn't my opinion, it's measurable. E.g. https://mdpi-res.com/d_attachment/ijerph/ijerph-18-07698/article_deploy/ijerph-18-07698-v2.pdf?version=1627009456 https://mdpi-res.com/d_attachment/ijerph/ijerph-18-07698/art... https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/02656736.2017.1345013 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/02656736.2017.13... "Findings indicate that academic achievement is linked to building condition mediated by the social climate and student attendance. The model accounted for 70 percent of the variance in the outcome measures." https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272494416300287 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02724... Teaching is complicated. Politics is complicated. Parent-school interactions are very complicated. Air conditioning, by comparison, is drop-dead simple. The inability of school districts to do the simplest and most obvious thing to address the problem underscores the degree to which meaningful information is driven out of the education dialogue by pet-issue squabbling.
• holyknight 4y ago
  Most teachers are incredibly incompetent at their job. I am all up in rising the wages of teachers if they can keep up with their task. Wages and seniority should be based on data on teacher performance not in years.
• gizmondo 4y ago
  Which math books were banned for being too woke? Are they good?
• donatj 4y ago
  > Well, I’m a teacher so let me tell you: > > It’s definitely about the money. If that's the case, you choose so poorly and your judgment is so questionable I'm not sure you should be teaching our children. You're trying to get milk from a stone. You get milk from a teat. You get money from where the money is, you get money from the private sector.
• spaceman_2020 4y ago
  As the husband of a college teacher who has been perpetually on the tenure track, it really is true that they’re not paid enough. My wife has put in more hours than anyone I know, is more qualified than almost everyone I know. And yet I made way more than her in a single year than she did in a decade because I happened to venture into a field VCs love (and which has zero positive impact on society - web3). Its cruel and a gross symptom late stage capitalism and its completely misaligned capital allocation.
• prirun 4y ago
  I know a few teachers who have quit or want to quit. It isn't a money issue, at least for them. My high-school computer science teacher (many moons ago) taught advanced high-school math. He quit because the administrative requirements became too burdensome. He loved teaching, but every year the administrivia got worse until he finally quit. Another teacher was a special-ed reading instructor; that's what she was trained for. But the school lost their funding for her category, so they made her a kindergarten teacher. As if that wasn't bad enough, the principal scheduled so many meetings that the teachers effectively lost their planning period and had to do that at home. Parents had direct access to teachers via email, and parents' complaints had to be addressed by the teachers every day - also outside of school hours. Another teacher was in a poorer school district (elementary) and quit because the teaching environment was just too difficult. More money won't fix any of these problems.
  • bittercynic 4y ago
    More money can certainly solve those problems. I work at a school that improved during my time. We've enjoyed some changes that brought the school significantly more funding, and it has allowed us to attract better applicants, and hire additional staff members that help take some of that load off the teachers. Also, simply having more adults per student makes a big difference, provided they are the right adults for the job. Your friend was forced into the wrong category because of a funding problem.
• mynameishere 4y ago
  This person is all over the map--it's the kind of rambling for which the awful five paragraph essay was designed to correct. Anyway, I am assuming that she is a public teacher and her job is to some extent supported by that fact (with respect to working conditions, salary, etc) as well as by a union. Many private schools, especially religious schools, actually do pay a "pittance" which probably more closely reflects the market rate. Such teachers often do depend on a spouse's salary, or live in real poverty. Public teachers benefits are usually much, much better. Of course, the big disadvantage of a public school: You get what you get. Only the very, very worst students are expelled so classroom behavior can be wretched, with correspondingly wretched parents (if any). The administration is politically motivated and the teachers get the short end there, too. Good districts have no trouble getting teachers, and never have.
• r3trohack3r 4y ago
  > Nobody wants to teach Counterpoint: the internet is full of people who want to teach. The first school of YouTube is overflowing with educational content on everything from merge sort to patching dry-wall. A large portion of my social circle hold teaching/mentorship as a career goal. I don't think this is pedantic. When I look around, I see a surplus of people that want to learn and want to teach. What I don't see is people storming the gates for a horribly broken system that robs many humans of their best years while inflicting lifelong trauma. A position that is horribly underpaid relative to the demands of the job (so you aren't doing it for money) and isn't allowed to meaningfully improve things (so you aren't doing it to "make a difference" unless you think putting on a smile is going to substantially change the outcome, which it sometimes does.) I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing. If you can provide a service at any standard of quality, list jobs at any standard of quality and pay, and the demand never dries up; there really is no incentive to fix things. At some point the education system in its current form needs to collapse.
  • Apreche 4y ago
    This is the one. If I have to work (i.e.: not just live a life of luxury on the beach) my top pick would be to teach computers to children. So why am I not doing that job today? 1) The barrier to entry to getting that job is very high. I would probably have to go back to school and learn education, and it won't even be free! The barrier to entry for a job in the private sector is low, requiring no special certification. If you can do the job, you can get the job. 2) The teaching job comes with vastly more bureaucracy and bullshit than a private sector job. The thing I actually want to do, teach computers, is actually only a small portion of what the actual job of a teacher entails. That other stuff is absolutely not how I want to spend my brief time living on this planet. 3) Given 1 and 2, the compensation for being a teacher is orders of magnitude lower than just working in the private sector. There's no reward for putting in the extra work and tolerating the hassle. I have indeed considered on many occasions becoming a teacher at the school of YouTube. I've been a student there longer than I have at any other institution.
  • carapace 4y ago
    This. The Internet obviates most of our current educational system. E.g., textbooks are absurd in a world where every child has a radio-networked pocket supercomputer. The daycare aspect of schools is broken, obviously, but that's a deep societal problem far beyond the ability of teachers to fix. The educational aspect of schools is (mostly, but not entirely) redundant to the resources available for free on the Internet. Perhaps we should separate those aspects from each other? (I dunno. I don't have children so it's not (immediately) my problem.)
• SturgeonsLaw 4y ago
  The United States seems hellbent on sabotaging education. This is not going to help future generations, and is going to put the likelihood of ongoing hegemony into question - over time, how can that compete with nations that continually invest in their population?
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • sanxiyn 4y ago
    I mean, yes in general, but there is simply no mystery here. US already competes by accepting immigrants, and US will be able to compete in the future as long as it is attractive to immigrants and keeps accepting more immigrants than anyone else. US definitely should invest in education, but US hegemony can be secure without doing so.
• sanderjd 4y ago
  Why would they? Super hard job, terrible pay, horrible disrespect by parents and politicians. It's an awful situation that makes me very worried about my kids' ability to get an education.
• bulbosaur123 4y ago
  Tons of people teaching on youtube every subject imaginable.
• booleandilemma 4y ago
  I've known former teachers who have turned to software engineering simply because the pay is better. People are going to go where the money is.
• chiefalchemist 4y ago
  > Almost nobody respects teachers. > They think schools exist in order to warehouse children while their parents do the real work, Full disclosure: I'm not a teacher. Three thoughts: 1) I wish I had $20 for everytime I've seen a social media meme along the lines of "kids should be taught _____ in school. Like/share if you agree" and 90% of the time it's something parents can and should be doing at home. 2) Ironically, anecdotally, it seems it's "too busy for their kids" parents who insist on outsourcing more and more to school systems. Some of this seems cultural (i.e., that belief has become normalized) but it also exist in the context of systemic issues (e.g., wages continue to lose ground to inflation...everyone needs to own more than they can afford). 3) The last couple of years there has been a lot of chatter about "threats to our democracy" imho most of it misguided hyperbolic media narrative. On the other hand, The Fourth Estate has erroded to become a toothless stuff animal. That's a legit threat. All that's needed now are less educated less thought-able masses.
• JustSomeNobody 4y ago
  There is a certain group of people who want to dismantle public education and replace it with a for-profit system. All of this going on right now is to support that goal.
• nsonha 4y ago
  At the same time everyone wants to teach and sell courses, no one want to actually do things they're supposedly a guru at.
• germinalphrase 4y ago
  Anecdote time: In June, I left my position teaching high school English after about ten years. Within weeks, I have increased my TC from ~50k to ~80k. Admittedly, I will have fewer vacation days, but I will work fewer hours with no additional labor or responsibilities in the evening/weekends.
