[TomOfTTB]

First I agree the cost Michigan pays per prisoner is too high. Texas manages to get by at $13,000 per prisoner Michigan shouldn't need $40,000. But that's for all the expenses to keep them alive (room, board, medical, etc...). So the comparison isn't an accurate one.

But let me ask this:

Michigan is a state where the average teacher makes $57,958 per year BEFORE benefits (http://www.teacher-world.com/teacher-salary/michigan.html). Benefits that include a lifetime pension after retirement. This is in a state with a median income of $44,627 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michigan)

Yet they rank 30th in education: http://tinyurl.com/5wwq8ep.

I'm not saying teacher's shouldn't be well paid. If they were making 10% over the median income I would have no complaints. But they're well above that and that, as much as the prisons, is why the schools in Michigan have no money.

[raganwald]

Your argument mixes numbers in a manner that confuses rather than enlightens. If you want to talk about how Michigan's education ranks in the nation and about how Michigan's teachers are paid, you need to compare Apples to Apples. If they're 30th in Education, how are their salaries relative to other teachers?

Likewise, the ranking of 30th... Does that measure the teachers alone or the entire system? If it measures the entire system, how does the funding of $7,000 per student compare to other states? Maybe Michigan is actually doing amazingly well considering its funding. Or maybe not. But that should be the basis of comparison, not comparing their salaries to those of burger flippers in McDonald's.

[lukejduncan]

As a former Michigander with family in education I can say that your comment on pension and retirement is wrong. My mom is about to retire and they just officially TOOK AWAY her retirement.

Teaching is an interesting profession. In fact, teachers are often treated as if they aren't part of the professional class. We call them incompetent, fire the youngest members of the profession first, underpay them, and then public ridicule them.

I would think people who live in the Silicon Valley world would agree: if you want to solve hard problems you need great talent. If you want great talent, you need to attract them, not repel them. Education is a hard problem and we treat teachers like unskilled labor.

[anamax]

> In fact, teachers are often treated as if they aren't part of the professional class.

They're not. Professionals are liable for malpractice.

> fire the youngest members of the profession first

That's what the teacher's unions demanded in negotation, so if you think that it's wrong....

[lukejduncan]

Wait, I'm sorry, are you saying teaching isn't a profession?

[Duff]

With the exception of teachers, "professionals" are licensed workers who carry liability for their actions. If a Registered Nurse is negligent in the course of her duties, she can lose her license to work as a nurse and potentially be held personally liable.

Teachers want to called "professionals" when negotiating for pay and benefits, but simultaneously want to retain strict union seniority, guaranteed employment and other benefits more commonly associated with regular civil service and blue-collar workers.

I have a half dozen friends who got laid off from teaching jobs this year. These are really smart, bright people who should not have been let go. In the case of one of my friends ALL of the layoffs in his district could have been avoided had the folks with 30+ years who are eligible to retire at 75% pay decided to do so. In the "professional" world, those folks would have been laid off or forced to retire.

[sp332]

They can't be considered "professionals" because they're not held to any professional standards.

[lukejduncan]

Seriously? I can see the arguments for accreditation, but to say they aren't held to professional standards is a joke.

Again, solving hard problems means finding top talent. People love to slander teachers as lazy, but what can you really expect from an industry that repels talent - especially young talent. Teachers are vilified are underpaid ($60k is nothing for the type of problem being solved, and many teachers make closer to $30k).

I promise you, if we treated teachers as well as we treated Software Engineers we'd have a much healthier education system.

[CWuestefeld]

to say they aren't held to professional standards is a joke.

Sample non-professional behavior:

--- quote [1]

A video [2] posted on YouTube titled "Teacher's Union Gone Wild" claims to capture New Jersey teachers ... using racial slurs and joking about tenure. The undercover video was ... recorded during the New Jersey Education Association's leadership conference this summer.

... Another woman is shown playing a video game laughs that taxpayers are paying her to play it. Another clip shows people sarcastically talking about tenure that it is a "joke" and teachers can do almost anything without being fired.

--- end quote

[1] http://www.myfoxny.com/dpp/news/local_news/new_jersey/teache...

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdqQTIQhn5A

[sp332]

When was the last time a tenured teacher was let go for underperforming?

[lukejduncan]

Teachers Unions are a part of the problem. We need more advocates like Michelle Rhee who both know it's wrong and are in the position to do something about it.

>They're not. Professionals are liable for malpractice. I'm not sure where this definition is coming from. By that definition a software engineer isn't a professional.

