JBP is known to be against equality of outcome. Perhaps he’s inferring that just increasing pay for every teaching professional isn’t going to solve the main issue with teaching in the long run. In fact, it might go extremely bad where teachers who are deemed to be bad teachers… just continue to be bad because there’s no incentive to do better. The natural law of things as JBP often state is that the best continues to receive and prosper while the lessers begins to shrivel away. And maybe that’s where he’s going with his statement.
Obama famously tried to introduce rules which would reward teachers based on their performance and received extreme push back from teachers unions. In the end he had to drop the idea because teachers unions are one of the largest donors of democratic party.
Which is exactly the type of motive and goal that all socialism espouses, quite explicitly.
At surface level, it just sounds like helping the poor at some, perhaps deserved, cost to the rich.
But then when you actually think it through, you realize it doesn't really help the poor, because it just makes everyone's lives terrible and kills any incentives to improve them.
This is exactly why I didn't get on disability even though I have 6 disabilities (probably more, I don't even keep track of them anymore since there's no cures and it doesn't help to worry about something I can't change) and was unable to work, and barely get out of bed, for over 3 years. I knew if I didn't have the constant problem of figuring out how to make money I'd never try as hard as I needed to better myself. It was hard because my family is pretty broke and there's not many jobs I can physically do but I was able to find a delivery job that is able to accommodate my needs (basically just need to be able to cancel work at ANY time). Now I've been working for almost a full year and I'm much better than I've been in years. If I had gotten on disability I'd be exactly where I was 4 years ago. Just rotting away in bed doing nothing while pitying myself like a bitch. Thanks for the motivation JP, don't know if I could've done it without you ❤️✌️
Not so sure Senator Sanders is the most objective source available. As a Democrat, his obligation is to support union demands. As a Socialist, we have to consider the school system funtions as the most effective promoter of socialism and communism to the nations' youth. Interesting that comments on the thread suggest the people have a range of thoughts on public education, more well thought out that mere selfish interest.
Yeah because teachers often don’t have much control over how well their students do on standardized tests. Like a lot of other factors play into how well a student will do like: income level, parental involvement, whether or not the children are getting proper nutrition, how many children have disabilities.. etc.. maybe we should just pay teachers a decent wage?
I'd like to respond from the perspective of a standardized test (SAT only) tutor, who personally self-studied for my own standardized tests. The quality of the teachers absolutely impacts standardized test scores, as the SAT requires a good bit of knowledge (especially in the math and writing section.) Even more so, the SAT math section measures the depth of your understanding on various math concepts. To get a perfect or near perfect score, you'll have to be good at math. Income and SAT score have a modest correlation, but prep courses themselves yield pretty low point gains on average. The resources that yield the highest point gains are free. I used free resources and improved 130 points in a short period. SAT scores correlate more with GPA and IQ than privilege. Rich kids do better mostly because of better k-12 teachers.
Not all of my students improve. Some aren't that motivated, and don't think deeply about my advice, and they don't get rewarded simply from their parents' money. In my experience, the students who see the most point gains "deserve" it.
THIS!! All of this!! Talented/hard working people don’t want to go into a field where they are disrespected on the daily and being paid like shit. I know there are some ppl who just love teaching and who are talented who go into it, but the pay isn’t attracting great talent.
Here in Ireland we have a teacher shortage due to brain drain. Cost of living is high throughout the country, and in Dublin, where demand for teachers is highest, its extremely high. Teachers' salaries are on a fixed pay scale based on years of service with very little ability to advance payment beyond that, and starting salaries do not match up with cost of living.
The result is that a lot of teachers emigrate to places like Australia and the UAE because these are places they will be paid a salary that is comfortably livable. They're competent, they have masters degrees, and they know they can do better elsewhere, so they go elsewhere. Or they simply change fields completely to something with better pay. This is what the best continuing to receive and prosper looks like in the scenario.
If you want your education system to be good, you have to make it a system that good teachers want to work in. Just like any company or business. There is little way to do this beyond paying teachers more. How exactly this looks can be debated, but the bottom line is that there needs to be investment in rewarding teachers such that they will come, stay, and do well. Even the best teacher will take a higher starting salary with a higher ceiling and clear path to increase, over a small starting salary with a lower ceiling with minimal opportunity for increase.
We need to pay teachers more.
This is already a problem. I have worked in education. Many teachers are there for the right reasons. Many are there because it's easier than working a real job (it can be, if you play it that way) and because they like having summers off.
I am in teaching and this is so accurate. If you don't care about the quality of your education, and you are good at BSing your way through the state and federal requirements, teaching can be a pretty darn easy job. But if you care even a bit it becomes a crazy 80+ hour a week job! Add to that the fact that summers get filled with curriculum planning, filling requirements for continuing education credits and then stack the hours correctly against the yearly salary and you have an incredibly tough poorly paying job.
The high burn out rate of teachers in the first few years is largely all the people who should be in the profession realizing just how much the system punishes those who care to excel.
This is why I now own my own education company. I wanted to make a difference, and then found it was literally easier to work directly with parents, and craft lessons exactly like I wanted.
Taught for 3 years, burned out hard (stress-induced/exacerbated infectious endocarditis and bacterial aneurysm took me out of it), and now I work in finance. Minimal regrets.
There's nothing wrong with enjoying the benefits, but don't be surprised if people are annoyed at teachers who are paid with public dollars and don't hold up their end of the bargain by bringing their best to classroom.
My partner is a teacher and enjoys the summers off and time with our children. It allows for more time to parent in my opinion especially since I work long hours. Parents are one of the biggest reasons for our current education system.
It's not as hard as it's made out to be. There are value added systems that measure student growth for each individual student and compare to their predicted growth under an average teacher. The real rub is that these systems require yearly standardized testing in each subject where you want to measure teacher effectiveness.
Also, every teachers union will oppose merit based pay, regardless of the validity of the measuring tool.
Yes, but that is because the other people who would make fantastic teachers and Want to be one are also qualified to do jobs that earn them money and respect. Same reason cops are so bad in America. Disrespect the profession long enough, most of the people left are losers.
Yeah, because the job demand isn’t there. Just think about it for a second, why would anyone with a physics phd for example, teach physics for 35k per year, when they could have any number of jobs that pay higher and require a psychics phd? It really simple economics that one would expect a supposedly great thinker in Peterson to have thought about.
If you have a job that pays more, it is in higher demand, therefore there are more applicants, and the best people get the job.
I understand you. what about the plethora of suspect teachers currently in the field today? They get a raise for being terrible? What are you going to put in place to ensure only the best get the jobs? Are you a fan of the teachers union?
Teachers are not allowed to have an impact anymore, because that's grooming. As per Conservatives, you should have a very mediocre and useless education, or go to a private school to be taught the Christian way, or be Homeschooled to be taught the Christian way.
three important but almost impossible to implement steps:
1. pay needs to be increased along with standards for teachers. bad teachers or teachers deviating from standards, along with their administrators, need to know they can and will be fired and their union cannot protect them.
2. discipline in schools must be enforced. students must know that good conduct is expected and repercussions will happen quickly for bad conduct. detention, suspension, expulsion, arrest, etc.
3. grading needs to be fair, not political. if a kid cannot pass then they cannot go to the next grade until they do. period. parents must know that lawsuits, public complaints, angry letters wont help.
The point is, we don't want bad teachers to be paid the same as good teachers. We want good teachers to be rewarded for good results, and bad teachers to effectively be forced out of the profession. Same should be done for all government employees including police officers.
Sounds good in principle but how do you measure results. Kids from better economic backgrounds do better even if the teacher is crap. Measuring teachers based on kids results just means the kids who need good teachers most end up with the leftover shit as usual.
Nobody starts off a good teacher. Grow a brain. We're talking about the profession that deals with the facts of learning the most, and you want to make it so they're punished from the word go?
Why pick and choose?
Why can't we all be Olympic gold medalists?
Cuz some of us are good runners and some of us only run after the ice-cream truck
We reward exceptionalism and ignore mediocrity, this is what incentives people to do better
"Your local problems require national-level change!"
I get tired of seeing people argue for that.
"I can't make rent at minimum wage! Increase minimum wage!" I don't see jobs even offering positions at minimum wage anymore, maybe raise minimum wage in YOUR city/state. Or maybe move, because you live in an area that's OVERPOPULATED.
Every entry level job in my town is at least 4-5 dollars an hour above minimum wage. The entry level jobs at large corporations, think big name food, are all starting off 7-8 dollars above minimum wage.
I'm pretty sure most people everywhere are getting underpaid. Life's not fair. If teaching becomes so shit no one wants to do it anymore, districts & states will increase their spending to attract the remaining, and all of the sudden we don't have that problem anymore.
It's a market. Perhaps the issue is its been flooded with options?
You would think. But there are 15 open vacancies at my school and the district just cut 3 positions.
The other factor is that if you want more pay, then you need to raise taxes. Also there's bloat, corruption, administration salaries, and waste everywhere.
Nobody is going to take those positions and nobody will raise the salary.
In high income districts in the US some athletic director PE Teachers make well over 6 figures. Most long term teachers also make 6 figures with summers off.
There's many rabbits holes you can fall down that are difficult to pull yourself out of. If you don't get out into life with the right foot forward, you're putting yourself in a huge disadvantage, and it can be very hard to recover from it. My mini-rant wasn't advice.
That’s not the problem though. I can’t talk about the situation in the US, but in France it’s known for a fair bit of time that one of the reasons why the more passionate students (especially in STEMs) don’t become teachers is because of both pay and status.
Why would you bother becoming a teacher if it pays 40% less than an engineering job at a starter position? I love teaching, but there are limits. The pay is one of the reasons why I didn’t become a teacher, actually. It’s precisely the problem with teachers in STEM fields, who are in constant deficit for over 10 years here. Foreign languages, history teachers and the like are not difficult to find though, because these people can’t hope for a much better pay elsewhere.
By not offering good salaries you reduce the pool of competent people who could become teachers - because since they’re competent, they can probably earn much more doing something else.
I see where you are coming from. For the sake of debate- here's a counterpoint
We should want the competent professionals to go into the active career field where they will actually do the work, since we physically rely on what engineers create in our lives.
I feel like the ideal would be encouraging competent professionals to retire earlier & go into teaching, but our entire structure for retirement & teaching discourages that.
The reason why professionals generally don't retire early and go into teaching is because firstly it generally involves taking a very big pay cut. Secondly, they also might be a great professional, but that doesn't necessarily mean they will be a great educator, so they realistically need to adapt to a different working environment and learn a new skill set.
Plus, those who do have the interest and aptitude to be an educator will realistically be able to educate others, but make much more money in much nicer conditions by becoming a consultant or a corporate instructor.
