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On November 11 2021 14:29 cLutZ wrote:Show nested quote +On November 11 2021 13:44 Husyelt wrote:
Lets revamp the education system from the ground up, rather than figure out what redundant administrators can be dismissed. The majority of teaching is based around memorization rather than teaching children how to think. And there is a uniformity issue where children who are succeeding faster are held back, and those who are struggling get pushed to fit the arbitrary grade so that uniformly the class can move on.
Unchain children to specific grades based on age, and allow students that thrive in certain subjects to keep progressing. I know some states have tried this, or locally in some cases, but I'd love to get more focus on that. This is basically unschooling. It works fine for high IQ kids with conscientious parents, and is basically untested in the bottom 50%. The bottom 50% are the people who are the problem in the current schooling system (per CRT and wokists at least). I suspect such a system would enrage them even more as it would compound pre-schooling disparities even more than our regimented current system (which, if we are being honest even places with AP and gifted programs hold back gifted students quite a bit).
I don't like your framing of this. My point is that the entire k-12 education system has been artificially dumbed down for generations. The "bottom" 50% in your example would be able to work at their own pace and excel in their own way.
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On November 11 2021 14:35 Husyelt wrote:Show nested quote +On November 11 2021 14:29 cLutZ wrote:On November 11 2021 13:44 Husyelt wrote:
Lets revamp the education system from the ground up, rather than figure out what redundant administrators can be dismissed. The majority of teaching is based around memorization rather than teaching children how to think. And there is a uniformity issue where children who are succeeding faster are held back, and those who are struggling get pushed to fit the arbitrary grade so that uniformly the class can move on.
Unchain children to specific grades based on age, and allow students that thrive in certain subjects to keep progressing. I know some states have tried this, or locally in some cases, but I'd love to get more focus on that. This is basically unschooling. It works fine for high IQ kids with conscientious parents, and is basically untested in the bottom 50%. The bottom 50% are the people who are the problem in the current schooling system (per CRT and wokists at least). I suspect such a system would enrage them even more as it would compound pre-schooling disparities even more than our regimented current system (which, if we are being honest even places with AP and gifted programs hold back gifted students quite a bit). I don't like your framing of this. My point is that the entire k-12 education system has been artificially dumbed down for generations. The "bottom" 50% in your example would be able to work at their own pace and excel in their own way.
That is fine. I think we have a point of disagreement about people thriving and excelling. I think people in the bottom 50% can, but not if the woke/CRT are in charge of standards. And also not if we try and make then attorneys and professors.
Being a good Christian and person (IMO based on my faith) I dont think I am a better person than people who struggle in the system. But, I do think its necessary to reward people according to ability, because otherwise no one would do anything but landscaping. At least, from my POV, landscaping (which I did for a summer) is the greatest possible job. Aside from the shitty pay. If it paid anywhere near to what I make as a patent attorney I'd be a landscaper. It is the greatest.
And, while a lot of low paid individuals complain about their jobs, if they paid well, people would flock to them, and we would be left with basically no one doing the things that drive progress and improve society. Why be a doctor if being a post office worker pays anywhere near the same? I wouldn't. All the strong candidates for basically any currently highly paid position (aside from political positions because those also offer power, thus incentivizing sociopaths even more in this system) would just take the good jobs. And we'd have a bunch of really good park rangers and a bunch of cancer researchers (realistically our most important people are logistics optimizers, but that isn't as fun and most people don't code it as difficult, even though it is) who don't even know what an enzyme is.
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On November 11 2021 16:06 cLutZ wrote:Show nested quote +On November 11 2021 14:35 Husyelt wrote:On November 11 2021 14:29 cLutZ wrote:On November 11 2021 13:44 Husyelt wrote:
Lets revamp the education system from the ground up, rather than figure out what redundant administrators can be dismissed. The majority of teaching is based around memorization rather than teaching children how to think. And there is a uniformity issue where children who are succeeding faster are held back, and those who are struggling get pushed to fit the arbitrary grade so that uniformly the class can move on.
