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Emergency-hired teachers without degrees as effective as licensed educators (the74million.org)
140 points by andygcook 9 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 198 comments



I am very close to obtaining an elementary school teaching degree (46 of 49 credits completed), and as of this year I am a full time teacher at a private school (which doesn't have to care whether I officially have a license). My masters program is considered among the best in the state.

Unfortunately, I don't have many good things to say about my masters program. The majority of my classes have been interesting but useless in a real classroom. Teaching is just one of those things that you largely learn by doing.

Teaching does take a lot of skill and practice—I am surrounded at work by more experienced colleagues, and watching them always leaves me impressed—but I don't think it's something you can learn from a textbook.

Similarly, the licensure exams are just awful, at least in New York. I will leave you with a real practice test question from the official preparation materials. This is for the content knowledge test on "Science and Technology".

----------

A construction company is evaluating proposals for the creation of a new playground. They are using the following scale to assess the relevant criteria:

    +--------------+------------------------+
    | Scale number | Scale score assessment |
    +--------------+------------------------+
    | 1            | Far below standards    |
    | 2            | Below Standard         |
    | 3            | Meeting standard       |
    | 4            | Exceeding standard     |
    +--------------+------------------------+
Use the chart below to answer the question that follows:

    +----------------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+
    | Criteria       | Company 1 | Company 2 | Company 3 | Company 4 |
    +----------------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+
    | Safety         | 3         | 4         | 3         | 1         |
    | Quality        | 3         | 2         | 3         | 4         |
    | Creativity     | 4         | 3         | 3         | 4         |
    | Sustainability | 3         | 2         | 2         | 4         |
    | Utility        | 3         | 3         | 4         | 4         |
    +----------------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+
According to the evaluation detailed in the chart, which company should be awarded the project?

----------

Ready for the answer? Take a moment to think about it before looking...

The answer key says it's company four, because they have "the highest overall score. We are not told any information about categories being weighted and therefore we cannot pay special attention to the low safety score."


This answer made me unreasonably angry. Apparently to become a teacher in New York, you're not allowed to use your brain. "We are not told any information about categories being weighted and therefore we cannot pay special attention to the low safety score." means exactly the following when you're talking about a playground: "Congratulations, all the kids love this creative, high quality playground! Unfortunately they're all at the hospital."

I agree with another commenter, you should name and shame, this is beyond stupid and deserves to be called out as the idiocy it is.


> I agree with another commenter, you should name and shame, this is beyond stupid and deserves to be called out as the idiocy it is.

You do you want me to name, exactly?

The tests are made by Pearson Education. The website for the certification tests is https://www.nystce.nesinc.com/.


Yep, that was exactly what I meant. Thanks a lot for posting!


All of the federal "can you walk and chew gum" hiring tests are booby-trapped like this. The highest tier of scores go to the people who follow instructions literally and without regard to context, and who never apply their own moral judgment.

In the above example the last company is clearly sacrificing lives to get work done.


> "Congratulations, all the kids love this creative, high quality playground! Unfortunately they're all at the hospital."

The company even optimised the number of children who can experience it! A child in the hospital is one who got to use the playground, _and_ one who isn't hogging it, stopping others from experiencing it.


> "Congratulations, all the kids love this creative, high quality playground! Unfortunately they're all at the hospital."

I absolutely love this! xD


But you were given "information about categories", Anything under 3 should be an auto-reject because it does not meet the standard.

"standard" usually implies that it's an outside rule from a regulatory body/certification agency that you need to conform to.

It's such a weird question to ask in the first place.


I dont think standard usually means codified. It is also frequently used to mean typical, or within expectation.

It this example, outside law or regulation on standard creativity and utility seem pretty unlikely.

There is also a pretty big difference between standard (singular) and standards (plural), where the latter is more likely to imply a set of minimum requirements.


The very first line item (Scale number 1) uses "standards" plural: "Far below standards"


weird


The correct answer is obviously "insufficient information"

Maybe company 4 is the best, but I don't see why no information on weights implies equal weights.

Edit:

After thinking about this phenomenon for a while, I think there is an argument for testing implied or unstated prompts. It is frustrating to have to read minds, and quess what expectations are in different contexts. However, building a mental models of other people is an important skill.

I dont know that I would want to hire someone entirely incapable of it, who routinely required complete and explicit instruction.

That said, I dont think this kind of cognitive test is what they were going for


> We are not told any information about categories being weighted and therefore we cannot pay special attention to the low safety score.

This is extra hilarious because, if you don’t know the weighting (or even that each score is linear), then adding the scores in the first place is an invalid operation.


Regardless of the weighing, company 1 is the only one meeting all standards, and thus should be the only one qualified.


Company 4 is a reasonable answer. What's the point in having a scoring system if you're going to use personal judgement to determine the winner? Of course company 4 would be a bad fit. But the problem is the method that was originally chosen to evaluate the companies. The key is "according to the evaluation detailed in the chart". In reality, the company should look at these results and realize that they need a new evaluation method.


Is that a choice question? Or does it require a subjective answer? If it's the latter, then the question is reasonable to some degree, I guess?

“Company 4 might be the best in terms of naive computer-calculated average, but anything that doesn't meet a particular standard generally should not be allowed by law to be used/built. So Company 1 is the only choice, and perhaps the best, subjectively.”

I think this is a good question for discussion, because a child might answer “Company 4” at first just by looking at it and averaging it as anyone without any context would, but then you could say something more about it. But, I don't think it was intended to be analysed or answered this way. Either way, dumb question to ask for a qualification exam IMO.


It's multiple choice, I posted screenshots of the real thing downthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39073974


> We are not told any information about categories being weighted and therefore we cannot pay special attention to the low safety score."

And this is why we have debacles like the 737max.


This is extremely meme worthy material. Would you mind sharing the source?


The source is copyrighted / costs money. Also, I did purposefully choose the worst question as an example.

Practice tests can be purchased from this site https://www.nystce.nesinc.com but I can't find the page for this specific test (and don't really want to spend time looking). You're looking for the practice test for CST 245. This is the Arts & Sciences section of the Multi-Subject test for Teachers of Childhood, Grade 1 - Grade 6.


Self-replying to add on, if you just want to see the original table (as opposed to as my ASCII version), here are screenshots of the question. I just can't share the full test since it's paid material. (Sharing one question for the purpose of commentary and criticism is obviously fair use.)

Question: https://i.postimg.cc/wvn7tRf8/Screen-Shot-2024-01-20-at-7-00...

Answer Key: https://i.postimg.cc/90TzyXK4/Screen-Shot-2024-01-20-at-7-02...


Seems about right for "Science and Technology", a variant of this question also shows up in German IHK (chamber of commerce) exams for software developer certifications, with a similar expected answer.

Although you do sometimes get weights… the important part is explaining that you evaluate some weighted sum and take the best result.

How much impact would this question have on the final result for the licensure exam?

IIRC during my own IHK examination this was worth around 5pp, which is almost enough to drop you an entire grade.


> How much impact would this question have on the final result for the licensure exam?

Fun fact: I have no idea!

Basically all I know is that (1) tests are scored on a scale from 400 – 600, (2) the minimum passing score is 520, and (3) the test is not graded on a curve. But I don't know why they even bother sharing these numbers, because they don't divulge any information on how they're calculated.

https://www.nystce.nesinc.com/content/docs/NYSTCE_ISR_Back_M...

> Although you do sometimes get weights… the important part is explaining that you evaluate some weighted sum and take the best result.