• yonaguska 4y ago
  > States banned math books for being too woke. > being asked to breathe children’s germs Ok. This article is basically a long rant, and this kind of teacher is exactly what contributed to the burning out of my wife as a teacher. She wanted to teach math, but was being asked to teach social justice math. > I mean, they’re letting anyone in the classroom now. I’m surprised they haven’t started recruiting the homeless. Is this a dig at the latest Desantis bill to fast track veterans into teaching roles? Another complaint, my wife went to one of the highest ranked schools in the country, and was just shy of the minimum gpa requirement to go into the public school system right out of college. Instead she went and taught at charter schools, and her students regularly outperformed other schools in the network with math scores. But she wasn't qualified to teach math until she did a graduate program that had nothing to do with math. She quit the graduate school program because she was being graded on her ability to be inclusive in the classroom and it was a rubric designed for pushing equity and social justice, when again...she was trying to teach math. She would have been just "anyone" being allowed to teach in a classroom.
  • atoav 4y ago
    What would "social justice math" look like? Serious question, I can't even imagine. Here in Europe math education hasn't changed a ton in the past decades at all.
    • rayiner 4y ago
      It’s an effort by teachers unions to use their presence in schools to socialize minority children into viewing themselves as victims of pervasive racism and to cultivate activist leanings that will lead them to vote democrat (the party tightly aligned with teachers unions): https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/teaching-math-through-a-social-justice-lens/2020/12 https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/teaching-math-throu...
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    • Tomte 4y ago
• analog31 4y ago
  The US has always experienced relentless political activism against public education. This creates a climate where teachers, and the institution they work in, are actively hated by a wide swath of the public. This is due in no small part to proponents of religious education. It's true that teachers receive an above-average salary, but that can be both a blessing and a curse. The curse is that your wages are a matter of public record, and more than half of voters earn less then you, though teaching their precious children should be a privilege. A second thing is that schools are the repository of social problems that they can't solve, including poverty, racism, the proliferation of firearms, and rise of violent rhetoric. My state outlawed the teachers' union several years ago, and a lot of senior teachers took early retirement or went into other jobs. Most were old enough that they had settled into their lifestyle, and weren't going to get rich by changing careers. The word they used the most was "respect." My neighbor, one of the best teachers in the district, is now working as an engineer. His spouse is a mid six figure executive.
  • rayiner 4y ago
    The proper socialization of children is always going to generate controversy. Fundamentally, most parents view teachers as public employees hired to teach kids what the community agrees kids should learn. But teachers often see themselves as part of a profession that has an obligation to socialize children in (little-l) liberal values or outright (big-l) Liberal values. Of course this generates backlash. And it’s not just from “proponents of religious education.” The most recent iteration is often coming from moderate liberals who oppose increasingly progressive teachers unions. Progressive teaching became a flash point in Loudoun County VA, right next to where I grew up. International migration to that region flipped Virginia blue in the earth 2000. A lot of Google employees live there. A great way to get an Indian Biden voter worked up is to tell them “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/578885-education-blunder-igniting-suburban-parents-driving-mcauliffe-panic-in/ https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/578885-education-blunde...
  • ErikVandeWater 4y ago
    > The US has always experienced relentless political activism against public education. Lol we spend almost 3x more on k-12 public education now (inflation adjusted) than we did in 1960. I really doubt the relentless political activism was on the side against public education. Really, the cost to educate a child should have gone down substantially relative to inflation given new technologies that make teaching easier and faster.
• CivBase 4y ago
  This title is absolutely false, at least where I live. My wife and many of my friends and family are teachers. There is a ton of competition and all of them have had a hard time getting a stable job teaching something they don't hate. Most of them have either moved across the country, feigned religious practice, or accepted positions nobody else would take with little opportunity for advancement just to get their feet in the door. My wife went the "positions nobody else would take with little opportunity for advancement" route and even amidst the so-called "shortages" she has been struggling and failing at finding a normal teaching position - both in her current district and nearby metro districts - even though she has a stunning reputation and 6 years of in-classroom teaching experience. There is no shortage. Teaching is an overcrowded job market and has been for a while, despite the poor pay and miserable conditions. I blame the education system itself for giving would-be teachers such unrealistic expectations for occupational outlook and work environment. The author said "Everyone secretly thinks they can teach because they watched Mr. Holland’s Opus" and she's right, but one of my biggest frustrations is how the post-secondary education system does nothing to address that mentality. But there's more to this than just the title, so let's take a look at the other headers. > Almost nobody respects teachers. Also false. The majority of people respect teachers. When my wife wears anything indicating she's a teacher outside of work, she often gets compliments on her position, words of encouragement, and general appreciation from random passerbys. I've never once heard anyone make a snide remark about teachers to her. The difficulty my wife seems to have is with parents and admins. The admins love to micromanage and usually end up wasting time and making things worse. Most parents are fine (some are even great), but there's always a few that have unreasonable expectations and would rather blame teachers for their child's misbehavior than hold their child responsible. Those are the ones she talks about, but she admits they are a minority. > Teachers are beyond burned out. Absolutely. > Americans think it’s “not about the money.” Is that really true though? I've never met anyone who has outwardly expressed that. You have to have some passion for teaching to bear with it, but I think most Americans realize that money is pretty important for getting by in life and teachers are no exception. > Teaching has become truly miserable. Yup. > It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. I don't really understand this one. The author talks about how schools are accepting worse and worse teachers, but she doesn't really elaborate on how that is a "self-fulfilling prophecy". > America doesn’t deserve its teachers. Don't we, though? I think we deserve exactly what the monstrous system we've created has given us - both the good and bad. I think there's a lot that can be done to fix the US education system. I think funding is part of it, but I also think starting there is a grave mistake. Putting more money into a bad system just produces more bad results. Fix the system, then invest more into it. I have lots of ideas on how to "fix" it, but this comment has gone on long enough.
• black_13 4y ago
• MomoXenosaga 4y ago
  Some professions simply can't do capitalism. I always joke with people at work that a hundred years ago doctors could charge whatever they wanted and sexually harass their patients. Now we just want to help people.
• amelius 4y ago
  Teachers are rockstars that need to find agents that make sure they get paid well.
  • zweifuss 4y ago
    The "Rockstar Professors" I know were overhyped. Some of my best teachers had only a so-so reputation, but were hard workers, curious, and honest and expected as much from their pupils.
• ericbarrett 4y ago
  Our school district just raised teacher salary significantly. Guess what? Applications are up 300%.
• grendelt 4y ago
  > It’s definitely about the money. This. It's all about the money. I left the classroom and literally shed a tear in front of my principal. She asked what she could do for me to stay and I said "I need more money. I have bills to pay." You can't pay a mortgage with thank you notes, certificates of appreciation, and hugs. I taught high school Computer Science, a needed subject area with countless CS training initiatives and resources, but the pay still wasn't (and still isn't) there. I have a family and can't afford to stay in the classroom if I want to stay in my house, own a car, have a cell phone and internet, and pay off student loans. I clicked the article because it says nobody wants to teach; I want to teach, I just can't afford to.
  • lordnacho 4y ago
    What do you do now? Coding?
• baazaa 4y ago
  Schools are just a place for warehousing kids; even people who take no interest in education know this from personal experience back from when they were a kid. Exactly 0 of 627 college students can answer simple questions like 'What is the name of the mountain range that separates Europe from Asia?' or 'What is the last name of the author of The Brothers Karamazov?'. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmarshallcrotty/2013/09/10/10-questions-that-most-college-students-cant-answer-but-you-probably-can/?sh=e4046cd1dba3 https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmarshallcrotty/2013/09/10/... The striking thing is that the dismal career prospects hasn't stopped bright ambitious people trying to get into academia. Whereas In Australia you can just look at entry-scores for teaching degrees to see that only people who did poorly in school go into teaching nowadays. So sure, pay and conditions have some influence but it's not a sufficient condition to explain what's happened in teaching. Pretty sure if researchers could get the job security and entitlements of teachers we'd have no problem finding bright people trying to get into research. But that's because research is more intrinsically rewarding and higher status. Child-minding just fundamentally isn't a job which requires much talent, the job is steadily degrading to the status and pay which one would expect for a semi-skilled occupation. The teachers' unions are doing a valiant job fighting a rear-guard action to prevent that decline, through rampant credentialism to buttress the 'professional' status of the job. But it's an uphill fight, politicians aren't going to push for tax hikes to fund teacher salaries when every voter knows full-well that regardless they're still going to have to teach their kids themselves or get tutoring if they want their kid to actually learn anything.