Unchain children to specific grades based on age, and allow students that thrive in certain subjects to keep progressing. I know some states have tried this, or locally in some cases, but I'd love to get more focus on that. This is basically unschooling. It works fine for high IQ kids with conscientious parents, and is basically untested in the bottom 50%. The bottom 50% are the people who are the problem in the current schooling system (per CRT and wokists at least). I suspect such a system would enrage them even more as it would compound pre-schooling disparities even more than our regimented current system (which, if we are being honest even places with AP and gifted programs hold back gifted students quite a bit). I don't like your framing of this. My point is that the entire k-12 education system has been artificially dumbed down for generations. The "bottom" 50% in your example would be able to work at their own pace and excel in their own way. That is fine. I think we have a point of disagreement about people thriving and excelling. I think people in the bottom 50% can, but not if the woke/CRT are in charge of standards. And also not if we try and make then attorneys and professors. Being a good Christian and person (IMO based on my faith) I dont think I am a better person than people who struggle in the system. But, I do think its necessary to reward people according to ability, because otherwise no one would do anything but landscaping. At least, from my POV, landscaping (which I did for a summer) is the greatest possible job. Aside from the shitty pay. If it paid anywhere near to what I make as a patent attorney I'd be a landscaper. It is the greatest. And, while a lot of low paid individuals complain about their jobs, if they paid well, people would flock to them, and we would be left with basically no one doing the things that drive progress and improve society. Why be a doctor if being a post office worker pays anywhere near the same? I wouldn't. All the strong candidates for basically any currently highly paid position (aside from political positions because those also offer power, thus incentivizing sociopaths even more in this system) would just take the good jobs. And we'd have a bunch of really good park rangers and a bunch of cancer researchers (realistically our most important people are logistics optimizers, but that isn't as fun and most people don't code it as difficult, even though it is) who don't even know what an enzyme is.
I think you forget that there are a lot of motivating factors other than pay! To name a few:
-Location
-Working hours
-Freedom of schedule
-Feeling meaningful
-Creative self realization
-Academic prestige
-Intelectual challenges
-Relations with colleagues
-....
Creative and highend research jobs are flocked around despite mediocre pay.
I think the key to underpay is organized workers, which can be a powerful counterweight in negotiations. In the US, the power elite has done everything to destroy unions for a reason, and minimum wage is a bandaid fix. "Right to work🤮"
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On November 11 2021 13:44 Husyelt wrote:
Lets revamp the education system from the ground up, rather than figure out what redundant administrators can be dismissed. The majority of teaching is based around memorization rather than teaching children how to think. And there is a uniformity issue where children who are succeeding faster are held back, and those who are struggling get pushed to fit the arbitrary grade so that uniformly the class can move on.
Unchain children to specific grades based on age, and allow students that thrive in certain subjects to keep progressing. I know some states have tried this, or locally in some cases, but I'd love to get more focus on that.
Are you actually involved in education in any way?
Because those are issues that schools try to deal with. Especially memorization is far less of a focus nowadays than it used to be 15 year ago, when it was already less of a focus than it used to be 30 years ago.
For example, in maths education there is a far greater focus on actually understanding stuff, using maths to tackle complex real-world problems, and generally developing some "thinking skills".
When i was a student ~15 years ago, a lot of it was focused on applying some standard method to increasingly complicated mathematical functions.
The uniformity problem is a problem indeed, but it is hard to solve with the current class sizes. If you teach a class of 25+ people, you simply can not effectively teach those 25 individuals at their individual learning speeds, you instead teach the class at the average class speed. And unchaining children from a specific age based grade doesn't help here, because there is still only one teacher who teaches those 25+ students at the same speed, and the only choices for students would be repeating a class or skipping ahead a class. I am lucky enough to currently teach a class that is split in half, so in one of my courses there are only 13 students. It makes a world of a difference, i can individually interact with every student in every session, take a look at their specific learning problems and actually spend time on helping them understand. I have had similar experiences when classes were split in half during the last year due to covid.
I am all for reforming stuff in the school system (and i am, of course, talking about the German school system here), as there are indeed a lot of real problems that could and should be handled better. But i think people should take a look at what is actually happening. Structural stuff can be done, but in my opinion the most important things to do will actually cost money.
Increasing the teacher to student ratio would be at the very top of the list of things that will increasing the individual learning results of the students. But that costs a lot of money. You need more teachers, you need more rooms, you need more admin to handle all of this. It would also make the teaching profession a lot more attractive, which would help with the fact that in some subjects in some school types, there is already a lack of qualified teachers.
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On November 11 2021 14:29 cLutZ wrote:Show nested quote +On November 11 2021 13:44 Husyelt wrote:
Lets revamp the education system from the ground up, rather than figure out what redundant administrators can be dismissed. The majority of teaching is based around memorization rather than teaching children how to think. And there is a uniformity issue where children who are succeeding faster are held back, and those who are struggling get pushed to fit the arbitrary grade so that uniformly the class can move on.