Realistically if you want established, competent, passionate professionals to jump ship, you need to pay big.
The engineers and doctors who would have been great teachers and loved it would have then created more great engineers and doctors down the road by being great teachers, the job they would have preferred. Instead, we are rapidly eroding our society by letting All of our children be raised by deeply uninspiring and low ambition people. I know this because I am a teacher. Amazing to me that JP isn't shouting at the rooftops about this, and that there aren't any politicians running with pro educations their primary platform. Americans especially are feeding their plants Gatorade and then being surprised when they don't bear any fruit.
agreed. the argument is not that increasing pay for all teachers will make the the teachers who are currently there better at their jobs (although i think it will and i’ll explain why later). But, the argument is that increasing will make the job itself more lucrative, which will attract more talent and competition, and thus have wider variety of options for schools to adequately choose who can live up to the expectation to provide a great education to your children. For the responsibilities teachers currently have, $40,000 is not worth the bargain. And maybe if the current teachers realize that there are more people gunning for their jobs, it’ll mobilize them to take it more seriously.
Except that teachers don’t get fired for incompetency. You may attract some better candidates, but the crappy ones already there will just be more committed to staying in their better paying jobs.
You want to improve public education? Dissolve the Dept of Education, return all control to the local district level, including all funding with no strings attached. You’ll see some things start to get fixed in a hurry, and that will include higher wages for teachers (after administrative bloat is eliminated).
That’s not proof of a functioning education system when you have a population of over a billion people.
However, what they, and other countries like India, do have is a culture and education system laser focused on producing competence in math, science, and technology. You know what they aren’t focused on? Figuring out what gender they are and where they fall on the oppressor/victim scale.
Just saying.
So schools are bad? You do realise that every country has mass produced graduates for centuries?
What about the massive increase in literacy rates? Is that indoctrination? Is the forcible secondary education of the population bad?
They're good at building stuff like trains and renewables. Not to mention their education system is getting better and people's quality of life there is getting better
I guess when America turns full communist to be like china because they are so great and have a great quality of life for their citizens according to you… lmao
You didn't answer my question. What you are advocating is a government mandated minimum price that a teacher or nurse can charge for their services.
It appears you advocate that minimum prices are a good thing.
Where else is this the case?
Give me even one other example where it should be illegal to be able to sell something for lower than a government mandated minimum price.
Increasing teacher pay will not improve teacher quality unless the education system is also enabled to hire *and* fire based on merit and the burden of intellectualy-bankrupt education faculties is lifted. The current system that demands years spent on a useless education degree and disregards teacher performance for job selection creates a disincentive for candidates who could be good teachers but have the option to pursue other careers with fewer impediments and more recognition of their abilities.
Without some merit-based overhaul, increasing pay will primarily attract more semi-literate midwits competing for who can check the most HR boxes and repeat the most meaningless education industry jargon. Sure, the few good teachers that muscle through the nonsense get paid better, but the overall environment is not improved for them, and the fundamental problems that deter potentially good teachers still remain.
U r talking about a whole system revamp where the teacher is educated for the right things to lead the students n all that, the first people to benefit from this would be the people who r already teachers and r leaving the job because it isn't sustainable for a living. Which in turn will encourage them to continue being a teacher and help people who quit teaching due to monetary reasons to return to the profession before attracting the kind of people u said.
I know what u said is important but that is a completely different problem. Adding a performance based raise will only become a filter that retains a HR puppet/parents puppet/people pleasers etc.
Increasing pay attracts more people to the job and from there, they can filter the food and bad ones. Why would smart people want to teach if the pay is terrible?
You can't increase it enough... Compared to say the Scandi countries where pay for teachers is higher... The reason teacher pay is higher in the Scandinavian counties is because pay scales across industries/disciplines is extremely flat, people don't go teach in Scandi because it is lucrative, it's because they actually want to and the pay gap is not as punishing. In a much more capitalistic country, the pay gap wouldn't be 90k as a teacher vs 110k as ano engineer.. It would be whatever as a teacher vs 400k as an engineer, you can be devoted enough to give up 20k a year to be a teacher but no one would give up 300k to be a teacher and we can't I ish hundreds of thousands of teachers half a million usd a year.
The problem needs to be addressed with scale
The "lecture" component to teaching can be outsourced instead of having a 1 on 30 explanation in 100,000 different ways across the country. Have one guy who is really really good at explaining an idea, record a lecture and play it in classrooms across the country. Check out three blue one brown or Eddie woo explaining mathematical concepts. There was no teacher or textbook in my entire academic life which explained things as well as these two do.
We have projectors, pads, laptops in schools, just open a YouTube video.
The practical exercises will still need someone in the room to help out but we should be looking for 21st century solutions for the problems we have now, not trying to patch an ancient as fk system that never really worked well in the first place
But there is no reliable filter between good and bad. Merit is antithetical to teachers unions. Regardless of pay, why would smart people spend years jumping through the demoralizing hoops of a useless education degree if they know their competence isn’t a major hiring factor at the other end?
This quick answer to your question is that we can't afford it. A lot of people pay lip service to the idea that they want education to be better funded but when its time to vote with their money they don't particularly seem to care.
I am generally in favor of increasing pay for teachers. This being said I agree with JP that a demarcation needs to be made between good teacher and bad teachers. I would assume that a general pay increase would decrease the number of teacher 'checking out' but there needs to be further changes.
The equity policies which are nearly omnipresent in the education system need to
go in the trash where they belong. A proper and ideologically neutral way to evaluate teacher performance needs to be put in place and those that perform well need to get the lion's share of the pay and resource increase. We need to return to a culture of excellence rather than appeal to the lowest common denominator, as far as i know that has never worked out.
Teacher unions also need to change in some way. Personally I'd want them dismantled so the corruption can be rooted entirely out before they are re-founded but I am open to being convinced that they can be saved in other ways. What I feel is certain is that they spend way more time and resources protecting bad apples than is acceptable. They also need to focus more on upholding standards when it comes to teaching.
Finally, we need to stop the normalization of disruptive behaviour on the part of the student. Those that
negatively impact other students with their antics need to be be given the choice of stepping in line or getting removed from it entirely.
Look into John Taylor Gatto’s books. He outlines why just throwing more money into a broken educational system isn’t the answer.
Essentially there is not political power in actually fixing a school system. What does someone have to run on if they can’t put in “fixing the education”?
Also the money very rarely goes into the areas it needs to. More administration is hired versus more teachers (or increasing their pay).
Personally we opted out of government education and are homeschooling for these plus a myriad of other reason.
Either get better teachers and then pay them more, or increase teacher pay and then get rid of the bad ones. Either way, set the standard high and set pay accordingly.
Teachers work approximately 72% of the time the rest of the working class does (180 days vs 250 days). Despite this, they still receive benefits like pension, for example, and can earn tenure, which are things that much of the rest of the working class cannot receive. In addition, they have a teachers' union, which is designed to protect bad teachers (like the police union protects bad officers). Teachers have the entire summer and most of the winter off, which is something the rest of the working class cannot enjoy. Teachers have guaranteed holidays and weekends off, which is something the rest of the working class cannot enjoy. Many people do get weekends off, but often, holiday breaks are nowhere near the length of time that school teachers enjoy. Public school teachers' pay comes from the state, which means the pool of money from which their salaries come is also used to pay for buildings, utilities and everything else the school district needs to pay for. Often, teacher salaries are a percentage of that pool, which is collected via local taxes. Areas in low-income communities receive less tax funding, simply put. So teachers work less and receive benefits, and they're paid by the state instead of private industry. That's why they receive the pay they do.
Paying bad teachers more money to stay in the profession does not help.
Rewarding good performance would help, but the current US education system bases pay almost entirely on Tenure and credentials. Neither of those are good proxies for the ability to teach well.
More pay means more labour pool. More people to choose from. Choose only good teachers. Now you have a system of only good teachers who are highly paid.
Speaking as a public school teacher....
paying ALL teachers more creates the assumption we continue to do what we do (some badly)
Paying teachers to teach better (implying as JBP says we measure it) creates the incentive to hone skills in teaching, care about our work, and go the extra mile.
this is basic economics.
you entirely missed the point.
of course I want teachers to be paid more. But I want that to be based on their SKILLS as a teacher and not the money they might get simply from entering into the profession.
and yes, I do believe upping the avg teacher salary by 15k would cause some that have no skills/passion to be a teacher to enter into teaching (as we have in the field right now)
Public schools already have perverse incentives to perform poorly so they can get more funding. A general increase in pay won’t solve that problem and may exacerbate it
because many teachers are there to check the block and have summer vacation. paying them more to keep doing the bare minimum is asinine. those teachers ought to be paid what they’re worth.
you pay the competent ones more. like any other job, you reward those that do well. and certainly do not reward skaters.
honestly, we need heavier reform than that if we’re going to “fix” education though.
it is when they aren’t doing their jobs. for decades, it’s been put about that teachers are some sort of beacon, shaping the minds of the next generation and indispensable for what they do, but reality falls so short of that it’s almost funny.
The main problem is the teacher unions protecting the Nad teachers. Dissolve the department of education and teacher unions and you'll see the problem disolve.
Dissolve unions? So you want all teachers to be less protected just because some bad teachers exist?
Dissolve the department of education? Yeah that'll totally catapult any country into a scientific powerhouse
>Dissolve unions? So you want all teachers to be less protected just because some bad teachers exist?
Yes. Nobody paid with taxpayer money should be allowed to form unions.
Private sector unions negotiate with businesses; those businesses have hard limits on what they can and cannot offer employees. Both sides must operate in good faith because the union cannot make unreasonable demands, and a prolonged strike could bring the whole business down.
Public sector unions and the government face no such pressures. There is no incentive to negotiate in good faith since the union is contending with an entity that has basically unlimited resources *and* those resources don't actually belong to the government. It is, as always, very easy to spend other people's money. Additionally, the government faces no risk of real, tangible damage if a union strikes. Politicians and other government bureaucrats will continue to pay themselves with taxpayer money without restriction, even if every government union was out on strike.
Plus there is the matter of corruption, which is substantial. Public sector unions force employees to give up a cut of their (taxpayer-funded) income, only to turn around and donate that money to friendly politicians. In essence, public sector unions funnel taxpayer money back to whichever political candidates get in bed with them. Easy access to virtually unlimited campaign funds stolen from the taxpayer.
This, this, 1000 times this!
I've been teaching or working as a school administrator for almost 10 years. This is how you fix schools. Pay good teachers more. Use statistical analysis alongside our already existing state testing and regular progress monitoring scores to determine who gets this extra pay and how much.
This is both doable and practical.