  • xwdv 4y ago
    > Exactly 0 of 627 college students can answer simple questions like 'What is the name of the mountain range that separates Europe from Asia?' or 'What is the last name of the author of The Brothers Karamazov?'. These simple questions that are just recitation of facts are worthless. I don’t even know the answers to these. The only questions that measure anything useful are critical thinking type questions, consider simple things any CS student should be able to answer such as “Describe the design for a roles based authentication system” or “Describe an implementation of a communications bus between multiple systems in a micro services architecture”
• brightball 4y ago
  Cut the administrative overhead, cut a lot of the federal requirements that drive up costs and put that money into classrooms directly. This is the stuff that advocates for vouchers and private schools have been saying for years. It’s impossible to change things in public schools due to the channels involved. Private schools, on the other hand, can operate and adapt much more efficiently. My kids go to one. They love it, we love it, their teachers are happy and well respected. Because by sending our kids to that school we made a choice. We evaluated our options and decided this was the best place for them. When kids are forced into a school due to zoning or because their parents can’t afford either a private or home school option, or moving to a house with different options, the parents have no recourse but to grumble about everything that they don’t like. It wasn’t their decision. Is money part of the problem? Sure. But it’s not just the teacher pay it’s the money for options that parents can choose. So much of this goes away if a school can simply tell an unhappy parent, “Maybe this isn’t the best school for your family?” When parents make a choice themselves, they own it.
• freddealmeida 4y ago
  Though many want to educate. teachers seem to be a new breed these days.
• epgui 4y ago
  The lack of respect for education and the teaching profession will be the downfall of the West, IMO. It’s not like that everywhere. My father was a teacher and I am very proud of that. However, I grew up thinking “my goodness, I never want to do this”. It’s a real shame.
  • sanxiyn 4y ago
    Writing from South Korea. My father was a teacher and I am very proud of that and basically everyone around me reinforced that pride by showing respect. Everything I read about US teachers is so alien.
• irrational 4y ago
  One thing I wonder is if teachers are in such high demand, why do they put up with crap from their administrators and politicians saying that this is what they have to teach and how they have to teach it. Why don’t they just teach whatever they want to teach and do it however they want to do it? The worst that can happen is they will be fired, but they can probably find a new teaching position easily since there is such a high demand.
  • Someone1234 4y ago
    Two reasons: - They legitimately love their jobs and the kids. - If they quit/are fired, and have to find a new job that may reset their steps (i.e. they take a pay cut, but not just for one year but for their career). Inter-district transfers can be blocked or have the same problems at the receiving school. Plus there are some fields that are more in-demand than others (e.g. maths/science Vs. art/social studies).
  • BuyMyBitcoins 4y ago
    >”The worst that can happen is they will be fired, but they can probably find a new teaching position easily since there is such a high demand.” Just like any career, the next institution looking to hire someone is going to ask about why that person left their last job. Regardless of whether or not the next school is public or private, they’re going to want to hire a teacher that is compliant rather than defiant. Even in the face of a teachers shortage, these schools are still obligated to teach a curriculum and won’t want to hire someone who they will likely have to replace in short order.
    • moeris 4y ago
      > the next institution looking to hire someone is going to ask about why that person left their last job Indeed, schools aren't as isolated as businesses are, either. If you go rogue and make a huge stink at one school, you can bet no nearby district will hire you. On the other hand, if you play ball and do a decent job, other districts will look out for you when an opening happens. It happened to me, right before I left teaching. Another thing to consider is that outside of large cities, you're geographically constrained. If you own a house and mess things up with your school, you're looking at having to add 30+ minutes to your commute to get to the next school. (Who will probably have heard of your escapades.) Seniority is another factor to consider. It's very difficult for teachers in their first five years to get a job. (On average, it takes five years for teachers to become proficient in classroom management, so schools tend to prefer more experienced teachers). Anyway, that means there's a huge block of teachers who will have a difficult time despite shortages. Like in tech, it's primarily a shortage of qualified teachers. At least, when I was teaching ~5 years ago.
• lastofthemojito 4y ago
  Can confirm - my wife is a teacher and it seems every year is getting more difficult. I guess it's too soon to say how much of this is pandemic-related, either directly or indirectly, but it seems like testing, bureaucracy and parent madness (e.g. perception that the curriculum is too "woke" or not woke enough, etc.) have certainly been getting worse too. But I'm also hearing (and experiencing) increased BS in other industries. Remote work spyware (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/08/14/business/worker-productivity-tracking.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/08/14/business/work...) and flawed metrics-based performance measurement. So I don't know how much of it is teacher-specific and how much of it is general nonsense.
• UIUC_06 4y ago
  "Teachers are underpaid, so let's spend more on education!" right? Wrong, or at least, a grade of Incomplete. http://usedbyeducatorsblog.com/education-spending-vs-teachers-salaries/ http://usedbyeducatorsblog.com/education-spending-vs-teacher... Colorado has enjoyed a 15 percent increase in spending per student from 1992 to 2014 when adjusted for inflation. Put another way, in 2014 Colorado public school students had 15 percent more real resources spent on their education compared to students in 1992. During that same period, however, the average Colorado teacher’s salary has gone down by 11 percent when adjusted for inflation This is fairly universal, I'd surmise. Most commenters seem to assume that if we wanted to spend, let's say, $100M more on teachers' salaries, we'd have to increase the public education budget by $100M. More like $300M, I'd guess.
• fancyfredbot 4y ago
  The same could be said about the UK. Anecdotally, every single teacher I know has either quit or moved into the private sector, with the exception of those with partners in a better paid profession. I'm genuinely surprised that anyone will do the job.
• wawjgreen 4y ago
  i have always said it: teachers don't know how to teach, students don't know how to learn, school admin don't know how to manage. Append a "most" for each (I love Ruby). The fundamental problem is one of teacher education and an understanding of what it means to impart knowledge. Nobody knows anything about this anymore, certainly not even edu psychologists (50% of their papers are statistically invalid, the other 50% are too lab-centric to have any classroom value). A good solution is to produce a highly-paid, highly-autonomous batch of properly-trained and highly-educated teachers who should have the biggest say in how they do their job--don't do that and pretty soon you won't have an educated class.
• flerchin 4y ago
  Is there any evidence that teachers are experiencing a labor shortage out of line with any other industry? My kids' teachers are awesome, and they're quite good at their jobs. My district also pays quite a bit more than the state average in Texas.
• yodsanklai 4y ago
  Situation is similar in France. Teachers are underpaid and in some fields (e.g. maths), it gets hard to fill open positions. The gvt tries to improve slightly the entry level salary to make the job more attractive, while betting that senior teachers are stuck there with no other job alternatives. And they compensate by hiring under qualified, short term, teachers. To some extent, it's similar in higher education. The relative freedom enjoyed in academic jobs isn't enough to compensate an increasing salary gap between public/private sectors. In expensive cities, it can even be hard to live decently with a teacher/lecturer salary, and certainly not possible to save for your retirement. If you can't rely on external sources of income, I think it's not reasonable to engage in these activities if more lucrative alternatives exist. And considering France increasing public debt, I don't see how the situation is going to improve.
  • ever1 4y ago
    yep, but I guess most people are ok with this, we have a lot of people saying that teachers are priviliged people having too much vacations and not working enough per week. It's a strong common belief. And with current government politics, it looks like we are witnessing the end of a public education in France, the unqualified contractuals teachers hired after a quick interview is more interesting financially than an official.
