Education is not just a funding issues. Policy choices, like making it impossible for students to fail which means they have no incentive to learn anything, can be more impactful.
As far as I understand it, the problem isn’t that teachers are shit. Giving more money would bring in better teachers, but I don’t know that they’d be able to overcome the other obstacles
> Giving more money would bring in better teachers, but I don’t know that they’d be able to overcome the other obstacles
Start with the easiest thing to control? Of giving more money and see what it does?
We seem to believe in every other industry that to get the best talent pay a high salary salary, but for some reason we expect teachers to do it out of compassion for the children while they struggle to pay bills. It's absurd.
Probably one of the single most important responsibilities of a society is to prepare the next generation, and it pays enormous return. But because we can't measure it with quarterly profits we just ignore it.
The rate of return on providing society with as good education is insane.
I think you need to research the issue more. Teachers are well remunerated in most states. Educational outcomes are largely a function of policy settings. Have a look at the amazing turnaround in literacy rates in Mississippi after they started teaching phonics again.
I date a lot of teachers. My last one was in the San Ramon (CA) Valley School district, she makes about $90k a year at 34 years old.
Talking to her basically makes me want to homeschool my kids to make sure someone like her isn't their teacher.
Paying teachers more won't do ANYTHING until we become a lot more selective about who gets to become and stay a teacher. It can't be like most government jobs where getting it is like winning the lottery and knowing you can make above market money for below market performance.
There is so much wrong with this. You cannot judge the class of teachers based on a small sample of your taste in women. You didn't actually communicate anything materially wrong with her. You listed a high income area to make us think teachers are overpaid but we have no insight by default into median income in the area or her qualifications.
Lastly its entirely impossible to attract better candidates without more money its just not how the world works.
For reference the median household income in san ramon is about 200k so 2 teachers would be below average. A cop with her experience in the same town makes 158k
I personally am not of the belief that anyone making under $90k a year is dumb. I believe if you were selective, you could take smart motivated people from other industries that don't pay much but still have smart employees, and have them do a great job teaching.
I do talk to actual teachers at many social events, and IMO they are a joke. Maybe it's hard to get this across in short messages.
Maybe take a look at reading and math proficiency rates... And then add in the fact that many kids propping up those stats are basically part time home schooled by parents after school and on the weekend to makeup for the lacking teachers.
Its interesting to hear you say that you date a lot of teachers while simultaneously holding this view of their level of competence. Or just not the ones you date?
If teachers made as much as half the people on this site, perhaps things would be better. 90k in San Ramon is more or less the median wage [1]. It's not _that_ much money.
Who knows? Maybe with the way AI is going that will be considered a lot of money compared to what people earn on this site.
As in what people generally earn on this site will crash way down and be outsourced to these models. I'm already seeing it personally from a social perspective - as a SWE most people I know (inc teachers in my circle) look at me like my days are numbered "cause of AI".
When I said government employees make above market, I didn't mean for the general area average.. I meant for the work they do.
Should a city landscape truck driver make $250k because his truck drives around a rich town? No, he should make what other people in this kind of industry make.
This is so basic that I feel I shouldn't need to say it, but you can't be selective if you don't pay. You take what you get.
The reason teaching became largely a women's profession when they used to be exclusively men is because we wanted to make education universal and free so we did that by paying less, and women who needed to work also had to take what they could get. The reason it has become a moron's profession is because we have made it uniquely undesirable. If you think that teachers should be amazing and imminently qualified and infinitely safe to have around children, pay them like programmers.
Instead, the middle-class meme is to pay them nothing, put them in horrible conditions, and resent them too. Typical "woman's work" model.
>The reason teaching became largely a women's profession when they used to be exclusively men is because we wanted to make education universal and free so we did that by paying less, and women who needed to work also had to take what they could get.
Do you have any source on the assertion that being a teacher used to pay more? Because to my knowledge it has never been a high paying profession.
I guess the problem isn't only the pay, it's the opportunity cost which only a certain kind of people are willing to pay for the whole career. If you select those people out... you're left with zero candidates.
It's not just investing in education, it's using tools proven to work.
WA spends a ton of money on education, and on reading Mississipi, the worst state for almost every metric, has beaten them.
The difference?
Mississipi went hard on supporting students and using phonics which are proven to work. WA still uses the hippie theory of guessing words from pictures (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_language) for learning how to read.
Because education alone in a vacuum won't fix the issues.
Even if the current model was working, just continuing to invest money in it while ignoring other issues like early childhood nutrition, a good and healthy home environment, environmental impacts, etc. will just continue to fail people.
