10 ms·

The $4 Million Teacher

124 points by muzz 13y ago

inetsee 13y ago
One of the best quotes from the article, in my opinion - "The harder I work, the more I make,".
- glesica 13y ago
  It's a great quote, until you read further and get to this one... "They don't have benefits or even a guaranteed base salary; their pay is based on their performance, and most of them work long hours and earn less than public school teachers."
- pmorici 13y ago
  Also worth nothing; the context in which he is making that statement is as the owner of his own company with 30 employees. In other words he isn't being rewarded by an employer for working extra hard.
gmunu 13y ago
Here's the final report by the Gates Foundation on evaluating teachers that is mentioned in the article: http://metproject.org/downloads/MET_Ensuring_Fair_and_Reliable_Measures_Practitioner_Brief.pdf http://metproject.org/downloads/MET_Ensuring_Fair_and_Reliab.... It's interesting that they have a whole section about how to convince teachers that the survey results would be reliable.
glesica 13y ago
I like this idea as a general concept, but I just don't know how well it would work in the US. Schools in the US are already locally controlled to a great extent, yet most are still under-funded. If people really wanted to spend more on education, why don't they vote to raise their own property taxes? If they think the schools are being run poorly, why don't they get involved with the school boards and make changes? I realize there are many entrenched interests here (unions, textbook companies, and many more), but those same entrenched interests would fight against importing the South Korean system. I also dislike the idea of kids going to school twice. From what I understand, research has shown that kids need more free time, not more time sitting in lectures, at least younger children. Additionally, the SK system seems like it would double-penalize low-income families since their children often need to get jobs in high school. So not only can't they afford the best tutors, their kids wouldn't have time to sleep!
- rdouble 13y ago
  If people really wanted to spend more on education, why don't they vote to raise their own property taxes? If they think the schools are being run poorly, why don't they get involved with the school boards and make changes? "Asian" educational models will never work in the USA. You can't convince middle America to pay more for teachers and/or enroll their kids in programs that involve hard academic work. After school academic programs are crazy, only for obsessed nerds. When would they have time for football practice? This model only works in American communities with large Asian populations. It partially works in low income communities in which the main benefit is keeping the kids away from their screwed up home life. This is a bit off topic, though. The article is about a guy who makes money off of video lectures. Americans do pay money for videos of things they care about, such as losing weight or improving their golf stroke. Only a small subset of the population would pay for academic tutoring videos.
- caseysoftware 13y ago
  "If people really wanted to spend more on education, why don't they vote to raise their own property taxes?" They can vote for more funding all they want, but they know the funding can go anywhere once it's approved. For example, in 2012 Prop 30 in California was supposed to go to the education system.. turns out it went to cover bad investments and otherwise non-education expenses racked up elsewhere: http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/11/18/Surprise-California-Education-Tax-Hike-Will-Go-To-Wall-Street-Cronies http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/11/18/Surprise-... If you want to make sure your money goes somewhere, you need to spend it on that.
  - glesica 13y ago
    That's why I only addressed local property taxes. Local people have more control when the scope of government in question is smaller. A single town raising its own taxes to pay for its own schools is unlikely to run into as many problems. I know this works, because this is what people did where I grew up. Will it work everywhere? No, that was part of my point. Many people just don't value education enough to spend more money on it than they absolutely must. Another thing to keep in mind. The article says that "students are the customers". But this is false. Parents are the customers. So what you've got to compare is South Korean parents and American parents.
joe_the_user 13y ago
Before anyone gets excited, this is following labor treads throughout the world; a few "rock stars" and many more lower paid people. You can see this in law, medicine, business, academia and so-forth. The US has very highly paid educators too. The only difference is they generally don't set foot in the class but rather serve as consultants ... on how schools can reduced average teacher pay and imposed pay-for-performance (among other things). This was the case for Beverly Hall, who created the local model for No Child Left Behind, sold it on a national level and was eventually arrested for falsifying the system. Her report on Atlanta School's local program which NCLB (No Child Left Behind) emulated: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Hwl55bHttcwJ:www.aspeninstitute.org/sites/default/files/content/docs/nclb/Beverly_Hall--Testimony.pdf+&cd=10&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Hwl55bH... Her arrest: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57577688/ex-atlanta-schools-chief-beverly-hall-posts-bond-on-cheating-charges/ http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57577688/ex-atlanta-scho... Edit: And another posters mentions, this isn't a "teacher" in the conventional sense of the word either but a slightly more hands-on testing-guru. So we can pretty much move along now...
- rdouble 13y ago
  Maybe someday one of those consultants will package an approach based on raising the bar on salary and teacher/student performance moderately and call it "Moneyball Education" and it will finally take off. It will have a better chance of success if it's already been approved by ESPN.
  - yummyfajitas 13y ago
    This approach already exists - it's called value added modelling + pay for performance. Unsurprisingly, it's a political nonstarter due to union opposition.