Unchain children to specific grades based on age, and allow students that thrive in certain subjects to keep progressing. I know some states have tried this, or locally in some cases, but I'd love to get more focus on that. This is basically unschooling. It works fine for high IQ kids with conscientious parents, and is basically untested in the bottom 50%. The bottom 50% are the people who are the problem in the current schooling system (per CRT and wokists at least). I suspect such a system would enrage them even more as it would compound pre-schooling disparities even more than our regimented current system (which, if we are being honest even places with AP and gifted programs hold back gifted students quite a bit).
There's plenty of Montessori schools (or even "freeer" school systems such as Jenaplan) in Europe you can look at. My opinion is that each system works for a group of children and fails spectacularly for another. As anecdotal evidence, a good friend of mine went to a Montessori primary school and the teachers there decided he was dumb as a brick. He went to a regular secondary school (in the Netherlands, so being quite inspired by Waldorf but taking many more traditional pedagogical approaches as well). He turned out to be one of the best performing students in the class. When asked why he didn't d o well in primary school his own explanation was that the lack of structure confused him and demotivated him, so he just didn't do anything. It could just have been a bad school, but he's an example of someone who got left behind in a Montessori system, but thrived in a traditional one.
Obviously Montessori and Waldorf methods are about a century old now, and pedagogy has advanced (albeit at a rather slow and plodding pace). In particular the use of technology in the classroom *could* be transformational (but generally isn't) by enabling "new" teaching methods such as flipped classrooms or other systems in which the teacher is more a personal tutor to students in charge of their own learning, and assessment is done by evaluating students' progress as they are progressing rather than at fixed periods in tests (standardized or not). These hybrid approaches to teaching show promise, but ar largely untested and I have no doubt there will be students that thrive in this environment and those that don't. There is no one size fits all, but the only way to really deal with that is to reduce classroom size to at most 10 students per teacher... and even if there were money for that, there aren't enough teachers!
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On November 11 2021 18:11 Acrofales wrote:Show nested quote +On November 11 2021 14:29 cLutZ wrote:On November 11 2021 13:44 Husyelt wrote:
Lets revamp the education system from the ground up, rather than figure out what redundant administrators can be dismissed. The majority of teaching is based around memorization rather than teaching children how to think. And there is a uniformity issue where children who are succeeding faster are held back, and those who are struggling get pushed to fit the arbitrary grade so that uniformly the class can move on.
Unchain children to specific grades based on age, and allow students that thrive in certain subjects to keep progressing. I know some states have tried this, or locally in some cases, but I'd love to get more focus on that. This is basically unschooling. It works fine for high IQ kids with conscientious parents, and is basically untested in the bottom 50%. The bottom 50% are the people who are the problem in the current schooling system (per CRT and wokists at least). I suspect such a system would enrage them even more as it would compound pre-schooling disparities even more than our regimented current system (which, if we are being honest even places with AP and gifted programs hold back gifted students quite a bit). There's plenty of Montessori schools (or even "freeer" school systems such as Jenaplan) in Europe you can look at. My opinion is that each system works for a group of children and fails spectacularly for another. As anecdotal evidence, a good friend of mine went to a Montessori primary school and the teachers there decided he was dumb as a brick. He went to a regular secondary school (in the Netherlands, so being quite inspired by Waldorf but taking many more traditional pedagogical approaches as well). He turned out to be one of the best performing students in the class. When asked why he didn't d o well in primary school his own explanation was that the lack of structure confused him and demotivated him, so he just didn't do anything. It could just have been a bad school, but he's an example of someone who got left behind in a Montessori system, but thrived in a traditional one. Obviously Montessori and Waldorf methods are about a century old now, and pedagogy has advanced (albeit at a rather slow and plodding pace). In particular the use of technology in the classroom *could* be transformational (but generally isn't) by enabling "new" teaching methods such as flipped classrooms or other systems in which the teacher is more a personal tutor to students in charge of their own learning, and assessment is done by evaluating students' progress as they are progressing rather than at fixed periods in tests (standardized or not). These hybrid approaches to teaching show promise, but ar largely untested and I have no doubt there will be students that thrive in this environment and those that don't. There is no one size fits all, but the only way to really deal with that is to reduce classroom size to at most 10 students per teacher... and even if there were money for that, there aren't enough teachers!
I think if you have the will, the lack of teachers will not be a problem forever. Sure, there are not enough teachers now, but that is partially based on how teaching works right now. You can do a lot to make the teaching job more attractive, and reducing class sizes is a big part of that. Reducing admin load on teachers by actually hiring admin people instead of just pushing all that stuff onto the teachers because they are already there and don't need to be paid extra for it would also help.