• xivzgrev 4y ago
  I’m frankly surprised schools haven’t collapsed. It seems like borderline abuse of teachers - low pay, undisciplined kids, have to buy your own supplies. Then this article also points out all the rules and people who think they know better than you. When I have kids, I plan myself to be lead with respect of the teachers when I meet them
• jschveibinz 4y ago
  I am an early-retired EE and I thought that I could have a second career in teaching HS physics. I got the MA Teaching in Maryland, and did my one year student teaching assignment. My thoughts: 1. The degree program was decent, although a certificate program would be better for prior professionals if the law allowed it (lower cost, too much wasted time in redundant classes). 2. Teachers are sad. Very sad. They are underpaid and overworked, even at the better suburban high schools. Parents treat them poorly, even when they are veteran teachers with lots of experience. 3. In general, the public resents that teachers get “3 months off” in the summer. I believe that this is the justification for lower pay. It is silly, because teachers work more in 9 months than most professionals and they also pay for things out of their own pockets. They also counsel and tutor students after school. It’s a difficult job. 4. In my job interviews, the first and most important qualification was “classroom control.” Math, science, engineering, life experience were all distant seconds. Teachers—-even in advanced math and science classes—-are first and foremost caretakers. Think about that for a second… 5. What is the current model for education based on? There are several competing historical arguments, but the salient factors like student-teacher ratio, subjects, grades, facilities, etc. are based on economics and legal requirements. The quality of either a student’s experience or a teacher’s experience is not very high on the list. Education is about checking a box on a list of requirements that was developed 150+ years ago. Ultimately, I decided to tutor rather than to teach in a classroom. I consider this a personal disappointment, although I learned a lot from the educational experience. I wish there could be a “town hall” type of discussion to consider ways to improve the situation.
  • VirusNewbie 4y ago
    Sounds like there are two jobs here: babysitting, and teaching. Both are valuable, though likely that the former isn’t as difficult skill to master.
    • bobthepanda 4y ago
      The problem is usually that in a very disrupted classroom, teaching is going to be impossible, so you do need to have the ability to keep things manageable. If kids start climbing on things and throwing stuff no one is going to pay attention to math.
• kevmo 4y ago
  We probably should have elected Bernie Sanders. https://berniesanders.com/issues/reinvest-in-public-education/ https://berniesanders.com/issues/reinvest-in-public-educatio...
• wiz21c 4y ago
  FTA: "When you call someone burned out, it implies a personal moral failing on their part. The phrase shifts the conversation away from work conditions to a teacher’s individual personal choices." So true... In other jobs too...
• kleer001 4y ago
  ... in the United States.
• jscipione 4y ago
  I don’t want teachers anymore either because I see them as an institution of racially motivated anti-white hate. From CRT to the Minneapolis teachers’ union all I see is hate.
  • n4r9 4y ago
    Could you provide some concrete examples please?
    • jscipione 4y ago
      Sure https://criticalrace.org/ https://criticalrace.org/ details anti-white hate training in higher education including teaching colleges as well as elite private high schools, and the Minneapolis Teachers’ union’s new anti-white hate policy has been widely reported for example by msn https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/minneapolis-teachers-union-defends-race-based-layoff-policy/ar-AA10SCe8 https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/minneapolis-teachers-union...
      • n4r9 4y ago
        This is kind of like saying that programs and scholarships for disadvantaged youths are "anti-wealth".
    • amusedcyclist 4y ago
      Don't feed the white supremacist trolls
• tristor 4y ago
  From growing up watching my mother struggling with the daft administration she dealt with as a teacher, I pretty much agree with the overall thrust of this article. I personally enjoy teaching and have discussed many times with my wife that I should teach in my retirement from tech, but we both understand the pay is so little it doesn’t provide a realistic career option until after we’ve hit FIRE. We truly do treat teachers horribly in this country. That said, I think this article would have been better without irrelevant jabs at favored left-wing punching bags who have nothing to do with the main point.
• jhoechtl 4y ago
  Partly because nobody wants to learn. Its all about getting a grade.
• devwastaken 4y ago
  "old system in modern day doesn't work, in other news water is wet.". Teachers leave overwhelmingly because of the school office politics. Admins want things to stay the same forever, pushing classes that we don't need for people that don't want them. High schools are prisons. Universities are scams. The good teachers recognize this and left. If we want to fix it, we need to wipe the system and create a new one that focuses upon what's necessary and not what ivy league people think is needed.
  • nerdponx 4y ago
    There is a lot of room between "teachers have it really rough" and "high schools are prisons and we should blow it all up".
• polskibus 4y ago
  This is the case in many countries not just USA but also EU.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• nutanc 4y ago
  I "want" to teach. It's just that, teaching as a profession is not sustainable for me. I am sure a lot of teachers are in the same boat as me.
• RickJWagner 4y ago
  Well, that's a mixed bag. My son just started his second year teaching kindergarten. I agree teaching is underappreciated and under paid. I'm from South Dakota, I have a different view of the event she described. In my view, teachers were able to volunteer to score donated dollars by taking part in a light-hearted fund raiser. Accusing the organizers of being monsters assures there will be no further donated-money galas. My wife also acts as a substitute teacher. From what I can gather, unruly kids who do not understand discipline are perhaps the biggest cause of unnecessary stress.
• tejohnso 4y ago
  > Americans think it’s great that some dude like Joe Rogan or Elon Musk can make a fortune off being an asshole. Could've done without this pathetic personal attack on two of the most successful people in their domains. Joe Rogan bringing an outstanding format, guests, and great conversation that people are willing to pay for, and Musk bringing intelligence and obsessive drive and courage to bear on multiple industries, resulting in world changing improvements. But sure, just call them assholes and somehow attribute their financial success to that. If that's all it took, there would be a lot more people with a net worth of nine or ten figures.
• nvahalik 4y ago
  Our kids attend a hybrid school. Home 2/3 days at school 2/3 days. It’s technically a private school but it leans way more classical. During orientation we learned a LOT of our new co-teachers were actually ex public school teachers. They were tired of the direction of the schools and didn’t want to subject their kids to the conditions they saw. They want to teach. They love teaching. Just not in the public schools.
• poorbutdebtfree 4y ago
  It's not money. Everyone is afraid to say the quiet part out loud. 90% of the kids in urban schools simply don't want to be there and make life hell for teachers, administration, and the other 10% with actual potential. Half measures dont work!
• dhosek 4y ago
  Former HS math teacher here. It was the hardest job I’ve ever had. I still have nightmares about being back in the classroom 18 years later. I was easily working 12+ hours a day doing class planning, grading, etc. not to mention the actual teaching. Returning to programming my pay doubled and my stress level dropped profoundly. Teacher pay should easily be double what it is. (And about that summers off—with the exception of teachers who had non-teaching spouses or those in the back third of their career, everyone worked summer jobs to make ends meet.)
  • acjohnson55 4y ago
    I'm also a former HS math teacher and I 100% agree.
  • douglaswlance 4y ago
    Why do you need to plan/grade ? Why isn't that automated?
    • jedberg 4y ago
      Ah, the engineer who thinks everything can be solved with software. To automate grading you first must create a general AI, because if you just do multiple choice exams, you aren't really testing or measuring someone's ability to perform the task, you're just measuring their ability to make a good guess. And some teachers do that. But not the good ones. As for planning, some senior teachers have filing cabinets labeled by day. They just reach into the file and pull out the lesson for "day 82". But any good teacher will realize that they have to customize the learning to that year's kids, and constantly update with new teaching methodologies, new information, etc. And sometimes the school adopts a whole new curriculum, and then you have to start all over.
      • acjohnson55 4y ago
        > Ah, the engineer who thinks everything can be solved with software. Just as a bit of feedback, starting your comment like this may have turned off the original poster to the rest of your thoughts, which I agree with.
• rodolphoarruda 4y ago
  > "...asked to breathe children’s germs and fling our bodies toward gunfire." These problems are above and beyond the community's reach to be resolved.
• radiojasper 4y ago
  Pay them more. Then while you're at it, pay police more as well. The two pillars that should keep our systems together are disgustingly underpaid... High School Teachers earned an average salary of $67,340 in 2020. Comparable jobs earned the following average salary in 2020: Elementary School Teachers made $65,420, Middle School Teachers made $64,990, School Counselors made $62,320, and Sports Coaches made $47,100. Then we haven't even mentioned the massive debt students rake up to be able to pay for their education and sustain their lives while studying. It's one big mess.