    - muzz 13y ago
      Perhaps, but this thread is somewhat off-topic of the article. The "teacher" works for an after school tutoring academy. He makes most of his money selling access to his online video for $4/hr. I don't know of anything preventing that here. Except, of course, for lack of demand for it.
rayiner 13y ago
Note, he makes most of his money from leverage. 150,000 students each his lectures each year at $4 an hour.
- beachstartup 13y ago
  i'm not sure i'd call that leverage, more like a clever distribution/marketing plan.
  - muzz 13y ago
    it's both, although maybe "distribution" is a better term than leverage he makes his money selling online video for $4/hr, which is not the same as classroom teaching. "Entrepreneur" would be a better term for him, rather than "Teacher"
  - rayiner 13y ago
    It's classic leverage. You go from a providing a personal service, which you sell by the hour, to packaging that service as a product where each hour of your work can be sold multiple times.
dkhenry 13y ago
I am going to preface this comment by saying the following. Its very important that we do everything we can to improve the quality of education our children receive. Nothing I am about to say should be taken to mean that we have no room for improvement! I think we should start measuring education systems by results not by test scores. This is stupid that we are elevating a system which makes kids score better on a few tests but produces a workforce that is persistently behind the American and European workforce in terms of accomplishments. Great your kids can read really really well. Mine are changing the world by becoming the leading Engineers, Scientists and Doctors. Maybe these tests aren't what we should be optimizing for. If you told me to go out and reform our public school system the last thing I would do is say is keep the kids in class twice as long and remove any vestige of childhood or independent though to thoroughly condition them to check the right box come test day. That's the impression I am getting from this article.
aresant 13y ago
Based on the headline and the first few paragraphs I was excited to read about a free market approach to public teaching. But most of his students are "high-school students looking to boost their scores on South Korea's version of the SAT." So is the article really about a $4m/yr teacher? Or a $4m/yr test prep guru? Test-prep is a HUGE industry in the USA. "Princeton Review" alone pulled down ~$150,000,000 in 2012.(1) John Katzman, a Princeton grad, founded it in 1981. So we've already tread this right? And the major criticism of Princeton review and other testing houses is that they drastically skew the balance of the tests by (a) Giving privileged kids an unfair advantage (b) Damaging the test integrity which is designed to find bright kids, not just "well prepared for this one day" kids. So that's not really that unique and, in fact, we've got a long history of how this type of market has under-served the US' own system. But great headline, got me to click. (1) http://www.wbjournal.com/article/20100830/PRINTEDITION/308309977/princeton-review-bets-on-online-learning--framingham-based-company-needs-recent-acquisition-to-help-it-reach-profitability http://www.wbjournal.com/article/20100830/PRINTEDITION/30830...
- jessriedel 13y ago
  Concurring with yummyfajita, test prep courses don't have too much impact: > On average students with private tutors improve their math scores by 19 points more than those students without private tutors. The effect is less on the verbal section, where having a private tutor only improves scores on average by seven points. Taking a commercial course has a similarly large effect on math scores, improving them on average by 17 points, and has the largest effect on verbal scores, improving them on average by 13 points. http://nepc.colorado.edu/files/Briggs_Theeffectofadmissionstestpreparation.pdf http://nepc.colorado.edu/files/Briggs_Theeffectofadmissionst... These differences (~15 points on a test with a standard deviation of 100 points) are rather small compared to the huge gaps between different socio-economic and racial backgrounds (~100 points between rich and poor). Probably worth the boost if you have the money, though.
  - cynicalkane 13y ago
    The way you get better at something is with deliberate, difficult practice, and deep inquiry. When I was in high school preparing for the SAT I found this was the opposite of how most test prep worked. I found one book--called something like SAT 1600, which was the max at the time--that talked about how test makers try to assess you, and how questions are constructed. The drill questions were very hard and came with an explanation of how the questions worked. Taking a practice test before and after the book my score went up by over 100 points. It got to the point where I could usually answer a math problem by guessing what the answer "should" be, based on how the question was built, and then just work backwards to verify the answer. But most test prep was boring drills together with strategies like "use the process of elimination." Yeah, duh. That sort of brain-switched-off busywork is the common pattern in test prep and, more broadly, American education.
falk 13y ago
"Education is never going to get any better, don’t look for it, be happy with what you’ve got." - George Carlin http://youtube.com/watch?v=kJ4SSvVbhLw http://youtube.com/watch?v=kJ4SSvVbhLw
ctdonath 13y ago
South Korean 15-year-olds rank No. 2 in the world in reading Unmentioned is that written Korean was designed by an accomplished linguist (around 1500), making it very easy to learn. This in contrast to English, a bewildering mashup of incompatible spelling & phonetic rules made up by happenstance.
- agumonkey 13y ago
  Korean looks cryptic at first, but it's fairly principled and the 'learn korean in 8 min' slides floating on the web not long ago was not a joke. Also, Asian counting system is very regular, allegedly easing the learning for young pupils. ps: I found english very easy, unlike french which is probably only meant for world class writers.
- argumentum 13y ago
