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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. Wher

by _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.
- blooalien 4y ago
  On the flip side of that coin, you sometimes have the parents who do know all about their child's ADHD and how to (help their child) manage it effectively, and then you get these meddling teachers or principals who genuinely believe they know better than everyone else about how "problem children" should be dealt with (all while utterly ignoring the actual problem children, like bullies for example). They hear that a child has "a diagnosis" and it's like painting a target on that child for some screwed up teachers/principals, no matter how actually well behaved that child is in practice. Sometimes those vile people even go beyond "too far" and ruin lives with their meddling.
dorchadas 4y ago
As a former teacher from the States (and maybe will go back to it one day, either internationally, or in another country permanently, depending on how life works out), I'd live to give my answers to some of this. Note, I'm biased. My undergraduate degree was not in teaching but in physics. I did a masters programme in teaching to transition to becoming a teacher. I enjoyed teaching, but just ended up finding it boring teaching the same thing six times a day, so when an opportunity to do a new masters came along, I took it. I didn't leave because I got burnt out or hated it, I just wanted something a bit more challenging. 2) They are. The masters I did for teaching was a joke. I've seen high schoolers with better writing abilities than half my professors. And these are people with 'educational doctorates'. Also, this might be different at better universities, but at least in my state several are propped up by their online teaching masters (the state requires a masters) and they exist just to pump them out. If you don't get a 4.0 something is wrong. I've heard similar issues with the undergraduate programmes in the state. 3. Kids don't want to be at school. They want to be out doing kid things, which we are limiting more and more in school. They also don't want to necessarily sit and learn the stuff they're supposed to learn. It's a complex issue, but that's my take on it a lot. 4. Yep. This is, in my opinion, the number one issue facing American schools, and why private/charter (sometimes) do so much better. They can be picky about the students they take -- thus they only take those who are well behaved and who want to be there and have active parent involvement. Parent involvement is a huge predictor of school success. Until we fix that -- including the issues of poverty and not social safety net -- some schools won't improve. Kids need a safe place at home and at school if they're to truly learn and achieve what they can. Sadly, nobody talks about this issue, nor are any steps taken to change it or the culture around education. I'm from a rural area, there's people proud they dropped out and didn't get a degree and even more proud they didn't get a college one. It gets passed on. 5. Absolutely. It's incredibly difficult to teach 30+ kids at once, of various levels. Especially when they refuse to create differentiated classes. I had some classes that ran the gamut from kids who needed extra assistance and had learning disabilities to kids who would literally be in the running for valedictorian and had all accelerated classes in the subjects that had it. If I spend time on one subset of those kids, it immediately hurts the other. Now, this is a school-specific problem and lazy guidance counselors and a principal who just didn't give a shit about academically gifted students, but I had a cousin leave the school just this year because they don't care about academics because they're too worried about passing the weaker ones (not catching them up, but just making sure they can squeak by with the bare minimum). Not entirely the dehumanisation and alienation you mentioned, but I think it leads to it when the classes can't be catered towards them. This is the one thing where I think more money could help -- get more teachers and get smaller class sizes. It'd also be nice I think to have a teacher go all four years with the students in high school, unless there's major issues, so the students get to truly know the teacher and feel like they can trust them. It could work in my state, except for science because each subject has its own certification as opposed to just one for 'math'.
candiddevmike 4y ago
1. Parasitic administration salaries 2. Depending on the state you may not even need one 3. It's the parents, not the kids that make them feel this way. Kids typically love their teachers 4. 100% 5. Building a new school is 10-100s of millions typically. Why it costs so much is worthy of debate, but plunking down new schools these days is far more costly than in the past.
- randomdata 4y ago
  1. Automation. Teaching in its rawest form has been automated away, leaving it to be a valueless human endeavour. “Teaching” in the context of children survives because it has become a childcare service. But babysitting is not able to charge much as its cost must remain under the income potential of parents, else parents will take the responsibility themselves.
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    1) Has it really? I'm sure the potential exists for video lectures or whatever, but I think the teachers still ostensibly at least teach. 2) How little do you pay babysitters? At, say, $5 per kid per hour, a teacher of 20 would be doing pretty well, and that's on the low side of class sizes these days I think.
    - randomdata 4y ago
      > Has it really? I'm sure the potential exists for video lectures or whatever, but I think the teachers still ostensibly at least teach. Yes. Gone are the days that you would hire a teacher to teach you something. These days you turn to automated teaching services. The fact that the word teacher is now synonymous with the K-12 school teacher further emphasizes that the career in general has effectively disappeared. As before, "teaching" has survived as a career where childcare is the actual service offered. > How little do you pay babysitters? In my case it is $3 per hour for a daycare provider that cares for no more than five children at a time. If the babysitter cared for more children I would expect to pay less as I would get much less value for my dollar. The quality of care and attention declines as the number of children increases. Large class sizes are accepted because we are going for bang for our buck over quality of care. If teachers were charging on the same order per child as other daycare providers providing higher quality care, indeed it would be good money, but there would be a shift to putting children into those better care facilities and so it wouldn't last. Why pay the same amount for lesser care?
chadash 4y ago
> 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. I was a disruptive child and my parents were the opposite of people who didn’t give a shit. Both of them highly valued education and spent plenty of time with me. they just had to contend with a child who wasn’t well behaved at school and it was genetics more than anything they did. They spent thousands of dollars on therapists and medicines and it didn’t help that much. Luckily for me, puberty seemed to turn things around and I ended up doing well in high school and very well in college (at a good school). Now I’ve got two little trouble makers of my own and it’s pretty obvious to me where they got those genes from. I agree that dealing with problematic kids is a pain in the ass for teachers and I do try to thank them when I see them, and I even agree that parenting is often the issue, but a lot of it is genetics and luck.