  • missedthecue 4y ago
    What's the minimum offer it would take for you to quit your job and go be a middle school teacher right now?
    • idontpost 4y ago
      About $400k. That's double what I'm paid now, but I used to be a high school teacher and it was twice as much work (as measured by mental and emotional strain, not hours) as my job now.
• douglaswlance 4y ago
  Why isn't education highly automated? Why do teachers across the country teach the same way we did before we had high-powered computers and information networks?
  • TIPSIO 4y ago
    Your comment made me think of the scene in the first Star Trek movie where all the little Spock children are in an emotionless hole being programmed with math and philosophy. Not saying you are wrong or right, but for many kids having an adult who simply cares is worth infinitely more than any amount of efficiencies or base material.
    • douglaswlance 4y ago
      So automate what can be automated to free the teacher to care more.
      • polypodiopsi 4y ago
        Lol, you have no idea. Prove me wrong... What do you think should be automated about the teaching profession? Taking care? Motivating? Observing listening analysing what is happening in that temporary microsociety you manage? Prepare lessons, research extend your own knowledge? React to what is Happening changing the course of your lessons to react to what actually happens in the classroom? Have conbersations with kids and parents? Judge if the production of these little ones shows progression? Figure out what potential problems might be (structurally socially psychologically). Have humor, and dedicate some time to just simply forming a bond? Damn I cant think of a lot that could be automated besides the officework where the same tools are used as everywhere for scheduling, dicumentation communication etc...
  • zweifuss 4y ago
    Learning is social. Very close to 100%. That is why the Nuremberg funnel was never really invented. Technology as a teacher substitute has never proven itself in practice (i.e. outside of laboratory environments). There are a few students that are exceptionally driven, but even they learn socially. That we have tried to get better schools by economy of scale and standardized testing is reason for some of the problems and therefore cannot be solved with more of the same. * Social learning is more enjoyable and motivating. We learn from people, with people and because of people. * Interaction with others gives meaning to ideas. Ideas mean little without a social context. This has been proven again and again. * Discussing ideas increases understanding and retention of those ideas.
• 99_00 4y ago
  Yet the teachers union is extremely powerful
• samhuk 4y ago
  I've always found the media coverage around this topic strange. You will hear almost nothing about it for months, then a huge wave of Unhappy Teachers articles, videos, news items, etc. will rise up, then it all evaporates away into nothing as quickly as it began. And little ever gets done. I feel like very few politicians want to touch the education beast out of fear, perhaps because last time they did ('member Common Core?) it went nuclear-FUBAR. I'm not sure if anyone has already linked it, but CNBC just released a new piece on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlnspY2wOVw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlnspY2wOVw
• jongjong 4y ago
  This isn't surprising at all. Crony-capitalism is a zero-sum game. It literally rewards value extraction at the expense of value creation. Teaching creates value and it's terrible at capturing value because it offers very little negotiating power; teachers are fully reliant on big, powerful institutions for employment. Why would the big corporations with market monopolies (which control our governments) want to educate the masses? The big corporations don't want their competitors to be educated and they certainly don't want more free thinkers in society who can learn about our dysfunctional monetary system. Elite colleges churn out just enough graduates to keep the big corporate monopolies running. Graduates of all other schools and colleges are just fuel for the competition; they're a nuisance for big corporations; these individuals need to be kept incompetent so that they do not pose a threat to the existing order. Financially, it makes sense to dumb down the masses, pack them into tiny living spaces, feed them crickets, connect them to virtual reality and make sure that they don't have any children. Our monetary system ensures that our economy always caters to capital and the sources of capital (reserve bank money printers), not to people. It doesn't even allow for parallel economies to form when people can't afford to participate in the mainstream economy. It keeps everyone hooked until death.
• creamynebula 4y ago
  Education is one of the most important things for human and economic development, yet teachers are severely underpaid. Quality and availability of education would improve dramatically if salaries were higher.
• acjohnson55 4y ago
  As a former high school teacher, it is also no mystery to me why people are leaving the profession. It's by far the hardest job I've ever done. I journaled my experience here, for anyone who cares to read: https://acjay.com/a-former-teachers-story/ https://acjay.com/a-former-teachers-story/
• krony 4y ago
  Great opinion piece. Much agree. My wife works as a middle and high school substitute teacher across 6 districts in a large metro. All schools need subs so badly. But only 1 even raised their sub pay rate this year. Some try to offer higher rates for working more days in their district. But when one district pays $25 more a day than the others, they still don’t increase it. Teachers deserve more money. Also boggles my mind that the teachers unions are supposedly so powerful in this country, but if so then why are they paid so poorly?
• tppiotrowski 4y ago
  "Every single teacher I know has a second or third source of income, even professors. They’re either married to a banker, or they work a conventional second job. They have side hustles." My anecdote: My sister is a professor and my partner a 3rd grade teacher. Neither ever worked summer jobs but it sounds like they're outliers. I will say that having a classroom full of kids whose parents want to apply their individual moral philosophy on everyone is a challenge.
  • Iwan-Zotow 4y ago
    > My sister is a professor. Neither ever worked summer jobs Mmm... Not even summer semester?
  • jedberg 4y ago
    Do you and your partner live together? Do you pay some their rent, or food, or for travel? You're basically their subsidy. Nothing wrong with that, but just pointing it out, that maybe they don't need a second job because they have you. And are you sure your sister doesn't have a side hustle? Writing books? Tutoring? Expert witness? Consulting? Professors get a lot of opportunity for short term work, and many have to take it.
    • tppiotrowski 4y ago
      Good points. My partner lived solo for a few years. I moved into her apartment so she's able to save whatever I offset. She got a big pay raise for doing a masters, 35% I think. She also gets pay increases for each year she works. "Teachers" is a massive generalization in this letter. There are teaching assistants, special ed, teachers with masters and PhDs and teachers with 20 years experience that will all make vastly different amounts of money. I think my partners district tops out at $130K after 20 years with a masters which is comparable to what I make as a developer. I think her job is harder in some ways and easier in others. As with most topics, there's a bit more nuance that you can't capture in a short and opinionated piece. My sister has 2 kids. Partner attending law school. $80K salary between both. They live in Albany. Mortgage was $250K. They don't have money for daycare or babysitters but university schedule is flexible enough that they can always be with their kids. I'm sure they'd love some alone time but it is what it is. They do take advantage of work perks like sabbaticals and free tuition for law school to avoid large expenses they would otherwise incur. Hope this provides some more context for more original comment.
• jmugan 4y ago
  As a father of 3 kids, one thing that gets lost in these discussions is the fact that some teachers are great and some are bad, like really bad. We need to give the good ones more money and freedom and the bad ones means and incentive to improve or find a new profession.
  • jmugan 4y ago
    I wonder if this also relates to police officers. One of the problems seems to be that society doesn't have the right leverage over their behavior. Some are heroic and some give the profession a bad name.
• myself248 4y ago
  False. I want to teach, I just don't want to teach in the environment we've created for teachers to exist in.
• ljw1001 4y ago
  > Americans think it’s great that some dude like Joe Rogan or Elon Musk can make a fortune off being an asshole. Thank you for your service.
• locutous 4y ago
  The entirety of the edifice of public education is rotten. Nobody likes building software for clueless business types, running deathmarch after deathmarch. I don't blame teachers for seeing problems. Time to rework the system. More likely, blow it up and start over as it's politically impossible to make the structural changes required. Just like since companies can't be salvaged, this one is done.
• obscurette 4y ago
  1. This is not about America. I'm from Eastern Europe and we have the very same problems. 2. This is not about money. Yes, being underpaid is part of a problem how teachers feel, but no money compensates humiliation and bullying teachers are experiencing. 3. It's not a rant. This EXACTLY how I feel after spending three years at school. I was a math teacher in classes of my kids because a school couldn't find any. Yes, nobody wants to teach any more.
  • santoshalper 4y ago
    It's not just about the money, but I think the mediocre pay combined with all the bullshit is just too much.
