
The High Cost of Low Teacher Salaries - ojbyrne
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/01/opinion/01eggers.html
======
caterping
The low pay wouldn't be so much of a problem if teachers got more support from
parents and administration. For example, when a teacher has to send a student
out of the room for bad behavior, the student should have hell to pay from
parents and the vice principal. Instead, what often happens is parents
complain about the teacher's discipline and the vice principal calls you in to
"have a discussion" with the student and to "hear their side of the story".
It's a fucking circus.

Also, grading is a _bitch_. I left the profession mostly because of the insane
hours you need to spend grading (well, high school anyway). Students will
nickel and dime you for every point while comparing with their peers. "Sally
missed the minus sign in step C of problem 4 but got the same number of points
as me? WTF?" WTF indeed.

Silly waste-of-time after-school meetings about meeting standardized testing
goals is also a complete waste of time as well.

Add to that, you have to be up and out of the house every morning by 6 am or
so to be on time. If you have kids, forget about seeing them for breakfast
before their school day starts. And that means giving up your evenings too
because you need to be in bed early.

As an aside, I knew a teacher who "retired early" basically due to a mental
breakdown from the stress. I suspect most teachers know someone who's done the
same.

 _Edit:_ And if you're male, all it takes is an unsubstantiated claim of
impropriety from a female student to end your career immediately.

Easily the worst and most stressful job I've ever had. And it really sucks
because I was an excellent teacher. Got great reviews from observers and
students. My students learned a ton. I really liked teaching too.

~~~
endtime
>For example, when a teacher has to send a student out of the room for bad
behavior, the student should have hell to pay from parents and the vice
principal. Instead, what often happens is parents complain about the teacher's
discipline and the vice principal calls you in to "have a discussion" with the
student and to "hear their side of the story".

I had a lot of teachers with serious personality problems when I was in public
school. Not all, of course, and I'm not saying you're one of them - but the
implicit suggestion you're making (side with the teacher by default, don't
listen to the kid's side of the story) would be even worse than the way it is
now.

>Also, grading is a bitch. I left the profession mostly because of the insane
hours you need to spend grading (well, high school anyway). Students will
nickel and dime you for every point while comparing with their peers. "Sally
missed the minus sign in step C of problem 4 but got the same number of points
as me? WTF?" WTF indeed.

Suck it up. I TAed a bunch of CS classes in grad school, including a couple
proof classes, and yes grading can be a bitch (CS103 was especially rough).
And believe me, Stanford students know how to ask for points back. But that's
part of the job. If you can't justify the grades you give, and/or you can't
grade consistently, then you deserve pushback from students.

>Add to that, you have to be up and out of the house every morning by 6 am or
so to be on time. If you have kids, forget about seeing them for breakfast
before their school day starts. And that means giving up your evenings too
because you need to be in bed early.

I agree that schools start stupidly early in the US, but when your workday
ends between 2:30 and 4:00, I don't think you can really complain about having
to go to bed early.

I don't mean to dispute that teaching is stressful, and I'm all for much much
higher teacher salaries (and the end of seniority, teachers' unions,
ridiculous benefits, rubber rooms, etc.). But your complaints don't really
seem reasonable.

~~~
scott_s
I think you sailed past the fact that the professor for your course had a TA
to help with grading. I TAed a junior level computing systems course, derived
from the CMU offering: <http://csapp.cs.cmu.edu/> Some weeks I would get very
little research done because the grading and office hour help duties were so
substantial - and that's even with farming the work out to other TAs.

If the professors in the course had to have done both teaching and grading,
there's no way they could have sustained the level of instruction and
assignments required by this substantial course. One or the other would have
suffered. I assume the same was true for your courses.