If you give teachers more support and make the teaching profession more attractive, more people will want to become teachers.
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On November 11 2021 09:40 cLutZ wrote:Show nested quote +On November 11 2021 09:22 micronesia wrote:On November 11 2021 09:16 cLutZ wrote:On November 11 2021 08:28 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:What state are you referring to? I would like to look at the actual numbers, because I'm skeptical that teachers are consistently being paid 2-3% above inflation percentages for 30 straight years (or that such a thing could ever happen). I've never heard of that happening before, and I don't think it's reasonable to project it now. Maybe your state happens to be an interesting exception, but everything I'm seeing seems to show that teacher salaries are barely keeping up with inflation, at best: (This source is pre-covid, to control for your suggestion that the pandemic is creating an exception) From 2000 to 2018: "In 32 states, teacher salaries have not kept pace with inflation ... On the whole, salaries in 19 places increased while salaries in 32 places (including DC) decreased." https://usafacts.org/articles/32-states-teacher-salaries-have-not-kept-pace-inflation/#:~:text=In 32 states, teacher salaries have not kept,from 2000 to 2018 More than 10% decrease The average rate of inflation over the past 10 years seems to be around 1-3%, and the salary increases of most teachers are not 2-3% more than that. That would suggest that teachers are generally making a 4-5% salary increase every year, and that would be incredibly rare. Salary guides for public schools (as well as teachers' actual salaries) are available for public record, and my annual salary increases have been 1-2%, keeping steady with (or slightly less than) these inflation numbers: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/inflation-cpi -> 10YR on the map. As an aside, keep in mind that your 30-year hypothetical compounding is to get to 40% of this year's budget, not the budget 30 years from now. That's a problem. You said that you can cut 30-50% of current budgets, not that in 30 years you think that schools would be able to cut 30-50% of their budgets (and keep in mind that the teachers' salaries only accounted for 1/6 of the hypothetical budget, so it's actually cutting 40% of 16%, not 40% of 100%). And on top of that, you can't assume that the costs of everything else (the other 5/6 of the budget: school maintenance, food, resources, etc.) over the next 30 years can be cut back the same way salaries can, and compound to get you a 40% reduction for the remaining 5/6 of the budget. It's unrealistic to think that all goods and services that are upcharged can be haggled down to merely the price of inflation. I really don't think any of this is working out, mathematically  CA 2000-2015. Obviously I don't know if that truly extrapolates either nationwide of for a full 30 years. But who knows. Also, I will note that prof salaries is not the answer vis a vis college tuition AFAIK. Its admin bloat + new facilities. From what you were saying before it sounds like California teachers are overpaid (although they may not have been 30 years ago) and that is contributing towards inefficient per student spending. I admittedly did only a cursory search for your state, but this is the data I looked at: https://www.cde.ca.gov/fg/fr/sa/cefavgsalaries.aspI'll focus on High School Districts because they are what I am most familiar with. For medium sized, the beginning teacher salary on average is $50,546, and the highest teacher annual salary is $103,463. How high should those numbers really be after making whatever corrections you think are appropriate? I think the top end could be cut about 20%. Obviously I was using a simple model (which exaggerated the result way too much) in suggesting you could potentially get 40% out of the teacher salary budget. .
Teachers being overpaid is a pretty hot take. I don't see how $50k-100k is overpaid for California. I live in the Bay Area, California. $100k is basically an average salary here. It probably translates to $60k in a southern state when you adjust for higher cost of living and taxes. According to This website Police officers in the Bay Area make $125-132k average salary. I don't really see a problem with teachers making $100k/year here, assuming they are working on average 35 hours/week. Not sure how many hours teachers work considering an average school year is 180 days for students.