    • obscurette 4y ago
      In most of Eastern Europe countries teachers had lower salaries than average as far as we remember - ie at least since WWII. It's expected for most of us here. But that wasn't my point. The point was that you can't compensate all this bullshit with money. OK, you might find some people who can do anything for money, but not so many you can fill all positions in public education system.
      • pojzon 4y ago
        30 years ago teachers were respected and parents trusted teachers with their kids. If the kid was misbehaving in class or getting bad grades -> was properly managed by parents. Right now parents are delusional about their kids. Blame teachers if something is wrong with the kid. Cant understand that most likely they are the issue why the kid is behaving this way. Dont want to take the blame. At least those are my obesrvations - my mom was a teacher with 40 years of experience and national wide fame.
        • vehementi 4y ago
          Like other people in this thread I've had the idea of retiring early and having a second career as a teacher. What if I did that, and then just refused to take any of that shit? Are teachers rare enough that I wouldn't get fired?
• LatteLazy 4y ago
  One core issue with modern education is that people DO want to teach. They want it so badly they will accept shit wages and spend their own money subsidising schools. The result is ever dwindling resources as teachers are viewed as sheep to be sheered and all cuts as tacitly excused as "they'll just have to make it work"...
• boxed 4y ago
  Change a few details and this is what it's like being a doctor too (at least in Sweden) from what I've heard. Autonomy. That's the thing. We have to let people do their damn jobs. Don't micro manage, don't second guess, don't interfere. Let people do their job. Let them.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• gorgoiler 4y ago
  I tried teaching high school CS for the best part of two years in a private school. Everything to do with the pupils was amazing and I loved every moment. I am a natural with behaviour management and although it was stressful, every time the bad kids acted up it presented a teachable moment. You could really feel the impact on their lives and behaviour, well behind the Python and the TCP/IP and while loops. But everything to do with working with other teachers was utter misery. Never have I met such a cantankerous downtrodden passive aggressive bunch of backstabbing political jobsworths. Actually, it was probably only one third of the staff that were the hyper negative old timers, but they had such a dismal impact on me it felt like everyone was cut from the same cliquey snobby cloth. Imagine the worst, most power hungry, little-napoleon office manager you’ve ever had and then imagine one in three of the staff have that mindset. It drove me mad and I’m now a SWE again but also volunteering at a youth center in our most deprived part of town and loving it. I can have impact with the kids, and as a volunteer I seem to command much more respect from parents than a lowly teacher. So now I am tainted too — if I hear you are a teacher then I will see before me someone who at best tolerates that level of crappiness in their workplace, and at worst actively takes part in it. Neither leave me with much respect for you, but I know why you do it: the kids.
  • Wistar 4y ago
    My wife is a primary public school teacher in the U.S. I read to her your comment, and she said to me, "We have 21 teachers at our school, and only one of them resembles what that comment describes."
    • donw 4y ago
      My parents were both teachers. A significant trunk of my classmates went into teaching after college. We keep in touch. The above comment is accurate.
      • Wistar 4y ago
        Which "above comment"?
• madsbuch 4y ago
  I am considering how the demografic development shapes this. In the span of 40 years or so, we will from 6 / 1 working to non working to 2 / 1 conclusing in the mid 2030s. I mean, indifferent to what means of redistribution schema we use, we simply won't get more labor, and issues might need to be solved along other axis. Not expecting the same level of service, etc.
• synthc 4y ago
  The same problem is happening in NL, it's a downwards spiral really that concerns me a lot. The government is trying to improve the situation by increasing pay a little, but with the current inflation it is probably too little, too late. A relative of mine became a teacher after a career switch, and while she likes the work, there are many frustrations: - Parents have a 'the customer is always right'-attitude, and complain about everything, but their kids are perfect of course. - Some years ago NL decided to cut down on schools for kids with special needs, so every class now has a few very disruptive kids who have nowhere else to go. This is a very frustrating situation for everyone: the disruptive kids don't get proper guidance, the 'normal' kids get lower quality classes, and teachers have to deal with problematic behaviour. - The shortage of teachers makes it hard to find replacements when calling in sick, plenty of teachers feel pressure to work when sick. This is of course a bad combo with the whole Corona situation. - Teachers spend a lot of (unpaid) time grading and other administrative BS. - Management is out of touch, they don't listen to their staff and think up time-consuming plans that are doomed to fail. (well, this is not specific to education) - Management is very unstable. The schools my kids go to had a different director pretty much each year.
  • Beltalowda 4y ago
    This is compounded by making it quite hard to actually get in to teaching, especially later in life. You have to go to school for 4 years and pay for this yourself (no student financing), which essentially no one does for obvious reasons. There is a special path for adults (zij-instroomtraject) which means you "only" get paid minimum wage for two years and the entry requirements (IMHO needlessly) excludes quite a few people. Inflexibility in how we treat education in general is a big problem; I was sent to MAVO back in the day only because I hated doing French and was pretty awful at it, and bad French grade of course means you can't possibly be good at anything else :-/ There were quite a few people in my MAVO class like that. There's been shortages of technically educated people for decades, which is not a surprise if you judge technical people on their ability to do French when they're 13 and then close off all avenues for further education based on that... Or, as one of my foreign friends said, "you need a diploma to clean a rat's arse here".
  • rr808 4y ago
• betwixthewires 4y ago
  Judging from this thread, my opinion on this is not going to be popular, please don't massacre me for it, just discuss it with me if you want, I won't be mean (unless you are) but I will be candid. Good. I'm glad nobody wants to teach anymore. The less teachers we have the better. That's for everyone, including the teachers. A surefire way to get paid more is a shortage of professionals. If you are so important as to be indispensable to society, maybe prove it by withholding your services. If you're so indispensable they'll pay you to get you to come back, and if they don't, fine, they'll find out just how indispensable you are. Teachers, at least in the US, are in fact glorified babysitters. The amount of stuff a kid in public school learns in 13 years that they actually use could be taught in 5. Public school is subsidized daycare so that the US could double it's labor force. This is not how I want it to be, I want kids to actually learn things, and only go to school to learn and not to be herded. I want overworked teachers to work less, much, much less. I have no doubt many of them are overworked, treated badly, and go into it at least because they care about children learning. But maybe it's like that because it's the only way an economy and society can justify the expense. Maybe the role they play is not worth as much as they think it is. Maybe they should stop teaching. I think most teachers have an overinflated sense of their contribution. Ask yourself, if they'll hire anyone off the street, that means anyone off the street wants to teach. That should tell you something about teaching, and if they really wouldn't last a week then don't sweat it, they're no threat to you, they'll be gone in a week. My big problem with education is not the teachers, it's the giant all encompassing bureaucracy that teachers and students have to constantly navigate. It seems to me like teachers by and large aren't that interested in simplifying that bureaucracy, even though from their complaints it's the largest source of their problems. I wonder why they don't attack it directly? I'm curious why they haven't all quit too. I want most of them to quit. Put your money where your mouth is. Show us what we all stand to lose without you. Don't tolerate this bullshit anymore. Quit. Find a profession where you're treated better. If you're right, we will beg you to come back. Make us beg. Make us grovel. Show us what it feels like. Rub our faces in it. I don't think teachers are "essential workers." I think that they don't quit because if they did, we (and they) would find out that we don't actually need them as much as they tell us we do. Maybe I don't know what I'm talking about, it wouldn't be the first time. You're wrong until you learn, right? Educate me.
  • 4y ago
• avsteele 4y ago
  Never trust an article with no numbers in it. Median teacher pay in NJ is $73K in 2020, and they get summer off.
  • rjbwork 4y ago
    I think I'd be a great teacher. Multiple of my co-workers have asked me if I've ever considered being a teacher, because apparently I'm really good at explaining things and taking on mentoring responsibilities. But the median pay for a teacher is a fraction of what I make. And for a vastly harder job. I don't think I've worked a truly 40 hour week in years. I at least feel that the software I'm working on can do some good in the world. But the old quote "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads" seems apropos, and they make a whole lot more than even I do. 73k seems a pittance for those entrusted for ensuring there are humans ready to perpetuate the society in the next generation.