My point: college courses with TAs don't neatly map to pre-college courses
because in elementary, middle and high school, one teacher has to do it all.

~~~
endtime
The point of that part of my comment wasn't to issue a who-was-busiest
challenge (though I'm pretty sure I'd win such a challenge, against either the
OP or any of the profs I was TAing for), but to say that long hours grading
and regrade requests are to be expected, and especially that the latter are
not just the result of unreasonable expectations on the part of the students.
Grading is not always fun, but that's why someone gives you money to do it.

And even though it's apples to oranges, I'll state for the record if I hadn't
been taking three classes, working on my startup (which I launched during
school), and (one quarter) interning at NASA, I think I would easily have had
time to put together and deliver lectures in addition to the office
hours/recitations/review sessions I was holding, problem sets I was grading,
exams I was helping write, robots I was admining, class logistics I was
organizing, and whatever else happened to fall under the umbrella of my TA
duties any given week.

~~~
scott_s
Sure, if you _had not_ been doing all of those other things, you would have
had time for the remaining duties of a teacher. But you wouldn't have time for
much else. And you're thinking of a work week in the same way that a grad
student, professor or startup founder does: work all the time. Which brings us
back to the point of the original article: if we're going to expect people to
put in that much time and effort, perhaps we should pay them more to
compensate.

~~~
endtime
I said in my comment that I think teachers should be paid more. I can think
that and also think that the complaints in the comment to which I was replying
were unreasonable.

>Sure, if you had not been doing all of those other things, you would have had
time for the remaining duties of a teacher. But you wouldn't have time for
much else.

Again, it's _beside the point_ , but actually I think I would have had time
for quite a lot else. Do you really think working for NASA, starting your own
company, and being a full time grad student at once take up the same amount of
time as preparing and delivering a couple lectures a week?

~~~
scott_s
I took the complaints not as "these are unreasonable expectation of a
teacher," but as "these are unreasonable expectations of someone who is paid
as little as teachers are."

As to your final question, to quote my freshmen year English professor,
"Anything is hard if you do it well." The course I had in mind was relatively
new, and as such its contents were in flux. The projects and lecture material
were under constant revision. If the professors for the course I TAed had had
the TA responsibilities as well, they would have had time for little else but
the course.

------
necubi
My mother was for many years an elementary school teacher in a district that
was almost entirely Hispanic, where a large percentage of the students could
barely speak English and where many were the children of migrant farm workers
who never stayed in one school for the entire year.

When NCLB hit, her school was unsurprisingly deemed "failing." The response
was to focus exclusively on test scores, eliminating any program (art, sports,
music) that did not directly traslate into better performance on the benchmark
test. And yet, because the students still couldn't speak English, nothing much
changed and the school was taken over by the state, which meant the principal
and many of the teachers were fired.

How does this sort of thing make any sense? How are the teachers to blame for
their unprepared students? These teachers are working in the hardest districts
with the most students of greatest need, and our national response is to
punish them.

It's distressing to see in many of these discussions exactly the attitudes
described in the article: teachers are lazy, they're overpaid, they even get
summers off! Never mind that their salaries are so low that many need to find
alternate work for the summer to make ends meet, or that it is impossible to
get all the work done during the school day, necessitating often long nights.

There are bad teachers, just as there are bad programmers and bad doctors. We
should try to help them become better teachers, and fire them if that's not
possible. But we shouldn't castigate an entire profession as a result, and we
should acknowledge that if we actually wanted good teachers, we will have to
pay for it.

~~~
davatk
I would be a lot more sympathetic to teachers if their pay system wasn't
seniority based, or if it wasn't so hard to fire teachers.

~~~
earl
But they essentially have to be.

First, teachers outside of pretty narrow bounds will never be more productive.
It takes one teacher to teach 20 students. In 10 years it will take one
teacher to teach 20 students. Thus there is no productivity growth while, if
you want people to be teachers, you have to eventually pay them more. So
assume you don't have a hard time firing teachers; I just found a cute way to
save a whole lot of money! Fire everybody with more than 10 years experience,
ie all your high salaried employees.

