Ultimately the argument is circling around the following point: which environment provides better education to students, one where teachers are unionized or one where they are not? Because no system is perfect and bad workers exist everywhere.
Here is my experience, with which reasonable people can disagree. I find that teachers care more about quality education than administrators, school boards, staff, politicians, and yes (even though it’s politically incorrect to say), parents. Because of that schools where teachers have some power and aren’t just peons provide better education.
Disclaimers: ceteris paribus, on average, extreme results exist, blah, blah.
The ancient problem in all political contexts is Quis custodiet ipsos custodes. Who watches the watchers. You let the teachers run wild you end up with problems. You put in place a mindless bureaucracy and you end up with problems. It ain't like this is easy or we wouldn't have people complaining about the issue for millennia. Paying teachers enough to attract good teachers and providing them with decent working conditions isn't going to solve all problems but it might get you near the top of the minmax curve.
“Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.”
― Marcus Aurelius
Also, anecdotes don't matter when deciding policy :P
True! I called it out on purpose because it's only worth so much.
My personal experience is that there are good teachers and neutral teachers and bad ones, and the bad ones mostly fuck up your kids while you're powerless to do anything except watch your kids be damaged daily for a year and sometimes completely derail an education, the neutral ones can't be recalled after a year but kids got through it OK, and the good ones are remembered forever by the kids but quickly move on to someplace better.
You can fix the moving on with better pay and benefits, and we should do that.
You gotta fix the bad ones by shitcanning them in days or weeks, not years. That's hard enough just in general, and simply harder to do with a union in place.
You can't fix the bad ones when the pay and benefits won't attract replacements. All you'll do is overload classrooms and make ALL the teachers into bad ones.
As someone who has worked in both union and non-union schools, this argument is pretty ridiculous. At charters, teachers can get fired because admin doesn't like them, and have it done in a way that means they basically cannot retain their license. Completely fictional situations, I've seen it three separate times. In a year, because I got the fuck out of that situation ASAP. And there was frequent retaliation for trying to make things better in the face of indifferent to garbage administration.
Two of the three were fucking fantastic teachers who the kids adored and learned a ton from. One special ed, and finding good special ed teachers willing to work in poor districts is basically impossible.
My wife's first boss and school founder at her current charter was stricken with cancer in his early 30s and died a little over a year later.
His replacement, who was connected with people further up the food chain - who had never taught himself- inherited a school that was first in their network the first two years of it's existence and ran the school into the ground over a period of four years.
My wife is one of two teachers still remaining from those first years. Administrative staff has totally turned over as well. People resigned in disgust and some we're driven out or outright fired for speaking out against over what was going on.
My wife easily had grounds for a sexual discrimination suit against this well connected gentleman and only survived his attempts to push her out because she was considered a star in the organization both prior to and during his tenure and other higher ups went to bat for her.
She had no union to go to and any redress we may have sought we would have had to pay out of our own pockets to fight a very well funded entity.
RedTide#1907 on Battle.net
Come Overwatch with meeeee
I'm not as sure about my stance toward public unions as I am toward private ones. In the latter I think unions are a great thing, but in the former idunno. Revenue sources are too stiff in the public sector that unions might hamper the ability of public managers to deal with budgets. Since the provision of goods/services is linked to tax ability not sales, how you navigate the public unions/budgetary issue is a lot harder than I think some give it credit.
Like, at the end of the day, people want their kids educated, and they'd prefer teachers to be paid well, but they don't want to pay the taxes for that.
Yes, the abysmal state of funding for education in general is an issue with paying teachers well. But I think you (and others) are missing an important aspect to this. The public managers aren't the top of the administration. Legislatures are. We don't expect unions in the private sector to just give up because managers don't have money to allocate. We expect them to talk to someone who can allocate money. And if you look at who the other party actually is in teacher's strikes, it's often the state legislature to begin with. You can't just draw the line at administrators and say there's no more money to pay teachers.
I mean, this is a fair question. "Teachers are underpaid" is right now an unproven assertion.
Only for the ignorant.
The plight of the American teacher is well known. Nationwide budget cuts, wage freezes, the ludicrous decision to tie school funding to student performance, teachers paying out of pocket for school classroom supplies, long hours and plenty of outside hours _required_ just to get the basic job done. This is all common knowledge, rendering your above statement for someone who has put three kids through school, fairly ludicrous.
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FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
edited February 2019
Also in a lot of places school funding is tied to property taxes.
I'm not as sure about my stance toward public unions as I am toward private ones. In the latter I think unions are a great thing, but in the former idunno. Revenue sources are too stiff in the public sector that unions might hamper the ability of public managers to deal with budgets. Since the provision of goods/services is linked to tax ability not sales, how you navigate the public unions/budgetary issue is a lot harder than I think some give it credit.