• lawrenceyan 4y ago
  Increase salaries, which will transitively increase the respect and prestige that teachers get in an actionable manner. Thanking them isn’t enough. An alternative is to automate the teacher away. But I think most people would agree that there’s still immense value in having a human being in the picture here.
• ninkendo 4y ago
  Unrelated, but when did Medium become broken in Reader mode in Safari? Reader only shows the first paragraph now, with an ellipsis after, which seems intentional on Medium’s part. It’s unfortunate because this seems like an interesting article but I don’t want to subject myself to their website in order to read it.
• mberning 4y ago
  Lot of sympathy here for teachers, which is very understandable. I am sure many of them, especially those early in their career, have a very miserable existence. But on the flip side I know several teachers that “stuck it out” and are making well over 100k annually working 9 months a year in low cost of living Ohio. In fact two of them are married, so they have a household income approaching 250k per year in an area where median household income is well under 100k. Teachers are very good at “putting on the poor mouth”, but many of them are living very comfortable lifestyles. And the administrators even more so. Their salaries would make some engineers blush.
• smeej 4y ago
  It sounds like there are a great many people who want to teach. The real headline should be, "Nobody wants to teach in public schools anymore." And do you blame them? The people (politicians, mostly, in dialogue with union leaders) who make the big decisions about public schools are so many levels removed from the students or the teachers that the best-case scenario for these decisions is to be woefully out of touch. At this point, it seems like the entire world recognizes the American public school system is messed up beyond repair. So why are we spending so much time, energy, and effort trying to save it instead of trying to reimagine the whole thing? Who's successfully teaching these days? As in, who are the examples of people who are actually being successful at putting ideas into other people's heads? If what you want is to teach, learn from them. (If you have a hundred other goals, like providing childcare and increasing character through athletic competition and whatever else you want to do, those are fine things too, but quit trying to lump it all together and do it at once. Find the people who are succeeding at those goals and learn from them as well.)
  • CharlesW 4y ago
    > The real headline should be, "Nobody wants to teach in public schools anymore." What part of TFA makes you think this is specific to public schools? https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/the-worst-i-ve-seen-it-job-vacancies-at-private-high-schools-double-20220622-p5avvy.html https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/the-worst-i-ve-seen-it-j...
  • stjohnswarts 4y ago
    There are plenty successful public schools out there, why not find out what is making them work instead of giving into those (GOP mostly) who want only the rich to get an education because they can afford private school?
• zackmorris 4y ago
  The fix for this by the way is to pay for school with federal funds instead of state and local. That way rich and poor children receive the same funding. This is also the reason to ban private school vouchers. That way rich children get taught alongside poor children, which prevents disparities in education quality. It also allows people with the means to afford private schooling to pay for an underprivileged child to still get an education via those tax dollars. If what I'm saying doesn't sound right to you, then we have an opportunity for a teachable moment. Don't feel bad, I just learned this yesterday. Let me introduce you to horizontal and vertical philosophy: https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-horizontal-issue-in-the-context-of-politics-and-administration-Are-there-vertical-issues-too-and-if-so-what-does-this-refer-to https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-horizontal-issue-in-the-cont... https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/to-unite-a-divided-nation-we-must-tackle-both-vertical-and-horizontal-inequality/ https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/to-unite-a-divided-nation... Horizontal ethics/politics/philosophy is concerned with the overall well being of the whole. It tends to focus on stuff like justice. Vertical ethics/politics/philosophy is concerned with doing right within a hierarchy. It tends to focus on stuff like liberty. Both are required for a society to function. But the US has experienced mostly vertical politics since before the Reagan revolution. So quite candidly, the problems we experience today will most likely be solved through horizontal policies. HN and most major news sources tend to track with vertical philosophies IMHO. So I tend to have the minority viewpoint here. But that appears to be changing, and I suspect that the world will go more horizontal over the next 10-20 years. A related concept is how generations tend to oppose the policies of their parents, as covered in the book The Fourth Turning: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/670089.The_Fourth_Turning https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/670089.The_Fourth_Turnin... I wish I could say that I've read it, but I hear good things. Gen Z is coming online now as we enter what I like to think will be a new progressive era. It's facing tremendous opposition from entrenched interests on both the left and right though. So there will likely be deadlock for the next election or two until the last of the Baby Boomers finally retire and relinquish control.
• robertlagrant 4y ago
  A reasonably prolific teacher Quoran on this topic: https://www.quora.com/The-number-of-public-teachers-in-the-U-S-has-dwindled-by-3-or-300-000-between-February-2020-and-May-2022-per-Bureau-of-Labor-Statistics-data-What-will-it-take-to-retain-teachers-during-this-day-and-age/answer/Matthew-Bates-27 https://www.quora.com/The-number-of-public-teachers-in-the-U...
• taylodl 4y ago
  Nobody in their right mind would become a teacher today. John Q. Public, just because he's paying "some taxes" that's "contributing to your pay" think he's your boss and can order you around like they're Donald Trump acting on The Apprentice. Everyone feels entitled to tell you why education sucks so much today and why it was so wonderful 50 years ago. Why would anyone of sound mind go into the profession? I've thought about it from time to time, but there's simply no way I'm subjecting myself to that crap! It's not so much as "nobody wants to teach anymore" as it is the general public simply sucks and having to interact with them, with them thinking they're your boss, is more of a soul-suck than spending a weekend with a Dementor!
• indymike 4y ago
  My wife teaches elementary school ESL and Spanish as needed. The school day is 8 hours of solid work, plus 2 hours of grading and two hours of planning. The minimum number of hours for most teachers is 60 hours, plus extra time for maybe coaching, or being and advisor for an extra-curricular (which are a dying bread of program in many schools). This is for doing the same thing you do year after year. Changes in academic guidelines, school policies, textbooks, academic fashion, technology and student aptitude variance from year to year force you to re-invent everything, every year. It's a horrible job not because teaching is horrible, but because we've turned our schools into the intersection of social engineering and politics. For every child there's at least one highly protective parent, with some political hot button. It's just a nightmare. For example, my wife teaches ESL and Spanish and had to go to meetings with a parent that thought her class was part of a "critical race theory" conspiracy. Another parent wanted my wife to teach Spanish without gender in the language. Still another was upset about having first graders sing, because the kinds might be "too judgey."
• throwaway675309 4y ago
  Part of it definitely has to deal with the country where you're teaching, the kind of school (public vs private), surrounding socioeconomic conditions, age group, etc. I taught ESL overseas in elementary and junior high school in Taiwan for years. Compared to my experiences teaching in the United States, the children are just empirically better behaved. There is an ingrained culture of respect for teachers and it shows.
• 8bitsrule 4y ago
  I taught science for a few years. > "Teachers ... leave the kids alone." - The Wall Administrators ... leave the teachers alone. Many admistrators have no education experience or credentials. The 'experience' of my superintendent was being a colonel in the military. Spent much of his time getting a return on the district's investment funds. > "It's about the money." Yep, you get what you pay for. If only full-time teachers were paid be the hour, like substitude teachers. I didn't get paid enough to get home at 7pm tired-out with a stack of papers to grade, eat supper and fall asleep instead. "Oh, and we need you to take admissions at the football game Friday night, and to stay afterwards to help count the money."