Second, I don't think you'll possibly get good employees without strong
unionization. Who would be stupid enough to teach without a union contract?
Real people want to do things like own homes, put down roots, start families,
and have some job security; that's enormously risky in an area with monopsony
employer(s). I'm a software engineer, so there are dozens to thousands of
employers in reasonably sized cities, whereas there are typically only one
public school district and perhaps a handful of private schools. That's a lot
more risk for the employee, since if I have a personality conflict with my
boss, there are plenty of other buyers of software engineering. What happens
to a teacher if he or she has a conflict with his or her principal? It's not
like there are tons of employers around, and if the answer is that employee is
just sol, don't expect smart hardworking people with choices to become
teachers.

~~~
natrius
For some time, I've lamented the negative effects that the government's
effective monopoly over primary education has had on our system. Eliminating
choice eliminates the natural incentive to improve that results from consumers
choosing better alternatives.

I found the monopsony problem you've pointed out on the employment end of the
system quite insightful. Entering an industry with a limited number of
employers generally isn't a great idea. However, there's a simpler solution to
the problem than more unionization, which in practice requires non-voluntary
membership to be effective. I think we'd all be better off if the government
continued to _fund_ education for those who can't afford it, but stopped
actually _running_ the schools themselves. I don't understand why voucher
proposals find such limited support.

~~~
yequalsx
Who is going to build a school in a poor neighborhood then? Who is going to
transport the child to the good school? When the slots to the best schools are
filled by children of wealthy parents then what?

We would end up with a worse two-tiered system than what we have now.

~~~
anigbrowl
If there is voucher money available, then the poverty of a neighborhood is a
lower factor than it is for, say, retailers.

On the other hand, poor neighborhoods can be more dangerous and involve
greater academic and social challenges. The solution is not to measure schools
in poor areas against those in good ones and declare them worse because they
perform more poorly (due to circumstances beyond teachers' control), but to
measure students' baseline ability and then fund and reward relative
improvement, rather than on the basis of absolute outcomes.

For example, say you go into a neighborhood on the first day of school and
find that only 50% of 10th graders meet expectations for literacy. The best
teacher in the world is not going to be be able to bring that up to the 95%
level in a wealthy area on the other side of town, but if the proportion of
students who are literate rises to 75% by the end of the 12th grade
(correcting for dropout %ages), then that's a huge improvement. In economic
terms, it's worth adding more funding right up to the point where marginal net
gain falls below zero.

There are obviously willing and committed teachers willing to take on these
important challenges. Maybe they would do better by setting up nonprofits and
applying for funds to establish charter schools instead of abdicating their
negotiation power to the national unions.

~~~
yequalsx
National unions do not negotiate salaries at the national level. Salary
negotiations are done at the local level from district to district done by
local union reps.

~~~
anigbrowl
Not all negotiations are about pay and benefits. Presumably there is some
benefit in being organized at the state and national levels or unions wouldn't
bother to do so.

~~~
yequalsx
Definitely there are reasons for having a national union. But you made a
statement about not abdicating negotiation power to national unions. I assumed
that by this you meant salary since that is the subject of the article about
which all these discussions come from. Of course, things do get off topic and
so I'm sorry if my assumption was incorrect.

------
Lost_BiomedE
To get a better look at the real pay, benefits should also be taken into
account. Any government job should be compared to a similar skill-level
private sector job, again pay plus benefits.

When it comes to schools, I don't think you can talk about pay or costs
without also focusing on the administration. It is a system. Requiring a part
of funding to go to teacher salaries would allow upping just that part of the
equation, if need be. If this requirement already exists, and pay plus
benefits are poor, then something higher up the food chain is broken and
should be what is focused on.

------
yequalsx
Let's fire the bad teachers! That's a great idea. Except, how do you define
bad teachers?

I've been a teacher for many years. I'm an average teacher. Not great, not
horrible. Some students really like me and others not so much. As far as I can
tell society wants three things:

1\. Almost everyone to have access to a great education. 2\. Almost everyone
to pass. 3\. Almost everyone who passes to know the material.

