4 ms·

If anything, it's almost obvious that almost all American public schools are, in general, "underfunded". Part of having a free market in labor (such as we have

by frig 18y ago

If anything, it's almost obvious that almost all American public schools are, in general, "underfunded". Part of having a free market in labor (such as we have) means that, if you're trying to attract people to take on a particular position, you need to offer enough to lure them away from their other options. Public school teachers have good job security and benefits (after awhile), but the starting salary is usually very uncompetitive with most skilled private sector work and it takes a long time to obtain enough seniority to catch up. For a lot of folks who might make good teachers, switching to teaching in public school is asking them to take a paycut in the 50-100k+ range. If you don't have starting salaries for teachers in the 60-90k range you lose a lot of people to law school, medicine, technical fields, grad school, finance, and even other public sector work like police and fire and so on. So rather than asking "is school underfunded or overfunded?", a better starting point is: (A) what would it cost to get the people we'd want to be teachers doing the job at a level we'd be happy with? We don't have to resort to guesswork and rhetoric here: think of people you know, and figure out what the pay would have to be to get them to take up teaching instead. That's your answer. (B) Once you've figured out what it'd cost, then you can start figuring out "is it worth it?" Most people jump in with a particular agenda to push and never do the gut check "would anyone I know who's capable of being a good teacher work for 45k starting?". There's certainly a lot of bureaucratic overhead that could be reduced, if the political-economic cost of reducing it was outweighed by the benefits of doing so; that's another fact-based question you could derive answers to with some real legwork. If anything, though, the above highlights one of the less-discussed issues with "rising income inequality": as the best "attainable" private sector outcomes become increasingly more attractive than the best public sector outcomes, you either have to spend a ton of money to get anyone to take a public sector job or you have to settle for only incompetents and failures going for public sector work; witness also, eg, the SEC or FDA.

fizzer9 18y ago
> Once you've figured out what it'd cost, then you can start figuring out "is it worth it?" There's more to it than money. Public school teaching is currently a lousy job for a number of reasons: * very large amounts of work to take home * having to deal with complaints from parents and administrators if you raise the rigor of your classes * if you're male, the possibility of losing your career if a female student decides to lie and say you did something wrong * the monotony of only a small portion of your work being actually academic-related. Most of the work is babysitting-style work or else administrative work. For people who like to work with their minds, this is a big deal and a reason against going into teaching. Also, I don't know where you're getting your numbers from. Who (non-teachers) is making these enormous salaries you quote? Those are big numbers.
- frig 18y ago
  I checked, and I was a bit off on the numbers. My basic assumption is that there's a minimal amount of smarts you'd need to have to be capable of being an effective teacher. I then looked @ people I know who I think have at least that minimal amount of smarts, took their job titles, than was going off of the local salaries for those kinds of jobs. My mistake was comparing local salaries for those kinds of jobs to the nationwide median for k-12 teachers; since "local" for me means "expensive eastern seaboard city", I'm comparing expensive apples to median oranges, and thus I'm a bit off. For reference: http://www.payscale.com/research/US/All_K-12_Teachers/Salary/by_Years_Experience http://www.payscale.com/research/US/All_K-12_Teachers/Salary... That said, I do think people's expectations are off for how much teachers "ought" to be getting paid. We can probably agree that there's some N for which "you probably have to have been in -- or have been capable of being in -- the top N% of your high school class to be capable of being a good teacher". We might not agree on that N -- 5%? 15%? 25%? -- but let's look at what each N means if do a naive mapping to individual income levels: top 5% -> 100k+ top 10% -> ~75k+ top 15% -> ~62.5k+ (I'm ballparking this from the table) etc., via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_S... So pick your top N% and pick a salary range and you've got a ballpark range for what it'd take to staff a school with teachers culled from the top N% of achievers (and note that I'm actually lowballing it: the $ for each N is the minimum amount to put you into the top-N%, not the average or median income of the top N% of earners). I'll happily admit that the above is a horribly inaccurate ballpark, but it's a place to start from instead of handwaving as to why teachers are/are not paid that much. As a side note: one of the things that isn't mentioned when looking @ how much school costs in, say, South Korea is that relative salaries are usually higher for teachers than their domestic counterparts, and on top of that due to cultural reasons they're more "respected" by their fellow adults than they are in the USA, which makes it cheaper to attract quality people to be teachers.

by frig 18y ago

fizzer9 18y ago

> Once you've figured out what it'd cost, then you can start figuring out "is it worth it?" There's more to it than money. Public school teaching is currently a lousy job for a number of reasons: * very large amounts of work to take home * having to deal with complaints from parents and administrators if you raise the rigor of your classes * if you're male, the possibility of losing your career if a female student decides to lie and say you did something wrong * the monotony of only a small portion of your work being actually academic-related. Most of the work is babysitting-style work or else administrative work. For people who like to work with their minds, this is a big deal and a reason against going into teaching. Also, I don't know where you're getting your numbers from. Who (non-teachers) is making these enormous salaries you quote? Those are big numbers.

frig 18y ago
I checked, and I was a bit off on the numbers. My basic assumption is that there's a minimal amount of smarts you'd need to have to be capable of being an effective teacher. I then looked @ people I know who I think have at least that minimal amount of smarts, took their job titles, than was going off of the local salaries for those kinds of jobs. My mistake was comparing local salaries for those kinds of jobs to the nationwide median for k-12 teachers; since "local" for me means "expensive eastern seaboard city", I'm comparing expensive apples to median oranges, and thus I'm a bit off. For reference: http://www.payscale.com/research/US/All_K-12_Teachers/Salary/by_Years_Experience http://www.payscale.com/research/US/All_K-12_Teachers/Salary... That said, I do think people's expectations are off for how much teachers "ought" to be getting paid. We can probably agree that there's some N for which "you probably have to have been in -- or have been capable of being in -- the top N% of your high school class to be capable of being a good teacher". We might not agree on that N -- 5%? 15%? 25%? -- but let's look at what each N means if do a naive mapping to individual income levels: top 5% -> 100k+ top 10% -> ~75k+ top 15% -> ~62.5k+ (I'm ballparking this from the table) etc., via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_S... So pick your top N% and pick a salary range and you've got a ballpark range for what it'd take to staff a school with teachers culled from the top N% of achievers (and note that I'm actually lowballing it: the $ for each N is the minimum amount to put you into the top-N%, not the average or median income of the top N% of earners). I'll happily admit that the above is a horribly inaccurate ballpark, but it's a place to start from instead of handwaving as to why teachers are/are not paid that much. As a side note: one of the things that isn't mentioned when looking @ how much school costs in, say, South Korea is that relative salaries are usually higher for teachers than their domestic counterparts, and on top of that due to cultural reasons they're more "respected" by their fellow adults than they are in the USA, which makes it cheaper to attract quality people to be teachers.