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On November 11 2021 20:41 BlackJack wrote:Show nested quote +On November 11 2021 09:40 cLutZ wrote:On November 11 2021 09:22 micronesia wrote:On November 11 2021 09:16 cLutZ wrote:On November 11 2021 08:28 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:What state are you referring to? I would like to look at the actual numbers, because I'm skeptical that teachers are consistently being paid 2-3% above inflation percentages for 30 straight years (or that such a thing could ever happen). I've never heard of that happening before, and I don't think it's reasonable to project it now. Maybe your state happens to be an interesting exception, but everything I'm seeing seems to show that teacher salaries are barely keeping up with inflation, at best: (This source is pre-covid, to control for your suggestion that the pandemic is creating an exception) From 2000 to 2018: "In 32 states, teacher salaries have not kept pace with inflation ... On the whole, salaries in 19 places increased while salaries in 32 places (including DC) decreased." https://usafacts.org/articles/32-states-teacher-salaries-have-not-kept-pace-inflation/#:~:text=In 32 states, teacher salaries have not kept,from 2000 to 2018 More than 10% decrease The average rate of inflation over the past 10 years seems to be around 1-3%, and the salary increases of most teachers are not 2-3% more than that. That would suggest that teachers are generally making a 4-5% salary increase every year, and that would be incredibly rare. Salary guides for public schools (as well as teachers' actual salaries) are available for public record, and my annual salary increases have been 1-2%, keeping steady with (or slightly less than) these inflation numbers: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/inflation-cpi -> 10YR on the map. As an aside, keep in mind that your 30-year hypothetical compounding is to get to 40% of this year's budget, not the budget 30 years from now. That's a problem. You said that you can cut 30-50% of current budgets, not that in 30 years you think that schools would be able to cut 30-50% of their budgets (and keep in mind that the teachers' salaries only accounted for 1/6 of the hypothetical budget, so it's actually cutting 40% of 16%, not 40% of 100%). And on top of that, you can't assume that the costs of everything else (the other 5/6 of the budget: school maintenance, food, resources, etc.) over the next 30 years can be cut back the same way salaries can, and compound to get you a 40% reduction for the remaining 5/6 of the budget. It's unrealistic to think that all goods and services that are upcharged can be haggled down to merely the price of inflation. I really don't think any of this is working out, mathematically CA 2000-2015. Obviously I don't know if that truly extrapolates either nationwide of for a full 30 years. But who knows. Also, I will note that prof salaries is not the answer vis a vis college tuition AFAIK. Its admin bloat + new facilities. From what you were saying before it sounds like California teachers are overpaid (although they may not have been 30 years ago) and that is contributing towards inefficient per student spending. I admittedly did only a cursory search for your state, but this is the data I looked at: https://www.cde.ca.gov/fg/fr/sa/cefavgsalaries.aspI'll focus on High School Districts because they are what I am most familiar with. For medium sized, the beginning teacher salary on average is $50,546, and the highest teacher annual salary is $103,463. How high should those numbers really be after making whatever corrections you think are appropriate? I think the top end could be cut about 20%. Obviously I was using a simple model (which exaggerated the result way too much) in suggesting you could potentially get 40% out of the teacher salary budget. . Teachers being overpaid is a pretty hot take. I don't see how $50k-100k is overpaid for California. I live in the Bay Area, California. $100k is basically an average salary here. It probably translates to $60k in a southern state when you adjust for higher cost of living and taxes. According to This website Police officers in the Bay Area make $125-132k average salary. I don't really see a problem with teachers making $100k/year here, assuming they are working on average 35 hours/week. Not sure how many hours teachers work considering an average school year is 180 days for students.
Yeah, wherever the cost of living is higher (parts of CA, NY, NJ, etc.), we should expect the salaries to be proportionally higher too, or else it wouldn't be financially feasible to be a teacher (or have any job that doesn't pay enough) in those places.
I don't know any teachers who only work 35 hours per week; most work 40-60 hour weeks from the start of the school year until the end of the school year (for me, that's early September until late June, roughly 10 months). Their time spent in the actual school (during the actual school day) is focused almost entirely on directly working with present students and doing the actual classroom teaching, but there is also a huge amount of weekly work that can't be done during that time (grading papers, preparing lessons/assessments for the current/following week, communicating with hundreds of families each marking period, etc.), so that's either brought home for late afternoons, evenings, and weekends, or sometimes teachers will stay late for a few hours inside the school, after all the students are gone. Similarly, while the average school year is 180 days for students, teachers will spend weekends and summers preparing content and resources too, so while it's nice to have two months where we don't need to physically drive to school, we often don't have summers "off" in the sense that some people think we do (it's not like we do nothing teacher-related for two months).
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On November 11 2021 10:45 JimmiC wrote:
How much does the US spend on schools and school security? No comparative country is spending money on metal detectors, armed guards, police and so on. Anyone have idea? That is a drain and is a big negative for the education of the students.
I had trouble finding significant data on this. I found a few random articles that said around $3B nationally, as of a few years ago, but I don't think that school security is the type of thing that we can simplify divide the total amount spent across the country by the total number of schools, as some areas have very little security (and very little need for it), while others have an insane amount of security (which may be somewhat justified).
https://fee.org/articles/school-security-is-now-a-3-billion-dollar-annual-industry-is-there-a-better-way-to-protect-kids/#:~:text=One ballooning school expenditure is the vast amount,of dollars spent on armed guards at schools.