The fact is, you can have any two of these but not all three and society is
not willing to come to grips with this reality. Society is also not willing to
come to grips with the fact that the truly great teachers are, well, truly
great. A rarity and it will always be this case as long as truly inspirational
people can better be fulfilled doing something other than teaching.

Think you know the answers? Then get into a classroom and lead the way. What?
The low pay, lack of respect, long hours, emotional stress aren't worth it? I
see.

~~~
schmittz
Can you elaborate on why you can only have two of those three things? They
seem very subjectively defined and I don't see why you can't have all three.
I'm not a teacher (I have tutored and TA'd), so I'm curious where this opinion
comes from.

~~~
yequalsx
It is my belief that not everyone is capable of mastering each topic. That
there aren't enough potential great teachers to make this possible unless you
do some sort of selection method.

Harvard gets great results but they select who enters the university. If you
want almost everyone to pass and to know the material then some sort of pre-
selection criteria must be met.

~~~
schmittz
Your conclusions from your example are factually not true, because there are
schools where everyone gets a "good education" that do not have pre-selection
criteria. I would also agree that not everyone is capable of "mastering each
topic," but why do you need to master them and why do they need to know each
topic? I'm sorry, I just don't feel like you answered my question. I don't
think you need great teachers to have everyone learn material. The onus of
learning should be on the student and our goals for what students should learn
are maligned with this concept. The fact that there isn't a definition for bad
teachers doesn't mean there aren't bad teachers (you have to agree with this)
and that something shouldn't be done about them. The way that I look at the
three points you have numbered is that the first one follows from the other
two. By working to redefine classroom expectations to closer align with
placing responsibility on students for doing the learning, we can realize that
more people can effectively learn appropriate material to a satisfactory
comprehension level.

~~~
yequalsx
Yes, there are schools where everyone gets a good education without a pre
selection criteria. They do not, however, posses the property that almost all
of the students pass and almost all of the students know the material. You
can't get all three conditions to be true simultaneously.

Of course there are bad teachers.

The onus of learning should be on the students? Sure. But then you aren't
going to get almost everyone knowing the material because most people don't
want to learn.

~~~
schmittz
I'm sorry, I still don't understand how these three things can't be filled
simultaneously, you just keep saying they can't without giving me any more
reason. Feel free to respond by explaining or not, I'm just curious why that's
the case. I agree that a large number of students don't want to learn, but a
lot of those students also just don't learn, in which case why are we paying
to "teach" them?

~~~
yequalsx
By definition, if a large number of students don't want to learn then it is
trivially true that we aren't going to get

2\. Almost everyone to pass. 3. Almost everyone who passes to know the
material.

unless we exclude them from the system. Property 1 was that almost everyone
goes to school.

~~~
calibraxis
In my experience, children are very curious. I'm very skeptical when teachers
claim otherwise, despite them having experience with many children, since
they're often the ones pummeling that curiosity out of them as part of the
job. (<http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm>)

------
BudVVeezer
My sister was Teacher of the Year for LAUSD, and if she doesn't spend her own
money on supplies for her students, they simply have nothing to write on or
with. She has never had a class size under 35 that I'm aware of. Yet, her job
is on the line based solely on the test scores of her kids, many of whom are
mainstreamed special Ed kids. In what way is this a recipe for success?

~~~
waterlesscloud
The Arts School in downtown L.A. was originally budgeted as a $70 million
project, then raised to $120 million before construction began, then finished
with a final cost of $573 million.

Giving LAUSD more money to manage seems like a bad idea to me.

~~~
Caballera
It would be interesting to see where the money really goes. Cause it's NYC
it's sure not to the teachers or for getting the students books. Not that the
students would even use the books, and whatever books they get they never
return at the end of the year.