- _vdpp 4y ago
  That’s valid, there are different kinds of disruptive kids. A good friend of mine at high school was very bright, kind of a troublemaker, diagnosed with ADHD, took prescription Ritalin, was a bit of a pain in the ass with his teachers, but had parents who cared and he ended up graduating and doing fine.
  - birdyrooster 4y ago
    I never formed good habits and I really wish my parent prioritized that (Ritalin) over growing big and tall for a minuscule chance of making it in pro sports.
    - MerelyMortal 4y ago
      I volunteer with kids, and I see parents who prioritize sports where they have to pay a lot of money for fees over more scholastic and much cheaper programs for the smaller chance of getting a sports scholarship/career than more plentiful academic scholarships. I don't know if they think their children just aren't capable intellectually or what.
Already__Taken 4y ago
Education and day-care shouldn't be coupled.
wrp 4y ago
>...parents who frankly just don’t give a shit... From my experience teaching in multiple Western and non-Western countries, I believe that this factor outweighs all the others put together.
- dorchadas 4y ago
  Same, to be completely honest. Generally, if the parents care about education and are involved the kids will do fine. This is complicated when mom wants her kids to do well but has to work two jobs and older brother watches younger sister after school, but in general it's an easily predicted trend.
- supertofu 4y ago
  Yep. I'm biracial, black and Indian. My mother is Indian. She raised me alone, with no financial support from my father. My father is a black American who never went to college. He doesn't understand the point of education. He wanted me to a be a movie director or singer or otherwise "famous". He didn't give a crap about school and let me do whatever I wanted when I stayed with him a couple weekends a month. My mother, an Indian immigrant, sat me down every night and made me do my homework even though she worked three jobs. She paid for twelve years of private schooling. She told me every single day that my education was the only thing I would ever have that would let me survive in this world. Thanks to her obsession with education, I completed college and never stopped educating myself. I now work as a front-end dev and make six figures. I'm currently preparing to apply for master's programs. I live a happy and comfortable life. I have some savings in the bank. I am constantly working to educate myself. I don't have vague fantasies about becoming "famous" or winning the lottery to support myself. Education is truly the only guarantee for people of color to achieve a comfortable life in the US. I would never have understood this without my Indian mother's cultural drive towards education.
hattmall 4y ago
1. Curriculum. Instructional tools and all the things that for profit publishers can convince politicians, bureaucrats, and administrators they need. 2. They are, and there is a useless but direct correlation to pay and degree attainment. Having more degrees will get you more money, but rarely has any correlation to the quality of teacher. 3. As in most industries where the customer isn't the payer compensation does not correlate to performance. The worst teachers make the same as the best, or more if they have the degrees. 4. Equality, no child left behind and related concepts dictate that the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Any efforts at exclusion are met with resistance, typically by unaffected / uninvolved parties. 5. The idea here is that consolidation of services will save money. The trend away from neighborhood schools to mega-schools / school complexes looks good from a burecratic view.
diognesofsinope 4y ago
> 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? Counterpoint: teachers' pay is great, it's just backloaded in pension plans. > 2. It seems that education degrees are seen as easier to achieve than others. Yeah, but cost is the same and cost is what's important. > 4. Many school problems are caused by disruptive children. Bingo. Half the success of 4-year colleges is that it's the first time the bottom 50% of the students are filtered out. Story time. I was an ESL teacher for 5 years in Asia and planned on coming home to the USA and getting my teacher's license in Math to teach at international schools. I am not currently a teacher, I'm a quant at a big bank. Why didn't I end up in teaching? The licensing requirements in Minnesota are insane. Counselor's straight up told me I'd have to borrow ~$50k from the UMN for a MS in Curriculum and Instruction before I could teach. The labor unions along with politicians have built a structure in which there is artificial scarcity of teachers. Not only is the profession filled with disrespect, but it's outrageously expensive and bureaucratic. Lastly, the Economics of Education field is wild. Clearly there's value to basic reading/math/science education, but it's not clear at all whether teachers are schools matter than much (wealthy communities/parents matter a lot). Edit: feel obligated to add that k12 education is financed and administrated at the local level, which means our experiences with this likely vary a lot. Mine are specific to trying to move back to the USA and become licensed in MN.
- bombcar 4y ago
  I suspect that almost all of the success of private schools can be ascribed to being able to kick students out and not requiring fifty billion dollars in degrees to teach.
  - danaris 4y ago
    Almost all of the success of private schools is, in fact, the former. Being able to select who goes there basically lets them set their outcomes.
    - mmcdermott 4y ago
trident5000 4y ago
Controversial opinion here (maybe?) but I think the purge of men from education has had a real impact on child behavior and learning. https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/02/the-explosion-of-women-teachers/582622/ https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/02/the-ex... "...men continued to make up most of the high-school teaching force until the late 1970s" Humans are still largely primal and male presence tends to instill respect and behavior changes in younger people; I suspect the absence of it has not helped the current situation in many schools.
- _vdpp 4y ago
  In that time I think we see a pretty big decline in the ratio of boys:girls graduating college too, no?
  - trident5000 4y ago
    I think this is absolutely part of what causes the phenomenon. Broadly speaking boys need male mentorship.
weatherlite 4y ago
> 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”? Well many students hated school, it is what it is. If you get beat up on a daily basis or are bored out of your mind (because let's face it, most of the material IS boring) I don't see why you should feel obligated to thank your teachers. It's not their fault but they also don't really deserve a thank you. Yes most teacher do what they can but it doesn't change the fact so many students are generally unhappy in school.