On November 11 2021 13:11 cLutZ wrote:Show nested quote +On November 11 2021 09:50 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On November 11 2021 09:40 cLutZ wrote:On November 11 2021 09:22 micronesia wrote:On November 11 2021 09:16 cLutZ wrote:On November 11 2021 08:28 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:What state are you referring to? I would like to look at the actual numbers, because I'm skeptical that teachers are consistently being paid 2-3% above inflation percentages for 30 straight years (or that such a thing could ever happen). I've never heard of that happening before, and I don't think it's reasonable to project it now. Maybe your state happens to be an interesting exception, but everything I'm seeing seems to show that teacher salaries are barely keeping up with inflation, at best: (This source is pre-covid, to control for your suggestion that the pandemic is creating an exception) From 2000 to 2018: "In 32 states, teacher salaries have not kept pace with inflation ... On the whole, salaries in 19 places increased while salaries in 32 places (including DC) decreased." https://usafacts.org/articles/32-states-teacher-salaries-have-not-kept-pace-inflation/#:~:text=In 32 states, teacher salaries have not kept,from 2000 to 2018 More than 10% decrease The average rate of inflation over the past 10 years seems to be around 1-3%, and the salary increases of most teachers are not 2-3% more than that. That would suggest that teachers are generally making a 4-5% salary increase every year, and that would be incredibly rare. Salary guides for public schools (as well as teachers' actual salaries) are available for public record, and my annual salary increases have been 1-2%, keeping steady with (or slightly less than) these inflation numbers: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/inflation-cpi -> 10YR on the map. As an aside, keep in mind that your 30-year hypothetical compounding is to get to 40% of this year's budget, not the budget 30 years from now. That's a problem. You said that you can cut 30-50% of current budgets, not that in 30 years you think that schools would be able to cut 30-50% of their budgets (and keep in mind that the teachers' salaries only accounted for 1/6 of the hypothetical budget, so it's actually cutting 40% of 16%, not 40% of 100%). And on top of that, you can't assume that the costs of everything else (the other 5/6 of the budget: school maintenance, food, resources, etc.) over the next 30 years can be cut back the same way salaries can, and compound to get you a 40% reduction for the remaining 5/6 of the budget. It's unrealistic to think that all goods and services that are upcharged can be haggled down to merely the price of inflation. I really don't think any of this is working out, mathematically CA 2000-2015. Obviously I don't know if that truly extrapolates either nationwide of for a full 30 years. But who knows. Also, I will note that prof salaries is not the answer vis a vis college tuition AFAIK. Its admin bloat + new facilities. From what you were saying before it sounds like California teachers are overpaid (although they may not have been 30 years ago) and that is contributing towards inefficient per student spending. I admittedly did only a cursory search for your state, but this is the data I looked at: https://www.cde.ca.gov/fg/fr/sa/cefavgsalaries.aspI'll focus on High School Districts because they are what I am most familiar with. For medium sized, the beginning teacher salary on average is $50,546, and the highest teacher annual salary is $103,463. How high should those numbers really be after making whatever corrections you think are appropriate? I think the top end could be cut about 20%. Obviously I was using a simple model (which exaggerated the result way too much) in suggesting you could potentially get 40% out of the teacher salary budget. Are you referring to the teachers who are making over $100,000 per year? That's a very small number of teachers, so cutting their salaries won't affect much of the budget. Even if we decided to screw over teachers making at least $90,000, those are also the ones who have advanced degrees (often PhDs) and/or have been working for 30+ years, with incremental pay increases. If teachers stopped getting pay increases after 20 years, then teachers would leave after 20 years. If teachers stopped being financially rewarded for having advanced degrees, then they wouldn't bother pursuing more education to better prepare them for teaching. I'd like to ask a follow-up question: Why bother cutting teacher salaries at all? I mean, at my HS the majority of teachers with more than 10 years EXP earned over that, obviously not median school, but they weren't particularly good. Yes they had advanced degrees, notably Ed. D, but that is literally a joke degree almost no one would get (many were online/mail only decades before Covid!) if there weren't automatic raises for getting one.
This cavalier attitude makes me think that you haven't actually looked at EdD requirements. Most EdD and most PhD and most master's and most bachelor's programs are accredited, in-person, and at real universities. I've been accepted into both EdD and PhD programs, and they had almost completely identical requirements (same prerequisites, same number of courses, same qualifying exam, same dissertation requirement). The only practical difference was that a few of the courses were different, because academic PhDs tend to use their doctorate more for research than for teaching/administrating, whereas academic EdDs tend to use their doctorate more for teaching/administrating than for research. That's pretty much it. There's so much redundancy between the two doctoral programs that they're generally just being merged into one nowadays, with the better-known PhD letters being given instead of EdD letters, but that's simply to reinforce that for all intents and purposes, an EdD is the same quality of doctorate as a PhD.