~~~
maxxxxx
I have read somewhere that the ratio of administrators to teachers goes up
constantly. That would also explain the rise in college tuition. More and more
administrators and consultants to pay. Wish I could find hard numbers
somewhere. But as with all political discussions real data is hard to find..,

------
js2
Direct links to the relevant McKinsey reports referenced in the article:

[http://www.mckinsey.com/clientservice/Social_Sector/our_prac...](http://www.mckinsey.com/clientservice/Social_Sector/our_practices/Education/Knowledge_Highlights/~/media/Reports/SSO/Closing_the_talent_gap.ashx)
[Sept 2010, 2.2 MB]

[http://www.mckinsey.com/App_Media/Reports/SSO/Worlds_School_...](http://www.mckinsey.com/App_Media/Reports/SSO/Worlds_School_Systems_Final.pdf)
[Sept 2007, 10 MB]

------
drm237
If an article complaining about teacher salaries doesn't mention that most
teachers get their summers off, I find it difficult to believe any other
points it tries to make. I knew a few teachers that worked jobs in the summer
to supplement their income and that seems pretty reasonable given that the
vast majority of people I know work all 12 months.

------
mikealle233
We don't blame soldiers, while we do blame teachers, because almost everyone
has personal experience dealing with lazy, bad teachers as a student. Many
people also have direct experience with lazy friends who became teachers for
lack of other options.

------
kenjackson
There are bad teachers. Sure. But there are good ones too. And teachers are
the largest professional field in the US (about 6.2M, versus, for example 1.2M
lawyers). This indicates a couple of problems:

1) The thought you can rid yourself of all or even most bad teachers is
absurd. You can't easily chop off the bottom 10% each year and bring in an
_additional_ 500,000 new teachers.

2) With a population that large the quality of teaching will regress to the
mean. We just realistically can't expect an all-star team of 6M of anything.

So what do we do? The first thing is to realize the big problem is in the
inner-city and rural areas -- in underserved communities. And honestly, I
think we need to focus a bit more on the community and less on the classroom
proper. Like I'd really like to see summer reading programs in these
communities, with some strong incentives. I also think things like Khan
Academy would actually really help. I'm probably overly optimistic, but I
think getting kids to listen to lectures is easier than getting them to do
homework at home.

My experience is that good schools and good students actually do quite well.
The biggest thing that probably will get overlooked, even by what I'd like to
do, are bright students at poor schools.

~~~
Eliezer
> You can't easily chop off the bottom 10% each year and bring in an
> additional 500,000 new teachers.

Yes you can. You just have to offer high enough salaries.

~~~
kenjackson
In the US we graduate about 100k engineering students each
year([http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2008/11/50-of...](http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2008/11/50-of-
us-engineering-students-dropout---why.html)).

So even if we hired every engineering graduate from US schools every year, we
wouldn't fill the gap, by a long shot.

My point is that for a population this huge you're not going to be able to
backfill for any reasonable dollar amount or you have to significantly lower
your standards, in which case you're probably hiring people that will largely
fall into that same bottom 10% next year.

------
gojomo
Here was another NYTimes op-ed in March, drawing upon the same McKinsey
international comparisons:

<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/opinion/13kristof.html>

(Kristof included a link to the McKinsey report,
[http://www.mckinsey.com/clientservice/Social_Sector/our_prac...](http://www.mckinsey.com/clientservice/Social_Sector/our_practices/Education/Knowledge_Highlights/~/media/Reports/SSO/Closing_the_talent_gap.ashx)
, and supporting material can be found at
[http://www.mckinsey.com/clientservice/Social_Sector/our_prac...](http://www.mckinsey.com/clientservice/Social_Sector/our_practices/Education/Knowledge_Highlights/Closing_the_talent_gap.aspx)
.)