Like, at the end of the day, people want their kids educated, and they'd prefer teachers to be paid well, but they don't want to pay the taxes for that.
Yes, the abysmal state of funding for education in general is an issue with paying teachers well. But I think you (and others) are missing an important aspect to this. The public managers aren't the top of the administration. Legislatures are. We don't expect unions in the private sector to just give up because managers don't have money to allocate. We expect them to talk to someone who can allocate money. And if you look at who the other party actually is in teacher's strikes, it's often the state legislature to begin with. You can't just draw the line at administrators and say there's no more money to pay teachers.
I'm not really drawing the line at administrators. The overriding axiom is that the public won't pay more taxes, and if taxes are raised they vote the sitting boards of education/trustees out and replace them with those that won't raise taxes. Hence the adage "no politician ever lost by running on cutting taxes".
"Class size is a fundamental issue," union president Alex Caputo-Pearl said at a recent press conference. "That is about student learning conditions. That is about educator working conditions."
Still, smaller class sizes means hiring more teachers, which is costly.
LAUSD officials have proposed reducing class sizes by a handful of students in certain schools, subjects and grade levels. And while they say they wish they could go further, they also say they're running out of money to spend on the union's demands. (UTLA leaders dispute this claim, saying they think the district is hiding money.)...
..."If you had an extra $1,000 per kid to spend," Chingos says, "it's not clear that you would definitely want to spend it on smaller classes versus paying your teachers more, providing more money for textbooks, for a music program or after-school activities."
By district estimates, the money LAUSD is currently devoting to a class-size reduction proposal could easily meet other union demands: a full-time nurse in every LAUSD school; a full-time librarian in every middle and high school; more counselors, deans and social workers.
In the public sector a lot of these issues have trade-offs and I think discounting the costs associated with different benefits doesn't lead to optimal decision making.
I mean, this is a fair question. "Teachers are underpaid" is right now an unproven assertion.
Only for the ignorant.
The plight of the American teacher is well known. Nationwide budget cuts, wage freezes, the ludicrous decision to tie school funding to student performance, teachers paying out of pocket for school classroom supplies, long hours and plenty of outside hours _required_ just to get the basic job done. This is all common knowledge, rendering your above statement for someone who has put three kids through school, fairly ludicrous.
Without touching on whether or not any of this is true, and to be fair it often is, taking a stab at what "getting the job done" means would go a lot farther to making a good argument here. the whole point I'm raising is that we can't adequately define the job, we don't know how to demonstrate whether it's getting done, and we don't seem to have a good idea of whether, just to pull a number out of thin air, tripling teacher salary would result in a small improvement, a large improvement, or no improvement.
Teachers are low-paid, that's certain. Teachers seem to be underpaid, but that is sentiment. maybe they're paid the right amount for the mediocre job they do, on the whole. Maybe they're wildly underpaid for the job they do!
Right now we're still arguing about how to define the job, and more importantly to this thread topic, how a union's effort might affect outcomes such that they aren't rent-seeking by demanding that the citizens fund an increase in union power to be exchanged for not just no tangible gain, but no metric for measuring gain.
Part of my wonders why anyone would want to be a public teacher (or a public employee in general) as we keep talking away their ability to unionize and strike and their job is constantly fucked with by both their adminstration and the public.
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
I mean, this is a fair question. "Teachers are underpaid" is right now an unproven assertion.
Only for the ignorant.
The plight of the American teacher is well known. Nationwide budget cuts, wage freezes, the ludicrous decision to tie school funding to student performance, teachers paying out of pocket for school classroom supplies, long hours and plenty of outside hours _required_ just to get the basic job done. This is all common knowledge, rendering your above statement for someone who has put three kids through school, fairly ludicrous.
Without touching on whether or not any of this is true, and to be fair it often is, taking a stab at what "getting the job done" means would go a lot farther to making a good argument here. the whole point I'm raising is that we can't adequately define the job, we don't know how to demonstrate whether it's getting done, and we don't seem to have a good idea of whether, just to pull a number out of thin air, tripling teacher salary would result in a small improvement, a large improvement, or no improvement.
Teachers are low-paid, that's certain. Teachers seem to be underpaid, but that is sentiment. maybe they're paid the right amount for the mediocre job they do, on the whole. Maybe they're wildly underpaid for the job they do!
Right now we're still arguing about how to define the job, and more importantly to this thread topic, how a union's effort might affect outcomes such that they aren't rent-seeking by demanding that the citizens fund an increase in union power to be exchanged for not just no tangible gain, but no metric for measuring gain.