To be clear, this is a multiple choice question. You need to select (A) Company 1, (B) Company 2, (C) Company 3, or (D) Company 4.


What’s the point of a question like this? Somewhere someone will have written down something they want teachers to be able to do and that will have been translated into a question like this. Was the original requirement bad or the translation into the question? What kind of system would lead to a better question?


I believe the standard is just "elementary school teachers should be able to read and interpret a table of data".


>What’s the point of a question like this?

To filter out people with the capacity and inclination to engage in critical thinking, because those people will not last as teachers.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NMoLJuDJEms7Ku9XS/guessing-t...


There is such a thing as testing for the conjunction fallacy.


Sorry, I'm not sure I follow. I know what the conjunction fallacy is but I don't see how it applies here.


Assuming a higher safety score means a “better” company isn’t an example (loosely speaking)?


That seems to match some real-world examples. "plug doors" anyone?


Are those MBA questions? Because that would explain a lot!


As a former high school teacher, I am in favor of reduced requirements to enter the profession; however, I taught in two states that supported these types of on ramps, and they didn’t seem to make a notable impact on applicant numbers (that is, out of the hundreds of educators I worked with over the years, I knew only one who came in via a non-traditional pathway after working in a different field (engineering)).

That’s not the question the article is asking, but I’m skeptical that making it easier for professionals to career switch into teaching is going to cause any meaningful number of them to do so.


Teacher pay is too low for anyone to want to take a teaching job when they have professional qualifications that would allow them to work a much better-paid job. (Especially when getting those skills also involved paying hundreds of thousands in student loans to a university. You need to earn your way out of that hole, and not working the best-paying job you can would be prolonging that debt!)

But I think the article is suggesting something different: that teachers could and should be hired fresh out of high school, when they don’t yet have any of those other professional skills — or the debt involved in acquiring them — and then simply given on-the-job training. Quote:

> Another recent study, out of Oakland, California, backs up this theory. Parents with high school diplomas who were given 10 weeks of training on a structured literacy program helped students produce strong early literacy gains, roughly on par with those made under fully credentialed teachers.


How much approximately do you think a teacher gets paid? Obviously it depends on specifics so maybe say whether you’re imagining a city centre / suburban / rural school, and whether the state/district is wealthy and whether it’s a high school or whatever.

I have some guesses in my head for something like ‘high school teacher in moderately wealthy Chicago suburb’ (I haven’t written the number here because I don’t want to anchor you) though I don’t have a great sense for how many jobs like that there are in the US. Above base pay there can also be more for helping with extracurriculars, potentially a defined benefit pension, and after settling in teachers will have a lot of free time/vacation not spent planning lessons. The amount of pay may not excite you if you’re a professional software developer at a well-paying company in the US, but I’m not sure that a more typical professional job would be “much better-paid”.


I taught in a moderately wealthy suburb of Minneapolis. With ten years of experience, my comp was about 50k. While I have heard stories of teachers from prior generations receiving somewhat lavish defined benefit pensions, I don’t believe that has been an option for new teachers in decades. With regard to vacations, we had the school calendar vacations (which is fine), but otherwise I accrued about 8 days of PTO per year without any other sort of vacation/parent leave/etc. When our first child was born, I burned all three weeks of accrued PTO and was back on the job. By comparison, when I left teaching - I doubled my income, work about 20 percent fewer hours a week, have comparable healthcare, unlimited PTO, took 8 weeks paid parental leave with our second child, and have much less day-to-day stress. Teaching isn’t a salt mine, but - in my experience - it wasn’t a cushy job either.


For another anecdote, someone I know teaching private with 0 years experience in the Bay Area / Silicon Valley makes $80k.


Public school in WA state, Masters degree, first year I'm making about $75k.

The trick is that it will take me 16 years to get to the top of the pay scale and make what I made as a software developer last year ($115K). When the union asks what I want, that is what I tell them. Top pay is fine, but it takes too long to get there.

I like the job a lot more and its only about three times as much work.


There are huge regional differences.


Oak Park, IL is wealthy but not like Kennilworth wealthy, or Lincoln Park wealthy. OPRF, our public high school, has zero teachers making less than six figures.

Lane III (bachelor's degree) CPS teacher entry comp --- year 1 --- is over $80k/yr, including benefits (a defined-benefit pension) and 10 weeks vacation.


The equivalent starting pay in my former district would by 37k/yr. I have relative living the Chicago suburbs that teaches. The difference in comp between her and I supports the numbers you have provided. I have also heard anecdotes about teachers that retired about 10 years ago and are provided 110+/yr on their pensions; however, the Illinois pension system seems to have crossed into "too big to fail" territory.


My mental model for this is that teacher comp in large urban and suburban school districts is quite good, and that comp in rural school districts is quite bad, and everything else is a crap shoot.


Almost my entire family are educators (wife, children, etc.) and we all agree that teacher pay is very low. Specifically, when you break it down at an hourly rate the pay is comically low. I think my wife calculated her pay several years ago at something like $2.00 / hour.

Interestingly, during the height of the pandemic everyone seemed to come around to the fact that teachers didn't get paid enough for the amount of work that they do. This was because parents and caregivers got first hand experience in what teachers go through on a day-to-day basis. However, that sentiment has faded with time and with it the value of a good teacher.


That rhetoric about teacher (and medical worker) pay during the pandemic was, whether people realize it or not, nothing but a cynical attempt to encourage teachers not to quit, in order to save the parents' jobs.

A lot of teachers (my wife being one as well) truly thought that people had been woken up to the incredible crisis in our education system, but 2-3 years later, we know better; they just wanted teachers to stay on long enough for their life situations to stabilize, so they could go back to ignoring them.


I was taking time off in 2022 when my daughter's high school CS teacher quit (to take a job at Microsoft).

I volunteered to step in until they could find a qualified replacement. It ended up working out, but it was a pretty big problem to have an unlicensed teacher in the school. They ultimately had me enroll as a substitute who just happened to get assigned to the same classes every day, but they said if I wanted to come back the following year I'd need to become officially licensed.

I could see myself teaching high school in retirement. Helps the community, keeps you busy, and your summers are open. But not if I have to jump through a bunch of make-work hoops for the privilege of helping out.


> I could see myself teaching high school in retirement.

My calc & discrete math teacher in HS was a retired guy from bell labs, apparently knew claude shannon. He had made a bunch of money doing that and was just teaching at the HS as a philanthropic service in old age. He wrote & printed the textbooks we used. Practically every other teacher seemed inadequate afterwards. Oddly enough I had a professor in college who was from bell labs too, absolutely brilliant too and taught in the same, in some way brutal, style too.


Just work at a community college, you just need a relevant masters degree.


I would love to teach high school but there would need to be some major changes to the system before I would be willing to.

What I really want is to be able to teach the kind of CS courses that I took in high school—they were optional classes that kids chose to be in because they were interested, and the teacher had full discretion on what to teach.

Unfortunately, that's not the typical high school class, and most teachers have to teach at least a few mandatory classes with curricula dictated at the state level. Props to the teachers who are willing to deal with reluctant students and enabling parents, but I would go crazy in that environment, and I've had bad experiences trying to teach curricula handed down from on high.


And the GPA-grubbing is ridiculous to the point of being comical.


It may not make any significant change in the numbers applying for k-12 positions, but do people really need to go through the torture, indoctrination, and expense of graduate school to teach k-12? Won't a handful of undergrad courses, seminars, and internships suffice in addition to whatever other degree is pursued? As it is now wannabe teachers already have too much time, the most precious of all commodities, invested in ramping up to teaching.