Previous HN discussion:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2318265>

------
tokenadult
Note the rhetorical sleight of hand in this op-ed piece. The op-ed piece, and
the advocacy group sources it cites to back up its claims, take care to write
about "teachers’ salaries" rather than write about "compensation packages for
teachers." The rhetorical reason for this is to divert attention from how
expensive it actually is to taxpayers to provide the total compensation
package for a typical schoolteacher, including subsidies for "professional
development" (which most professionals pay for out of their own pocket),
family health care benefits, and defined-benefit pensions. And that's not even
to mention the issue of schoolteacher job security

[http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2008-05-06-teachers-t...](http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2008-05-06-teachers-
tenure_n.htm)

<http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41956922/ns/nightly_news/>

[http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2011/0414/Why-N.J.-te...](http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2011/0414/Why-N.J.-teacher-
tenure-reform-plan-matters-to-the-rest-of-America)

which exceeds the job security of almost all other forms of employment in the
United States

[http://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/28/nyregion/teachers-and-
tenu...](http://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/28/nyregion/teachers-and-tenure-
rights-vs-discipline.html)

[http://www.schoolmatch.com/audit/jacksonville/articles/teach...](http://www.schoolmatch.com/audit/jacksonville/articles/teach1.htm)

whether or not the teachers are able to teach the subjects they are hired to
teach.

<http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf>

<http://www.nctq.org/p/>

<http://educationnext.org/evaluating-teacher-effectiveness/>

Education reform is not a simple issue, and much basic research still needs to
be done and assimilated to bring about improvements.

[http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2066577,00.ht...](http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2066577,00.html)

But to begin to get United States schools on track to meet the standards met
in other countries, policy analysts in the United States have to be honest
about what the overall framework of regulation now is, and just exactly what
teachers are accountable to do, for what level of compensation, under current
contracts in most school districts.

P.S. I should make clear that an effective teacher is worth the teacher's
weight in gold, and currently the best teachers in the United States are
mostly substantially underpaid. But they are underpaid, in large part, because
they haven't mobilized their own political participation to unshackle their
pay from the lockstep pay scales that also are granted to ineffective
teachers. That's why I do my teaching on a contract basis with public school
districts or through my own nonprofit organization, so that I can deliver
quality lessons without bureaucratic interference and gain professional
recognition for the results of my teaching.

~~~
yequalsx
Most people do not talk about total compensation in the U.S. when discussing
salaries. My total compensation is around $65,000. It is much less than anyone
I know in the private sector with comparable education and experience. And
this while comparing my total compensation with just their salary.

Most professionals do get health coverage and some sort of pension coverage
(usually 401K matching funds). I don't think it's fair to include these things
when talking about teacher pay unless one does this for non-teachers as well.
As a society we usually don't include these things when talking about non-
teacher pay. Heck, most people think that they only pay half of FICA and that
the employer pays the other half.

Given the hours worked, emotional stress, and grief that many teachers
experience I think teachers are underpaid. Very much underpaid. I'm a teacher
and have an obvious bias. At my school our contracts are being negotiated
right now. It's clear we are going to take a pay cut. I haven't had a pay
raise in 2 years and will be taking a pay cut over the the next two years.

The job is becoming less and less desirable. I strongly encourage anyone who
will listen to me to not go into teaching. It's a bad career choice in my
opinion.

~~~
gsmaverick
Regarding pension, matching 401k is not comparable with a government backed
defined benefit pension.

~~~
yequalsx
Actually it is. There is an easy way to compare them from an actuary point of
view. Both types of systems have a present day value and both are calculable
expenses to the employer. Some 401Ks are much nicer than my pension. Some are
much worse. But they are comparable.

~~~
georgieporgie
Does your pension carry the risk of losing its entire value as a result of a
stock market crash?

~~~
yequalsx
Yes. All pensions invest in the stock market. Well run ones invest in
government bonds too and other safe instruments. Right now my pension is
around 80% funded as a result of the market crash.

~~~
georgieporgie
_All pensions invest in the stock market_

I believe that statement is untrue. Regardless, let me rephrase my question:
are you guaranteed a certain retirement benefit regardless of market
performance?