It's been pointed out multiple times in this thread that there's a teacher shortage. Low pay is part of the reason for that.
Coming up with metrics for evaluating teachers that 1) actually measure teaching quality and 2) don't introduce obvious perverse incentives is impossible because of the sheer number of things that affect student outcomes. Besides which, I feel like demanding "improvement" in exchange for higher pay, when some teachers aren't even making a living wage, is spectacularly missing the point.
One of the fundamental requirements for a productive workforce is to pay people enough that they don't have to worry about money.
Part of my wonders why anyone would want to be a public teacher (or a public employee in general) as we keep talking away their ability to unionize and strike and their job is constantly fucked with by both their adminstration and the public.
It's awesome having people oscillate between idly wondering aloud and defending passionately the idea that you don't presently eat enough shit.
RedTide#1907 on Battle.net
Come Overwatch with meeeee
I mean, this is a fair question. "Teachers are underpaid" is right now an unproven assertion.
Only for the ignorant.
The plight of the American teacher is well known. Nationwide budget cuts, wage freezes, the ludicrous decision to tie school funding to student performance, teachers paying out of pocket for school classroom supplies, long hours and plenty of outside hours _required_ just to get the basic job done. This is all common knowledge, rendering your above statement for someone who has put three kids through school, fairly ludicrous.
Without touching on whether or not any of this is true, and to be fair it often is, taking a stab at what "getting the job done" means would go a lot farther to making a good argument here. the whole point I'm raising is that we can't adequately define the job, we don't know how to demonstrate whether it's getting done, and we don't seem to have a good idea of whether, just to pull a number out of thin air, tripling teacher salary would result in a small improvement, a large improvement, or no improvement.
Teachers are low-paid, that's certain. Teachers seem to be underpaid, but that is sentiment. maybe they're paid the right amount for the mediocre job they do, on the whole. Maybe they're wildly underpaid for the job they do!
Right now we're still arguing about how to define the job, and more importantly to this thread topic, how a union's effort might affect outcomes such that they aren't rent-seeking by demanding that the citizens fund an increase in union power to be exchanged for not just no tangible gain, but no metric for measuring gain.
It's been pointed out multiple times in this thread that there's a teacher shortage. Low pay is part of the reason for that.
Coming up with metrics for evaluating teachers that 1) actually measure teaching quality and 2) don't introduce obvious perverse incentives is impossible because of the sheer number of things that affect student outcomes. Besides which, I feel like demanding "improvement" in exchange for higher pay, when some teachers aren't even making a living wage, is spectacularly missing the point.
One of the fundamental requirements for a productive workforce is to pay people enough that they don't have to worry about money.
"It's impossible to tell if we're good at this, or if we'll ever get better, but give us more anyway" is not an inspiring argument to make. There are a couple of teacher or adjacent people in here - are there any success metrics you'd accept if your union rep came to you and said "a 20% raise is on the table, but only if you agree do this"?
And like, we're a fabulously productive workforce right now without being paid enough to stop worrying about money.
Do all jobs require concrete, objective metrics for performance?
Ideally, the school administrators would be able to look into teachers individually, and talk to their students, to determine which teachers are best able to educate their students. Increasing compensation would help current teachers dedicate time to their job without as much hardship, but mostly it would help improve teacher quality by raising the desirability of the position and attracting better quality applicants.
There you get into potential incentive problems for the administration, though. How do we ensure they're managing the school with quality education as a higher priority than hiring buddies or grift? I could see an argument for metrics on the school or district scale, though they should either specifically account for economic changes in the local population, or be very loose so that shifts outside of control of the school don't cause unnecessary changes in strategy.
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Kane Red RobeMaster of MagicArcanusRegistered Userregular
I don't have much to add as I'm catching up with the thread but a few pages back spool gave an example of each teacher having a class of twenty or so kids and I literally laughed out loud. A shirt derisive bark of laughter sure, but I think it still counts. I haven't seen a class size of less than 30 since the early nineties, and last I checked they were closer to forty than thirty.
I don't have much to add as I'm catching up with the thread but a few pages back spool gave an example of each teacher having a class of twenty or so kids and I literally laughed out loud. A shirt derisive bark of laughter sure, but I think it still counts. I haven't seen a class size of less than 30 since the early nineties, and last I checked they were closer to forty than thirty.
People look at teacher to student ratio and assume oh its 23 students to a teacher but don't take into account how a school operates. My wife has minimum 30 kids to a class in her school with a 20 student to teacher ratio.
I mean, this is a fair question. "Teachers are underpaid" is right now an unproven assertion.
Only for the ignorant.