Teachers need graduate degrees to teach K-12?


It depends on the state, but in some cases yes. In New York there are undergraduate programs which provide an "initial certification", which is sufficient to teach in a public school for X number of years. However, you must obtain a masters degree before the initial certification expires.


I Googled around a bit. Looks like Connecticut, Maryland, and New York requires them and a small set of other states lock specific licensures behind graduate degrees. I sincerely had no idea this was happening. I have young kids, in California, but we haven't hit kindergarten yet.


States that don’t require higher degrees often have a wall on the pay scale that’s hit early in one’s career, without a graduate degree.

What’s weird about the market for teaching master’s degrees, at least (idk about PhDs) is that this generates a ton of demand for them, but it makes no difference how good the program is. Teachers don’t care because they don’t really matter that much for improving teaching skill. Schools don’t care—pay bump is the same no matter what.

This has all the effects one might guess on the quality of these programs—almost all are very easy, because nobody involved cares how rigorous they are, and one party would generally prefer they not be very difficult. Whole thing’s a joke, total waste of money and teachers’ time.


Thanks for the reply. It's not surprising to hear any of this, honestly, but I am surprised all the same. What a sad state of affairs.


My guess from what I've seen over the past three decades is that this started because private schools and some public schools in wealthy areas were touting how many of their teachers had master's degrees. Other school systems wanted to compete, so they started offering higher salaries to teachers if they had a master's degree. Soon it became very common for most teachers to have one. Amongst the teachers I know, most have master's degrees from the University of Phoenix because apparently it's one of the quickest and easiest ways to get that credential.

Back when this started, much of the alure of teachers with master's degrees was that they were highly educated in the subject matter they were teaching. It was implied that the chemistry teacher would have an MS in Chemistry. But now all the teachers I know have their MA in either Elementary Education or Secondary Education but none of them are teaching how to be teachers. It's a strange situation and recently one of them was ranting about the pay difference between having a master's degree and just a bachelor's degree had shrunk to nearly nothing. This is probably because the MA in Education has become so ubiquitous that it has little value. What school brags about the percentage of teachers with a master's degree anymore now that almost every school is over 80%-90%?


depends on the state, but in most of them, you earn more by having a graduate degree.


Maybe not significant numbers, but my wife and I have both thought about switching (along with a move to a lower COL area) as an exit ramp from the corporate rat race.

I have a BA in economics and a 20+ year career in software. As best we can tell, in order to teach middle or high school in VA (I’d want to teach CS/IT) I need to obtain a Masters in Education to do so. Spending $30k+ on a post-graduate degree for a career with starting pay 1/4 of my current income doesn’t make any sense.

If there was an on-job path to certification it would be viable. But the expense of taking a year off work to get a Masters pretty well kills it.


I did an online masters in teaching while working full time for less than $6K. When figuring out costs be sure to remember that you pay tuition for your observations and student teaching as well as your regular class time. Those add up to 4-5 months of full time unpaid work in a classroom.


Reminder to everyone commenting here: you are not an average student. The hard part of teaching is not coming up with dynamite lessons for kids who are smart and want to learn and are capable of doing so and aren’t hungry. Anyone can do that. Well, almost anyone.

Way back in the olden times, 5 to 10% of people went to school, and it worked really well for them. Now everyone goes to school, and it works really well for about 5% of us.


I promise you, this site is not as special as you think it is.

The majority of people here are incredibly average (like me!), just fortunate to be born at the right time, be exposed to technology at the right time, get a few other lucky breaks, and of course put some work in.

It’s super easy to convince yourself that because you’re successful you must be special. Remember that people tend to ascribe their successes to themselves and their failures to someone else.


You would be average if you actually thought this site doesn't have a selection bias out of the world population. If you think HN averages out to a middle of the pack student, people who spend their free time reading text, you have quite the social bubble around you. There's also like 25 $1b+ founder/ceo's out of 50k.


Believe it or not the world has a lot of people who are above average whose lives don’t revolve around computers. There’s just as many losers here as anywhere.


First part, of course, but since HN is only like 50k that doesn’t say much about HN.

Second part, there can forsure be many “losers” here but it’s quite ignorant to think there’s the same percentage struggling in math classes as the general population. Think about it. If you took 100 HN’ers where do you think they skew on succeeding on math tests or even taking classes like Calculus compared to gen pop? The average person even in the US doesn’t have a Bachelors degree. Do you think that applies to HN? Or that it’s not correlative with educational success?


I never said anything about calculus or math.

I said that HN is mostly average students and I haven’t heard anything that changes my mind, regardless of whether you think a lot of people here are good at calculus. How do you think HN readers fared in art/literature/English classes?


Pretty fucking good, actually. That's why we're here writing copious amounts of text, more Bachelor's (a big general education) than average, reading articles, and upvoting ACX posts, someone who was top of the top in English class writing competency.


Agree to disagree, I guess.

I’d give you a B- or so if you turned in your comment as an essay, given the easy-to-spot sloppy error and other issues.

• Bachelor shouldn’t be capitalized unless it’s the full degree title like Bachelor of Arts

• Copius writing doesn’t mean good writing

• ACX should be explained the first time you use it


All that just to typo copious too, sheesh. 15 second long HN comments hardly reflect the writing strength of putting arguments to an essay. Or I guess IRC (Internet Relay Chat) folks are illiterate. So again, maybe you are the average ones if you think it's indicative of HN's success in their English/lit classes.


Yes! Of course I am average. Most people are average or worse.

And I did typo copius on purpose to get you to reply. Just a fun thing for me too do.


Even if you believe you have average intelligence, it's without doubt that there are many more students in school with lower motivation. To the point that getting them to write a paragraph is like pulling teeth. The difference between the students in the AP classes when I was in high school and the students in the A or B level classes was night and day in terms of just paying attention or being able to give any answer to a question.

There's only so much you can do to make a subject interesting when the students care so little about their education. It starts at a young age and just compounds. By the time you see them as students in high school, they're already years behind in motivation and education.


My grades said otherwise


Makes sense to me. I attended public school all my life. Everyone I knew more or less had the same out look on formal education, means to an end, can I just get the spark notes, thanks.

In college I interacted with a strange life form called a "homeschooler". Almost without exception they were smarter, better read, and had a desire to learn. Educating children seems to be far more than degrees, licenses, and CE credits.


I am a home educating parent. There is no way I could teach a classroom without learning how. Teaching one to one, encouraging and mentoring does not need as much skill. Most of us do it somewhere (e.g. at work). On the other hand I am sure the skill can be learned on the job, but teaching a classroom is still definitely difficult.

I also did not spend much time teaching as such: when they were young, lots of learning through play (even things like learning to read can be turned into games) and as they got older they taught them selves more. We have used tutors a bit for exams (GCSEs - British exams taken at 16 in schools though my kids sat most younger) but even then very little (two to three hours a week at most, and even that for just one year).

Home educating is a lot more flexible so kids can follow their interests. You can do a vast range of subjects (my younger daughter did Astronomy GCSE and is doing Latin, did Physics but not Biology). That combined with the study skills and self-discipline from teaching themselves more leaves them more motivated and better prepared for further study (and work too).


It may depend. I was mainly educated in the UK. I went to council schools in poor areas, and to an expensive public school, and the difference between pupil behaviour was enormous. In the former they were hard to control (I even remember a kid angrily telling a teacher to fuck off) but in the former when the teacher started speaking everybody piped down and started listening immediately. I remember being so struck by that the first time I saw it. I guess a class of willing students is going to be a whole lot easier to teach than a roomful of ragamuffins who would rather be outside playing footie.