- DangitBobby 4y ago
  I agree that there are reasons someone would hate school, but it doesn't make sense for it to be a cultural norm to say that to teachers. No one ever says "wow you murder people for Uncle Sam for money?" to someone who was in the military, they say "thank you for your service". I think that's what the author was getting at. It's not just low pay; teaching is thankless, even looked down upon.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - weatherlite 4y ago
    It's a chicken and egg kinda problem. People who on average don't have lots of motivation or other options go to teaching. They then get burned out by the chaotic classes, low pay and thanklass routine. In turn they on average do a mediocre job (or less) of educating and teaching, which causes the students to pay even less attention and show less respect...which causes the teachers to get more burned out...anyway I think you see where I'm getting at.
    - vkou 4y ago
      > People who on average don't have lots of motivation or other options go to teaching. I'm not sure where you're from, but every single teacher I have known, both as a student, and as an adult, has been incredibly motivated to teach.
rayiner 4y ago
> 2. It seems that education degrees are seen as easier to achieve than others. Here is the problem. Teachers in America compare themselves to professionals, but their test scores are below the average for college educated people generally: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2017/05/11/education-programs-and-unselective-colleges https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2017/.... Now 40% of college graduates don’t even get a job that requires a college degree. Disproportionately, those are people with lower aptitude scores. Teachers as a group are right on the borderline above those folks. Teacher salaries are not low compared to jobs typically held by people with similar test scores—especially when you account for degree-required jobs that pay a premium for mathematical aptitude (accounting, engineering), or dealing with blood and body parts (nursing).
- dadoge 4y ago
  If we paid them more, it’d be easier to hold them to a higher standard
  - rayiner 4y ago
    I’m all for creating a new salary band for teachers with 1300+ SAT scores and STEM degrees. I’ll pay whatever taxes you want for that.
    - SoftTalker 4y ago
      Is there any evidence to show that these people make good teachers? You don't need to be a genious to teach. You need to have good social skills with kids, care about doing a good job, and a mastery of the subject matter (which not very demanding for even average-intelligence adults, at least until the latter part of high school).
      - AlbertCory 4y ago
        Yes to all of those: necessary but not sufficient. You left out "willing to do whatever it takes for THAT kid, regardless of what the textbooks or principal or union says."
yojo 4y ago
On 4: I disagree that more resources cannot help with this problem. Some disruptive children have undiagnosed learning disabilities. Having more money for screening and special education can help get them the support they need. Class sizes are also going to matter. Many disruptive children are just seeking attention. With smaller classes teachers can spend more time with each student, which will help with behavior management. I don’t know what the right level of investment here is, but from speaking with friends who are teachers it sure seems like classes are too big and special Ed is stretched incredibly thin.
- galangalalgol 4y ago
  We know what percentage of children typically need these extra services. If we funded school special education based on how many they should statistically have. And incentivised them to find that many, then they would. If they miss some early amd are full that will be counterbalances by the number of parents who insist on "normal" education despite evidence that isn't what is best. Letting educators give feedback about the effects of medication levelsbwould also help I think.
2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
> Disruptive children are caused by parents who frankly just don’t give a shit. I was disruptive. I had ADHD. Parents did a fantastic job being present and caring but strict. My brothers and I were in multiple sports leagues.
amelius 4y ago
The main problem with teachers is that the price for them is not controlled by quality. A teacher who performs better than other teachers (e.g. a 10x teacher) will not be worth more in the current system. And with the quality/price relation missing, there is nothing a teacher can do about the price, and consequently their wages will be as low as possible.
- bobthepanda 4y ago
  Even at the high level, teacher salaries aren’t very high compared to industry. Couple that with high licensing requirements and bad working conditions, neither of which are secret, and of course the best and brightest do not consider it a real option.
- juve1996 4y ago
  Quality is hard to prove. Everyone thinks they're "quality." The fact is most people are average. We freak ourselves out about these very few super teachers or super devs but most are not these people and they still need jobs and perform valid functions.
drbojingle 4y ago
"Disruptive children" are arguably dusruptive because the system is soul sucking and one size fits all. Its just not going to work for everyone. Forest schools all the way
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
supertofu 4y ago
Regarding 4: Not every kid should be going to high school. They and/or their families are not capable of supporting them through it. We need public vocational and alternative high schools.
- mjevans 4y ago
  A good time for 'think of the children' rather than their parents. Maybe combined with better access to free contraception so that every child is a desired child. If the environment isn't good for the child change that child's environment (family). Yes, those systems probably also need more love.
drnonsense42 4y ago
At this point, I think people who can say 1. with a straight face are either intellectually dishonest or just repeat things others say. The majority of teachers make a median US wage fairly early into their career and plenty make a multiple of it later on, on top of great benefits. Their job is no more challenging than nearly all other professions. “But they have to”… yes, everyone else has shit they have to deal with. The fact that the Waltons, crypto lottery winners, etc. exist is a separate problem that doesn’t mean teachers are underpaid. Education majors are easier.The sky is blue. If we even remotely believe in a meritocracy (liberals often really don’t when you dig into their beliefs, granted) starting teachers should not make as much as a starting EE major. Nobody in their right mind would or should pursue an engineering career if teaching paid equivalently.
koolba 4y ago
> Many school problems are caused by disruptive children. Being able to fire your students is greatest advantage that private schools have over public ones.
- OldBrev 4y ago
bodhiandphysics 4y ago
1) healthcare. 2) education degrees are a problem. They make becoming a teacher financially very risky. They also don’t seem to actually improve teacher quality
29athrowaway 4y ago