I doubt most (or even many) teachers would leave the profession if it paid less at the top end. They don't draw from prestigious universities, and Ed programs regularly are regularly comprised of the lower scoring students at those schools. They don't have mobility or transferrable skills. Indeed, my best HS teacher "retired" from chemical engineering to become a chem teacher.
And my worst HS teacher "retired" from being a professional physicist to become a physics teacher, because he incorrectly believed that knowing how to do physics automatically means you can teach it. He lasted one year, and I had to teach myself physics in college because I didn't learn it in high school. Anyways, anecdotes aside, the overall rhetoric here reminds me of the terribly untrue phrase "those who can't do, teach". In reality, teachers not only need to be able to "do", but also have the capacity to explain and help other people (children, at that!) "do", too. Plenty of teachers (such as myself) didn't major in education; I have plenty of skills and content knowledge that are transferrable outside of the classroom. My bachelors was in mathematics, which is an incredibly versatile degree. I could have made a ton of money doing other things besides teaching, if I wanted to, but I love teaching. That being said, if teaching became financially unfeasible for me, I have a ton of other options doing statistics or mathematics elsewhere and making a killing. That's just not what I'd prefer, so I'm happy that I get paid reasonably well.
Show nested quote +On November 11 2021 10:46 gobbledydook wrote:
I think the biggest salary earners are the varsity sport coaches, followed by the top admin?
Its mostly people who game the system by stacking positions (which also decreases teaching load! so the problem is worse than you think because they don't even count as NTF's, but they are only teaching 1 class a day!). An infamous guy at my HS was Math Department Chair and AD so he taught 1 math class and made like 160k. But it is true that going after teacher's salaries isn't the best move for efficiency. You need to rid yourself of various deans, counselors, etc, which are the bulk of the new costs relating to salaries. And you need to stop building new schools, pretending IPads are a legitimate school expense etc. My school district, for example, built an elementary school circa 2000, only to retire my elementary school (built 1990) in 2005. Its madness!
I agree with you that some administrative positions could probably be cut or combined, although we'd need to look at what the expectations are for each of those positions, because maybe there's a good reason why those positions currently exist. On a different note, iPads / personal computers for every student is absolutely a legitimate school expense, especially coming out of a global pandemic where our entire country had to teach remotely, while tons of students don't actually have a personal computer at home. Ensuring that everyone has access to modern technology is imperative, and helps bridge some of the gaps regarding equality of opportunity.
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United States24776 Posts
This idea that paying teachers less wouldn't reduce the quality of teaching at schools is difficult to reconcile with the problem that the teaching profession has trouble drawing quality candidates. You get what you pay for, and when you aren't willing to pay even 100k to the most experienced/educated members of the profession in an expensive state, you are setting up the schools for failure. I can only conclude cLutZ's actual objective here hasn't been explicitly stated.
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On November 11 2021 23:58 JimmiC wrote:
@dpb that is a lot of "waste" when you consider it does not help the students get a better education. And i think all the police is schools comes out of the police budget. Guns create this huge cost in public funds in general from schools, policing, healthcare, jails and so on. I wonder if the discussion moved from guns vs no guns to something like guns or 10% less tax, or guns vs universal healthcare or whatever the carrot is, an either or instead of it just being "taking soemthing away" if that would make a differnce.
Why do you think that investing money into school safety doesn't help the students get a better education? From training and intervention programs to having security guards to proactively deter (or, at least, break up) fights and other potential issues, ensuring a safe school is pretty important. Some schools need more help than others, and while it may be the case that some security-related costs can be cut, the idea in general isn't a useless one.
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On November 12 2021 00:14 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:Show nested quote +On November 11 2021 23:58 JimmiC wrote:
@dpb that is a lot of "waste" when you consider it does not help the students get a better education. And i think all the police is schools comes out of the police budget. Guns create this huge cost in public funds in general from schools, policing, healthcare, jails and so on. I wonder if the discussion moved from guns vs no guns to something like guns or 10% less tax, or guns vs universal healthcare or whatever the carrot is, an either or instead of it just being "taking soemthing away" if that would make a differnce. Why do you think that investing money into school safety doesn't help the students get a better education? From training and intervention programs to having security guards to proactively deter (or, at least, break up) fights and other potential issues, ensuring a safe school is pretty important. Some schools need more help than others, and while it may be the case that some security-related costs can be cut, the idea in general isn't a useless one:
I think the idea is that it should not be necessary to have armed guards in school.