Yeah, classroom behavior sets the floor (and often the ceiling) for what can be accomplished. It's a hell of a lot easier when students are already aligned towards decorum and achievement. However, teachers and schools can create classroom culture.

One of my mentors told me about his first year of teaching in a rough area where, as he put it, "I knew what I was in for when the principal was more interested by my law-enforcement background than anything I might know about math". He spent the first two months gaining compliance with one rule: come to class with two pencils and your notebook, and nothing else. Literally nothing else was accomplished. Once he got them there, however, he had a chance to teach, and his classes ended with some of the best scores in the district (admittedly not a high bar).

When I worked as a supply / substitute teacher in primary and secondary schools my theatre training was infinitely more valuable than any education class I ever took.


all the best teachers I had in public school were people who got into teaching after having an actual career because they had actually lived in the real world. Most of the "teaching" is just stuff mandated by the government and taught via lesson plans created by the book companies.

another issue is that teachers get promoted based on years in the system or by getting more useless degrees, rather than on how well they actually teach their students


Now that you mention it, my best teachers were all men who made careers for themselves in the military before retiring and going into education.


You interacted with a homeschooled student who made it to college. Huge difference compared to the average homeschooled student.


Can we please not get into the homeschool flame war here again? Every time it comes up it turns into a pointless war of anecdotes, because the data on outcomes simply isn't strong enough for it to be anything else (trust me, I've tried).


Sorry, I jumped in because I hadn't seen it before. I agree it's difficult to generalize at this point, I just chafe at the suggestion that homeschooled kids do better overall since I've heard it my whole life and my experience was so different.


All good—this difference is why it always turns into a war of anecdotes.

Homeschool outcomes are as diverse as parents are—in public schools we at least try to standardize, but not so for homeschool. And since emotions surrounding our parents are some of the strongest that we have, everyone who's been homeschooled has strong opinions of some sort about how it turned out.

I'd be happy for the conversation to happen if there were data, but the big problem is that for every study that leans one way there's another that goes the opposite, because the outcomes are so incredibly diverse and the numbers involved are so small.


I said in another comment before I read yours: homeschooling, having more outcomes at the extremes, lead to many people to have observational biases (and strong opinions) in both directions.


We really need to get better data that's disaggregated based on reason for homeschooling. A lot of academically inclined parents are afraid about the risks of homeschooling when they're not really the population that needs to be targeted by messaging about the risks of homeschooling.


I think the only conclusion I've been able to draw from anecdotes about homeschooling (having experienced it myself) is that outcomes are more varied than traditional education, whether there's a bias in that variance is not something anyone can speak to (as of yet).

A very smart student has the opportunity to get much farther ahead whereas a poorly crafted education plan and/or an unmotivated student has the potential for negative outcomes.


I has to disagree about the "education plan". I did not plan very much, and my kids have done very well academically. The advantage is you can try stuff and do what works.

It is also more motivating.

It is possible to mess it up, but schools mess up too. On the whole kids seem to usually do better than comparable kids at school (at least in the UK) and there are studies that back that up.

The data is biased by many things that need to be corrected for. For example (at least in the UK) a lot of kids with SEN or mental health problems are home educated because in many areas schools do not have adequate provision. On the other hand if you have a home that encourages academic achievement (i.e. the sort background that leads kids to do better in school) they will probably do a lot better than at school


Maybe 'educational plan' is a misnomer. How about 'strategy and tactics'. Both knowing what the child should eventually learn and adapting so that they learn it.


I disagree with your comment. When I read the GP I thought "oh that's cool", without thinking. Then parent's reply brought the reality of the situation back to me (that it's more complicated).


I didn't intend to get the parent's comment downvoted to hell—two anecdotes is fine for illustrating the complexity, but these threads usually devolve from there into enormous flame wars nested tens of comments deep. I was just trying to preempt that after one round of anecdotes.


It's OK :) This place became a cesspool quite a while ago. I switched to using throwaways so I'm unphased by karma.


Then you're contributing to the decline. Most of the negative, off-putting or outright insane comments I read come from <6mo old accounts. It's easy to troll when you can just make a new account and continue, without factoring in the long term reputation at all.


The thread started with a public school flaming. Why only step in when someone takes the other side? I agree these flame wars are silly, but this thread was lost from the start.


I already explained my reasoning for where I put the comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39069617


contrary O....during WI defense hired people that came up with the first IQ test for soldiers...that data shows home schooled people at less IQ than those who went through public schools at the time...actual real data...


And for every study that shows that there's another on the other side. Homeschool outcomes are incredibly diverse by nature and the numbers involved are so small that it's hard to have a study with any reasonable amount of power.


Public education outcomes are pretty diverse as well, although there are good and bad schools (and home life status plays a lot in the results, which I assume is also true with homeschooling).


True, but each individual school is big enough to have actual data associated with it. Conclusions about the system as a whole might not work, but you can make a reasonable guess about whether you want to send your kids to a specific school.


Individual schools but we already know different schools vary greatly. As a form of selection bias, I bought my home in an area with schools where most kids go to college. The house was more expensive, so also needed to be richer, and it’s a two parent home, my neighbors are the same. It is t necessarily the school that’s good, it’s just selection bias all the way down.


The same IQ test that we now call the SATs?


You mean the SATs that you can study for and doesn't attempt to measure base level intelligence?


I was completely unschooled prior to college and while I did fine in school I was generally very poorly adjusted. I actually don't know a single homeschooled person who came of age nearly as prepared for the world as anyone I know who went to primary school.


Can you expand on how you felt unprepared? My experience doesn't mirror yours.


My observatiom has been that a lot of unschooling families have parents who do it because of their own neuroses and are otherwise ill equipped as parents. Conspiracy theories and fringe religions are common. Emotional manipulation and abuse is common. Isolation and poor social skill development is common. Important childhood experiences are restricted. Often these parents don't want their children to succeed and leave the nest.

I'm glad you had a good experience, and I am sure there are a lot of people who do when their relatively well adjusted parents commit to homeschooling their children. I just suspect most homeschooling experiences aren't like yours. I've met several families from very different backgrounds with a similar outcome to mine.


Speaking from first-hand experience, the positive and negative experiences aren't mutually exclusive.

I might be a college-educated autodidact who made an entire career out of self-taught tech skills but that was despite a parent trying to raise me as a young earth creationist and despite all kinds of still un- and underdiagnosed trauma and disorders. Didn't get my ADHD diagnosis until my late thirties and still haven't been diagnosed as autistic, among other things, all of which likely would have been glaringly obvious to public school staff.


Prior generations had more of that, but the more recent trends have lots of support groups for home schoolers, where you get more socialization and support from other families.

Parents are increasingly opting for home schooling to get away from bad or ineffective schools, rather than for purely religious or psychological syndromes.


It is also a lot easier than it used to be. The internet hugely improves access to materials. There is a vibrant online community to discuss and get help.


Do you have any studies or sources to show outcomes of homeschooled children? I've since met many outside of college, they all seem far better off than the average high schooler I knew as a kid.


Is the average high schooler you knew as a kid representative of the types of people you now meet in your circles? Each stage of our lives is its own sort of selection bias.


Presumably there is a similar difference between the average non-homeschooled student and the population that made it to college.


as there is between the average high school student and those who make it to college?