The plight of the American teacher is well known. Nationwide budget cuts, wage freezes, the ludicrous decision to tie school funding to student performance, teachers paying out of pocket for school classroom supplies, long hours and plenty of outside hours _required_ just to get the basic job done. This is all common knowledge, rendering your above statement for someone who has put three kids through school, fairly ludicrous.
Without touching on whether or not any of this is true, and to be fair it often is, taking a stab at what "getting the job done" means would go a lot farther to making a good argument here. the whole point I'm raising is that we can't adequately define the job, we don't know how to demonstrate whether it's getting done, and we don't seem to have a good idea of whether, just to pull a number out of thin air, tripling teacher salary would result in a small improvement, a large improvement, or no improvement.
Teachers are low-paid, that's certain. Teachers seem to be underpaid, but that is sentiment. maybe they're paid the right amount for the mediocre job they do, on the whole. Maybe they're wildly underpaid for the job they do!
Right now we're still arguing about how to define the job, and more importantly to this thread topic, how a union's effort might affect outcomes such that they aren't rent-seeking by demanding that the citizens fund an increase in union power to be exchanged for not just no tangible gain, but no metric for measuring gain.
It's been pointed out multiple times in this thread that there's a teacher shortage. Low pay is part of the reason for that.
Coming up with metrics for evaluating teachers that 1) actually measure teaching quality and 2) don't introduce obvious perverse incentives is impossible because of the sheer number of things that affect student outcomes. Besides which, I feel like demanding "improvement" in exchange for higher pay, when some teachers aren't even making a living wage, is spectacularly missing the point.
One of the fundamental requirements for a productive workforce is to pay people enough that they don't have to worry about money.
"It's impossible to tell if we're good at this, or if we'll ever get better, but give us more anyway" is not an inspiring argument to make. There are a couple of teacher or adjacent people in here - are there any success metrics you'd accept if your union rep came to you and said "a 20% raise is on the table, but only if you agree do this"?
And like, we're a fabulously productive workforce right now without being paid enough to stop worrying about money.
They already have metrics they are graded upon. I think the issue is your one or two bad incidents with a teacher coloring all the other teachers that enriched your kids life. It is a fallacy that teachers can't be fired for not being good at their job. Just like every other job it should require a good bit of evidence to prove it. Most teachers are good at their job, so maybe stop focusing on outliers?
If teachers were fired because parents thought they were bad teachers, there wouldnt be a single teacher in this country. On any given day my wife and every single one of her teacher peers are called a best teacher ever by one parent and the worst teacher ever that should be fired yesterday by another. This happens every single day they work. Just last week my wife was told by a parent that she should be fired because she wouldnt personally sit with a kid for 2 hours to help that one student with a test.
Parents and their feelings towards teachers should absolutely never have an impact on a teachers career. In my experience it is outrageously crazy wrong most of the time.
Also just love that you hear the same complaints about teachers here in NC (teacher unions are illegal) as you do in other states with teacher unions. A parent has a bad experience and thinks the teacher should be fired because it's bound to happen in a cohort of 120 kids per semester.
Why is performance the main requirement for increasing pay, when it had nothing to do with the reasons it stalled in the first place?
Because it looks better as an excuse to keep pay low than the true: parents prefer low taxes to good schools.
This isnt even really true. A local district just got done building a 2 or 3 hundred million dollar middle school, and then turned around and asked for another couple hundred million for the high school and the voters approved it. You kinda have to have good to great schools to get to this point, and a cultural understanding that taxes are not actually theft, but it's not unheard of.
My mom was a spectacular teacher according to many hundreds of people. She still has former students come up to her in town to thank her. She stayed after, she altered lessons to help make it more engaging for people who weren't served by the standard curriculum, she tutored, she took them outside when it was nice, she danced in the morning to cheer them up, she brought in outside lecturers and guests...
She was acceptable but needed to watch herself according to the metrics used by the administration, most of the time. Not enough teaching to the test.
Some teachers took about a week or two out of their schedule to just hand their kids practice tests and drill them for the upcoming standardized testing. They were much better at their jobs, weirdly.
Teaching is something for which it is not easy to establish consistent, simple, and widely scalable metrics that allow you to determine if someone is good or bad.
Hell, a teacher that by all most accounts is excellent can STILL be a nightmare for your kid in particular. I know folks who have depression and their not-trained-mental-health-professional teachers didn't catch on that depression was the cause for their not doing homework or engaging in class. That made those classes stressful and bad for them.
I had anxiety that made demanding but very effective teachers an absolute terror but made low key ones that didnt motivate some other kids into a welcome relief. It would be hard to quantify this sort of impact across a class.