6. Teachers are often completely out of touch with technology. Math teachers could be using Jupyter notebooks and decent plots. Instead they are using their poor drawing skills. Everyone should do what 3b1b is doing. They could be using cool physics simulations, but instead everything are lame poorly drawn arrows. Technology that exists for education often has developer art level UX and bad usability. 7. Art used in school material is cringy as fuck. What artists think kids like and what kids actually like has nothing to do with each other. 8. There could be a github or reddit of class material that teachers could use, saving teachers' time and improving the learning experience. 9. People in the department of education are fucking bozos and should all be fired. Their job is to neglect education so that politicians can keep using better education as vote bait.
erdos4d 4y ago
> 2. It seems that education degrees are seen as easier to achieve than others. They absolutely are. I taught math as a university lecturer while I was finishing my PhD. I taught one Algebra course and one Geometry course to education majors. These were both literally just high school math courses and the people I taught were mostly not able to do the work. Yes, literally high school math and over half flunked the courses outright. That is just pathetic. I was told to pass 85% of the class, so most got curved right into a classroom anyway, against my wishes. This is what teaches your kids. I can also anecdotally report that they were clearly the dumbest people I ever ran into teaching. Bad English, can't think in a straight line, and ready to argue at the first sign that you might enforce standards and fail their pitiful "work". They were perfect for a bureaucratic job that rewards idiots.
tristor 4y ago
1. Administrators. We have insane administrative bloat, especially in higher ed. In some institutions there is nearly a 1:1 count of administrators to faculty. Ironically, given the social politics implied by the author, a significant amount of administration bloat is specifically tied to DEI. 2. Well, they are. A teaching certification used to only require two years of higher learning compared to typical 4 for other things. That said, most teachers are actually more highly educated than the average person because schools use educational attainment as direct basis for pay. My mother has a Master’s and is shy only a few hours and a dissertation from being a Ph.D. This was relatively common, especially for special ed teachers or those who focus on a specific subject like Math or English. 3. Partly because school in the US is boring and designed to grind out individuality in favor of making good industrial cogs. We no longer have an economy that rewards industrial cogs so students resent their school experience in adulthood as they discover how illy prepared they are for the world. That and parents/social fabric encourages and allows anti-social behavior and viewpoints. 4. Yes, and parents not giving a shit isn’t even a cause, it’s a symptom of larger and more intractable social and cultural problems in parts of America. Fixing this is nearly impossible because those most motivated to fix it are even more heavily motivated to ignore significant amounts of critical data about the causal factors. 5. Yes. Scaling is hard, and we’ve roughly tripled the population since we built the institutionalization of education in the US. It’s obvious a breakpoint exists somewhere and we failed to pivot.
- elforce002 4y ago
  This is true in almost every country. Education is a money pit.
  - CharlesW 4y ago
    > Education is a money pit. How exactly do you mean this? The U.S. spent $90.5 billion for "Elementary, Secondary, and Vocational Education" in 2021* (a subset of "Education, Training, Employment, and Social Services"), which is 1.3% of $6.82 trillion in total 2021 government expenditures. Compare to $696.5B for Medicare, $754.8B for National Defense, etc. If anything, this illustrates how relatively unimportant a base level of education is in the U.S. * https://datalab.usaspending.gov/americas-finance-guide/spending/categories/ https://datalab.usaspending.gov/americas-finance-guide/spend...
username223 4y ago
> parents who frankly just don’t give a shit They exist. What are you going to do with their children? Teachers are the people who have to answer that question.
prepend 4y ago
> teachers seem to be grossly underpaid Is this true? It seems like teachers in the US [0] make the 7th highest in the world on average. Of course the US is big and has lots of diversity so there may be pockets that aren’t paid more. But I think they are paid more than other countries. I think the issue isn’t pay as they are paid more than the US median and mean for annual salary (since they aren’t paid for their two summer months off). And they have more vacation days than any other profession with their 40-60 days of leave. It’s an important profession, but it’s pretty well paid and stable. [0] https://www.businessinsider.com/teacher-salaries-by-country-2017-5 https://www.businessinsider.com/teacher-salaries-by-country-...
RickJWagner 4y ago
Agreed on the point that bad parenting makes teaching difficult.
balderdash 4y ago
Could you support #1, it’s my understanding that teachers are actually quite well compensated when you adjust for pension/LT benefits and three months of vacation. Points 2-5 seem spot on.
jltsiren 4y ago
> 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? There are over 8 million people employed in primary and secondary education, which is about 5% of the workforce. Public spending on primary and secondary education is 3.2% of GDP and private spending is 0.3%. By the latest numbers, that's about $800 billion/year. If we assume that 2/3 of the costs are personnel and 1/3 are facilities and other expenses, that leaves just $65k for the wages and benefits of the average employee.
bArray 4y ago
> 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. Some. Most children I believe require an approach that the education system cannot adequately provide (for numerous reasons). Children are relatively malleable and in the right environment will thrive.
- Spivak 4y ago
  The bend is an while for every kid there is an educational environment that will work for them, there isn’t an educational environment that will work for every kid.
- OldBrev 4y ago
hgs3 4y ago
> 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? Personal anecdotal: I started programming on my own freshmen year of High School and I wrote and self published a book sophomore year. When I showed my computer programs and a physical copy of my self-published book to my teachers, they basically gave me a pat on the back. I did not receive 1 point of extra credit. I was told to take my seat and learn about Microsoft Word (by my computer teacher) and to write a 3 page story like everybody else (by my English teacher). As I’m sitting in my desk, I’m thinking “Why waste my time with Word, clearly I’m beyond it? Why am I writing a 3 page paper, I already wrote a book!” What I concluded from this experience was that the education system is not designed for self starters. It’s designed for the lowest common denominator. I don’t dislike my teachers, rather I dislike the education system for being inflexible. I can only hope technology will allow students in the future to customize their educations to a degree beyond what I was offered. Another commenter mentioned schools being about churning out cogs. I don't disagree.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