Probably a bimodal distribution here in terms of homeschool education.

Though the entire set is probably more useful and practical.


The long-term impact is much more ambiguous to measure.

I paid particular attention in school when a teacher would explain why they were trying to teach us something. I noticed the same patterns of teaching among different teachers in the same school system, and how it all worked together to reinforce the skills we needed. (Note: many of my peers experienced the "extra" work as pointless, because they didn't understand the long-term implications).

Teachers who don't understand educational theory can't work as part of an educational system without additional training. In the meantime, their students miss out on long-term skill building.

This situation makes me think of technical debt. A short-term fix with long-term, ambiguous problems that are difficult to unravel.


Good point. In short, I would rephrase it as "if your measurement doesn't show the difference between trained and untrained teachers, maybe your measurement is wrong?"

There 2 other plausible hypothesis that the article ignores:

1. What if untrained teachers are effective because they learn on the job from trained teachers? Which means that you have to have certain % of trained teachers to keep the system alive.

2. What if trained teachers become less effective because they drop their standards looking at how untrained ones work? This is a common phenomenon at workplaces, and I've seen it happen in software development many times.


What’s a concrete example of one of the explanations for a reason you were given for your being taught something?


Most of what I remember involves "transferability" - the ability to take a skill in one area and apply it in a different context. One way to teach this involves combining subjects, such as practicing reading and comprehension skills in math class with word problems.

There is a keyword I am forgetting which would make this comment easier to answer in detail. If I remember it I will post again.


Not who you replied to, but the bad one I always got was "You'll need to know it for college".


Some additional context from TFA, which is actually pretty insightful.

> One preliminary explanation from the New Jersey study was that the emergency licensed teachers were working in schools that had a record of helping students make strong academic gains. It’s possible that the schools had supports in place, such as teacher coaching, a strong curriculum or something else that compensated for less training... Another recent study, out of Oakland, California, backs up this theory.

> There’s some evidence that teacher licensure tests are mildly accurate predictors of who will be a good educator. All else equal, a school would be better off selecting candidates with a higher test score, especially if they’re going to be teaching math or science. But that general rule would mischaracterize a lot of teachers — some test well but don’t have great classroom management or interpersonal skills, while others may not test well but are effective at working with children.

I'm not an expert, but my impression of modern classrooms is that teachers don't have as much leeway to choose what or how they teach, compared to, say 50 years ago. They have a strictly defined curriculum to get through, and they're generally spending a lot of their classroom hours teaching to standardized tests. Might the difference in "classroom management" skill, which is evidently untested in teacher licensing, be the most significant thing left that can make one teacher better than another? That is, if we make teachers (essentially) read from the same script, maybe it's all in the delivery?

And if this is untested in teacher licensing, maybe it's somewhat evenly distributed between licensed and unlicensed teachers?


Sounds like a good reason to continue the experiment. As long as we continue to insist on paying teachers as little as possible, it makes sense to lower the ridiculous educational requirements just to teach elementary school.


I have a family member who was hired as an Emergency teacher over 20 years ago. They've since become fully credentialed, obtained their masters in education, taught masters students, and organized a particular program/subject at the district level.

Speaking with them, their experience has been the core driver of a successful teacher is primarily whether they want to be there and care about the students success.

Of course, when they were first hired they spent all of their free time crafting lessons plans for a subject they basically failed in high school. Studying the textbook and relevant material so they could teach it.


Those few who are willing to go take a low salary to go deal with all the issues of the modern education system are just as good as those who are willing to go take a low salary and deal with all the issues of the modern education system, but have to jump through a few more hoops. I'm shocked.

Let's face it, those who are willing to teach, and are probably leaving decent careers to do so, have a decent chance of being an okay teacher, because they probably have an idea of what they're getting into, and are willing to work hard. ie they WANT to be teachers.

Of course, if we just paid teachers more, you'd probably have a higher number of qualified candidates, but that seems like that's too hard of a thing to do?


The school district I went to had a policy that the teachers are required to have a related masters degree in the subject they’re teaching. It was a great school district since the teachers were all formerly non teachers at one point. My social studies teacher was a lawyer before, physics teacher actually published some papers as a physicists. The downside is the property tax ballooned out of control but I got a great education.


A state or a small country can afford maybe a few schools like that. You need state sponsorship, endowment money or a district where property values ballooned out of control. And with a lot of money at stake, it's very likely that school administration compensation will be ballooning instead.

Connecting schools with a university system could be a more viable option. Make it easy to teach in a nearby school, pay reasonably for tuition and a university can be a source of PhD students and postdocs that could get some easy pocket money as guest lecturers. I think, it's also refreshing for PhD students and postdocs to give classes to younger kids.


Entire states are like this, and it doesn't work out that way at scale. Teachers get degrees to teach, and are buried under a mountain of debt while not being paid for it. On top of that, they need to take "continuing education" credits, which ostensibly is a way to stay on top of teaching trends but is really a racket for the teaching-adjacent industry.

I don't think my state required the masters degree, but pay scales definitely were weighed in favor of it. It certainly didn't make for better teachers.


Entire countries do this. Seems to work fine for them.


Finland has generalist with special degrees doing Elementary school. After that the teachers have degree in subject or adjacent subject. Plus pedagogy. On other hand education is state paid so there isn't huge loans to pay off.

It did not do badly in past. But less resources and more non-natives have taken a toll on results.


Mostly the "non-natives", as you so politely call them... and we are not really talking about Germans and Swedes...


Here is the study for Massachusetts (saving you several layers of summary articles):

https://wheelockpolicycenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/...

In every category, emergency/provisional licensed median values were lower than licensed teachers, including performance evaluations, although these results didn't reach 95% statistical significance of rejecting the null hypothesis. Even if they didn't reach P < 0.05, when all of the results point in one direction, I am not so sure I would completely agree with the top-level headline as it is stated.


The first plot in your link certainly looks inconclusive. It doesn’t look very close at all to meeting the statistical significance bar and I think it would be an error to conclude that it shows the emergency/provisionally licensed teachers were worse. But I wonder if other things might be going on, eg maybe COVID meant the emergency/provisionally licensed teachers were also disadvantaged from having less practice. And on the other hand, lots of them will have gotten much of the requirements for a license so it doesn’t really show much about the long term effects of changing the license requirements.


It seems to me that we've already gutted the requirements for a teaching degree -- it's one of the easiest college majors. The primary hurdle is surviving the first couple of years in the classroom.


Maybe public education is so broken in the U.S. (e.g., No Child Left Behind) that this issue is just statistical noise in the outcomes?

I'm mostly going on the stories from a teacher relative; I'm 99% speculating.


This is good news for me personally. I'd like to make money in tech for perhaps 10 more years and then teach music (and comp sci?) in a public high school. I have advanced degrees in music but no education degree. Under current rules I'd have to stick to teaching at the college level which doesn't appeal to me because the degree is a bad financial decision for the students working towards it.


For humans, being able to teach is an innate capability. After all, we've been able to teach our children for 100,000 years before schools existed.

Today, parents routinely teach their kids things like reading and arithmetic.

The best teachers I had were professors at university, and they never had a day of teacher training. They simply knew the subject material.

What skills a masters degree in education confers is a mystery to me.


Licenses are more to protect the interest groups and deflect legal fights.


"Because most did not teach tested grades and subjects, the researchers also looked at evaluation ratings. Both groups of teachers received similar marks from their supervisors."

That is, they cannot speak to how effective the teachers were as educators, only how disruptive they were as employees.