And BESIDES all of that, people are due a living wage. They deserve to be compensated in a way that allows them to live, just because.
Why is performance the main requirement for increasing pay, when it had nothing to do with the reasons it stalled in the first place?
Because it looks better as an excuse to keep pay low than the true: parents prefer low taxes to good schools.
This isnt even really true. A local district just got done building a 2 or 3 hundred million dollar middle school, and then turned around and asked for another couple hundred million for the high school and the voters approved it. You kinda have to have good to great schools to get to this point, and a cultural understanding that taxes are not actually theft, but it's not unheard of.
Google "school board", "contractor" and "bribes." You get more than 6 million hits. Even when things don't get to the point of illegality, the chumminess between school boards, state and local superintendents, legislators, and contractors goes a long way to explain why there is always money for new buildings and never money for new salaries.
It’s simpler than that: people like schools but hate teachers.
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CambiataCommander ShepardThe likes of which even GAWD has never seenRegistered Userregular
"Why pay more money when we already don't like the product!" is a dumb question. You always - ALWAYS - get a better product when you pay your workers more (the same thing happens any time you raise worker happiness). Will there still be some bad workers, will there be people who take advantage? Of course, there always are. The thing is, when you make the job something that is desirable though compensation and benefits, you get more people applying and a higher quality of people applying, so you no longer have to accept whatever comes your way in terms of workers, you can actually restrict based on quality.
I still don't understand why this is even an argument. Every time I hear complaints about raising wages, I think about this guy and wish more bosses were like him. The fact that he's singularly unique (despite the obvious benefits to his business) is the entire reason we need unions unilaterally.
Peace to fashion police, I wear my heart
On my sleeve, let the runway start
by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research at the University of Chicago found similar but not identical results: 78 percent of adults said public school teachers earn too little (with 6 percent saying they earn too much and 15 percent saying their salaries are fine). The 78 percent figure was up from an AP-Stanford poll taken in 2010, which found that 57 percent of Americans thought teachers did not earn enough for their work
I mean, this is a fair question. "Teachers are underpaid" is right now an unproven assertion.
Only for the ignorant.
The plight of the American teacher is well known. Nationwide budget cuts, wage freezes, the ludicrous decision to tie school funding to student performance, teachers paying out of pocket for school classroom supplies, long hours and plenty of outside hours _required_ just to get the basic job done. This is all common knowledge, rendering your above statement for someone who has put three kids through school, fairly ludicrous.
Without touching on whether or not any of this is true, and to be fair it often is, taking a stab at what "getting the job done" means would go a lot farther to making a good argument here. the whole point I'm raising is that we can't adequately define the job, we don't know how to demonstrate whether it's getting done, and we don't seem to have a good idea of whether, just to pull a number out of thin air, tripling teacher salary would result in a small improvement, a large improvement, or no improvement.
Teachers are low-paid, that's certain. Teachers seem to be underpaid, but that is sentiment. maybe they're paid the right amount for the mediocre job they do, on the whole. Maybe they're wildly underpaid for the job they do!
Right now we're still arguing about how to define the job, and more importantly to this thread topic, how a union's effort might affect outcomes such that they aren't rent-seeking by demanding that the citizens fund an increase in union power to be exchanged for not just no tangible gain, but no metric for measuring gain.
It's been pointed out multiple times in this thread that there's a teacher shortage. Low pay is part of the reason for that.
Coming up with metrics for evaluating teachers that 1) actually measure teaching quality and 2) don't introduce obvious perverse incentives is impossible because of the sheer number of things that affect student outcomes. Besides which, I feel like demanding "improvement" in exchange for higher pay, when some teachers aren't even making a living wage, is spectacularly missing the point.
One of the fundamental requirements for a productive workforce is to pay people enough that they don't have to worry about money.
Low pay, high class size and city/state govts that have been actively pooping on and demonizing teachers for decades. The few who still want to become teachers quickly become burned out handling much bigger class loads than is wise and then dealing with parents and govt forces actively trying to undercut you. There are a lot easier ways to make that minimal amount of money than teaching thats for sure.
"Why pay more money when we already don't like the product!" is a dumb question. You always - ALWAYS - get a better product when you pay your workers more (the same thing happens any time you raise worker happiness). Will there still be some bad workers, will there be people who take advantage? Of course, there always are. The thing is, when you make the job something that is desirable though compensation and benefits, you get more people applying and a higher quality of people applying, so you no longer have to accept whatever comes your way in terms of workers, you can actually restrict based on quality.
I still don't understand why this is even an argument. Every time I hear complaints about raising wages, I think about this guy and wish more bosses were like him. The fact that he's singularly unique (despite the obvious benefits to his business) is the entire reason we need unions unilaterally.