It is my understanding that pension programs typically guarantee some
percentage of your highest salary, with a multiplier for length of service.

~~~
yequalsx
I like to know of an example of a pension system in the U.S. that does not
invest in the stock market. I'm in a defined benefit pension system and
regardless of how the stock market does my benefit is guaranteed by the state.
Of course, the actuaries who set up the pension devised it so that it the
guaranteed benefit would very likely be able to be met by the contributions I
make to it.

There is a push by some politicians to get states to declare bankruptcy so
that they will be able to renege on their guarantee.

~~~
georgieporgie
_I like to know of an example of a pension system in the U.S. that does not
invest in the stock market_

Social Security, as mentioned in the Wikipedia link. Additionally, there is no
reason a private pension couldn't be directly funded.

 _I'm in a defined benefit pension system and regardless of how the stock
market does my benefit is guaranteed by the state_

Which is what I meant when I asked about being invested in the stock market.
While your pension may be _funded_ via stock market investments, for all
intents and purposes, your pension is unrelated to the market. With my 401k, I
am very much at the whim of the market. If I hit 65 and my anticipated returns
don't materialize, there's nobody for me to sue. Thus, pensions are not
directly comparable to 401ks.

 _There is a push ... guarantee._

Given the unrealistic contracts that were agreed to, in light of our near-term
economic realities, bankruptcy or mass firings and re-hirings are literally
the only way this problem can be addressed.

------
dpatru
If the earth-moving industry were like the education industry, the hand shovel
would still be the tool of choice and bulldozers, backhoes, and other machines
would not exist. A basic problem with education is that the technology has
stagnated. The public school classroom has not changed much in 50 years.
Teachers still have live lectures during class, kids still do homework at
home. Each teacher's class size is the same as the other teachers' in the
school. There's no innovation aimed at dramatically reducing costs and raising
outcomes.

The cause for this stagnation is obvious: the education industry is controlled
by people who have a strong interest in keeping the education process
inefficient and labor intensive. When was the last time you heard a teachers'
union or a department of education support a technology that promised to
reduce the cost of education and the number of teachers? Instead, the public
education industry is focused on making education more inefficient: requiring
teacher certification, reducing class sizes, increasing funding, etc.

The most promising recent developments in education have come from outside the
establishment. Wikipedia makes it possible to get a fairly good understanding
of any subject quickly and for free. Khan Academy features thousands of ten-
minute long micro-lectures covering most of the math and science taught in
schools through high school along with software to test mastery and help
students tutor each other. Flash card sites help students memorize. These are
the "bulldozers" of the education industry which will enable one person to do
the work of hundreds. These are the technologies which will "fix" education.

------
kazoolist
I'm late to the discussion, but want to add a few things.

First, is there really a large group of people who think that teachers a.) are
whom to blame for the state of American education; and b.) are paid too much?
The only time I hear about people making such arguments is in op-eds like this
one that try to refute them. I think such op-eds are battling straw men.

That said:

1\. If you look at total compensation broken down by per-hour-worked (which I
think is a fair metric), teachers are paid within the norms for their level of
education, etc. There is a reasonable write up on this here: [http://www.cato-
at-liberty.org/hate-the-deception-not-the-te...](http://www.cato-at-
liberty.org/hate-the-deception-not-the-teacher/)

2\. I think a growing number of people are outraged at Teachers Unions, and
Teachers Unions try to associate themselves back to just being "teachers".
It's a dirty trick. People don't want employment contracts dictating how their
kids are taught. They want teachers to be able to work longer hours if they're
inclined to, try creative strategies, etc. They want to attract and keep the
best teachers by paying them more than less effective teachers. Many (most?)
union contracts dictate terms that disallow this kind of stuff. People are
upset at the obstacles the union is putting up, not with the teachers that
often are forced to have to join that union.

3\. I am upset that we, as a country, continue to spend more and more per-
pupil on education and have stagnant-at-best results. Something like only 40
cents per dollar spent on education actually make it into the classroom
("citation needed", I know). I'd like to see education spending done more
effectively. If this means moving dollars spent on bureaucratic waste into
higher teacher salaries, I'd welcome that change.