  English bashing is so easy its tiring. There's a reason English is a "bewildering mashup", because it developed organically taking input from all around the world. It is quite arguable that this is it's greatest strengths as a language. This is due not only to the British Empire but also the fact that they essentially let language develop on its own. Unlike say, France (which had a similarly expansive empire), which tightly controlled the French language and still does to this day.
  - lkbm 13y ago
    So, basically you agree with the OP?
  - Dewie 13y ago
    Yeah, there is a reason English is the way it is. Who said there wasn't? Saying that 'there is a reason' doesn't really rebut anything (you agreed with it anyway), and I kind of expected a rebut with the antagonistic opening sentence. > , because it developed organically taking input from all around the world. It is quite arguable that this is it's greatest strengths as a language. Having a lot of loanwords is one thing: not having any sane and simple rules for spelling and phonetics is quite another. If 'organic' spelling is it's greatest strength, then it seems like a language more suited for spelling bees# then for communication. #I doubt you'll find something like a Spanish spelling bee: from what I've seen of its diction, a Spanish spelling bee would be too trivial. Like making a competition out of tic-tac-toe.
w1ntermute 13y ago
"Should the US follow South Korea's education system?" No, that would just make things infinitely worse. The SK education system consists of nothing more than rote memorization, and produces a pressure-cooker environment that is responsible for an extremely high teenage suicide rate.
clarky07 13y ago
I might get hammered for this, but I really don't think teachers are significantly underpaid. I say this as someone married to a teacher. Considering that they only work 9 months a year and generally have good benefits, I'm not convinced they should be getting paid significantly more. Take an average salary of around 30-35k and /.75 (9 of 12 months) and it becomes $40,000 - $46,667 a year. Add into that good retirement and great healthcare, it just doesn't seem that unreasonable to me. It's unreasonable to compare a salary from a job working 9 months a year to another profession that works 12 months a year. "Well it's hard, if you had to deal with these kids you'd need a few months off too." Yeah, and that's why I didn't become a teacher. You chose this knowing all the pros and cons. Pro - only work 9 months a year Con - only get paid for 9 months a year
- lkbm 13y ago
  > Yeah, and that's why I didn't become a teacher. You chose this knowing all the pros and cons. Exactly. And if we want better teachers, we need to boost the pros or reduce the cons so it's a better option. Cashing it out in terms of what we've decided they "deserve" may be gratifying, but it's useless. Let's base our policy based on what will actually best achieve our goals.
- sillysaurus 13y ago
  Our teachers are our kids' jailers. Spending more for better jailers would probably have a decent impact on the future.
- byoung2 13y ago
  How many hours are spent outside of class preparing lessons, grading papers, staff meetings, parent conferences, etc.? This reduces the hourly rate somewhat.
  - rayiner 13y ago
    The amount of class time per week in our county is ~30. So even if they spend 15 hours a week outside of class on those things, that's a 45 hour work week, very consistent with that of other white collar workers making that kind of money. Teachers get paid extremely well in most larger cities. In Atlanta, Chicago, Philadelphia, Houston, and New York, starting salaries are in the $40-45k/year range with a bachelors. This might seem low to people on this board accustomed to Silicon Valley pay scales, but it's substantially above average for liberal arts majors. When I graduated college in Atlanta in 2007, the going rate for a fresh BA in white collar professional job (say in the accounting department of a company) was $35k. Teachers were starting at $40k+. Also, the benefits cannot be ignored. Good health insurance and a pension contribution are extravagant benefits for young college graduates in the Millennial generation. They easily add $15-20k/year to total compensation.
mitchi 13y ago
Some weird stuff in this article. How can he have a teaching empire if he only makes 4M a year? Anyway, good for him. Meanwhile there are people putting tons of content on the internet, for free. Youtube channels, Khan Academy. If you really want to learn you only need to put aside some quiet time.
- arbuge 13y ago
  4m and 30 employees is a bigger empire than most teachers can lay claim to...
MyDogHasFleas 13y ago
Can't see the original article due to paywall. But I get the gist from the comments. The "teachers don't make enough", "we don't spend enough on education", etc. debate is on the wrong point. The education system and philosophy in the USA is broken at all levels. Citizens are acting rationally by not volunteering to spend more tax dollars on it. Those that can afford it bypass it entirely by paying for private education, or if they don't have quite that much money, by moving to a community that is wealthier and has better public education. Economic forces combined with the digital age's technology will inevitably lead to the creative destruction of the education industry, just as other industries formed under Industrial Age economics have been deconstructed. Unfortunately this is being fought to the death by the established education community and its monopolistic, union-based government and quasi-governmental constituents. Try telling a public school teacher any of this, and you'll get not a reasoned response, but scorn, anger, and a slamming door in your face. It's going to be brutal for them when it comes.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- muzz 13y ago
  Your comment clearly does not address the article, which makes no mention of the things you cite (union-based government, etc).
Dewie 13y ago
> I traveled to South Korea to see what a free market for teaching talent looks like—one stop in a global tour to discover what the U.S. can learn from the world's other education superpowers. Education superpower for having well-educated citizens? Or educations superpower for having many of the top universities?
mathattack 13y ago
If he has 30 assistants, he's a lot more than a teacher. He's the equivalent of a senior partner at a professional services firm.