by _vdpp 4y ago

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.
blooalien 4y ago
On the flip side of that coin, you sometimes have the parents who do know all about their child's ADHD and how to (help their child) manage it effectively, and then you get these meddling teachers or principals who genuinely believe they know better than everyone else about how "problem children" should be dealt with (all while utterly ignoring the actual problem children, like bullies for example). They hear that a child has "a diagnosis" and it's like painting a target on that child for some screwed up teachers/principals, no matter how actually well behaved that child is in practice. Sometimes those vile people even go beyond "too far" and ruin lives with their meddling.

dorchadas 4y ago

As a former teacher from the States (and maybe will go back to it one day, either internationally, or in another country permanently, depending on how life works out), I'd live to give my answers to some of this. Note, I'm biased. My undergraduate degree was not in teaching but in physics. I did a masters programme in teaching to transition to becoming a teacher. I enjoyed teaching, but just ended up finding it boring teaching the same thing six times a day, so when an opportunity to do a new masters came along, I took it. I didn't leave because I got burnt out or hated it, I just wanted something a bit more challenging. 2) They are. The masters I did for teaching was a joke. I've seen high schoolers with better writing abilities than half my professors. And these are people with 'educational doctorates'. Also, this might be different at better universities, but at least in my state several are propped up by their online teaching masters (the state requires a masters) and they exist just to pump them out. If you don't get a 4.0 something is wrong. I've heard similar issues with the undergraduate programmes in the state. 3. Kids don't want to be at school. They want to be out doing kid things, which we are limiting more and more in school. They also don't want to necessarily sit and learn the stuff they're supposed to learn. It's a complex issue, but that's my take on it a lot. 4. Yep. This is, in my opinion, the number one issue facing American schools, and why private/charter (sometimes) do so much better. They can be picky about the students they take -- thus they only take those who are well behaved and who want to be there and have active parent involvement. Parent involvement is a huge predictor of school success. Until we fix that -- including the issues of poverty and not social safety net -- some schools won't improve. Kids need a safe place at home and at school if they're to truly learn and achieve what they can. Sadly, nobody talks about this issue, nor are any steps taken to change it or the culture around education. I'm from a rural area, there's people proud they dropped out and didn't get a degree and even more proud they didn't get a college one. It gets passed on. 5. Absolutely. It's incredibly difficult to teach 30+ kids at once, of various levels. Especially when they refuse to create differentiated classes. I had some classes that ran the gamut from kids who needed extra assistance and had learning disabilities to kids who would literally be in the running for valedictorian and had all accelerated classes in the subjects that had it. If I spend time on one subset of those kids, it immediately hurts the other. Now, this is a school-specific problem and lazy guidance counselors and a principal who just didn't give a shit about academically gifted students, but I had a cousin leave the school just this year because they don't care about academics because they're too worried about passing the weaker ones (not catching them up, but just making sure they can squeak by with the bare minimum). Not entirely the dehumanisation and alienation you mentioned, but I think it leads to it when the classes can't be catered towards them. This is the one thing where I think more money could help -- get more teachers and get smaller class sizes. It'd also be nice I think to have a teacher go all four years with the students in high school, unless there's major issues, so the students get to truly know the teacher and feel like they can trust them. It could work in my state, except for science because each subject has its own certification as opposed to just one for 'math'.

candiddevmike 4y ago

1. Parasitic administration salaries 2. Depending on the state you may not even need one 3. It's the parents, not the kids that make them feel this way. Kids typically love their teachers 4. 100% 5. Building a new school is 10-100s of millions typically. Why it costs so much is worthy of debate, but plunking down new schools these days is far more costly than in the past.

randomdata 4y ago
1. Automation. Teaching in its rawest form has been automated away, leaving it to be a valueless human endeavour. “Teaching” in the context of children survives because it has become a childcare service. But babysitting is not able to charge much as its cost must remain under the income potential of parents, else parents will take the responsibility themselves.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  1) Has it really? I'm sure the potential exists for video lectures or whatever, but I think the teachers still ostensibly at least teach. 2) How little do you pay babysitters? At, say, $5 per kid per hour, a teacher of 20 would be doing pretty well, and that's on the low side of class sizes these days I think.
  - randomdata 4y ago
    > Has it really? I'm sure the potential exists for video lectures or whatever, but I think the teachers still ostensibly at least teach. Yes. Gone are the days that you would hire a teacher to teach you something. These days you turn to automated teaching services. The fact that the word teacher is now synonymous with the K-12 school teacher further emphasizes that the career in general has effectively disappeared. As before, "teaching" has survived as a career where childcare is the actual service offered. > How little do you pay babysitters? In my case it is $3 per hour for a daycare provider that cares for no more than five children at a time. If the babysitter cared for more children I would expect to pay less as I would get much less value for my dollar. The quality of care and attention declines as the number of children increases. Large class sizes are accepted because we are going for bang for our buck over quality of care. If teachers were charging on the same order per child as other daycare providers providing higher quality care, indeed it would be good money, but there would be a shift to putting children into those better care facilities and so it wouldn't last. Why pay the same amount for lesser care?

chadash 4y ago

> 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. I was a disruptive child and my parents were the opposite of people who didn’t give a shit. Both of them highly valued education and spent plenty of time with me. they just had to contend with a child who wasn’t well behaved at school and it was genetics more than anything they did. They spent thousands of dollars on therapists and medicines and it didn’t help that much. Luckily for me, puberty seemed to turn things around and I ended up doing well in high school and very well in college (at a good school). Now I’ve got two little trouble makers of my own and it’s pretty obvious to me where they got those genes from. I agree that dealing with problematic kids is a pain in the ass for teachers and I do try to thank them when I see them, and I even agree that parenting is often the issue, but a lot of it is genetics and luck.