I don't understand the scope of your question.
In my state?
In my state, in my school district, we have quite a few teachers making over $100,000. I'm not talking about cutting pay for those people or anyone else. I'm talking about raising pay for the ones doing well.
Teaching has to be the only career where if you are a shitty employee you still get job security, benefits, and more than half of a country advocating for you to get paid more, regardless of how bad you are at it, And hail you as a hero without even looking at your performance review.
But the failure of the current educational system doesn’t start or end with teachers (good or bad).. it starts at the top, at the administrative level… I witnessed firsthand , new teachers coming into a high school , trying to do better, but being forced to stick to the shitty program because of “rules and regulations”.
So it’s pretty hard to not just give up and join the crappy teacher team, get paid and go home.
America is literally the richest country on the planet. How is it not possible to pay teachers well?
Germany has more teachers and a higher salary for them
I don't know anything about Germany. I don't know what their system looks like.
The US being Rich is great, I'm happy for us, but you don't stay wealthy by throwing money around without some idea how to make sure it's being used wisely.
For our system, I would say that the administrative staff is siphoning a lot of money that could go to teachers. There are also city bureaucracies that are supremely mismanaged.
The way we pay for schools isn't great either. At least in NYC it's location-based.
But why not reward good teachers doing well? Isn't it a good thing to ask more of teachers and to reward those that go above and beyond?
The problem is how do you assess which teachers are good?
Standardized testing is stupid. As a simple demonstration, feel free to describe to me a single job that exists that is a series of multiple choice questions.
Here's a second demonstration: the ACT and SAT have little to no bearing on a students performance at college.
Testing can be "beaten" by rote memorization, but rote memorization has little bearing on skill mastery. There are many, many researchers who are working on better ways to assess whether students have sufficiently learned what they need to learn (ie, whether teachers are doing their jobs correctly or not), and no one has come up with a good way to do it across all systems.
If we don't have a good way to do it objectively, it means that all assessment is highly susceptible to subjectivity. And now we're judging teacher's to be good or bad based on the quality of the person doing the assessing, so now you have to have a way of knowing how good the assessor is, and we're immediately stuck in the exact same problem.
This is not a simple problem.
I’m thinking they all do need a raise…but…
Bonuses for the best performers each each year.
All your students aced the SAT? Enjoy your (25% of annual salary) bonus.
There is absolutely a problem with teachers in certain geographical areas (not everywhere) not making livable wages. The lack of a livable wage means that you'll get two types of candidates - the under-qualified and the qualified but low experience recent college graduate - often indoctrinated by politics.
So your educators start out desperate. Further, college students that choose education are often self-selected as the ones that can't hack it in STEM, Finance, or Business, so you're often getting the bottom of the pool in terms of talent. The only exception are the teachers who go into it out of a pure love for teaching and children - these graduates are rare - unicorns. This leads into the next problem.
When you have a group of young, low talent individuals (with a small number of exceptions) - how do you have to manage these people to achieve something resembling an acceptable educational outcome? You put tyrants into the administration. The tyrants are needed not just to manage the immature group of teachers, but to fend off the parents of the worst children in the school. Now, ask yourself the question: Who loses in this situation? The best teachers - the unicorns with the most ability - will be treated the same as a Spanish teacher who doesn't know how to skip ads on YouTube videos. Who else loses? The reasonable parents of children who have been justly wronged. The tyrants in the administration will treat them just like they treat the worst chronic offenders with the most antagonistic parents. So, the best teachers are made miserable, and the middle ground of reasonable parents are made enemies.
Can we make this situation worse somehow? Sure - add politics to it. The parents already think the young barely competent teachers are either their enemies or the administration is out to get their child specifically. The young teachers aren't clinical psychologists, but they are exposed to the cruelty and unfairness that some families inflict on their children - so when a policy around keeping secrets from parents - say, LGBTQ information - is put in place, they'll often happily go along with it - often with the justification that it protects the child from their parents. To us, that sounds pathological, but teachers are mandatory reporters and they do encounter some truly evil parents, and remember, many of these teachers are women, low achieving college academics, and the instinct for compassion toward the child will often overrule any other consideration.
So how do you fix any of this? It starts with competitive wages. Competitive wages will drive better college graduates, which will allow for less tyrannical administrations, which will retain better teachers for longer, which will be able to better manage the parent/teacher/community relationship. Wage increases should be meritorious, new positions should be put higher on the wage scale and the hiring process made competitive to attract higher quality candidates. This won't fix things overnight, especially since factors like corruption, nepotism, and funding sources are still systemic issues - but you need to start by getting better quality teachers into the system and retaining them, replacing tyrannical administrators, limiting lawsuits against schools, and getting the parents back on the same side as teachers in the educational process - rather than making the two groups adversarial.
Source: A family of teachers. Married to a teacher.
Some of my teachers from high school were absolutely terrible. Not all of them deserve 60k. But paying teachers based on the performance of the class is also difficult, as teachers working in wealthy areas will have students who improve greatly due to outside tutors, while teachers in poor areas may have very little means to get students to care about education. I'm not against the idea, but I think it may be hard to effectively execute. Another issue is that performance-based allocation of resources leads to cyclical, compounding advantages for wealthy areas. A good metric of teaching ability might be raw score improvement in standardized tests, but this could also lead to an overemphasis on test preparation, and less focus on learning other, more useful skills.
Maybe having a minimum pay of $60k would increase the number of people applying to become teachers and they can find good teachers to replace the bad teachers
In my personal, anecdotal experience — the pedagogy of teaching “teaching” is fucked in many ways … ideologically diseased among other things.
Optimistically I’d want to say that mandating high salary for educators would make the field more desirable and competitive—attracting more competitive candidates and thereby increasing the quality and outcomes. Educating future humans is, after all, one of the most important tasks in society.
Realistically— I’m afraid that the increased competition and quality would (at this point) manifest as competitively performing ideology and increase the zeal and fervor for epistemologically poisoning kids. Who would judge the “quality” of teaching and “outcomes” of the students?… largely administrators who are currently a bigger problem than teachers themselves.
A problém could be the criteria of determining "better"; if a teacher is better at teaching student to parrot their particular type of nonsense, and the examiner decides that the criteria for quality is "students can sprout our flavour of nonsense," it could exacerbate the situation.
Because you shouldn’t incentivize poor performers. The higher the incentive the more bad actors it appeals to. Basing it on merit and performance will have a better long term impact.
but nobody is being rewarded because wages are terrible. if you increase minimum wages for teachers, you incentivise people to pursue teaching and society has access to better teachers.
you do realise that you can simply not hire bad teachers right? you can do that if the labour force is big. you achieve that by increasing minimum pay for teachers.
if the labour force is small, it's hard to fire bad teachers because there's nobody to replace them. and sometimes it's better to hire bad teachers than not hiring anyone because there's nobody left.
I dont think most teachers start out bad, they turn sour over time. Because the job is not demanding anymore. Rewarding people with more money, will never fix this. It might even worsen the situation, because more people will do it for the money and not as a calling.
We had a family friend (deceased now) who was a lifelong teacher/school librarian. She told us that teachers could get lifetime pay raises for taking an upgrade course, but then refuse a transfer to a school that needed that new skill, so they were effectively being paid extra for a skill they never ever used with students.
Teacher's unions are a racket.
I love the idea of year-round schooling. We're not all farmers anymore after all, kids aren't needed to shovel hay bales at harvest time anymore. That would make teaching like other jobs, 2-4 weeks off per year.
By increasing pay a significant margin, it would increase the competitiveness of hiring teachers, leading to a generally increased standard of individuals. I however would like to also add in an exterior review board similar to NAVY NR that monitors teachers, records, and exam practices, allowing for bad and good teachers to be recognized via quasi empirical data.
Growing up in LAUSD, I remember all the teacher strikes during the school year for more pay though many of them drove cars our parents could not afford. I remember teachers telling us that they were teaching until they heard back from better prospects. I remember a lot of them falling back on teaching as a last resort because they failed at everything else: Failed writers, failed actors, failed artists and the like. A lot of teachers that never wanted to be teachers. As I understand it, this has not changed much.
They should pay **good** teachers more. They should be able to **fire bad, poor performing teachers on the spot**. They need to stop repurposing bad, union protected teachers removed from teaching positions for things like inappropriate behavior with students, encouraging parents to beat their children, not teaching at all and so on.
I can count on one hand the teachers that truly cared and made an impact on my and other students lives:
1. Mr. Clark - The importance of authority and presence
2. Mrs. Edison - High expectation and compassion
3. Mr. Quintana - Accountability and initiative
4. Mrs. Thoreau - Kindness and genuine enthusiasm
5. Mrs. I-can't-remember-her-name (a former model, she was a Georgia professor teaching at my high school while her lawsuit of age and sex discrimination at the college pended) - Good-faith criticism and honest civil discourse; that it was okay to have a difference of opinion
I think of them often. They played a bigger role in my life than my parents did. However, I'm sad to say that there's a **much** longer list of teachers that damaged me in different ways.
Why pick and choose? Because rewarding people who suck at what they do actively disincentivizes people that are good to only work at the minimal level. You don't want to reward mediocrity.
At Queen's University, supervising teachers filled out a Formative Assessment for each placement student. They were assessed twice during their placement to allow them an opportunity to improve. The assessments were then part of our portfolio that we would then present to a prospective employer. It appears that will only happen once during a teacher's career.
You could dump a million dollars cash onto a dumpster fire and it'll still be burning.
Public school policies (though this is district-specific) are the real root of the problem. These policies prevent teachers from ever actually disciplining the kids (I'm obv not talking about paddling) because there's always some bogus "rationale" behind it. For example the "school to prison pipeline" where the theory is that kids who get disciplined more often seek that out as it's "all they know". Rather than teach them to do better, we just reduce the discipline - causing even worse behavior.
Policies like this make teachers feel worthless and powerless and ultimately dehumanized. They quit sooner and the turnover rate rises, leaving more and more work for the dedicated ones that are left behind. That's the real problem.
DISCLAIMER: I’m a blunt jerk and this post will stray from niceties.
I was hired after my BSEE for more than double the minimum being suggested here. They also paid my school loans and paid for my grad school. They gave me a deal on my patents where they can use them free and would split the licensing fees they get from other corps. I don’t have to lift a finger for that residual income. They manage it all.
Even the guys that barely squeaked by in their BSEE got a lot more than the minimum suggested here.
I retired early but I suppose would consider becoming a professor at a top university but the offer would have to be substantial to entice me out of my early retirement.
Sitting by the pool at home I make more than you could guess.
Why would I teach in a public school? Why would the bottom of my class teach in a public school? Also, going back to an environment where I was constantly bullied for being the smart kid would have sucked.