Assessing educator effectiveness is not a solved problem. For instance, the Gates Foundation made a full throated effort to research and develop a quantifiable measure and failed. In the end, they released a set of holistic, observable behaviors/practices that they believe are associated with teacher effectiveness. It’s a hard problem.


I completely agree. For one thing, they're probably looking at the wrong things since student effectiveness will dominate teacher effectiveness, and that is where the hard problems come (knowing what to look at, what to measure, proxy measurement error, and measurement distinction)


The UK always had a program that allowed you to become a teacher without a degree. It involves a diploma followed by gaining QTLS (Qualified Teacher Learning and Skills) status I believe. Is this not the case in the USA?


Generally in the US you need a bachelors degree and a teaching certificate.

But requirements are set individually by the states and vary widely.


It'll vary by state.


For me personally, I learned and performed much better under teachers that I knew had some passion for the subjects they taught. Unfortunately that’s more difficult to measure.


Whatever can be measured can be managed, but not everything that counts can be counted. I'd be interested to see international comparisons and closer attention paid to more subjects than English and maths, as well as psychosocial development, classroom environment, and student mental health.


I'm sceptical, isn't the take from this we should have that we need to improve the education needed for educators. In my childhood, the only teachers that did not make life hell for me where the ones that actually had decent education, and was not just extra hires.


That's literally the opposite reading? The teachers who got better education didn't perform that much better, so the education needed does not need to improve. Based on that article the argument would be "if you want to raise the bar for teacher education you need to improve the level of what and how it is being taught".


I'm a strong advocate for scrapping all degree requirements to every profession, perhaps even in law (ie., banning most employers from asking).

This shifts the burden on to the employer to make a reliable assessment of the applicant. This would have two, imv, favourable effects: 1) a university education would compete on its merits as education with all alternatives; 2) breaking the rent-seeking monopolies universities have on entrance to the jobs market.

The law would have to be carefully crafted -- but we're long past the era when a degree was predictive of anything. It was always a positional good, and if 50% of the next generation have one there's no signal within the noise anymore.

And of course, it was always as much about 'keeping the rifraff out' as it was in selecting good candidates.

For certain professions, eg., teaching/drs/etc., i think it makes more sense for the state to have 'licence to practice' certifications/exams -- rather than assume that a degree is such a licence.


On the flip side, the reason they're finding emergency teachers just as effective as ones without degrees is because in many places all of the good teachers have quit to find other professions. This is less an indictment on the education of teachers, and more an indictment on society and how poorly teachers are treated in 2023.

>Like other first-year teachers, those granted emergency credentials were disproportionately assigned to work with children with disabilities, English learners and low-income students.

AKA: the jobs with the highest turnover rate of qualified professional teachers.

>The law would have to be carefully crafted -- but we're long past the era when a degree was predictive of anything. It was always a positional good, and if 50% of the next generation have one there's no signal within the noise anymore.

The point of a degree was to get you to think critically as much as it is about teaching you how to do the job the degree will lead to. Teachers need that skill as much as anyone when they're working with impressionable youth.


Law? Medicine? Engineering? Would you want the bridges to be designed by anyone with any degree? I realize there's lots of sillyness in degree programs, but certainly the rigor is worth something, right?


You can become a licensed Civil or Aerospace Engineer and sign off on bridges and planes without an academic degree. Inversely, a degree does not make you a licensed engineer.

You have to pass the same rigorous tests. Degree can be substituted for relevant work experience.

The biomedical engineers designing your artificial heart and gene therapy have no professional licensing requirements whatsoever. A professional license to do medical engineering doesn't even exist.

https://www.bpelsg.ca.gov/applicants/flowchart_for_fe.pdf


Sure, so assess for rigour.

A person who had studied mathematics and physics until 18 could then over two or three years easily, consume the relevant engineering curriculum from MIT/stanford/etc. if they wanted to avoid the fee's of a university education.

A business will never let some jnr hire actually design a bridge to be actually built. Most of the relevant education comes from years on the job, in almost all jobs.

All that applicants need have is enough prior conceptual foundations to cope during that on-the-job training.


This isn’t a realistic worry. Someone about to plunk down hundreds of thousands or millions for a bridge will exercise more due diligence than random selection.


Do you think so? There are already several sad examples of political leaders who insisted on people of their favorite race or sex. The bridges collapsed.

The problem with the system is that the political leaders are spending other peoples money and they'll make decisions that don't always line up with the bridges staying up.

The advantage of degree programs is that they add another layer of bureaucracy to mix. Yeah, that's a pain but it might be necessary with the political system.


you might be shocked to learn that degrees ARENT required for anyone building bridges and planes.


It's challenging because good architects (ones you've heard of!) weren't necessarily qualified as architects, but the person designing the thing doesn't need to be the one deciding if it's structurally sound

You do need that validation step somewhere, though, and it feels quite reasonable to have stringent standards for that.

One way to work around not knowing if something is structurally sound subject to the pressures it will be under is to over build (this is what we did before we had super accurate computer simulations)

Anyway, I found this episode of 99 percent invisible to be great, especially "Escarping Imprisonment by Kurt Kohlstedt"

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/mini-stories-volume-1...


This just sounds like an argument that degrees are not good proof of qualification, but it assumes that a certification would be. Might certifications not fall prey to the same decline in quality as degrees, which used to act as an imprimatur?


My proposal would be that organisations provide domain-specific assessments for particular jobs, rather than there be any certification outside of state-licenced areas.

Eg., if you want to be a graphic designer, apply, perform the "graphic designer assessment by AssessCorpX" as required by IndustryX and so on.

Basically just taking the examiniation function away from universities into the market, and making it industry specific. I think these are the 'natural incentives' businesses have, and these are distorted by the gov monopoly granted to universtiites (ie., their degree awarding powers).

Prior to the era of mass university education people were hired based on a judgement of their suitability for the role, and then trained to do it over a period of years. That's still how things work.


It was great for selecting quality candidates until the education system got heavily abused and mismanaged and corrupted with maladjusted incentives, may it RIP.


> This shifts the burden on to the employer to make a reliable assessment of the applicant.

It shifts the burden on the employer to make an alternative assessment of the applicant. If what they're using now isn't reliable, but convenient, why would any alternative be?


I read the parent comment differently.

In a hypothetical future where there is no degree requirement, whatever they’re doing now to assess applicants is not relevant. In that scenario, the system has fundamentally changed, and I think this strongly implies that employers will now need to look for ways to screen candidates other than “has degree”.

As things stand now, there is an expectation that holding a degree is in itself valuable and that the holder has already been assessed by the educational institution that granted the degree.

Put another way, the lack of a reliable process now is the point. If I’m an employer, the reliability of the signal that is the degree the applicant holds is as variable as the standards of the various institutions granting those degrees. In a world where the degree is no longer a primary signal, employers must by necessity establish some other assessment criteria, and since that criteria is set by the employer, it’s at least more reliable than making decisions based on various other organization’s assessment criteria.


Because the people best placed to assess a candidate for a role are those who know the duties of that role in detail. Much of what's taught at university has marginal benefits beyond a core, much smaller, cirriculum.

Take something fairly complex like game development, say. Now: do some linear algebra, geometry, programming, etc. assessment in a wholistic way. Maybe a quick quiz for initial filter, then a hackathon with applicants (or w/e).

People filtered by the quiz can be directed to the now many resources for self-study (you can easily do an entire degree via MIT lectures, etc. -- i know i did, i barely attended lectures and just watched stanford/MIT classes; gilbert strang's LA course several times).