_vdpp 4y ago
That’s valid, there are different kinds of disruptive kids. A good friend of mine at high school was very bright, kind of a troublemaker, diagnosed with ADHD, took prescription Ritalin, was a bit of a pain in the ass with his teachers, but had parents who cared and he ended up graduating and doing fine.
- birdyrooster 4y ago
  I never formed good habits and I really wish my parent prioritized that (Ritalin) over growing big and tall for a minuscule chance of making it in pro sports.
  - MerelyMortal 4y ago
    I volunteer with kids, and I see parents who prioritize sports where they have to pay a lot of money for fees over more scholastic and much cheaper programs for the smaller chance of getting a sports scholarship/career than more plentiful academic scholarships. I don't know if they think their children just aren't capable intellectually or what.

Already__Taken 4y ago

Education and day-care shouldn't be coupled.

wrp 4y ago

>...parents who frankly just don’t give a shit... From my experience teaching in multiple Western and non-Western countries, I believe that this factor outweighs all the others put together.

dorchadas 4y ago
Same, to be completely honest. Generally, if the parents care about education and are involved the kids will do fine. This is complicated when mom wants her kids to do well but has to work two jobs and older brother watches younger sister after school, but in general it's an easily predicted trend.
supertofu 4y ago
Yep. I'm biracial, black and Indian. My mother is Indian. She raised me alone, with no financial support from my father. My father is a black American who never went to college. He doesn't understand the point of education. He wanted me to a be a movie director or singer or otherwise "famous". He didn't give a crap about school and let me do whatever I wanted when I stayed with him a couple weekends a month. My mother, an Indian immigrant, sat me down every night and made me do my homework even though she worked three jobs. She paid for twelve years of private schooling. She told me every single day that my education was the only thing I would ever have that would let me survive in this world. Thanks to her obsession with education, I completed college and never stopped educating myself. I now work as a front-end dev and make six figures. I'm currently preparing to apply for master's programs. I live a happy and comfortable life. I have some savings in the bank. I am constantly working to educate myself. I don't have vague fantasies about becoming "famous" or winning the lottery to support myself. Education is truly the only guarantee for people of color to achieve a comfortable life in the US. I would never have understood this without my Indian mother's cultural drive towards education.

hattmall 4y ago

1. Curriculum. Instructional tools and all the things that for profit publishers can convince politicians, bureaucrats, and administrators they need. 2. They are, and there is a useless but direct correlation to pay and degree attainment. Having more degrees will get you more money, but rarely has any correlation to the quality of teacher. 3. As in most industries where the customer isn't the payer compensation does not correlate to performance. The worst teachers make the same as the best, or more if they have the degrees. 4. Equality, no child left behind and related concepts dictate that the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Any efforts at exclusion are met with resistance, typically by unaffected / uninvolved parties. 5. The idea here is that consolidation of services will save money. The trend away from neighborhood schools to mega-schools / school complexes looks good from a burecratic view.

diognesofsinope 4y ago

> 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? Counterpoint: teachers' pay is great, it's just backloaded in pension plans. > 2. It seems that education degrees are seen as easier to achieve than others. Yeah, but cost is the same and cost is what's important. > 4. Many school problems are caused by disruptive children. Bingo. Half the success of 4-year colleges is that it's the first time the bottom 50% of the students are filtered out. Story time. I was an ESL teacher for 5 years in Asia and planned on coming home to the USA and getting my teacher's license in Math to teach at international schools. I am not currently a teacher, I'm a quant at a big bank. Why didn't I end up in teaching? The licensing requirements in Minnesota are insane. Counselor's straight up told me I'd have to borrow ~$50k from the UMN for a MS in Curriculum and Instruction before I could teach. The labor unions along with politicians have built a structure in which there is artificial scarcity of teachers. Not only is the profession filled with disrespect, but it's outrageously expensive and bureaucratic. Lastly, the Economics of Education field is wild. Clearly there's value to basic reading/math/science education, but it's not clear at all whether teachers are schools matter than much (wealthy communities/parents matter a lot). Edit: feel obligated to add that k12 education is financed and administrated at the local level, which means our experiences with this likely vary a lot. Mine are specific to trying to move back to the USA and become licensed in MN.

bombcar 4y ago
I suspect that almost all of the success of private schools can be ascribed to being able to kick students out and not requiring fifty billion dollars in degrees to teach.
- danaris 4y ago
  Almost all of the success of private schools is, in fact, the former. Being able to select who goes there basically lets them set their outcomes.
  - mmcdermott 4y ago

trident5000 4y ago

Controversial opinion here (maybe?) but I think the purge of men from education has had a real impact on child behavior and learning. https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/02/the-explosion-of-women-teachers/582622/ https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/02/the-ex... "...men continued to make up most of the high-school teaching force until the late 1970s" Humans are still largely primal and male presence tends to instill respect and behavior changes in younger people; I suspect the absence of it has not helped the current situation in many schools.

_vdpp 4y ago
In that time I think we see a pretty big decline in the ratio of boys:girls graduating college too, no?
- trident5000 4y ago
  I think this is absolutely part of what causes the phenomenon. Broadly speaking boys need male mentorship.

weatherlite 4y ago

> 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”? Well many students hated school, it is what it is. If you get beat up on a daily basis or are bored out of your mind (because let's face it, most of the material IS boring) I don't see why you should feel obligated to thank your teachers. It's not their fault but they also don't really deserve a thank you. Yes most teacher do what they can but it doesn't change the fact so many students are generally unhappy in school.