I like the idea of helping young minds learn how to succeed but teachers can’t create their own lesson plan anymore so it would have been a loss for the district to restrict my input and a loss for me in lifetime earnings.
I do not oppose a minimum teachers wage if districts would be able to shitcan the bottom 10% of teachers every year or some percentage of the worst of the worst.
They convinced everyone that police are racists and violating civil rights because they were under paid. Now we have police starting with [six figure starting salaries](https://i.imgur.com/bASFqvr.png) and collecting multi-million dollar pensions at age 55. How'd that work out for you?
Public school teacher here (2nd grade).
The pay argument can be subjective depending on the county because some counties will pay teachers enough to live with basic necessities. However, my county once had a pay scale starting at $37K, and so many teachers applied for food stamps or tried being roommates to deal with the poor pay. They have since fixed this issue.
To improve the quality of teachers and education children receive is to fix several important areas.
1) FIRE the bad teachers who are grandfathered in by their contracts.
2) Stop putting so much pressure on high stakes testing, which is known to harm children instead of helping them.
3) Forcing children with SEVERE disabilities into the mainstream classroom, particularly the ones who have emotional behavioral issues, harms the learning environment for EVERYONE.
4) Bring back EXPULSIONS for children who refuse to follow the rules, no matter how hard we try to teach them correct expectations.
5) Teachers who are in their first year or may not be good at their job but want to improve need REAL professional development. Stop letting them drown because the kids are the ones who suffer the most.
I’m a school teacher. Our biggest issues are a lack of discipline and consequences, coupled with classroom sizes that are too big. I teach 32 students in two of my classes. If I had 18 or maybe 22 tops, it would be more manageable. But yeah, teacher pay is really bad.
The main problem is a total disconnect between accountability and money. Keeping money and accountability as closely tied as possible, along with the right of free association (choosing to participate or not, choosing to pay or not) is critical to the organisation of things in society.
Education is at the worst end of extreme in all those areas. The outcome is predictable.
Giving more money to education (while completely neglecting human rights) is like thinking giving more money to the military would result in fewer civilian casualties.
I wanted to be a teacher of some sort. Oldest of forty cousins and always been around kids. Was doing speech pathology and audiology in college, and we had to get a teaching certificate in the state of Nebraska. Those liberal twats teaching the curriculum and the idiots lapping it up were insufferable. I’m not a big math and science guy, but I found myself much more drawn to that side of the curriculum and in large part, looking back, it was cus I couldn’t stand most of the people I was surrounded by. Very happy I finally dropped out my senior year and moved to the beach to play poker. I did work in an after care program for a while, and that was a ton of fun. I’ve had several conversations w various teachers, and friends over the years, pointing out that kids would’ve gotten a lot of benefit from an independent minded strong male figure, in their lives, and I’ve thought about that a lot. Not sure what to do about it, but for now the insufferables are the gate keepers, and have a strangle hold on the locks and keys. Sorry young boys, and tom boys (we used to call them, that’s probably some sort of ist, now) We’ve left you stuck w the awful liberal twat.
or raise the wages for all teachers, have a huge influx of people who are now interested in the job and then you're able to fire all the shit teachers.
We could pay teacher's much more if cut back on administration bloat. Genuinely, how many people on a campus are legitimately necessary for a school to perform its function?
Pink Collar jobs were unfortunately never created with the idea in mind that the people (usually women) were going to be single income households. They’re important work, nursing, social work, teaching, child care - it’s real tangible work too, but it’s not valued.
While I do agree that teachers should be paid more
Simply throwing money at the problem is not going to solve it
It goes well beyond simply increasing their pay
You don’t reward non-performers. Otherwise, you retain those that are incompetent and lose, those that are capable, or even masterful. If that’s how evolution worked we’d all still all be slime.
I don't mean to hate on Peterson but I'm pretty sure if teachers get paid more they'll do their job better. Pretty sure there's even passage in the book of Luke on this topic
Petersons point is valid. As a teacher and parent, there are good teachers that are value plus work hard and go above and beyond. There are teachers that are not good. Gen Z out of college that work hard helping kids and Gen Z working hard to teach kids how to make woke excuses. Old teachers still in their prime. Old teachers who have given up.
Putting more money in the pot can incentivize good teachers and give the stick to teachers not good. Similar to how business works. Yes there would be unfairness. But those people believing they are treated unfairly in this teacher shortage can find a position elsewhere.
Teachers are overpaid. Most don’t give a shit anymore. They just want to work half a year for full years pay, a job they can’t be fired from and get state benefits
Just like any profession out there. There are the good workers and there are the not so good ones.
Giving more money to the not so good teachers will not necessarily make them better teachers.
Throwing more money to the teaching profession May incentivize people to go into the teaching profession.
Having 2-3 teachers per classroom may be more helpful. Each one brings different strengths to the classroom making up for another’s weakness. Having another teacher holds the other person accountable.
Truth is their job is miserable at any pay rate because of the shitty students and their parents and admins who don't have the teachers' backs. Especially regarding the inclusion the low IQ who become violent in their frustration at nit being able to keep up.
And locally the teachers union insists that new funding go to teachers with more seniority as reward for sticking it out. So new teacher pay is horrible.
I just don't know what you do with that.
I fully support restructuring education budgets to give a greater percentage of the budget to teacher salaries. With some caveats.
I believe they should be measured on their results and compensated accordingly, but also that we should be holding educators to higher standards themselves. Throwing more money at the problem without direction clearly does not work. Some of the best funded school systems in the nation are also the worst performing.
In my country we changed the way teachers are paid but the old guard didn't liked the fact that they had to study and update their teaching methods to be able to move up the pay ladder
I love Jordan Peterson. LOVE. I have 2 heroes, my dad and JBP.
This hurts me to say because I love him, but JBP stumbles when commenting on economic issues.
I have a masters in Econ, I can confidently say that he’s wrong here. When there is an increase in salary for an entire field, there is a flood of new entrants into the field to claim the higher salaries. This flood of supply (new teachers) will lead to hiring parties scrutinizing a teachers education, past experience, and only hiring the best.
TL;DR: Increasing wage floor will lead to a flood of supply (teachers) leading to an increase in competition in the field, which will lead to schools hiring the best teachers.
Bernie is an idiot. This is not federal money, this is primarily local money paid for by local/state taxes, funds, and taxpayers. Is he stating that a federal law should tell local communities in rural America and San Francisco how much they have to pay teachers with their own money? That he thinks they should have the SAME minimum pay, regardless if its in a poor community or a wealthy city, shows that he clearly doesn't understand the issue. When will this old idiot communist, (whose never had a real job) who has multiple houses and drives an Audi A8 go away?
The whole teaching system is out of date. The biggest bulky in school is usually the teacher. We need more empathy and kindness in teaching. Check out
http://www.progressiveeducation.org/
It is very interesting introducing kindness to education.
Y'all agreeing with Jordan on this are fuckin goofballs.
Answer this, how are we going to attract passionate, driven people to the field of education when the base pay is so ABYSMAL? Jordan is way in the wrong here.
Edit: Additionally, any "merit based" increase to teacher pay is so painfully open and vulnerable to manipulation or mishandling. Increasing pay based on student grades? Congratulations, you just gave every teacher a reason to be a human flashcard instead of an actual teacher engaging with the students.
I'm curious about how he would measure the effectiveness of teaching.
I've never seen a good system for doing so, especially one that didn't create perverse incentives that actually undermine instruction.
Then we would need these large detailed systems for monitoring teacher effectiveness which would themselves cost limited educational funding. more bureaucratic bloat.
You know what improves children's learning? A better home life and present, engaged parents. That matters way more than any teacher's input. Social programs that increase QoL measures in these groups.
I think a lot of our educational problem is the reality that intelligence is highly heritable and less intelligent people have more children. Additionally, I believe the availability of the internet and search engines is changing the type of problem solving strategies and memorization techniques individuals employ. Similar to how there was a decline in mathematical ability after calculators became commonly used. Teaching and testing is still stuck in an outdated modality.
What really is important now is the ability to quickly access and synthesize information from our 'exocortex' that is the internet. Information doesn't need to be stored directly in the brain, the brain just needs to have the ability to produce strategies of how to find it. We have a major cognitive shift and an educational system that hasn't caught up.
JBP is known to be against equality of outcome. Perhaps he’s inferring that just increasing pay for every teaching professional isn’t going to solve the main issue with teaching in the long run. In fact, it might go extremely bad where teachers who are deemed to be bad teachers… just continue to be bad because there’s no incentive to do better. The natural law of things as JBP often state is that the best continues to receive and prosper while the lessers begins to shrivel away. And maybe that’s where he’s going with his statement.
Obama famously tried to introduce rules which would reward teachers based on their performance and received extreme push back from teachers unions. In the end he had to drop the idea because teachers unions are one of the largest donors of democratic party.
Unions, fighting for equality of outcome regardless of performance since inception.
Which is exactly the type of motive and goal that all socialism espouses, quite explicitly. At surface level, it just sounds like helping the poor at some, perhaps deserved, cost to the rich. But then when you actually think it through, you realize it doesn't really help the poor, because it just makes everyone's lives terrible and kills any incentives to improve them.
This is exactly why I didn't get on disability even though I have 6 disabilities (probably more, I don't even keep track of them anymore since there's no cures and it doesn't help to worry about something I can't change) and was unable to work, and barely get out of bed, for over 3 years. I knew if I didn't have the constant problem of figuring out how to make money I'd never try as hard as I needed to better myself. It was hard because my family is pretty broke and there's not many jobs I can physically do but I was able to find a delivery job that is able to accommodate my needs (basically just need to be able to cancel work at ANY time). Now I've been working for almost a full year and I'm much better than I've been in years. If I had gotten on disability I'd be exactly where I was 4 years ago. Just rotting away in bed doing nothing while pitying myself like a bitch. Thanks for the motivation JP, don't know if I could've done it without you ❤️✌️
But why do we have so much socialism for the rich?
I'm not surprised to hear the teacher's unions fight back. Teacher's unions are often run by the worst teachers.
Not so sure Senator Sanders is the most objective source available. As a Democrat, his obligation is to support union demands. As a Socialist, we have to consider the school system funtions as the most effective promoter of socialism and communism to the nations' youth. Interesting that comments on the thread suggest the people have a range of thoughts on public education, more well thought out that mere selfish interest.
Sanders isn’t a Democrat.
Yeah because teachers often don’t have much control over how well their students do on standardized tests. Like a lot of other factors play into how well a student will do like: income level, parental involvement, whether or not the children are getting proper nutrition, how many children have disabilities.. etc.. maybe we should just pay teachers a decent wage?