We, as a nation, are in love with the punishment mindset. It's why we have a massive prison population, and it is why so many management/conservative solutions to social problems boil down to "The whippings will continue until morale improves." It feels satisfying to certain mindsets who fixate more on the need to punish the unworthy than the problem itself, empowers a lot of bullies in management, and leads to the decay of institutions. You'd think we'd have learned this watching the Soviets crumble for the same reasons.
We know what successful education systems look like. The schools are well funded; the class sizes are small; the teachers are well paid, well trained throughout their career, and have freedom to determine the details of their lesson plans. It also really, really helps when the overall society funds housing, meals, and medical care, since a lot of student behavioral issues and performance problems have more to do with the side effects of poverty than ability. Fixing those issues will require a government and society healthy enough to pay for and sustain better schools, and for that to happen will require fixing a hell of a lot more than just finding better K-12 teachers willing to work for less money.
What about funding the schools nationally somehow?
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TL DRNot at all confident in his reflexive opinions of thingsRegistered Userregular
Consider also that the way we fund public schools via local property taxes is fundamentally inequitable and racist, and contributes to the ongoing problems with the education system including the fact that the schools most in need of funding are the ones that can't get it.
Consider also that the way we fund public schools via local property taxes is fundamentally inequitable and racist, and contributes to the ongoing problems with the education system including the fact that the schools most in need of funding are the ones that can't get it.
Yes the whole way we do basic funding for schools on a local level is a big reason for the wildly unequal levels of funding/school performance. The schools in the poorer areas get less funding and therefore perform poorer and around and around. This really should be done on a state wise basis or federal basis.
by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research at the University of Chicago found similar but not identical results: 78 percent of adults said public school teachers earn too little (with 6 percent saying they earn too much and 15 percent saying their salaries are fine). The 78 percent figure was up from an AP-Stanford poll taken in 2010, which found that 57 percent of Americans thought teachers did not earn enough for their work
This is why the strikes are succeeding. Despite the whinging in the media or in this thread, most people seem to get it and teachers strikes can put an immense amount of pressure on management (in this case, the government).
Consider also that the way we fund public schools via local property taxes is fundamentally inequitable and racist, and contributes to the ongoing problems with the education system including the fact that the schools most in need of funding are the ones that can't get it.
Yes the whole way we do basic funding for schools on a local level is a big reason for the wildly unequal levels of funding/school performance. The schools in the poorer areas get less funding and therefore perform poorer and around and around. This really should be done on a state wise basis or federal basis.
State level would be ok, if states start to actually collect taxes.
mrondeau on
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TL DRNot at all confident in his reflexive opinions of thingsRegistered Userregular
Consider also that the way we fund public schools via local property taxes is fundamentally inequitable and racist, and contributes to the ongoing problems with the education system including the fact that the schools most in need of funding are the ones that can't get it.
Yes the whole way we do basic funding for schools on a local level is a big reason for the wildly unequal levels of funding/school performance. The schools in the poorer areas get less funding and therefore perform poorer and around and around. This really should be done on a state wise basis or federal basis.
State level would be ok, if States start to actually collect taxes.
Therein does lie the problem - it's hard enough to get people to fund education; imagine asking suburban parents to fund those schools, too.
Good school districts also drive housing prices up because people are desperately trying to buy into them and out of bad ones, which often just creates a pair of self-reinforcing spirals.
Consider also that the way we fund public schools via local property taxes is fundamentally inequitable and racist, and contributes to the ongoing problems with the education system including the fact that the schools most in need of funding are the ones that can't get it.
Yes the whole way we do basic funding for schools on a local level is a big reason for the wildly unequal levels of funding/school performance. The schools in the poorer areas get less funding and therefore perform poorer and around and around. This really should be done on a state wise basis or federal basis.
State level would be ok, if States start to actually collect taxes.
Yeah, the problem is that we can see with higher education that the same shit happens at the state level. No one wants to pay via taxes.
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The ancient problem in all political contexts is Quis custodiet ipsos custodes. Who watches the watchers. You let the teachers run wild you end up with problems. You put in place a mindless bureaucracy and you end up with problems. It ain't like this is easy or we wouldn't have people complaining about the issue for millennia. Paying teachers enough to attract good teachers and providing them with decent working conditions isn't going to solve all problems but it might get you near the top of the minmax curve.
― Marcus Aurelius
Path of Exile: themightypuck
You can't fix the bad ones when the pay and benefits won't attract replacements. All you'll do is overload classrooms and make ALL the teachers into bad ones.
My wife's first boss and school founder at her current charter was stricken with cancer in his early 30s and died a little over a year later.