DangitBobby 4y ago
I agree that there are reasons someone would hate school, but it doesn't make sense for it to be a cultural norm to say that to teachers. No one ever says "wow you murder people for Uncle Sam for money?" to someone who was in the military, they say "thank you for your service". I think that's what the author was getting at. It's not just low pay; teaching is thankless, even looked down upon.
- deleted 4y ago
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- weatherlite 4y ago
  It's a chicken and egg kinda problem. People who on average don't have lots of motivation or other options go to teaching. They then get burned out by the chaotic classes, low pay and thanklass routine. In turn they on average do a mediocre job (or less) of educating and teaching, which causes the students to pay even less attention and show less respect...which causes the teachers to get more burned out...anyway I think you see where I'm getting at.
  - vkou 4y ago
    > People who on average don't have lots of motivation or other options go to teaching. I'm not sure where you're from, but every single teacher I have known, both as a student, and as an adult, has been incredibly motivated to teach.

rayiner 4y ago

> 2. It seems that education degrees are seen as easier to achieve than others. Here is the problem. Teachers in America compare themselves to professionals, but their test scores are below the average for college educated people generally: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2017/05/11/education-programs-and-unselective-colleges https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2017/.... Now 40% of college graduates don’t even get a job that requires a college degree. Disproportionately, those are people with lower aptitude scores. Teachers as a group are right on the borderline above those folks. Teacher salaries are not low compared to jobs typically held by people with similar test scores—especially when you account for degree-required jobs that pay a premium for mathematical aptitude (accounting, engineering), or dealing with blood and body parts (nursing).

dadoge 4y ago
If we paid them more, it’d be easier to hold them to a higher standard
- rayiner 4y ago
  I’m all for creating a new salary band for teachers with 1300+ SAT scores and STEM degrees. I’ll pay whatever taxes you want for that.
  - SoftTalker 4y ago
    Is there any evidence to show that these people make good teachers? You don't need to be a genious to teach. You need to have good social skills with kids, care about doing a good job, and a mastery of the subject matter (which not very demanding for even average-intelligence adults, at least until the latter part of high school).
    - AlbertCory 4y ago
      Yes to all of those: necessary but not sufficient. You left out "willing to do whatever it takes for THAT kid, regardless of what the textbooks or principal or union says."

yojo 4y ago

On 4: I disagree that more resources cannot help with this problem. Some disruptive children have undiagnosed learning disabilities. Having more money for screening and special education can help get them the support they need. Class sizes are also going to matter. Many disruptive children are just seeking attention. With smaller classes teachers can spend more time with each student, which will help with behavior management. I don’t know what the right level of investment here is, but from speaking with friends who are teachers it sure seems like classes are too big and special Ed is stretched incredibly thin.

galangalalgol 4y ago
We know what percentage of children typically need these extra services. If we funded school special education based on how many they should statistically have. And incentivised them to find that many, then they would. If they miss some early amd are full that will be counterbalances by the number of parents who insist on "normal" education despite evidence that isn't what is best. Letting educators give feedback about the effects of medication levelsbwould also help I think.

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago

> Disruptive children are caused by parents who frankly just don’t give a shit. I was disruptive. I had ADHD. Parents did a fantastic job being present and caring but strict. My brothers and I were in multiple sports leagues.

amelius 4y ago

The main problem with teachers is that the price for them is not controlled by quality. A teacher who performs better than other teachers (e.g. a 10x teacher) will not be worth more in the current system. And with the quality/price relation missing, there is nothing a teacher can do about the price, and consequently their wages will be as low as possible.

bobthepanda 4y ago
Even at the high level, teacher salaries aren’t very high compared to industry. Couple that with high licensing requirements and bad working conditions, neither of which are secret, and of course the best and brightest do not consider it a real option.
juve1996 4y ago
Quality is hard to prove. Everyone thinks they're "quality." The fact is most people are average. We freak ourselves out about these very few super teachers or super devs but most are not these people and they still need jobs and perform valid functions.

drbojingle 4y ago

"Disruptive children" are arguably dusruptive because the system is soul sucking and one size fits all. Its just not going to work for everyone. Forest schools all the way

deleted 4y ago
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supertofu 4y ago

Regarding 4: Not every kid should be going to high school. They and/or their families are not capable of supporting them through it. We need public vocational and alternative high schools.

mjevans 4y ago
A good time for 'think of the children' rather than their parents. Maybe combined with better access to free contraception so that every child is a desired child. If the environment isn't good for the child change that child's environment (family). Yes, those systems probably also need more love.

drnonsense42 4y ago

At this point, I think people who can say 1. with a straight face are either intellectually dishonest or just repeat things others say. The majority of teachers make a median US wage fairly early into their career and plenty make a multiple of it later on, on top of great benefits. Their job is no more challenging than nearly all other professions. “But they have to”… yes, everyone else has shit they have to deal with. The fact that the Waltons, crypto lottery winners, etc. exist is a separate problem that doesn’t mean teachers are underpaid. Education majors are easier.The sky is blue. If we even remotely believe in a meritocracy (liberals often really don’t when you dig into their beliefs, granted) starting teachers should not make as much as a starting EE major. Nobody in their right mind would or should pursue an engineering career if teaching paid equivalently.

koolba 4y ago

> Many school problems are caused by disruptive children. Being able to fire your students is greatest advantage that private schools have over public ones.