------
Ratufa
Is there any good evidence that the main problem with our schools is bad
teaching? In other words, if you're going to spend money on improving
educational outcomes, should you spend it on "better" teachers or on something
like early childhood interventions, as per arguments like this:

[http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/03/james-heckman-
educ...](http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/03/james-heckman-education-
achievement-gap)

(Ignoring for the moment that spending people's tax dollars on better teachers
is politically more acceptable than spending it on targeted interventions.)

~~~
caterping
> Is there any good evidence that the main problem with our schools is bad
> teaching?

Not to my knowledge.

Ask any teacher (and they are the ones who know) what the main problem is, and
they'll tell you that the problem isn't necessarily the schools, or teachers,
or administration -- it's the parents. If parents do their job and make their
kids' learning a priority, that would make the biggest improvement to the
situation by far.

------
schmittz
I would be very curious to see what effect increased student punishment had on
education quality. Some rules should be more lax (I once spent twenty minutes
having to explain why I was in the hallway after the bell rang in order to
avoid detention [the answer was that my locker was on the other side of the
building from my classroom]), but most systems are too lax. We try to keep
students around who have no interest in learning because it "keeps them off
the streets." This has two results. First, even if they make it to the end,
they probably wind up on the streets anyway. Secondly, they drag down those
who do want to learn or would be willing to learn such that their chances of
excelling are minimized. We should have more remedial job training (not sure
how well this would work, but other analogous programs such as rehab over jail
have proven quite successful) and stricter rules about whether students can
stay in school or not. These shouldn't be performance based per se, so much as
based on a student's effort to complete assignments, pay attention in class,
etc. We consequently end up paying a lot of money for people who don't learn
anything and bring down those who could. We'd also have to pay for the job
training, but it's shorter curriculum would serve to save money and probably
increase their chances of gainful employment. I'm not sure how well this would
work, but we've certainly never tried it in the US, at least that I'm aware
of.

~~~
caterping
> We try to keep students around who have no interest in learning because it
> "keeps them off the streets."

The reason this is done is because they are children -- not adults. They are
immature and may be making bad decisions. They might have a rotten home life
with bad role models. The point is, you try to help them anyway in case they
do indeed see a reason to turn their life around.

Why do you think schools have so much sports education? One reason is because
it keeps some kids around who otherwise would simply drop out. And every good
teacher knows that you can often get a problem kid in your class to focus and
learn something by having one or more of their coaches get on their case.

~~~
schmittz
Mmm, yes. I agree to a certain extent. I guess my belief is that there are
ways to engage a child outside of a formal education system that would have
the same effect while concentrating on something they want to do, since
learning is not that thing. I haven't thought this entirely through, but it
seems that the current paradigm isn't optimal. You're absolutely right that
sports and arts programs provide outlets auxiliary to a standard education,
but for students with no interest in traditional learning, maybe it would be
better to focus on those things they do enjoy and leave off those that they
won't engage in. It would be analogous to the perception that everyone should
attend college because it leads to a better life, when in fact many students
should be attending post-secondary technical schools. Why not start the split
earlier for those who actively refuse to be educated?

~~~
caterping
> Why not start the split earlier for those who actively refuse to be
> educated?

Because:

(A) in high school they're still kids, and

(B) one main goal here is to have an educated citizenry, and this means
educating all kids as well as we can, whether the kids themselves think it's a
good idea or not. :)

------
gregatragenet
From the article: We don’t say, "It’s these lazy soldiers and their bloated
benefits plans! That’s why we haven’t done better in Afghanistan!"

It's a good thing our military isn't unionized.. мы все были бы говоря России.

------
gojomo
Here was another NYTimes op-ed in March, drawing upon the same McKinsey
international comparisons:

<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/opinion/13kristof.html>

Previous HN discussion:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2318265>

------
georgieporgie
This is too low quality even for a weekend HN post.