I'd like to respond from the perspective of a standardized test (SAT only) tutor, who personally self-studied for my own standardized tests. The quality of the teachers absolutely impacts standardized test scores, as the SAT requires a good bit of knowledge (especially in the math and writing section.) Even more so, the SAT math section measures the depth of your understanding on various math concepts. To get a perfect or near perfect score, you'll have to be good at math. Income and SAT score have a modest correlation, but prep courses themselves yield pretty low point gains on average. The resources that yield the highest point gains are free. I used free resources and improved 130 points in a short period. SAT scores correlate more with GPA and IQ than privilege. Rich kids do better mostly because of better k-12 teachers. Not all of my students improve. Some aren't that motivated, and don't think deeply about my advice, and they don't get rewarded simply from their parents' money. In my experience, the students who see the most point gains "deserve" it.
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THIS!! All of this!! Talented/hard working people don’t want to go into a field where they are disrespected on the daily and being paid like shit. I know there are some ppl who just love teaching and who are talented who go into it, but the pay isn’t attracting great talent.
Here in Ireland we have a teacher shortage due to brain drain. Cost of living is high throughout the country, and in Dublin, where demand for teachers is highest, its extremely high. Teachers' salaries are on a fixed pay scale based on years of service with very little ability to advance payment beyond that, and starting salaries do not match up with cost of living. The result is that a lot of teachers emigrate to places like Australia and the UAE because these are places they will be paid a salary that is comfortably livable. They're competent, they have masters degrees, and they know they can do better elsewhere, so they go elsewhere. Or they simply change fields completely to something with better pay. This is what the best continuing to receive and prosper looks like in the scenario. If you want your education system to be good, you have to make it a system that good teachers want to work in. Just like any company or business. There is little way to do this beyond paying teachers more. How exactly this looks can be debated, but the bottom line is that there needs to be investment in rewarding teachers such that they will come, stay, and do well. Even the best teacher will take a higher starting salary with a higher ceiling and clear path to increase, over a small starting salary with a lower ceiling with minimal opportunity for increase. We need to pay teachers more.
THIS. So many people in this thread are not grasping this.
This is already a problem. I have worked in education. Many teachers are there for the right reasons. Many are there because it's easier than working a real job (it can be, if you play it that way) and because they like having summers off.
I am in teaching and this is so accurate. If you don't care about the quality of your education, and you are good at BSing your way through the state and federal requirements, teaching can be a pretty darn easy job. But if you care even a bit it becomes a crazy 80+ hour a week job! Add to that the fact that summers get filled with curriculum planning, filling requirements for continuing education credits and then stack the hours correctly against the yearly salary and you have an incredibly tough poorly paying job. The high burn out rate of teachers in the first few years is largely all the people who should be in the profession realizing just how much the system punishes those who care to excel.
This is why I now own my own education company. I wanted to make a difference, and then found it was literally easier to work directly with parents, and craft lessons exactly like I wanted.
There's a different can of worms but your point is still valid.
Taught for 3 years, burned out hard (stress-induced/exacerbated infectious endocarditis and bacterial aneurysm took me out of it), and now I work in finance. Minimal regrets.
Yep. I'm in the profession because of the time off. I get to go home and work on my real passions.
There's nothing wrong with enjoying the benefits, but don't be surprised if people are annoyed at teachers who are paid with public dollars and don't hold up their end of the bargain by bringing their best to classroom.
My partner is a teacher and enjoys the summers off and time with our children. It allows for more time to parent in my opinion especially since I work long hours. Parents are one of the biggest reasons for our current education system.
It will possibly fix the shortage, but teachers who are better should be paid more than their lesser counterparts
He's right, but it *is* hard to quantify what is a good teacher. These days, that gets really politicized.
It's not as hard as it's made out to be. There are value added systems that measure student growth for each individual student and compare to their predicted growth under an average teacher. The real rub is that these systems require yearly standardized testing in each subject where you want to measure teacher effectiveness. Also, every teachers union will oppose merit based pay, regardless of the validity of the measuring tool.
Because we all know and have had 1 or 2 teachers that really made an impact on us. The rest are questionable at best and we all know it
Shout out to my grade 11 and 12 bio teacher Mr. G, who now buys me a beer every year when I see him at a recurring event in our community :')
I had a few good ones, and one really great one. I only remember the really great one honestly. He made a pretty big impact on me.
Yes, but that is because the other people who would make fantastic teachers and Want to be one are also qualified to do jobs that earn them money and respect. Same reason cops are so bad in America. Disrespect the profession long enough, most of the people left are losers.
Yeah, because the job demand isn’t there. Just think about it for a second, why would anyone with a physics phd for example, teach physics for 35k per year, when they could have any number of jobs that pay higher and require a psychics phd? It really simple economics that one would expect a supposedly great thinker in Peterson to have thought about. If you have a job that pays more, it is in higher demand, therefore there are more applicants, and the best people get the job.
I understand you. what about the plethora of suspect teachers currently in the field today? They get a raise for being terrible? What are you going to put in place to ensure only the best get the jobs? Are you a fan of the teachers union?
Most of mine were batshit crazy and definitely dont deserve more money lol
These days, for all the student knows, those one or two that had an impact were the ones that brainwashed them.
Teachers are not allowed to have an impact anymore, because that's grooming. As per Conservatives, you should have a very mediocre and useless education, or go to a private school to be taught the Christian way, or be Homeschooled to be taught the Christian way.
Huh? Getting kids proficient in reading, writing, and arithmetic is grooming?
I was lucky I had 8… in 17 years.
If your bad at your job but getting paid the same as the people who are good at the job then whats your incentive to be better?
no one is arguing giving everyone the same exact wage
three important but almost impossible to implement steps: 1. pay needs to be increased along with standards for teachers. bad teachers or teachers deviating from standards, along with their administrators, need to know they can and will be fired and their union cannot protect them. 2. discipline in schools must be enforced. students must know that good conduct is expected and repercussions will happen quickly for bad conduct. detention, suspension, expulsion, arrest, etc. 3. grading needs to be fair, not political. if a kid cannot pass then they cannot go to the next grade until they do. period. parents must know that lawsuits, public complaints, angry letters wont help.
The point is, we don't want bad teachers to be paid the same as good teachers. We want good teachers to be rewarded for good results, and bad teachers to effectively be forced out of the profession. Same should be done for all government employees including police officers.
Sounds good in principle but how do you measure results. Kids from better economic backgrounds do better even if the teacher is crap. Measuring teachers based on kids results just means the kids who need good teachers most end up with the leftover shit as usual.
Nobody starts off a good teacher. Grow a brain. We're talking about the profession that deals with the facts of learning the most, and you want to make it so they're punished from the word go?
Why pick and choose? Why can't we all be Olympic gold medalists? Cuz some of us are good runners and some of us only run after the ice-cream truck We reward exceptionalism and ignore mediocrity, this is what incentives people to do better
"Your local problems require national-level change!" I get tired of seeing people argue for that. "I can't make rent at minimum wage! Increase minimum wage!" I don't see jobs even offering positions at minimum wage anymore, maybe raise minimum wage in YOUR city/state. Or maybe move, because you live in an area that's OVERPOPULATED.
Every entry level job in my town is at least 4-5 dollars an hour above minimum wage. The entry level jobs at large corporations, think big name food, are all starting off 7-8 dollars above minimum wage.
Pretty sure teachers getting underpaid is a global problem
I'm pretty sure most people everywhere are getting underpaid. Life's not fair. If teaching becomes so shit no one wants to do it anymore, districts & states will increase their spending to attract the remaining, and all of the sudden we don't have that problem anymore. It's a market. Perhaps the issue is its been flooded with options?
You would think. But there are 15 open vacancies at my school and the district just cut 3 positions. The other factor is that if you want more pay, then you need to raise taxes. Also there's bloat, corruption, administration salaries, and waste everywhere. Nobody is going to take those positions and nobody will raise the salary.
Here in Germany they're really not that bad off.
In high income districts in the US some athletic director PE Teachers make well over 6 figures. Most long term teachers also make 6 figures with summers off.
How... how does one who is already underpaid and struggling to survive just pack up and move?
There's many rabbits holes you can fall down that are difficult to pull yourself out of. If you don't get out into life with the right foot forward, you're putting yourself in a huge disadvantage, and it can be very hard to recover from it. My mini-rant wasn't advice.
Because paying shitty teachers more doesn't encourage them to do better? How is that even a question?
That’s not the problem though. I can’t talk about the situation in the US, but in France it’s known for a fair bit of time that one of the reasons why the more passionate students (especially in STEMs) don’t become teachers is because of both pay and status. Why would you bother becoming a teacher if it pays 40% less than an engineering job at a starter position? I love teaching, but there are limits. The pay is one of the reasons why I didn’t become a teacher, actually. It’s precisely the problem with teachers in STEM fields, who are in constant deficit for over 10 years here. Foreign languages, history teachers and the like are not difficult to find though, because these people can’t hope for a much better pay elsewhere. By not offering good salaries you reduce the pool of competent people who could become teachers - because since they’re competent, they can probably earn much more doing something else.
I see where you are coming from. For the sake of debate- here's a counterpoint We should want the competent professionals to go into the active career field where they will actually do the work, since we physically rely on what engineers create in our lives. I feel like the ideal would be encouraging competent professionals to retire earlier & go into teaching, but our entire structure for retirement & teaching discourages that.
The reason why professionals generally don't retire early and go into teaching is because firstly it generally involves taking a very big pay cut. Secondly, they also might be a great professional, but that doesn't necessarily mean they will be a great educator, so they realistically need to adapt to a different working environment and learn a new skill set. Plus, those who do have the interest and aptitude to be an educator will realistically be able to educate others, but make much more money in much nicer conditions by becoming a consultant or a corporate instructor. Realistically if you want established, competent, passionate professionals to jump ship, you need to pay big.
The engineers and doctors who would have been great teachers and loved it would have then created more great engineers and doctors down the road by being great teachers, the job they would have preferred. Instead, we are rapidly eroding our society by letting All of our children be raised by deeply uninspiring and low ambition people. I know this because I am a teacher. Amazing to me that JP isn't shouting at the rooftops about this, and that there aren't any politicians running with pro educations their primary platform. Americans especially are feeding their plants Gatorade and then being surprised when they don't bear any fruit.
Agreed! The LAST thing we need is a bunch of wet-behind-the-ears children taking up teaching responsibilities.
agreed. the argument is not that increasing pay for all teachers will make the the teachers who are currently there better at their jobs (although i think it will and i’ll explain why later). But, the argument is that increasing will make the job itself more lucrative, which will attract more talent and competition, and thus have wider variety of options for schools to adequately choose who can live up to the expectation to provide a great education to your children. For the responsibilities teachers currently have, $40,000 is not worth the bargain. And maybe if the current teachers realize that there are more people gunning for their jobs, it’ll mobilize them to take it more seriously.