OldBrev 4y ago

bodhiandphysics 4y ago

1) healthcare. 2) education degrees are a problem. They make becoming a teacher financially very risky. They also don’t seem to actually improve teacher quality

29athrowaway 4y ago

6. Teachers are often completely out of touch with technology. Math teachers could be using Jupyter notebooks and decent plots. Instead they are using their poor drawing skills. Everyone should do what 3b1b is doing. They could be using cool physics simulations, but instead everything are lame poorly drawn arrows. Technology that exists for education often has developer art level UX and bad usability. 7. Art used in school material is cringy as fuck. What artists think kids like and what kids actually like has nothing to do with each other. 8. There could be a github or reddit of class material that teachers could use, saving teachers' time and improving the learning experience. 9. People in the department of education are fucking bozos and should all be fired. Their job is to neglect education so that politicians can keep using better education as vote bait.

erdos4d 4y ago

> 2. It seems that education degrees are seen as easier to achieve than others. They absolutely are. I taught math as a university lecturer while I was finishing my PhD. I taught one Algebra course and one Geometry course to education majors. These were both literally just high school math courses and the people I taught were mostly not able to do the work. Yes, literally high school math and over half flunked the courses outright. That is just pathetic. I was told to pass 85% of the class, so most got curved right into a classroom anyway, against my wishes. This is what teaches your kids. I can also anecdotally report that they were clearly the dumbest people I ever ran into teaching. Bad English, can't think in a straight line, and ready to argue at the first sign that you might enforce standards and fail their pitiful "work". They were perfect for a bureaucratic job that rewards idiots.

tristor 4y ago

1. Administrators. We have insane administrative bloat, especially in higher ed. In some institutions there is nearly a 1:1 count of administrators to faculty. Ironically, given the social politics implied by the author, a significant amount of administration bloat is specifically tied to DEI. 2. Well, they are. A teaching certification used to only require two years of higher learning compared to typical 4 for other things. That said, most teachers are actually more highly educated than the average person because schools use educational attainment as direct basis for pay. My mother has a Master’s and is shy only a few hours and a dissertation from being a Ph.D. This was relatively common, especially for special ed teachers or those who focus on a specific subject like Math or English. 3. Partly because school in the US is boring and designed to grind out individuality in favor of making good industrial cogs. We no longer have an economy that rewards industrial cogs so students resent their school experience in adulthood as they discover how illy prepared they are for the world. That and parents/social fabric encourages and allows anti-social behavior and viewpoints. 4. Yes, and parents not giving a shit isn’t even a cause, it’s a symptom of larger and more intractable social and cultural problems in parts of America. Fixing this is nearly impossible because those most motivated to fix it are even more heavily motivated to ignore significant amounts of critical data about the causal factors. 5. Yes. Scaling is hard, and we’ve roughly tripled the population since we built the institutionalization of education in the US. It’s obvious a breakpoint exists somewhere and we failed to pivot.

elforce002 4y ago
This is true in almost every country. Education is a money pit.
- CharlesW 4y ago
  > Education is a money pit. How exactly do you mean this? The U.S. spent $90.5 billion for "Elementary, Secondary, and Vocational Education" in 2021* (a subset of "Education, Training, Employment, and Social Services"), which is 1.3% of $6.82 trillion in total 2021 government expenditures. Compare to $696.5B for Medicare, $754.8B for National Defense, etc. If anything, this illustrates how relatively unimportant a base level of education is in the U.S. * https://datalab.usaspending.gov/americas-finance-guide/spending/categories/ https://datalab.usaspending.gov/americas-finance-guide/spend...

username223 4y ago

> parents who frankly just don’t give a shit They exist. What are you going to do with their children? Teachers are the people who have to answer that question.

prepend 4y ago

> teachers seem to be grossly underpaid Is this true? It seems like teachers in the US [0] make the 7th highest in the world on average. Of course the US is big and has lots of diversity so there may be pockets that aren’t paid more. But I think they are paid more than other countries. I think the issue isn’t pay as they are paid more than the US median and mean for annual salary (since they aren’t paid for their two summer months off). And they have more vacation days than any other profession with their 40-60 days of leave. It’s an important profession, but it’s pretty well paid and stable. [0] https://www.businessinsider.com/teacher-salaries-by-country-2017-5 https://www.businessinsider.com/teacher-salaries-by-country-...

RickJWagner 4y ago

Agreed on the point that bad parenting makes teaching difficult.

balderdash 4y ago

Could you support #1, it’s my understanding that teachers are actually quite well compensated when you adjust for pension/LT benefits and three months of vacation. Points 2-5 seem spot on.

jltsiren 4y ago

> 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? There are over 8 million people employed in primary and secondary education, which is about 5% of the workforce. Public spending on primary and secondary education is 3.2% of GDP and private spending is 0.3%. By the latest numbers, that's about $800 billion/year. If we assume that 2/3 of the costs are personnel and 1/3 are facilities and other expenses, that leaves just $65k for the wages and benefits of the average employee.

bArray 4y ago

> 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. Some. Most children I believe require an approach that the education system cannot adequately provide (for numerous reasons). Children are relatively malleable and in the right environment will thrive.

Spivak 4y ago
The bend is an while for every kid there is an educational environment that will work for them, there isn’t an educational environment that will work for every kid.
OldBrev 4y ago

hgs3 4y ago

> 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? Personal anecdotal: I started programming on my own freshmen year of High School and I wrote and self published a book sophomore year. When I showed my computer programs and a physical copy of my self-published book to my teachers, they basically gave me a pat on the back. I did not receive 1 point of extra credit. I was told to take my seat and learn about Microsoft Word (by my computer teacher) and to write a 3 page story like everybody else (by my English teacher). As I’m sitting in my desk, I’m thinking “Why waste my time with Word, clearly I’m beyond it? Why am I writing a 3 page paper, I already wrote a book!” What I concluded from this experience was that the education system is not designed for self starters. It’s designed for the lowest common denominator. I don’t dislike my teachers, rather I dislike the education system for being inflexible. I can only hope technology will allow students in the future to customize their educations to a degree beyond what I was offered. Another commenter mentioned schools being about churning out cogs. I don't disagree.

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