Schooling alone isn't going to help the kid with a crappy home life, with poor parents who can't afford proper nutrition, and without the proper tools to develop the mindset needed to learn (because these tools were never taught by the parents, and/or they are too focused on simply surviving).
We, as a society, need to stop allowing people to be in a situation where they can't focus on education because they are too focused on working and surviving.
A lot of that funding in the US goes to pay teachers money they then use to pay for health insurance -- which in other countries is often provided by the tax base at large and not counted as an education expense.
That's half true. You have to think about cost of living, you can't just compare across the globe like that. And especially opportunity cost. In the US, teacher pay lags behind similarly educated professionals.
But you're right after a certain point other factors matter more than simple $ per student. Unfortunately one of those factors is teacher pay <=> teacher quality.
From the teacher's I've talked to, it's teacher work conditions related to student behavior that are creating more problems than anything else.
Disruptive students in particular who negatively impact everyone around them but for whatever reason, are frequently not removed from the environment. It's also driving a lot of good teachers into retirement.
When you see clusters of poor performance, my guess is that it's associated with regional policy creating a poor environment rather than a total absence of quality teachers.
Literally look at any education chart and it's straight up better than wage growth for the last 70 years.
Further, the statement is about as nuanced as "the universe is just atoms". For example, I come from New Orleans where since Katrina they have effectively been 100% Charter schools (that's privatized). It has been a total disaster as not only did it not change literally any statistic for the better, it totally wrecked the local policy atmosphere. Now that shit is in 30 other states. Those "schools" get the same amount of funding (sometimes more!) and are worse in literally every meaningful measurement for society.
What measurements show the charter schools are worse?
Locals demand charter schools when the existing schools are already failing but the politics of a larger district make it impossible to meaningfully change anything.
It’s been a couple of years since I looked into Louisiana’s charters. When I last looked most of what I saw was political propaganda (from both proponents and opponents).
EDIT: I looked into it. Charters appear to experience the same performance spread (approximately) as district schools where negative performance is primarily associated with poverty.
And that makes the point…school funding is not the problem. The environment outside of school for the child is the problem. Pumping money into the schools isn’t going to get the benefit because it can’t affect outside factors. Money is better allocated elsewhere.
Relevant excerpt:
> Older studies align with this nuance: A 2013 analysis found 86% of Louisiana charters outperforming peers in reading/math, with spillover benefits. But a 2023 legislative audit linked poor results to poverty—71% of students are economically disadvantaged statewide, and concentrations above 80% predict lower scores. Notably, 85 of 138 rated charters earned D’s or F’s, and some high performers enrolled fewer low-income students than legally required.
It's pretty clear that while spending is a factor, it's probably not the biggest one. The countries that seem to do best are those that combine adequate funding with real rigor in instruction.
I posted elsewhere you can't just compare across the globe like that. You have to think about cost of living and especially opportunity cost. In the US, teacher pay lags behind similarly educated professionals, which means they get stretched thin and the best with options will leave.
We're higher paying than a number of countries with higher cost of living that (whether fairly or unfairly) pay lower than us.
I stand by my assertion. I don't think our per pupil spending is the major bottleneck in our performance. I think our educational system needs fundamental reform (just like everything else in this country)
> While U.S. teachers make 58% of their counterparts’ salaries, Finnish teachers make 92% of the salaries of similarly educated professions. This trend follows with other countries ranked highly in the World Happiness Report. Teachers in Denmark (ranked #2 in World Happiness) make 81% of their counterparts’ salaries and teachers in Sweden (ranked #4) make 74% of their counterparts’ salaries.
I mean, I don't deny that teachers are paid less compared to other fields, but that is actually pretty universal among occupations that provide the worker with a higher sense of purpose. You can see the same thing in social work, the non profit sector and elsewhere. Whether that's truly just is an entirely different question than 'is there a direct relationship between teacher pay and student achievement' and looking at all other sources I've provided, there clearly is not.
I'm not from the US and I think that attitude is fucked up. You'll get your wish -- the US has been steadily dropping on the lists of "World's Happiest Countries"[1]. But luckily I don't need to do anything. Nature will teach you what a simple text box cannot. Eventually you guys will ruin all your important institutions & become deeply unhappy & hit rock bottom & start meditating or something.
[1] https://data.worldhappiness.report/chart -- Fit a line and you can extrapolate by ~2030 China will be a better place to live. That's really not that far away. That attitude is not "universal".