For example, in the school i teach in, there are 0 armed guards, 0 other guards, 0 metal detectors and so forth. I think there is some security person who comes by every day to lock all the doors after hours, and that is about it.
Sure, if the choice is between having guards and having the school being shot up, then having guards enables students to have a better education. To me, the idea of having a society where a school needs armed guards and metal detectors is abhorrent. I don't think that they are necessarily wasteful in the setup of the US, but they are also wasteful in the meaning that they shouldn't need to be there.
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On November 12 2021 00:39 Simberto wrote:Show nested quote +On November 12 2021 00:14 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On November 11 2021 23:58 JimmiC wrote:
@dpb that is a lot of "waste" when you consider it does not help the students get a better education. And i think all the police is schools comes out of the police budget. Guns create this huge cost in public funds in general from schools, policing, healthcare, jails and so on. I wonder if the discussion moved from guns vs no guns to something like guns or 10% less tax, or guns vs universal healthcare or whatever the carrot is, an either or instead of it just being "taking soemthing away" if that would make a differnce. Why do you think that investing money into school safety doesn't help the students get a better education? From training and intervention programs to having security guards to proactively deter (or, at least, break up) fights and other potential issues, ensuring a safe school is pretty important. Some schools need more help than others, and while it may be the case that some security-related costs can be cut, the idea in general isn't a useless one: I think the idea is that it should not be necessary to have armed guards in school. For example, in the school i teach in, there are 0 armed guards, 0 other guards, 0 metal detectors and so forth. I think there is some security person who comes by every day to lock all the doors after hours, and that is about it. Sure, if the choice is between having guards and having the school being shot up, then having guards enables students to have a better education. To me, the idea of having a society where a school needs armed guards and metal detectors is abhorrent. I don't think that they are necessarily wasteful in the setup of the US, but they are also wasteful in the meaning that they shouldn't need to be there.
Sure; hypothetically it'd be great if no American schools needed to worry about school safety, but it's not something that can be currently removed from school budgets.
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Norway28804 Posts
Here, schools are massively underfunded and a large part of what is required to improve education is impossible unless that changes. Thinking about how to cut costs rather than how to secure more funding entirely misses the ball. (I'm sure there are individual schools in different regions where this isn't true, but as a 'general trend', I have a very hard time seeing how schools/education stand out as a place with 'too much funds going into it'.)
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On November 12 2021 00:44 Liquid`Drone wrote:
Here, schools are massively underfunded and a large part of what is required to improve education is impossible unless that changes. Thinking about how to cut costs rather than how to secure more funding entirely misses the ball. (I'm sure there are individual schools in different regions where this isn't true, but as a 'general trend', I have a very hard time seeing how schools/education stand out as a place with 'too much funds going into it'.)
I am pretty sure that if you actually did an honest calculation about the societal benefits of spending money on education over the lifetime of the students, you would get a massively positive result out of every cent.
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On November 12 2021 00:50 Simberto wrote:Show nested quote +On November 12 2021 00:44 Liquid`Drone wrote:
Here, schools are massively underfunded and a large part of what is required to improve education is impossible unless that changes. Thinking about how to cut costs rather than how to secure more funding entirely misses the ball. (I'm sure there are individual schools in different regions where this isn't true, but as a 'general trend', I have a very hard time seeing how schools/education stand out as a place with 'too much funds going into it'.) I am pretty sure that if you actually did an honest calculation about the societal benefits of spending money on education over the lifetime of the students, you would get a massively positive result out of every cent.
Eh. Looking at US universities and the bloat thereof, I can't really agree with a blind "fund it all" approach. And eventually it might not be "the taxpayers" footing the bill either.
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United States10432 Posts
On November 12 2021 00:44 Liquid`Drone wrote:
Here, schools are massively underfunded and a large part of what is required to improve education is impossible unless that changes. Thinking about how to cut costs rather than how to secure more funding entirely misses the ball. (I'm sure there are individual schools in different regions where this isn't true, but as a 'general trend', I have a very hard time seeing how schools/education stand out as a place with 'too much funds going into it'.)
I agree with this the most. If too many funds are going into schools, this doesn't explain why many teachers have to pay out of pocket for school supplies for their own students. Is this anecdotal? Yeah, but it's an anecdote that thousands of teachers have told over the course of history.
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EPT