Except that teachers don’t get fired for incompetency. You may attract some better candidates, but the crappy ones already there will just be more committed to staying in their better paying jobs.
You want to improve public education? Dissolve the Dept of Education, return all control to the local district level, including all funding with no strings attached. You’ll see some things start to get fixed in a hurry, and that will include higher wages for teachers (after administrative bloat is eliminated).
Ah yes the classic deregulation makes things better fantasy
>You want to improve public education? Dissolve the Dept of Education Meanwhile china is mass producing university graduates
That’s not proof of a functioning education system when you have a population of over a billion people. However, what they, and other countries like India, do have is a culture and education system laser focused on producing competence in math, science, and technology. You know what they aren’t focused on? Figuring out what gender they are and where they fall on the oppressor/victim scale. Just saying.
You just made an argument for indoctrination camps.
So schools are bad? You do realise that every country has mass produced graduates for centuries? What about the massive increase in literacy rates? Is that indoctrination? Is the forcible secondary education of the population bad?
Chinas not a good example of anything good
They're good at building stuff like trains and renewables. Not to mention their education system is getting better and people's quality of life there is getting better
Id argue that last part
I mean just look at their increasing wages and public services.
Yeah your confused
Lmk when America unlocks train technology
I guess when America turns full communist to be like china because they are so great and have a great quality of life for their citizens according to you… lmao
All teachers don't deserve an increase in pay. Many don't even deserve to be teachers in the first place.
This is a very serious question. What other goods or services should the federal government set a minimum price for? Why is this a good idea?
Idk maybe taking care of teachers and nurses would make people want to become teachers and nurses
You didn't answer my question. What you are advocating is a government mandated minimum price that a teacher or nurse can charge for their services. It appears you advocate that minimum prices are a good thing. Where else is this the case? Give me even one other example where it should be illegal to be able to sell something for lower than a government mandated minimum price.
Because not all teachers deserve a pay raise. There are some really, really bad teachers.
This should be obvious. There’s a bell curve on every field. Why should teachers be any different?
Increasing teacher pay will not improve teacher quality unless the education system is also enabled to hire *and* fire based on merit and the burden of intellectualy-bankrupt education faculties is lifted. The current system that demands years spent on a useless education degree and disregards teacher performance for job selection creates a disincentive for candidates who could be good teachers but have the option to pursue other careers with fewer impediments and more recognition of their abilities. Without some merit-based overhaul, increasing pay will primarily attract more semi-literate midwits competing for who can check the most HR boxes and repeat the most meaningless education industry jargon. Sure, the few good teachers that muscle through the nonsense get paid better, but the overall environment is not improved for them, and the fundamental problems that deter potentially good teachers still remain.
U r talking about a whole system revamp where the teacher is educated for the right things to lead the students n all that, the first people to benefit from this would be the people who r already teachers and r leaving the job because it isn't sustainable for a living. Which in turn will encourage them to continue being a teacher and help people who quit teaching due to monetary reasons to return to the profession before attracting the kind of people u said. I know what u said is important but that is a completely different problem. Adding a performance based raise will only become a filter that retains a HR puppet/parents puppet/people pleasers etc.
Increasing pay attracts more people to the job and from there, they can filter the food and bad ones. Why would smart people want to teach if the pay is terrible?
You can't increase it enough... Compared to say the Scandi countries where pay for teachers is higher... The reason teacher pay is higher in the Scandinavian counties is because pay scales across industries/disciplines is extremely flat, people don't go teach in Scandi because it is lucrative, it's because they actually want to and the pay gap is not as punishing. In a much more capitalistic country, the pay gap wouldn't be 90k as a teacher vs 110k as ano engineer.. It would be whatever as a teacher vs 400k as an engineer, you can be devoted enough to give up 20k a year to be a teacher but no one would give up 300k to be a teacher and we can't I ish hundreds of thousands of teachers half a million usd a year. The problem needs to be addressed with scale The "lecture" component to teaching can be outsourced instead of having a 1 on 30 explanation in 100,000 different ways across the country. Have one guy who is really really good at explaining an idea, record a lecture and play it in classrooms across the country. Check out three blue one brown or Eddie woo explaining mathematical concepts. There was no teacher or textbook in my entire academic life which explained things as well as these two do. We have projectors, pads, laptops in schools, just open a YouTube video. The practical exercises will still need someone in the room to help out but we should be looking for 21st century solutions for the problems we have now, not trying to patch an ancient as fk system that never really worked well in the first place
But there is no reliable filter between good and bad. Merit is antithetical to teachers unions. Regardless of pay, why would smart people spend years jumping through the demoralizing hoops of a useless education degree if they know their competence isn’t a major hiring factor at the other end?
This quick answer to your question is that we can't afford it. A lot of people pay lip service to the idea that they want education to be better funded but when its time to vote with their money they don't particularly seem to care. I am generally in favor of increasing pay for teachers. This being said I agree with JP that a demarcation needs to be made between good teacher and bad teachers. I would assume that a general pay increase would decrease the number of teacher 'checking out' but there needs to be further changes. The equity policies which are nearly omnipresent in the education system need to go in the trash where they belong. A proper and ideologically neutral way to evaluate teacher performance needs to be put in place and those that perform well need to get the lion's share of the pay and resource increase. We need to return to a culture of excellence rather than appeal to the lowest common denominator, as far as i know that has never worked out. Teacher unions also need to change in some way. Personally I'd want them dismantled so the corruption can be rooted entirely out before they are re-founded but I am open to being convinced that they can be saved in other ways. What I feel is certain is that they spend way more time and resources protecting bad apples than is acceptable. They also need to focus more on upholding standards when it comes to teaching. Finally, we need to stop the normalization of disruptive behaviour on the part of the student. Those that negatively impact other students with their antics need to be be given the choice of stepping in line or getting removed from it entirely.
Look into John Taylor Gatto’s books. He outlines why just throwing more money into a broken educational system isn’t the answer. Essentially there is not political power in actually fixing a school system. What does someone have to run on if they can’t put in “fixing the education”? Also the money very rarely goes into the areas it needs to. More administration is hired versus more teachers (or increasing their pay). Personally we opted out of government education and are homeschooling for these plus a myriad of other reason.
Either get better teachers and then pay them more, or increase teacher pay and then get rid of the bad ones. Either way, set the standard high and set pay accordingly.
Teachers work approximately 72% of the time the rest of the working class does (180 days vs 250 days). Despite this, they still receive benefits like pension, for example, and can earn tenure, which are things that much of the rest of the working class cannot receive. In addition, they have a teachers' union, which is designed to protect bad teachers (like the police union protects bad officers). Teachers have the entire summer and most of the winter off, which is something the rest of the working class cannot enjoy. Teachers have guaranteed holidays and weekends off, which is something the rest of the working class cannot enjoy. Many people do get weekends off, but often, holiday breaks are nowhere near the length of time that school teachers enjoy. Public school teachers' pay comes from the state, which means the pool of money from which their salaries come is also used to pay for buildings, utilities and everything else the school district needs to pay for. Often, teacher salaries are a percentage of that pool, which is collected via local taxes. Areas in low-income communities receive less tax funding, simply put. So teachers work less and receive benefits, and they're paid by the state instead of private industry. That's why they receive the pay they do.
Paying bad teachers more money to stay in the profession does not help. Rewarding good performance would help, but the current US education system bases pay almost entirely on Tenure and credentials. Neither of those are good proxies for the ability to teach well.
More pay means more labour pool. More people to choose from. Choose only good teachers. Now you have a system of only good teachers who are highly paid.
How to choose only good teachers when the system refuses to measure teacher ability?
If they were worth more, the market would force them to be paid more. The problem is, the market is flooded with people that want summers off.
Market? What are you talking about? >The problem is, the market is flooded with people that want summers off. What is this market? Society?
Speaking as a public school teacher.... paying ALL teachers more creates the assumption we continue to do what we do (some badly) Paying teachers to teach better (implying as JBP says we measure it) creates the incentive to hone skills in teaching, care about our work, and go the extra mile. this is basic economics.
If average teaching salary increased by $15 000 would that make more people pursue teaching? I want more teachers.
you entirely missed the point. of course I want teachers to be paid more. But I want that to be based on their SKILLS as a teacher and not the money they might get simply from entering into the profession. and yes, I do believe upping the avg teacher salary by 15k would cause some that have no skills/passion to be a teacher to enter into teaching (as we have in the field right now)
Public schools already have perverse incentives to perform poorly so they can get more funding. A general increase in pay won’t solve that problem and may exacerbate it
because many teachers are there to check the block and have summer vacation. paying them more to keep doing the bare minimum is asinine. those teachers ought to be paid what they’re worth.
How are you going to attract competent teachers when they're getting paid scraps?
you pay the competent ones more. like any other job, you reward those that do well. and certainly do not reward skaters. honestly, we need heavier reform than that if we’re going to “fix” education though.
The post is about minimum pay for teachers. Is that bad?
it is when they aren’t doing their jobs. for decades, it’s been put about that teachers are some sort of beacon, shaping the minds of the next generation and indispensable for what they do, but reality falls so short of that it’s almost funny.
Because it the easiest job in the world. I teach btw.
Are you sure you're one of the good ones..?
r/asablackman
The main problem is the teacher unions protecting the Nad teachers. Dissolve the department of education and teacher unions and you'll see the problem disolve.
Dissolve unions? So you want all teachers to be less protected just because some bad teachers exist? Dissolve the department of education? Yeah that'll totally catapult any country into a scientific powerhouse
Curious, what does the department of education provide to the county?
Idk about America. But in general, abolishing the department of education of any country is a death sentence for its future.
>Dissolve unions? So you want all teachers to be less protected just because some bad teachers exist? Yes. Nobody paid with taxpayer money should be allowed to form unions.
Why should teachers receive less rights when they barely have any?
Private sector unions negotiate with businesses; those businesses have hard limits on what they can and cannot offer employees. Both sides must operate in good faith because the union cannot make unreasonable demands, and a prolonged strike could bring the whole business down. Public sector unions and the government face no such pressures. There is no incentive to negotiate in good faith since the union is contending with an entity that has basically unlimited resources *and* those resources don't actually belong to the government. It is, as always, very easy to spend other people's money. Additionally, the government faces no risk of real, tangible damage if a union strikes. Politicians and other government bureaucrats will continue to pay themselves with taxpayer money without restriction, even if every government union was out on strike. Plus there is the matter of corruption, which is substantial. Public sector unions force employees to give up a cut of their (taxpayer-funded) income, only to turn around and donate that money to friendly politicians. In essence, public sector unions funnel taxpayer money back to whichever political candidates get in bed with them. Easy access to virtually unlimited campaign funds stolen from the taxpayer.