If you really want to be a game dev, and can't self-study after a failed attempt and a year or so of reflection then go to university. Now you know it's for you, that it really will help, etc. They're providing a service you actually need.


I don't disagree, but that doesn't seem to address the point. If a hiring organization doesn't bother to assess that now, why would the above-proposed change make a difference?


I'm not concerned about the quality of hiring at businesses -- they are sufficiently strongly incentivised to hire productive employees, not ones whose net effect is to lower production. I think the incentives on everyone involved are faily 'naturally well-aligned'.

I'm more concerned about how universities have positioned themselves gatekeepers to the employment market backed by state-granted degree awarding powers.

I think this is an extremely artifical situation with extremely negative social concequences. Vast amounts of money are being funnelled into universities for little gain.

They are, if you like, the App Store of the jobs market. Taking a 30% cut on just getting hired. It's insane, unsustainable, economic madness, and social madness.


> If a hiring organization doesn't bother to assess that now, why would the above-proposed change make a difference?

I think the answer is in the question, and boils down to: the proposal is to change the status quo. Changing the status quo here means that organizations not doing these assessments are responsible for doing so going forward.

It’s reasonable to think that an organization in the current environment is not focused on such assessments because the system is supposed to be handling this (I’m not saying this should be considered sufficient). A change that involves shifting the burden necessarily means a change in the status quo of hiring organizations regardless of their past practices around assessing candidates.

To your point, setting the expectation that the hiring organization is responsible for assessing incoming candidates is part and parcel to the broader idea. The operating environment would no longer look like the current one, and would necessitate additional steps by hiring organizations. Not taking those steps would result in poorer and poorer quality hires.

Bringing this full circle, I think it’s worth pointing out that the place this started from is: teachers who did not complete a specific training requirement are as effective as those who did. At the very least, this seems to indicate that completing the specific training requirement is not a sufficient assessment criteria, and is presumably not helping organizations bring in better people. At the same time, the requirement does reduce the pool of available candidates, with seemingly no positive effect.

At least for this particular school example, in a worst case scenario, organizations that change nothing are no worse off than they already are. The training requirement isn’t acting as a differentiating criteria, which means that the organization is already the most impactful decision maker. The proposed change just formalizes the idea that completing a specific curriculum is not by itself a good indicator of future success. Organizations relying on this signal are not worse off if it’s taken away because it never indicated much to begin with, if the data are to be believed.


Strang’s course is very tightly coupled between his lecture and his book but from the perspective of other books, it’s pretty disorganized


There is often a very technology and IT centric viewpoint on this website. This is often the case anyway with technology positions, but for other things like accounting, medicine, law, etc formal education is more required.


If you wont pass an accountancy exam without formal education, and i'd say most wouldnt, then they'll get one.

The number of applicants who succeed in such cases, at getting through without formal education, will be very small. And i'd be 90% of those cases, that applicant is way above their peers in performance -- ie., worth having let it


Tech already does this and it doesn’t seem great? The STEM initiative beginning in the 70s is a national program to get lots of qualified workers into STEM jobs. And yet most STEM graduates don’t have STEM careers (51%). One reason is tech companies hire whoever they want based on their own metrics. Your suggestion just gives large industry more power and leaves people without stable careers or not getting jobs they went to school for. It’s like, why even go through the effort of a national educational system.

I don’t want ANOTHER elementary school in my district known as the “Google” school. Let’s just have Google in our lives from 1st grade onward!


Isn’t the stat about STEM grads not working in STEM largely people with degrees in fields like biology (with all of its vocationally limited subfields like evolutionary and population) or chemistry (where you might only be qualified to work as a low paid technician without graduate study)? It seems to me that the difference in employability between a BS in Biology and a BSEE is enormous, both in ease of finding a job as well as career earnings.


"STEM" is a very nebulous group of fields. Plenty of people study math and become math teachers, financiers, or work in think tanks. Those jobs aren't "STEM careers" but mathematics knowledge is definitely applicable.


> it was always as much about 'keeping the rifraff out' as it was in selecting good candidates.

The proposal moves this phase to the university system, like it used to be.


Maybe it's actually liscensed educators are no more effective than unlicensed teachers.


Underlying problem: people don't want to pay teachers enough.


Compensation is a vector. Teachers who are government employees receive their cash compensation, paid leave, summers off, job security through formalized tenure, generous pensions, generous health care benefits, and some lifetime benefits if they reach retirement age.


Have no fear, the requirements to receive the benefits is rising; such as 30y teaching not before 68yo. When my SO went full time as a public school teacher her salary only modestly contributed to our retirement, healthcare costs, and covered childcare for the kids too young for school. Our bank account didn't receive enough money to cover the other bills when I was briefly laid off. She considered teaching a net loss and didn't renew her contract.


My wife taught for about 10 years. Can confirm, at least in our state, the benefits are not the “cushy” state employee benefits that many suppose exist (actually, our state employees have trash benefits, too—you go federal if you want good bennies in that sort of job, here). Only way to have decent benefits in education is to go into admin (supers and assistant-supers get totally different, and far better, benefits in many districts—go figure)

She left teaching for WFH, a ~40% total-comp increase, and a far better work environment. Turns out the skills and experiences a good teacher tends to accumulate are really valuable to companies.


Looks like a permanent rentier gig these days - how many teachers are earning enough money to buy their own home in the community in which they are teaching? If that's not a plausible outcome, if living in a rental unit your whole life is part of the job description, then it's not an attractive deal.


thats not just teachers - thats about 70% of the population right now - fix the inflation and interest rate problem, and that problem will get better over time.


>Compensation is a vector.

This misses the point. To go along with your terminology, the problem is that the norm of the vector isn't large enough.

But calling it a vector in the first place is pretentious and unnecessary.


Teachers are paid around the median wage for someone with a college degree. The job neither has a high skill requirement nor difficult work conditions. What is the rationale for paying them more than the typical person with a college degree?


I'd count "dealing with parents" as difficult working conditions.


Piecemeal, perhaps, but I wonder if this would scale. A whole lot of the HR problems that things like degrees and certifications solve are problems that happen at scale.

If you suddenly drop the licensing requirements for teaching, you'd now have a new job available to anyone in the job market that would start attracting different profiles of people than you will get when emergency hiring teachers. Also emergency hired teachers probably come in via social networks of existing teachers, parents, etc.


I'm pretty sure that "too many applicants" counts as a first-world problem for most schools.


Both of my children were taught by an educator without a degree until 6th and 9th grade. Both entered the private school system/public school system and have scored two years of perfect grades so far.

We were a pretty laid-back home schooling family. My kids didn't spend all day nose-in-books, watching documentaries in the afternoon between violin, piano and Spanish lessons. Up until this year it was a closely guarded secret how much time my kids spent "in home school." Had I let my family or non-homeschooling friends know how much actual formal class time there was, I would have probably been derided as a terrible parent. Now that they're sailing through school -- not just doing well, but generally underwhelmed by the difficulty of the material -- I'm not so shy.

They had, on a really good day about 2 hours of actual, formal, class-time with homework. The vast majority of the time, it was under an hour of mom-led learning followed by under an hour of homework, done in one room, alternating kids between homework/study but often times with both kids participating in each other's lessons (why not?). Aside from having to be single-income, and except for the "they're your kids so they aren't as easy to teach" problems[0], it wasn't difficult at all. Hell, the vast majority of the time -- especially since I work remotely -- it was downright awesome.