• dogmatism 4y ago
  Counterpoint: someone I know went from practicing medicine ("part time", meaning actually more than 40hrs/wk) to teaching (in a unionized system) HS, and only makes a little less, works less, and has way more job satisfaction. This is probably more of an indictment of the state of some corners of american medicine than a paean to the public teaching system though
• archhn 4y ago
  It's called "class warfare." America isn't one nation: it's a hierarchy of classes. The managerial/administrative class is superior to the proletarian educator class in the hierarchy. They don't want to listen to what teachers have to say just like a baron didn't want to listen to what his peasants think. They are seen as a highly redundant exploitable resource, thus they are disposable. The author feels all these things, but she can't properly interpret them because she's still under the spell that there's good faith at the top, that we are one nation trying to work together the best we can. She would have to believe this to maintain her self-worth as a pillar of the system. If she didn't, she would lose faith in the significance of her job. She would see herself as a conditioner of slaves, not as one who enlightens the lives of others with knowledge. Once she loses this faith, she'll either become a dead, dispirited teacher, or she'll quit. Right now, she's in the twilight zone between idealism and jaded realism. The inequality and unfairness is not a bug: it's a feature of the class system. In order for the high to live like demigods, we must be trodden under foot to level the field for their opulent lives. They can't live as they live if we aren't forced to live as we live. It we weren't constantly in fear of losing our jobs and ending up on the street, to openly die as passersby mock us, reaffirming the value of compliance in their minds, we wouldn't endure the hardships we suffer. We wouldn't work for minimum wage. We wouldn't consent to clearly unfair exploitation. But since utter ruin and death is the consequence of refusal, we keep running along and comfort ourselves with a whole host of delusions and distractions that make us feel better about our servitude. There will be no empathy from those who build their dreams upon our nightmares.
• OldBrev 4y ago
• cat_plus_plus 4y ago
  The problem is lack of perceived benefit. You drop off and pick up kids for 10 years, at inconvenient times that do not really solve the problem of childcare while you work. After all that they often end up as obnoxious teenagers with no marketable skills. Imagine if we had schools that at younger age emphasized good manners, being respectful and helpful to parents and allowing for full work days in 2 job households. And then at some point shifted towards practical skills best suited for each individual child - someone is a budding nuclear scientist, someone is better of training as an electrician. I bet parents would love those teachers and not begrudge them good pay.
• chkaloon 4y ago
  Teachers having second jobs is nothing new. Most of my teachers from the 60s-70s had second jobs in the summer - the canning factory, retail clerks, you name it.
• pradn 4y ago
  If you want to help teach computer science to high schoolers for two hours a week (before your day job), look into TEALS [1]. It's a rewarding way to teach the next generation of technologists/citizens/people. I've been a TEALS volunteer for five years while working at Google in NYC. The students are fantastic - curious, hilarious, and wonderful to be around. It's the best part of my day. You assist students with their projects and lecture if you wish. You work with the teacher to improve assignments/projects and help them be better teachers; so you're teaching them to fish. Going in to school stabilizes my schedule and gets me into the office earlier than I would on my own. Absolutely recommend it. They also have remote teaching opportunities. [1]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/teals https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/teals
• asiachick 4y ago
  I'm sympathetic to what I guess are these issues but the article was like WAT? > The shortages have started hitting colleges > They’ve never paid us a living wage Google's average college teacher's salary. Looks like a living wage to me. I see $73k to $250k I guess the author meant public K-12 schools in which case it's probably right? Though the first Google says average in California is $82k (not sure that is or is not a living wage) > When I tell someone I’m a teacher, they don’t say anything along the lines of “thank you for your service.” No, they usually talk about how much they hated school. They complain about your summers off. Really? I've never heard anyone disparage teachers but maybe I'm out of the loop > Most Americans don’t think teaching is a real job. They think schools exist in order to warehouse children while their parents do the real work, and to keep them out of trouble. I've never heard this. I've heard people complain that's all they're allowed to do in some schools because discipline is disallowed but I've never heard anyone say teaching wasn't a real job. In fact I've only ever heard the opposite. It's one of the toughest jobs there is, in part because it's more than 40hrs a week > Burnout is just victim blaming. I've never heard that ever Am I supposed to read between the lines of the hyperbole? > Every single teacher I know has a second or third source of income, This I do know. Even long decades ago my teachers all had second jobs. > what really drives teachers out of the profession... is lack of autonomy. Yes, i've heard that at least I guess I'm just ranting that the post seems kind of incoherent. I don't have a solution. Move to Norway or some other place where they value teachers. The USA seem over in so many ways and I see no possible way it's going to get better.
• UtopiaPunk 4y ago
  I sometimes wonder if I would make a good teacher. Teaching others is something I enjoy, I've worked with kids a few different times in my life and it seemed positive for everyone, and a college professor I admired said multiple times that I would make a good teacher. I have several teachers in my family, and while they feel fulfilled teaching children (and I envy that fulfillment) , the pay is disrespectful. Furthermore, the administration above them seems like a special kind of hell that could only be spawned by public-private partnerships that neoliberalism loves. The past few years have been particularly rough, as bizarre alt-right politics from parents has to be constantly addressed (ranging anger about masks to anger about CRT to anger). Mix in the lingering anxiety of school shootings (and the its constant reminder by the presence of SROs, aka cops), and it really seems miserable. I think teaching is one of the most important vocations in constructing and maintaining a healthy and vibrant society. But the invisible hand of the market has determined that I will make more money and have less stress by answering customer support emails. Seems whack
• ano88888 4y ago
  if there is a shortage, shoudn't the wages go up? Or has the invisible hand failed?
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• technick 4y ago
  Nobody should want to teach at the current pay rate offered and the lack of f*cks given for their mental and physical health, workload, student counts and support. My wife taught for 12-13 years and now coordinates for special education kids in her district, but her pay is tied to the teachers pay scale. Her district gave out 2% raises this year, in a record inflation year, she's making less than she did 3 years ago at this rate. I'm on the side of letting our education system collapse and get rebooted, teachers need to be treated better, way better. Kids should value education, and if they don't want to be there, kick them out. Teachers are not day care.
• bmitc 4y ago
  Lack of autonomy and abysmal pay is why I don't teach. I would love to do so, but it literally requires you to sacrifice your lifetime and lifestyle. It's pretty simple: increase taxes on the wealthy and megacorps and pay teachers more. Also, get rid of the bureaucrats who infest education administration.
• milkoolong 4y ago
  I'm not fond of public schools in my district which is rural and poorer. I wrote a response in which I believe teachers don't deserve its students as opposed to the article's "America doesn't deserve its teachers": https://abovenorm.co/a-personal-anecdote-on-public-school-teachers-and-bullying/ https://abovenorm.co/a-personal-anecdote-on-public-school-te...
• raarts 4y ago
  I'd like to offer a contrarian view. Note I'm a former tech enterpreneur, switched late in life to teaching CS in college 5 years ago, several members in my family are HS teachers. 1. Teacher aren't respected any more. True. The main reason: outcome quality is dropping. Reading/math proficiency has been dropping for tens of years. The general public knows this. 2. Disorderly classrooms. Due to changing norms and morals, setups where kids don't face the teacher but each other or even the back of the back wall it's become impossible to keep everyone focused. Everybody suffers. 3. Endless new teaching methods, experiments. Misconceptions like: 'kids nowadays need 21st century skills', 'knowledge can be acquired from the internet', 'almost nobody needs algebra later on in life', 'kids can decide for themselves what they need to learn'. No. 4. Smaller families lead to more attention per child, princes and princesses, helicopter parents. School admin also bend the knee towards this. 5. Kids with special needs get way more attention, which is a time sink. More and more kids are getting a label. 6. Most contentious opinion: men teach differently from women. We need more men in the classroom. Women try to treat boys like girls. But boys have more energy and need more playtime outside. After they get rid of that energy they'll pay more attention in class. All this leads to boys dropping out way more often. 7. Education standards for becoming a teacher are too low. Many teachers can't even to math properly, or can't spell themselves. I deliberately have been blunt while writing the above list. Take that into account.
• TurkishPoptart 4y ago
  >Everywhere you look, states have banned almost every aspect of education that’s worth teaching. States banned math books for being too woke. They’re passing bills that don’t let you teach history. Critical race/gender theory =/= history. The 1619 project book is also not history, but a reinterpretation of it to empower today's neo-Marxist race grifters (i.e. Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DeAngelo, Nikole Hanna Jones, among others).
• plankers 4y ago
  Pay teachers more and more people will teach. On a website so dedicated to discussion of free market principles, the amount of rationalization people put themselves through to avoid this simple conclusion is both funny and tragic.
• albrewer 4y ago
  I wanted to be a teacher when I was in high school (and I still do; I like teaching people new things). Then I found out brand new engineering graduates made more than any adult employed by the school district except for the superintendent and high school head principal. I still want to teach, but taking the 70% pay cut required to do it does not make sense.
• WhyDoIThink 4y ago