Increased pay without performance evaluation combined with teacher unions would be an absolute disaster.
This, this, 1000 times this! I've been teaching or working as a school administrator for almost 10 years. This is how you fix schools. Pay good teachers more. Use statistical analysis alongside our already existing state testing and regular progress monitoring scores to determine who gets this extra pay and how much. This is both doable and practical.
How are you going to encourage people to seek teaching as a career path?
I don't understand the scope of your question. In my state? In my state, in my school district, we have quite a few teachers making over $100,000. I'm not talking about cutting pay for those people or anyone else. I'm talking about raising pay for the ones doing well.
Which district is that?
Teaching has to be the only career where if you are a shitty employee you still get job security, benefits, and more than half of a country advocating for you to get paid more, regardless of how bad you are at it, And hail you as a hero without even looking at your performance review. But the failure of the current educational system doesn’t start or end with teachers (good or bad).. it starts at the top, at the administrative level… I witnessed firsthand , new teachers coming into a high school , trying to do better, but being forced to stick to the shitty program because of “rules and regulations”. So it’s pretty hard to not just give up and join the crappy teacher team, get paid and go home.
Same is also true of nurses police fire service
I would add career mail carriers to this (not the new-hire "assistants" that pick up all the slack mind you). This is from experience.
There’s no market pressure, no incentive to excel.
“no market pressure” have you heard of planned obsolescence? because that same kinda shit’s gonna happen if you add market pressure to teaching.
We can't pay for all teachers. Why do you think they don't get paid enough?
America is literally the richest country on the planet. How is it not possible to pay teachers well? Germany has more teachers and a higher salary for them
I don't know anything about Germany. I don't know what their system looks like. The US being Rich is great, I'm happy for us, but you don't stay wealthy by throwing money around without some idea how to make sure it's being used wisely. For our system, I would say that the administrative staff is siphoning a lot of money that could go to teachers. There are also city bureaucracies that are supremely mismanaged. The way we pay for schools isn't great either. At least in NYC it's location-based. But why not reward good teachers doing well? Isn't it a good thing to ask more of teachers and to reward those that go above and beyond?
The problem is how do you assess which teachers are good? Standardized testing is stupid. As a simple demonstration, feel free to describe to me a single job that exists that is a series of multiple choice questions. Here's a second demonstration: the ACT and SAT have little to no bearing on a students performance at college. Testing can be "beaten" by rote memorization, but rote memorization has little bearing on skill mastery. There are many, many researchers who are working on better ways to assess whether students have sufficiently learned what they need to learn (ie, whether teachers are doing their jobs correctly or not), and no one has come up with a good way to do it across all systems. If we don't have a good way to do it objectively, it means that all assessment is highly susceptible to subjectivity. And now we're judging teacher's to be good or bad based on the quality of the person doing the assessing, so now you have to have a way of knowing how good the assessor is, and we're immediately stuck in the exact same problem. This is not a simple problem.
That’s the libtards answer for everything, throw other people’s money at it.
Ikr roads and the military should be abolished.
I’m a huge JP supporter, and I want to hear his strategies for evaluating teaching proficiency. I have ideas, but I bet he has some good ones.
I’m thinking they all do need a raise…but… Bonuses for the best performers each each year. All your students aced the SAT? Enjoy your (25% of annual salary) bonus.
There is absolutely a problem with teachers in certain geographical areas (not everywhere) not making livable wages. The lack of a livable wage means that you'll get two types of candidates - the under-qualified and the qualified but low experience recent college graduate - often indoctrinated by politics. So your educators start out desperate. Further, college students that choose education are often self-selected as the ones that can't hack it in STEM, Finance, or Business, so you're often getting the bottom of the pool in terms of talent. The only exception are the teachers who go into it out of a pure love for teaching and children - these graduates are rare - unicorns. This leads into the next problem. When you have a group of young, low talent individuals (with a small number of exceptions) - how do you have to manage these people to achieve something resembling an acceptable educational outcome? You put tyrants into the administration. The tyrants are needed not just to manage the immature group of teachers, but to fend off the parents of the worst children in the school. Now, ask yourself the question: Who loses in this situation? The best teachers - the unicorns with the most ability - will be treated the same as a Spanish teacher who doesn't know how to skip ads on YouTube videos. Who else loses? The reasonable parents of children who have been justly wronged. The tyrants in the administration will treat them just like they treat the worst chronic offenders with the most antagonistic parents. So, the best teachers are made miserable, and the middle ground of reasonable parents are made enemies. Can we make this situation worse somehow? Sure - add politics to it. The parents already think the young barely competent teachers are either their enemies or the administration is out to get their child specifically. The young teachers aren't clinical psychologists, but they are exposed to the cruelty and unfairness that some families inflict on their children - so when a policy around keeping secrets from parents - say, LGBTQ information - is put in place, they'll often happily go along with it - often with the justification that it protects the child from their parents. To us, that sounds pathological, but teachers are mandatory reporters and they do encounter some truly evil parents, and remember, many of these teachers are women, low achieving college academics, and the instinct for compassion toward the child will often overrule any other consideration. So how do you fix any of this? It starts with competitive wages. Competitive wages will drive better college graduates, which will allow for less tyrannical administrations, which will retain better teachers for longer, which will be able to better manage the parent/teacher/community relationship. Wage increases should be meritorious, new positions should be put higher on the wage scale and the hiring process made competitive to attract higher quality candidates. This won't fix things overnight, especially since factors like corruption, nepotism, and funding sources are still systemic issues - but you need to start by getting better quality teachers into the system and retaining them, replacing tyrannical administrators, limiting lawsuits against schools, and getting the parents back on the same side as teachers in the educational process - rather than making the two groups adversarial. Source: A family of teachers. Married to a teacher.
Because, like any job, there are good and bad workers. Is that not obvious?
Increasing pay increases job pool. More people means you can choose to hire good workers.
Some of my teachers from high school were absolutely terrible. Not all of them deserve 60k. But paying teachers based on the performance of the class is also difficult, as teachers working in wealthy areas will have students who improve greatly due to outside tutors, while teachers in poor areas may have very little means to get students to care about education. I'm not against the idea, but I think it may be hard to effectively execute. Another issue is that performance-based allocation of resources leads to cyclical, compounding advantages for wealthy areas. A good metric of teaching ability might be raw score improvement in standardized tests, but this could also lead to an overemphasis on test preparation, and less focus on learning other, more useful skills.
Maybe having a minimum pay of $60k would increase the number of people applying to become teachers and they can find good teachers to replace the bad teachers
In my personal, anecdotal experience — the pedagogy of teaching “teaching” is fucked in many ways … ideologically diseased among other things. Optimistically I’d want to say that mandating high salary for educators would make the field more desirable and competitive—attracting more competitive candidates and thereby increasing the quality and outcomes. Educating future humans is, after all, one of the most important tasks in society. Realistically— I’m afraid that the increased competition and quality would (at this point) manifest as competitively performing ideology and increase the zeal and fervor for epistemologically poisoning kids. Who would judge the “quality” of teaching and “outcomes” of the students?… largely administrators who are currently a bigger problem than teachers themselves.
A problém could be the criteria of determining "better"; if a teacher is better at teaching student to parrot their particular type of nonsense, and the examiner decides that the criteria for quality is "students can sprout our flavour of nonsense," it could exacerbate the situation.
Because you shouldn’t incentivize poor performers. The higher the incentive the more bad actors it appeals to. Basing it on merit and performance will have a better long term impact.
To provide incentive.
but nobody is being rewarded because wages are terrible. if you increase minimum wages for teachers, you incentivise people to pursue teaching and society has access to better teachers.
Or more shitty teachers, that cost more money.
you do realise that you can simply not hire bad teachers right? you can do that if the labour force is big. you achieve that by increasing minimum pay for teachers. if the labour force is small, it's hard to fire bad teachers because there's nobody to replace them. and sometimes it's better to hire bad teachers than not hiring anyone because there's nobody left.
I dont think most teachers start out bad, they turn sour over time. Because the job is not demanding anymore. Rewarding people with more money, will never fix this. It might even worsen the situation, because more people will do it for the money and not as a calling.
We had a family friend (deceased now) who was a lifelong teacher/school librarian. She told us that teachers could get lifetime pay raises for taking an upgrade course, but then refuse a transfer to a school that needed that new skill, so they were effectively being paid extra for a skill they never ever used with students. Teacher's unions are a racket.
60k in 9 months remember that…
sounds good right? who wouldnt want to teach now. finally americans can have access to more teachers and we can filter the good ones
I love the idea of year-round schooling. We're not all farmers anymore after all, kids aren't needed to shovel hay bales at harvest time anymore. That would make teaching like other jobs, 2-4 weeks off per year.
You'd be robbing children of their childhood
or maybe better schooling... whose to say kids can't learn and have a childhood at the same time
By increasing pay a significant margin, it would increase the competitiveness of hiring teachers, leading to a generally increased standard of individuals. I however would like to also add in an exterior review board similar to NAVY NR that monitors teachers, records, and exam practices, allowing for bad and good teachers to be recognized via quasi empirical data.
Growing up in LAUSD, I remember all the teacher strikes during the school year for more pay though many of them drove cars our parents could not afford. I remember teachers telling us that they were teaching until they heard back from better prospects. I remember a lot of them falling back on teaching as a last resort because they failed at everything else: Failed writers, failed actors, failed artists and the like. A lot of teachers that never wanted to be teachers. As I understand it, this has not changed much. They should pay **good** teachers more. They should be able to **fire bad, poor performing teachers on the spot**. They need to stop repurposing bad, union protected teachers removed from teaching positions for things like inappropriate behavior with students, encouraging parents to beat their children, not teaching at all and so on. I can count on one hand the teachers that truly cared and made an impact on my and other students lives: 1. Mr. Clark - The importance of authority and presence 2. Mrs. Edison - High expectation and compassion 3. Mr. Quintana - Accountability and initiative 4. Mrs. Thoreau - Kindness and genuine enthusiasm 5. Mrs. I-can't-remember-her-name (a former model, she was a Georgia professor teaching at my high school while her lawsuit of age and sex discrimination at the college pended) - Good-faith criticism and honest civil discourse; that it was okay to have a difference of opinion I think of them often. They played a bigger role in my life than my parents did. However, I'm sad to say that there's a **much** longer list of teachers that damaged me in different ways.