124 points by muzz 13y ago

inetsee 13y ago

One of the best quotes from the article, in my opinion - "The harder I work, the more I make,".

glesica 13y ago
It's a great quote, until you read further and get to this one... "They don't have benefits or even a guaranteed base salary; their pay is based on their performance, and most of them work long hours and earn less than public school teachers."
pmorici 13y ago
Also worth nothing; the context in which he is making that statement is as the owner of his own company with 30 employees. In other words he isn't being rewarded by an employer for working extra hard.

gmunu 13y ago

Here's the final report by the Gates Foundation on evaluating teachers that is mentioned in the article: http://metproject.org/downloads/MET_Ensuring_Fair_and_Reliable_Measures_Practitioner_Brief.pdf http://metproject.org/downloads/MET_Ensuring_Fair_and_Reliab.... It's interesting that they have a whole section about how to convince teachers that the survey results would be reliable.

glesica 13y ago

I like this idea as a general concept, but I just don't know how well it would work in the US. Schools in the US are already locally controlled to a great extent, yet most are still under-funded. If people really wanted to spend more on education, why don't they vote to raise their own property taxes? If they think the schools are being run poorly, why don't they get involved with the school boards and make changes? I realize there are many entrenched interests here (unions, textbook companies, and many more), but those same entrenched interests would fight against importing the South Korean system. I also dislike the idea of kids going to school twice. From what I understand, research has shown that kids need more free time, not more time sitting in lectures, at least younger children. Additionally, the SK system seems like it would double-penalize low-income families since their children often need to get jobs in high school. So not only can't they afford the best tutors, their kids wouldn't have time to sleep!