New Mexico (where I live) is dead last in education out of all 50 states. They are currently advertising for elementary school teachers between 65-85K per year. Summers off. Nice pension. In this low cost of living state that is a very good salary, particularly the upper bands.
In WA they always pass levies for education funding at local and state level however results are not there.
Mississipi is doing better on reading, the biggest difference being that they use phonics approach to teaching how to read, which is proven to work, whereas WA uses whole language theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_language), which is a terrible idea I don't know how it got traction.
So the gist of it, yes, spend on education, but ensure that you are using the right tools, otherwise it's a waste of money.
First time hearing of whole language theory, and man, it sounds ridiculous. Sounds similar to the old theory that kids who aren't taught a language at all will simply speak perfect Hebrew.
I almost agree, but too many people will take that to mean “we need to do more with less”. It’s a feature of capitalism. Teachers are stretched thin in most places, that’s always the main problem. Are WA teachers compensated about the same as other similarly educated professionals? As cops?
Hire smart motivated people, pay them well, leave them alone, they’ll figure this one out. It’s not hard, anyone can google what Finland does.
> WA teachers compensated about the same as other similarly educated professionals
WA teachers are among the best salaries in the country for being a teacher (within top 5). You start at around 84k$ I think, 90k$+ if you have a masters degree, at least in Seattle, and it can scale up to 150k$ with enough seniority, as well as pension plan.
> Hire smart motivated people, pay them well, leave them alone, they’ll figure this one out. It’s not hard, anyone can google what Finland does.
The problem is not the teachers themselves, it's what the system tells them to teach. You can have the best teacher in the world, but if they use BS curricula students will unfortunately learn BS.
Think about it, you can have brilliant engineers, but an idiot ceo, and the company will fail despite the engineers.
What I'm hearing is "teachers just outside Seattle are doing great, but inside Seattle and the rest of America, they're really not." That's the local cost of living set by the tech sector.
In my own social/family circle, there’s no correlation between net worth and how someone leans politically. I’ve never understood why given the pretty obvious pros/cons (amount paid in taxes vs. benefits received)
That's interesting b/c I see it very obviously in mine with the partial exception of myself. The more professional and private sector their job or spouse, the more conservative they are. E.g a real estate lawyer is conservative, a lawyer for the state is liberal, a software engineer is a communist, and the musicians are libertarians or socialist-lite.
Professional or artisanal work are petit bourgeois positions, so are flexible in their outlook regardless of income.
If they own their own land or equipment it makes more sense. It's their relationship to production that is the driving force, but if they are not self-employed and don't own their own equipment it is a little more of an interesting situation.
The people most vociferously for conservative values are middle class, small business owners, or upper class, though the true upper class are libertine (notice who participated in the Epstein affair). The working class is filled with all kinds of very diverse people united by the fact they have to work for a living and often can't afford e.g. expensive weddings. Some of them are religious, a whole bunch aren't. It's easy to be disillusioned with formal institutions that seem to not care at all about you.
Unfortunately, a lot of these people have either concluded it is too difficult to vote, can't vote, or that their votes don't matter (I don't think they're wrong). Their unions were also destroyed. Some of them vote against their interests, but it's not clear that their interests are ever represented, so they vote for change instead.
By policy changes giving unions less power, enacted by politicians that were mostly voted for by a majority, which is mostly composed of the working class. Was this people voting against their interests? (Almost literally yes, but you could argue that their ideological preference for weaker unions trumps their economic interest in stronger unions.)
You don't need an educated workforce if you have machines that can do it reliably. The more important question is: who will buy your crap if your population is too poor due to lack of well paying jobs? A look towards England or Germany has the answer.
Unfortunately, people are born with a certain intellectual capacity and can't be improved beyond that with any amount of training or education. We're largely hitting peoples' capacities already.
We can't educate someone with 80 IQ to be you; we can't educate you (or I) into being Einstein. The same way we can't just train anyone to be an amazing basketball player.
From what I've read, IQ is one of the more heritable traits, but only about 50% of one's intelligence is attributable to one's genes.
That means there are absolutely still massive benefits to be had in trying to ensure that kids grow up in safe, loving homes, with proper amounts of stimulation and enrichment, and are taught with a growth, not a fixed potential mindset.
Sad to say, but your own fixed mindset probably held you back from what you could truly achieve. You don't have to be Einstein to operate on the cutting edge of a field, I think most nobel prize winners have an iq of ~ 120
This is extremely not settled science. Education in fact does improve IQ and we don't know how fixed intelligence is and how it responds to different environmental cues.
The sane conclusion would be to invest in education, not to dump hundreds of billions of llms, but ok