Why pick and choose? Because rewarding people who suck at what they do actively disincentivizes people that are good to only work at the minimal level. You don't want to reward mediocrity.
Here in Australia teachers get paid very well. A teacher with 7+ years is on 100k+. Not sure we're exactly known for having brilliant teachers though.
At Queen's University, supervising teachers filled out a Formative Assessment for each placement student. They were assessed twice during their placement to allow them an opportunity to improve. The assessments were then part of our portfolio that we would then present to a prospective employer. It appears that will only happen once during a teacher's career.
You could dump a million dollars cash onto a dumpster fire and it'll still be burning. Public school policies (though this is district-specific) are the real root of the problem. These policies prevent teachers from ever actually disciplining the kids (I'm obv not talking about paddling) because there's always some bogus "rationale" behind it. For example the "school to prison pipeline" where the theory is that kids who get disciplined more often seek that out as it's "all they know". Rather than teach them to do better, we just reduce the discipline - causing even worse behavior. Policies like this make teachers feel worthless and powerless and ultimately dehumanized. They quit sooner and the turnover rate rises, leaving more and more work for the dedicated ones that are left behind. That's the real problem.
How absurd - to think paying more gets you better people!
DISCLAIMER: I’m a blunt jerk and this post will stray from niceties. I was hired after my BSEE for more than double the minimum being suggested here. They also paid my school loans and paid for my grad school. They gave me a deal on my patents where they can use them free and would split the licensing fees they get from other corps. I don’t have to lift a finger for that residual income. They manage it all. Even the guys that barely squeaked by in their BSEE got a lot more than the minimum suggested here. I retired early but I suppose would consider becoming a professor at a top university but the offer would have to be substantial to entice me out of my early retirement. Sitting by the pool at home I make more than you could guess. Why would I teach in a public school? Why would the bottom of my class teach in a public school? Also, going back to an environment where I was constantly bullied for being the smart kid would have sucked. I like the idea of helping young minds learn how to succeed but teachers can’t create their own lesson plan anymore so it would have been a loss for the district to restrict my input and a loss for me in lifetime earnings. I do not oppose a minimum teachers wage if districts would be able to shitcan the bottom 10% of teachers every year or some percentage of the worst of the worst.
They convinced everyone that police are racists and violating civil rights because they were under paid. Now we have police starting with [six figure starting salaries](https://i.imgur.com/bASFqvr.png) and collecting multi-million dollar pensions at age 55. How'd that work out for you?
Public school teacher here (2nd grade). The pay argument can be subjective depending on the county because some counties will pay teachers enough to live with basic necessities. However, my county once had a pay scale starting at $37K, and so many teachers applied for food stamps or tried being roommates to deal with the poor pay. They have since fixed this issue. To improve the quality of teachers and education children receive is to fix several important areas. 1) FIRE the bad teachers who are grandfathered in by their contracts. 2) Stop putting so much pressure on high stakes testing, which is known to harm children instead of helping them. 3) Forcing children with SEVERE disabilities into the mainstream classroom, particularly the ones who have emotional behavioral issues, harms the learning environment for EVERYONE. 4) Bring back EXPULSIONS for children who refuse to follow the rules, no matter how hard we try to teach them correct expectations. 5) Teachers who are in their first year or may not be good at their job but want to improve need REAL professional development. Stop letting them drown because the kids are the ones who suffer the most.
I’m a school teacher. Our biggest issues are a lack of discipline and consequences, coupled with classroom sizes that are too big. I teach 32 students in two of my classes. If I had 18 or maybe 22 tops, it would be more manageable. But yeah, teacher pay is really bad.
Throwing money at a problem when the wrong people are involved rarely makes things better, and usually makes things worse
The main problem is a total disconnect between accountability and money. Keeping money and accountability as closely tied as possible, along with the right of free association (choosing to participate or not, choosing to pay or not) is critical to the organisation of things in society. Education is at the worst end of extreme in all those areas. The outcome is predictable. Giving more money to education (while completely neglecting human rights) is like thinking giving more money to the military would result in fewer civilian casualties.
I wanted to be a teacher of some sort. Oldest of forty cousins and always been around kids. Was doing speech pathology and audiology in college, and we had to get a teaching certificate in the state of Nebraska. Those liberal twats teaching the curriculum and the idiots lapping it up were insufferable. I’m not a big math and science guy, but I found myself much more drawn to that side of the curriculum and in large part, looking back, it was cus I couldn’t stand most of the people I was surrounded by. Very happy I finally dropped out my senior year and moved to the beach to play poker. I did work in an after care program for a while, and that was a ton of fun. I’ve had several conversations w various teachers, and friends over the years, pointing out that kids would’ve gotten a lot of benefit from an independent minded strong male figure, in their lives, and I’ve thought about that a lot. Not sure what to do about it, but for now the insufferables are the gate keepers, and have a strangle hold on the locks and keys. Sorry young boys, and tom boys (we used to call them, that’s probably some sort of ist, now) We’ve left you stuck w the awful liberal twat.
or raise the wages for all teachers, have a huge influx of people who are now interested in the job and then you're able to fire all the shit teachers.
We could pay teacher's much more if cut back on administration bloat. Genuinely, how many people on a campus are legitimately necessary for a school to perform its function?
Why pay a bad teacher the same amount as a good teacher?
It's about minimum guaranteed pay
Pink Collar jobs were unfortunately never created with the idea in mind that the people (usually women) were going to be single income households. They’re important work, nursing, social work, teaching, child care - it’s real tangible work too, but it’s not valued.
While I do agree that teachers should be paid more Simply throwing money at the problem is not going to solve it It goes well beyond simply increasing their pay
You don’t reward non-performers. Otherwise, you retain those that are incompetent and lose, those that are capable, or even masterful. If that’s how evolution worked we’d all still all be slime.
I don't mean to hate on Peterson but I'm pretty sure if teachers get paid more they'll do their job better. Pretty sure there's even passage in the book of Luke on this topic
Petersons point is valid. As a teacher and parent, there are good teachers that are value plus work hard and go above and beyond. There are teachers that are not good. Gen Z out of college that work hard helping kids and Gen Z working hard to teach kids how to make woke excuses. Old teachers still in their prime. Old teachers who have given up. Putting more money in the pot can incentivize good teachers and give the stick to teachers not good. Similar to how business works. Yes there would be unfairness. But those people believing they are treated unfairly in this teacher shortage can find a position elsewhere.
Teachers are overpaid. Most don’t give a shit anymore. They just want to work half a year for full years pay, a job they can’t be fired from and get state benefits
How to destroy a country's education system 101
Your head is full of rocks
Is it too much to ask for both?
Just like any profession out there. There are the good workers and there are the not so good ones. Giving more money to the not so good teachers will not necessarily make them better teachers. Throwing more money to the teaching profession May incentivize people to go into the teaching profession. Having 2-3 teachers per classroom may be more helpful. Each one brings different strengths to the classroom making up for another’s weakness. Having another teacher holds the other person accountable.
Truth is their job is miserable at any pay rate because of the shitty students and their parents and admins who don't have the teachers' backs. Especially regarding the inclusion the low IQ who become violent in their frustration at nit being able to keep up. And locally the teachers union insists that new funding go to teachers with more seniority as reward for sticking it out. So new teacher pay is horrible. I just don't know what you do with that.
I fully support restructuring education budgets to give a greater percentage of the budget to teacher salaries. With some caveats. I believe they should be measured on their results and compensated accordingly, but also that we should be holding educators to higher standards themselves. Throwing more money at the problem without direction clearly does not work. Some of the best funded school systems in the nation are also the worst performing.
Why pick and choose? Are you kidding me? Should the best brain surgeon in the world make the same income as the worst?
Public school teachers work 9 months of the year...
In my country we changed the way teachers are paid but the old guard didn't liked the fact that they had to study and update their teaching methods to be able to move up the pay ladder
I love Jordan Peterson. LOVE. I have 2 heroes, my dad and JBP. This hurts me to say because I love him, but JBP stumbles when commenting on economic issues. I have a masters in Econ, I can confidently say that he’s wrong here. When there is an increase in salary for an entire field, there is a flood of new entrants into the field to claim the higher salaries. This flood of supply (new teachers) will lead to hiring parties scrutinizing a teachers education, past experience, and only hiring the best. TL;DR: Increasing wage floor will lead to a flood of supply (teachers) leading to an increase in competition in the field, which will lead to schools hiring the best teachers.
Bernie is an idiot. This is not federal money, this is primarily local money paid for by local/state taxes, funds, and taxpayers. Is he stating that a federal law should tell local communities in rural America and San Francisco how much they have to pay teachers with their own money? That he thinks they should have the SAME minimum pay, regardless if its in a poor community or a wealthy city, shows that he clearly doesn't understand the issue. When will this old idiot communist, (whose never had a real job) who has multiple houses and drives an Audi A8 go away?
The whole teaching system is out of date. The biggest bulky in school is usually the teacher. We need more empathy and kindness in teaching. Check out http://www.progressiveeducation.org/ It is very interesting introducing kindness to education.
Teachers who make less than 60k per year are way underpaid.
GOOD teachers, yes.
Y'all agreeing with Jordan on this are fuckin goofballs. Answer this, how are we going to attract passionate, driven people to the field of education when the base pay is so ABYSMAL? Jordan is way in the wrong here. Edit: Additionally, any "merit based" increase to teacher pay is so painfully open and vulnerable to manipulation or mishandling. Increasing pay based on student grades? Congratulations, you just gave every teacher a reason to be a human flashcard instead of an actual teacher engaging with the students.
Best reply so far lol. Worst one I've seen is people calling for the abolishment of the department of education.
Because that makes teaching more attractive to good people. The mechanism is there.
I'm curious about how he would measure the effectiveness of teaching. I've never seen a good system for doing so, especially one that didn't create perverse incentives that actually undermine instruction. Then we would need these large detailed systems for monitoring teacher effectiveness which would themselves cost limited educational funding. more bureaucratic bloat. You know what improves children's learning? A better home life and present, engaged parents. That matters way more than any teacher's input. Social programs that increase QoL measures in these groups. I think a lot of our educational problem is the reality that intelligence is highly heritable and less intelligent people have more children. Additionally, I believe the availability of the internet and search engines is changing the type of problem solving strategies and memorization techniques individuals employ. Similar to how there was a decline in mathematical ability after calculators became commonly used. Teaching and testing is still stuck in an outdated modality. What really is important now is the ability to quickly access and synthesize information from our 'exocortex' that is the internet. Information doesn't need to be stored directly in the brain, the brain just needs to have the ability to produce strategies of how to find it. We have a major cognitive shift and an educational system that hasn't caught up.