rdouble 13y ago
If people really wanted to spend more on education, why don't they vote to raise their own property taxes? If they think the schools are being run poorly, why don't they get involved with the school boards and make changes? "Asian" educational models will never work in the USA. You can't convince middle America to pay more for teachers and/or enroll their kids in programs that involve hard academic work. After school academic programs are crazy, only for obsessed nerds. When would they have time for football practice? This model only works in American communities with large Asian populations. It partially works in low income communities in which the main benefit is keeping the kids away from their screwed up home life. This is a bit off topic, though. The article is about a guy who makes money off of video lectures. Americans do pay money for videos of things they care about, such as losing weight or improving their golf stroke. Only a small subset of the population would pay for academic tutoring videos.
caseysoftware 13y ago
"If people really wanted to spend more on education, why don't they vote to raise their own property taxes?" They can vote for more funding all they want, but they know the funding can go anywhere once it's approved. For example, in 2012 Prop 30 in California was supposed to go to the education system.. turns out it went to cover bad investments and otherwise non-education expenses racked up elsewhere: http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/11/18/Surprise-California-Education-Tax-Hike-Will-Go-To-Wall-Street-Cronies http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/11/18/Surprise-... If you want to make sure your money goes somewhere, you need to spend it on that.
- glesica 13y ago
  That's why I only addressed local property taxes. Local people have more control when the scope of government in question is smaller. A single town raising its own taxes to pay for its own schools is unlikely to run into as many problems. I know this works, because this is what people did where I grew up. Will it work everywhere? No, that was part of my point. Many people just don't value education enough to spend more money on it than they absolutely must. Another thing to keep in mind. The article says that "students are the customers". But this is false. Parents are the customers. So what you've got to compare is South Korean parents and American parents.

joe_the_user 13y ago

Before anyone gets excited, this is following labor treads throughout the world; a few "rock stars" and many more lower paid people. You can see this in law, medicine, business, academia and so-forth. The US has very highly paid educators too. The only difference is they generally don't set foot in the class but rather serve as consultants ... on how schools can reduced average teacher pay and imposed pay-for-performance (among other things). This was the case for Beverly Hall, who created the local model for No Child Left Behind, sold it on a national level and was eventually arrested for falsifying the system. Her report on Atlanta School's local program which NCLB (No Child Left Behind) emulated: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Hwl55bHttcwJ:www.aspeninstitute.org/sites/default/files/content/docs/nclb/Beverly_Hall--Testimony.pdf+&cd=10&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Hwl55bH... Her arrest: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57577688/ex-atlanta-schools-chief-beverly-hall-posts-bond-on-cheating-charges/ http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57577688/ex-atlanta-scho... Edit: And another posters mentions, this isn't a "teacher" in the conventional sense of the word either but a slightly more hands-on testing-guru. So we can pretty much move along now...

rdouble 13y ago
Maybe someday one of those consultants will package an approach based on raising the bar on salary and teacher/student performance moderately and call it "Moneyball Education" and it will finally take off. It will have a better chance of success if it's already been approved by ESPN.
- yummyfajitas 13y ago
  This approach already exists - it's called value added modelling + pay for performance. Unsurprisingly, it's a political nonstarter due to union opposition.
  - muzz 13y ago
    Perhaps, but this thread is somewhat off-topic of the article. The "teacher" works for an after school tutoring academy. He makes most of his money selling access to his online video for $4/hr. I don't know of anything preventing that here. Except, of course, for lack of demand for it.

rayiner 13y ago

Note, he makes most of his money from leverage. 150,000 students each his lectures each year at $4 an hour.

beachstartup 13y ago
i'm not sure i'd call that leverage, more like a clever distribution/marketing plan.
- muzz 13y ago
  it's both, although maybe "distribution" is a better term than leverage he makes his money selling online video for $4/hr, which is not the same as classroom teaching. "Entrepreneur" would be a better term for him, rather than "Teacher"
- rayiner 13y ago
  It's classic leverage. You go from a providing a personal service, which you sell by the hour, to packaging that service as a product where each hour of your work can be sold multiple times.

dkhenry 13y ago

I am going to preface this comment by saying the following. Its very important that we do everything we can to improve the quality of education our children receive. Nothing I am about to say should be taken to mean that we have no room for improvement! I think we should start measuring education systems by results not by test scores. This is stupid that we are elevating a system which makes kids score better on a few tests but produces a workforce that is persistently behind the American and European workforce in terms of accomplishments. Great your kids can read really really well. Mine are changing the world by becoming the leading Engineers, Scientists and Doctors. Maybe these tests aren't what we should be optimizing for. If you told me to go out and reform our public school system the last thing I would do is say is keep the kids in class twice as long and remove any vestige of childhood or independent though to thoroughly condition them to check the right box come test day. That's the impression I am getting from this article.