His replacement, who was connected with people further up the food chain - who had never taught himself- inherited a school that was first in their network the first two years of it's existence and ran the school into the ground over a period of four years.
My wife is one of two teachers still remaining from those first years. Administrative staff has totally turned over as well. People resigned in disgust and some we're driven out or outright fired for speaking out against over what was going on.
My wife easily had grounds for a sexual discrimination suit against this well connected gentleman and only survived his attempts to push her out because she was considered a star in the organization both prior to and during his tenure and other higher ups went to bat for her.
She had no union to go to and any redress we may have sought we would have had to pay out of our own pockets to fight a very well funded entity.
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Yes, the abysmal state of funding for education in general is an issue with paying teachers well. But I think you (and others) are missing an important aspect to this. The public managers aren't the top of the administration. Legislatures are. We don't expect unions in the private sector to just give up because managers don't have money to allocate. We expect them to talk to someone who can allocate money. And if you look at who the other party actually is in teacher's strikes, it's often the state legislature to begin with. You can't just draw the line at administrators and say there's no more money to pay teachers.
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The plight of the American teacher is well known. Nationwide budget cuts, wage freezes, the ludicrous decision to tie school funding to student performance, teachers paying out of pocket for school classroom supplies, long hours and plenty of outside hours _required_ just to get the basic job done. This is all common knowledge, rendering your above statement for someone who has put three kids through school, fairly ludicrous.
I'm not really drawing the line at administrators. The overriding axiom is that the public won't pay more taxes, and if taxes are raised they vote the sitting boards of education/trustees out and replace them with those that won't raise taxes. Hence the adage "no politician ever lost by running on cutting taxes".
For example, we can look at what's going on in LA right now:[/quote]
In the public sector a lot of these issues have trade-offs and I think discounting the costs associated with different benefits doesn't lead to optimal decision making.
Without touching on whether or not any of this is true, and to be fair it often is, taking a stab at what "getting the job done" means would go a lot farther to making a good argument here. the whole point I'm raising is that we can't adequately define the job, we don't know how to demonstrate whether it's getting done, and we don't seem to have a good idea of whether, just to pull a number out of thin air, tripling teacher salary would result in a small improvement, a large improvement, or no improvement.
Teachers are low-paid, that's certain. Teachers seem to be underpaid, but that is sentiment. maybe they're paid the right amount for the mediocre job they do, on the whole. Maybe they're wildly underpaid for the job they do!
Right now we're still arguing about how to define the job, and more importantly to this thread topic, how a union's effort might affect outcomes such that they aren't rent-seeking by demanding that the citizens fund an increase in union power to be exchanged for not just no tangible gain, but no metric for measuring gain.
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It's also pretty difficult to have a dual-income household without the ability to park your children somewhere for the duration of a normal work day.
It's been pointed out multiple times in this thread that there's a teacher shortage. Low pay is part of the reason for that.
Coming up with metrics for evaluating teachers that 1) actually measure teaching quality and 2) don't introduce obvious perverse incentives is impossible because of the sheer number of things that affect student outcomes. Besides which, I feel like demanding "improvement" in exchange for higher pay, when some teachers aren't even making a living wage, is spectacularly missing the point.
One of the fundamental requirements for a productive workforce is to pay people enough that they don't have to worry about money.
It's awesome having people oscillate between idly wondering aloud and defending passionately the idea that you don't presently eat enough shit.
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"It's impossible to tell if we're good at this, or if we'll ever get better, but give us more anyway" is not an inspiring argument to make. There are a couple of teacher or adjacent people in here - are there any success metrics you'd accept if your union rep came to you and said "a 20% raise is on the table, but only if you agree do this"?
And like, we're a fabulously productive workforce right now without being paid enough to stop worrying about money.
Ideally, the school administrators would be able to look into teachers individually, and talk to their students, to determine which teachers are best able to educate their students. Increasing compensation would help current teachers dedicate time to their job without as much hardship, but mostly it would help improve teacher quality by raising the desirability of the position and attracting better quality applicants.
There you get into potential incentive problems for the administration, though. How do we ensure they're managing the school with quality education as a higher priority than hiring buddies or grift? I could see an argument for metrics on the school or district scale, though they should either specifically account for economic changes in the local population, or be very loose so that shifts outside of control of the school don't cause unnecessary changes in strategy.
People look at teacher to student ratio and assume oh its 23 students to a teacher but don't take into account how a school operates. My wife has minimum 30 kids to a class in her school with a 20 student to teacher ratio.