The above paragraphs might make it sound like I'm saying "Screw Teachers, their job is easy, any idiot could do it!" Obviously, it's much easier to teach two children than it is twenty-ish. Obviously, being that they're your own children, you have lack the complexity of dealing with parents, administration and politics. The reason "it worked for us so easily" is almost entirely due to these factors. I think about how, one year, we decided to ditch the math curriculum we were using for my son -- he was struggling, we found something better for him and within a week he was enjoying learning it. Having just the two kids meant we could make sure they were enjoying learning. When kids want to learn something, all you really have to do is point them toward "how." You're not going to get 25 kids -- some who come from tough home situations -- to all enjoy learning.

That said, I've never understood why (at least in the past) substitute teachers[1] never required degrees and were plenty effective, homeschooling is allowed without restriction, registration, or any requirement to prove you are actually home schooling to teach from a book basic things that every adult -- at one point -- learned. That sounds dismissive -- I'd imagine the vast majority of the job isn't that, and I have no interest in becoming a teacher because of those factors (difficult children, parents, administration, government) but I'd be willing to bet there are a lot of very qualified adults who would, but can't, because of degree requirements.

[0] My daughter was famous for breakdowns during math lessons. She can be emotional, but trust me, she's not breaking down in front of her Math teacher at school, today. Incidentally, despite her claiming to hate math all throughout home-schooling days, now that she's past Arithmetic, it's her favorite subject.

[1] Yes, most of the time, that's a single-day activity. We had one for three months, once.


This is very similar to my own experience. My older daughter was home educated until she was 16, then went to a sixth form college (school for 16 to 18 year olds) to do A levels (American equivalent would roughly be APs, AFAIK). Younger daughter is planning to do the same.

I did not even spend two hours a day teaching. They mostly taught themselves. It was fun for them, and rewarding for me. I also work remotely (self-employed) at that was vital.

So far both have done well academically.The older had offers of places at multiple good universities (Durham, York...) but decided to do a degree apprenticeship (govt funded, employer funded, degree + work) with Jaguar LandRover (and uni of Warwick, which is good for engineering) instead so dad's wallet is off the hook!

I am really glad we did it, and my kids are too.


Very cool -- it's always interesting meeting other (what I like to call) "normie" home-school parents. I would say the story of "2 hours of lessons, max" is probably the most consistent thing I hear from other home schooled (the kids will tell you way before the adults will -- when my kids found out other kids went to school for 7 hours, they were shocked)[0] :).

I had two families who led me to the decision, myself. If people really knew what a typical "I don't have an axe to grind, I just want to direct my child's education" home-schooled parenting life was like, everyone would choose it if their life situation allowed. I understand that I was blessed to have circumstances that allowed us to do this for our children[1].

[0] Many in the homeschooling community find themselves having to explain their choices, often, to outsiders so they tend to over-compensate with their kids out of a desire to not have others' think of their children as "weird". I tell my kids to be as weird as they want.

[1] Well ... my circumstances were anything but ideal despite how it sounds. We just made it work.


There’s obviously no way this finding is true.


With working from home getting popular, even fewer people want to be a teacher. 5 days a week starting at 8am. Not going to happen.


But the flexibility during the summer beats many other jobs.


The stress when it’s in-session is pretty bad, though. And a lot of teachers work a summer job to make ends meet, it’s often not time off.

The summers off are basically the only notable perk, too. At least in my state. Healthcare’s expensive and bad and gets worse every year. Pay’s bad. Work environment is usually bad. Retirement’s ok-ish but doesn’t close the gap on the poor pay.


Maybe in the future, to entice people to become public teachers, or at least to stem the bleeding of current teachers, they'll allow teachers to work less.

Instead of one teacher teaching a class/subject (like math) 5 days a week, two teachers will rotate, one teaching math 3 days per week, and the other teaching 2 days per week.

But then, that would require them to double their supply of teachers, which seems unlikely to happen.


work less? in my state they are contractually obligated to work just over 900 hours a year - a typical FT employee is expected to work more than twice that (1920 - 2000 hours) depending on vacation benefit.

I don't think teachers pay is all that low (at least in my state), when you factor in they only work 50% as many hours - on an hourly basis, teachers (except perhaps the brand new ones) make pretty good hourly rate, full benefits, and are usually able to retire a lot earlier than regular folks, and with a defined-benefit pension and full healthcare.

Make them work even less? No thanks.


> contractually obligated to work just over 900 hours a year

Are you making a mistake to confuse hours spent teaching in class with working hours? Teachers have a lot of other duties outside the classroom, preparing the lesson plans and grading papers being the most obvious examples.


Low bar


now control for salaries


Note that The 74 is an anti-union, pro-privatization, conservative advocacy (disguised as news) site funded by groups like The Dick & Betsy DeVos Family Foundation.

https://truthout.org/articles/campbell-brown-the-new-leader-...


I think that explains my observations.

FTA: “New Jersey’s waiver policy was similar. Candidates could earn a temporary credential before passing the normal licensure exams or completing a teacher preparation program. The licenses were good for one year, at which point candidates would need to go back, pass the tests and complete their training”

So, those people would have a job for a year, but in that time also would study to pass “the normal licensure exams”?

I would think that strongly selects for people motivated to teach.

Also, did they really have to _earn_ a temporary credential? The answer to that question seems to be “yes”. Google gives me https://www.nj.gov/education/covid19/teacherresources/instru..., which says:

“Candidates who have met all requirements for a CE or Certificate of Eligibility with Advanced Standing (CEAS) but have not yet passed the basic skills test and/or test of subject matter knowledge are eligible for the Temporary CE”

Doesn’t that mean people who got that waiver are educated as teachers, but haven’t managed to pass all exams (most of them likely not because they can’t pass them but because there wasn’t any opportunity to do them)?

I couldn’t find the regulation for Massachusetts, so I couldn’t check whether it had similar provisions (https://www.doe.mass.edu/licensure/emergency/ Probably comes close, but it mentions a program extension, and becomes confusing to me because of that)

Also FTA: “Starting June 2020, Massachusetts began temporarily letting anyone with a bachelor’s degree teach”

So, it’s not “without degrees”, but “without teaching degrees”, at least in Massachusetts (the article isn’t clear as to whether New Jersey had a similar restriction, but it had. See the link above)


Is the data they uncover dangerous?


I think the implication is that it may be misrepresented or cherry-picked in a way that strengthens their argument against public education. Not that every outlet isn't biased in some way, but this is a group with a known strong bias.


A lot of my teacher acquaintances have this mistaken idea that they should be paid a lot more because they are “teaching the next generation” or any other variation of that delusion. They don’t seem to understand that the reason they don’t make a lot is because a lot of people can do the job. As we can see from this story.


TFA:

> Because most did not teach tested grades and subjects, the researchers also looked at evaluation ratings. Both groups of teachers received similar marks from their supervisors.

(Borrowing reasthenotes1’s quote elsewhere in the thread)

What you wrote may or may not be true, but this study doesn’t do much to support it.


It’s unambiguously true. Look at how many people graduate with an education major vs other majors such as mathematics or engineering. If you deny that a mathematics degree is significantly more difficult than an education degree then I have nothing more to say.

The story supports the idea that many people could be childhood educators based on the fact that the program was not scrapped, the degreeless teachers weren’t sacked, and the customers were apparently satisfied.


“Tested grades and subjects” includes math basically everywhere. Those weren’t considered here.

Again, you may be right, but this study doesn’t really support what you’re claiming.




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