aresant 13y ago

Based on the headline and the first few paragraphs I was excited to read about a free market approach to public teaching. But most of his students are "high-school students looking to boost their scores on South Korea's version of the SAT." So is the article really about a $4m/yr teacher? Or a $4m/yr test prep guru? Test-prep is a HUGE industry in the USA. "Princeton Review" alone pulled down ~$150,000,000 in 2012.(1) John Katzman, a Princeton grad, founded it in 1981. So we've already tread this right? And the major criticism of Princeton review and other testing houses is that they drastically skew the balance of the tests by (a) Giving privileged kids an unfair advantage (b) Damaging the test integrity which is designed to find bright kids, not just "well prepared for this one day" kids. So that's not really that unique and, in fact, we've got a long history of how this type of market has under-served the US' own system. But great headline, got me to click. (1) http://www.wbjournal.com/article/20100830/PRINTEDITION/308309977/princeton-review-bets-on-online-learning--framingham-based-company-needs-recent-acquisition-to-help-it-reach-profitability http://www.wbjournal.com/article/20100830/PRINTEDITION/30830...

jessriedel 13y ago
Concurring with yummyfajita, test prep courses don't have too much impact: > On average students with private tutors improve their math scores by 19 points more than those students without private tutors. The effect is less on the verbal section, where having a private tutor only improves scores on average by seven points. Taking a commercial course has a similarly large effect on math scores, improving them on average by 17 points, and has the largest effect on verbal scores, improving them on average by 13 points. http://nepc.colorado.edu/files/Briggs_Theeffectofadmissionstestpreparation.pdf http://nepc.colorado.edu/files/Briggs_Theeffectofadmissionst... These differences (~15 points on a test with a standard deviation of 100 points) are rather small compared to the huge gaps between different socio-economic and racial backgrounds (~100 points between rich and poor). Probably worth the boost if you have the money, though.
- cynicalkane 13y ago
  The way you get better at something is with deliberate, difficult practice, and deep inquiry. When I was in high school preparing for the SAT I found this was the opposite of how most test prep worked. I found one book--called something like SAT 1600, which was the max at the time--that talked about how test makers try to assess you, and how questions are constructed. The drill questions were very hard and came with an explanation of how the questions worked. Taking a practice test before and after the book my score went up by over 100 points. It got to the point where I could usually answer a math problem by guessing what the answer "should" be, based on how the question was built, and then just work backwards to verify the answer. But most test prep was boring drills together with strategies like "use the process of elimination." Yeah, duh. That sort of brain-switched-off busywork is the common pattern in test prep and, more broadly, American education.

falk 13y ago

"Education is never going to get any better, don’t look for it, be happy with what you’ve got." - George Carlin http://youtube.com/watch?v=kJ4SSvVbhLw http://youtube.com/watch?v=kJ4SSvVbhLw

ctdonath 13y ago

South Korean 15-year-olds rank No. 2 in the world in reading Unmentioned is that written Korean was designed by an accomplished linguist (around 1500), making it very easy to learn. This in contrast to English, a bewildering mashup of incompatible spelling & phonetic rules made up by happenstance.

agumonkey 13y ago
Korean looks cryptic at first, but it's fairly principled and the 'learn korean in 8 min' slides floating on the web not long ago was not a joke. Also, Asian counting system is very regular, allegedly easing the learning for young pupils. ps: I found english very easy, unlike french which is probably only meant for world class writers.
argumentum 13y ago
English bashing is so easy its tiring. There's a reason English is a "bewildering mashup", because it developed organically taking input from all around the world. It is quite arguable that this is it's greatest strengths as a language. This is due not only to the British Empire but also the fact that they essentially let language develop on its own. Unlike say, France (which had a similarly expansive empire), which tightly controlled the French language and still does to this day.
- lkbm 13y ago
  So, basically you agree with the OP?
- Dewie 13y ago
  Yeah, there is a reason English is the way it is. Who said there wasn't? Saying that 'there is a reason' doesn't really rebut anything (you agreed with it anyway), and I kind of expected a rebut with the antagonistic opening sentence. > , because it developed organically taking input from all around the world. It is quite arguable that this is it's greatest strengths as a language. Having a lot of loanwords is one thing: not having any sane and simple rules for spelling and phonetics is quite another. If 'organic' spelling is it's greatest strength, then it seems like a language more suited for spelling bees# then for communication. #I doubt you'll find something like a Spanish spelling bee: from what I've seen of its diction, a Spanish spelling bee would be too trivial. Like making a competition out of tic-tac-toe.