They already have metrics they are graded upon. I think the issue is your one or two bad incidents with a teacher coloring all the other teachers that enriched your kids life. It is a fallacy that teachers can't be fired for not being good at their job. Just like every other job it should require a good bit of evidence to prove it. Most teachers are good at their job, so maybe stop focusing on outliers?
Parents and their feelings towards teachers should absolutely never have an impact on a teachers career. In my experience it is outrageously crazy wrong most of the time.
Because it looks better as an excuse to keep pay low than the true: parents prefer low taxes to good schools.
I'm vastly uninformed, but looking at statements around, people act like parents resented teachers for not letting them have segreagate schools.
This isnt even really true. A local district just got done building a 2 or 3 hundred million dollar middle school, and then turned around and asked for another couple hundred million for the high school and the voters approved it. You kinda have to have good to great schools to get to this point, and a cultural understanding that taxes are not actually theft, but it's not unheard of.
She was acceptable but needed to watch herself according to the metrics used by the administration, most of the time. Not enough teaching to the test.
Some teachers took about a week or two out of their schedule to just hand their kids practice tests and drill them for the upcoming standardized testing. They were much better at their jobs, weirdly.
Teaching is something for which it is not easy to establish consistent, simple, and widely scalable metrics that allow you to determine if someone is good or bad.
Hell, a teacher that by all most accounts is excellent can STILL be a nightmare for your kid in particular. I know folks who have depression and their not-trained-mental-health-professional teachers didn't catch on that depression was the cause for their not doing homework or engaging in class. That made those classes stressful and bad for them.
I had anxiety that made demanding but very effective teachers an absolute terror but made low key ones that didnt motivate some other kids into a welcome relief. It would be hard to quantify this sort of impact across a class.
And BESIDES all of that, people are due a living wage. They deserve to be compensated in a way that allows them to live, just because.
The irony is those same parents will turn right around and pay for a charter or private school out of pocket at a much higher expense.
The real answer is somewhere else besides unions, a bad teacher, and taxes I think.
Google "school board", "contractor" and "bribes." You get more than 6 million hits. Even when things don't get to the point of illegality, the chumminess between school boards, state and local superintendents, legislators, and contractors goes a long way to explain why there is always money for new buildings and never money for new salaries.
I still don't understand why this is even an argument. Every time I hear complaints about raising wages, I think about this guy and wish more bosses were like him. The fact that he's singularly unique (despite the obvious benefits to his business) is the entire reason we need unions unilaterally.
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Teachers are well liked generally. It tends to be the loud taxation is theft people and monied interests who hate the idea of public education.
http://neatoday.org/2018/08/27/pdk-poll-2018/
66% of people believe teacher salaries are too low. 73% would support teachers if they went on strike for wages.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2018/06/01/new-polls-find-most-americans-agree-teachers-are-underpaid-and-many-would-pay-higher-taxes-to-fix-it/?utm_term=.2dc7e239e3cd
Low pay, high class size and city/state govts that have been actively pooping on and demonizing teachers for decades. The few who still want to become teachers quickly become burned out handling much bigger class loads than is wise and then dealing with parents and govt forces actively trying to undercut you. There are a lot easier ways to make that minimal amount of money than teaching thats for sure.
We, as a nation, are in love with the punishment mindset. It's why we have a massive prison population, and it is why so many management/conservative solutions to social problems boil down to "The whippings will continue until morale improves." It feels satisfying to certain mindsets who fixate more on the need to punish the unworthy than the problem itself, empowers a lot of bullies in management, and leads to the decay of institutions. You'd think we'd have learned this watching the Soviets crumble for the same reasons.
We know what successful education systems look like. The schools are well funded; the class sizes are small; the teachers are well paid, well trained throughout their career, and have freedom to determine the details of their lesson plans. It also really, really helps when the overall society funds housing, meals, and medical care, since a lot of student behavioral issues and performance problems have more to do with the side effects of poverty than ability. Fixing those issues will require a government and society healthy enough to pay for and sustain better schools, and for that to happen will require fixing a hell of a lot more than just finding better K-12 teachers willing to work for less money.
Yes the whole way we do basic funding for schools on a local level is a big reason for the wildly unequal levels of funding/school performance. The schools in the poorer areas get less funding and therefore perform poorer and around and around. This really should be done on a state wise basis or federal basis.
This is why the strikes are succeeding. Despite the whinging in the media or in this thread, most people seem to get it and teachers strikes can put an immense amount of pressure on management (in this case, the government).
State level would be ok, if states start to actually collect taxes.
Therein does lie the problem - it's hard enough to get people to fund education; imagine asking suburban parents to fund those schools, too.
Yeah, the problem is that we can see with higher education that the same shit happens at the state level. No one wants to pay via taxes.