w1ntermute 13y ago

"Should the US follow South Korea's education system?" No, that would just make things infinitely worse. The SK education system consists of nothing more than rote memorization, and produces a pressure-cooker environment that is responsible for an extremely high teenage suicide rate.

clarky07 13y ago

I might get hammered for this, but I really don't think teachers are significantly underpaid. I say this as someone married to a teacher. Considering that they only work 9 months a year and generally have good benefits, I'm not convinced they should be getting paid significantly more. Take an average salary of around 30-35k and /.75 (9 of 12 months) and it becomes $40,000 - $46,667 a year. Add into that good retirement and great healthcare, it just doesn't seem that unreasonable to me. It's unreasonable to compare a salary from a job working 9 months a year to another profession that works 12 months a year. "Well it's hard, if you had to deal with these kids you'd need a few months off too." Yeah, and that's why I didn't become a teacher. You chose this knowing all the pros and cons. Pro - only work 9 months a year Con - only get paid for 9 months a year

lkbm 13y ago
> Yeah, and that's why I didn't become a teacher. You chose this knowing all the pros and cons. Exactly. And if we want better teachers, we need to boost the pros or reduce the cons so it's a better option. Cashing it out in terms of what we've decided they "deserve" may be gratifying, but it's useless. Let's base our policy based on what will actually best achieve our goals.
sillysaurus 13y ago
Our teachers are our kids' jailers. Spending more for better jailers would probably have a decent impact on the future.
byoung2 13y ago
How many hours are spent outside of class preparing lessons, grading papers, staff meetings, parent conferences, etc.? This reduces the hourly rate somewhat.
- rayiner 13y ago
  The amount of class time per week in our county is ~30. So even if they spend 15 hours a week outside of class on those things, that's a 45 hour work week, very consistent with that of other white collar workers making that kind of money. Teachers get paid extremely well in most larger cities. In Atlanta, Chicago, Philadelphia, Houston, and New York, starting salaries are in the $40-45k/year range with a bachelors. This might seem low to people on this board accustomed to Silicon Valley pay scales, but it's substantially above average for liberal arts majors. When I graduated college in Atlanta in 2007, the going rate for a fresh BA in white collar professional job (say in the accounting department of a company) was $35k. Teachers were starting at $40k+. Also, the benefits cannot be ignored. Good health insurance and a pension contribution are extravagant benefits for young college graduates in the Millennial generation. They easily add $15-20k/year to total compensation.

mitchi 13y ago

Some weird stuff in this article. How can he have a teaching empire if he only makes 4M a year? Anyway, good for him. Meanwhile there are people putting tons of content on the internet, for free. Youtube channels, Khan Academy. If you really want to learn you only need to put aside some quiet time.

arbuge 13y ago
4m and 30 employees is a bigger empire than most teachers can lay claim to...

MyDogHasFleas 13y ago

Can't see the original article due to paywall. But I get the gist from the comments. The "teachers don't make enough", "we don't spend enough on education", etc. debate is on the wrong point. The education system and philosophy in the USA is broken at all levels. Citizens are acting rationally by not volunteering to spend more tax dollars on it. Those that can afford it bypass it entirely by paying for private education, or if they don't have quite that much money, by moving to a community that is wealthier and has better public education. Economic forces combined with the digital age's technology will inevitably lead to the creative destruction of the education industry, just as other industries formed under Industrial Age economics have been deconstructed. Unfortunately this is being fought to the death by the established education community and its monopolistic, union-based government and quasi-governmental constituents. Try telling a public school teacher any of this, and you'll get not a reasoned response, but scorn, anger, and a slamming door in your face. It's going to be brutal for them when it comes.

deleted 13y ago
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muzz 13y ago
Your comment clearly does not address the article, which makes no mention of the things you cite (union-based government, etc).

Dewie 13y ago

> I traveled to South Korea to see what a free market for teaching talent looks like—one stop in a global tour to discover what the U.S. can learn from the world's other education superpowers. Education superpower for having well-educated citizens? Or educations superpower for having many of the top universities?

mathattack 13y ago

If he has 30 assistants, he's a lot more than a teacher. He's the equivalent of a senior partner at a professional services firm.