At least from Wikitionary (better source?) http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/professional_class

1) A social and economic demographic, commonly identified as part of the upper middle class.

2) (plural) the groups in society composed of highly educated professionals

[scythe]

>They're not. Professionals are liable for malpractice.

Even programmers?

[ori_b]

Programmers aren't professionals in the sense that he's using. There is no accreditation procedure, there is no regulating body, there is no licensing, there is no code of ethics that must be followed by all programmers, and there is no liability attached to malpractice.

[lukejduncan]

Note that there are accreditation procedures, regulating bodies, and licensing for teachers.

So how are teachers not professionals?

[anamax]

> Note that there are accreditation procedures, regulating bodies, and licensing for teachers.

> So how are teachers not professionals?

Those are schemes for limiting the number of people who are allowed to teach in certain circumstances. They don't have much to do with quality teaching.

If you disagree, the following questions are relevant.

(1) How often does a regulating body discipline a teacher?

(2) In what circumstances are licenses actually revoked?

Feel free to compare the numbers to the corresponding ones for stock brokers. (I don't think that stock brokers are clean enough, so if teachers are worse....)

[ori_b]

Point. I don't really know how teacher accreditation works in the states, so I don't know if they'd qualify as professionals or not.

[skimbrel]

Really? Please don't blame the teachers for this.

This line of reasoning has never made any sense to me -- why does everyone blame the public employees and want to take away their (hardly that great when compared to the rest of the country) salary and benefits? The solution isn't to cut them off at the knees; the solution is to raise everyone else up to the same standards.

If you want someone to blame for this, start with the No Child Left Behind act that forces schools to waste their budgets on meaningless standardized testing, and then penalizes them for it when they do poorly, creating a vicious cycle where a failing school can never become successful because it loses more funding each year. Or you could just go back to the root of the problem and blame the robber barons who, through well-paid lobbyists, have convinced the federal government to dismantle itself and its services year after year since 1980 in the name of the free market. We forgot what happens when corporate influence runs unchecked; we're learning again, and we're learning the hard way. The American experiment is dangerously close to failure.

[anamax]

> This line of reasoning has never made any sense to me -- why does everyone blame the public employees and want to take away their (hardly that great when compared to the rest of the country) salary and benefits?

Oh really? Public employees are far more likely to have pensions than the rest of us. Public employees earn significantly more too and have greater job security.

We blame them because they have a huge effect on who gets elected, which directly affects how much we have to pay for them.

> If you want someone to blame for this, start with the No Child Left Behind act that forces schools to waste their budgets on meaningless standardized testing,

What's your method for determining whether children are learning? We tried trusting teachers and schools - that didn't work.

> Or you could just go back to the root of the problem and blame the robber barons who, through well-paid lobbyists, have convinced the federal government to dismantle itself and its services year after year since 1980

Education spending steadily increased (after inflation) during that time, so if services went down, it wasn't because of spending.

Note that the US Department of Education was a shadow of its current self in 1980, so if you're going to argue that the federal govt has dismantled itself wrt education, you get to explain why it's much bigger wrt education.

The US govt collects about as much in taxes per person as the "high tax/high services" countries. (The US actually collects significantly more per person than Canada.) Yet, we don't get the services. More money can't solve that problem.

Before you start about rates, they're not the only term in the equation. The US collects a smaller fraction of its economy, but it has a larger economy (per person). And, even with much higher rates, the US has never collected more than 22% of the economy in taxes. The sustainable max appears to be around 20%. (People "adjusted" to the 21.9% and got the number back to 20. That's going to happen when the tax code is used to encourage/discourage.)

[krakensden]

> Oh really? Public employees are far more likely to have pensions than the rest of us. Public employees earn significantly more too and have greater job security.

Good benefits yes, good salary, not so much: http://www.onlinedegrees.org/calculator/degrees/education

for instance. I really have no idea how people complain that teachers are overpaid. It beats picking lettuce, but consider the opportunity cost of a bachelors and a teaching certificate. They could be making a lot more money if they were doing anything else.

[jbooth]

Yeah, that's one of those "believe it because I want to believe it" things.

I mean, do these people actually know any teachers? Why aren't they teachers themselves if it's so great?

I know for a fact that I'm not a teacher because the pay is shit and I'm not a good enough person to sacrifice my lifestyle for it. At least I can admit that.

[anamax]

"public employees" != "teachers".

> They could be making a lot more money if they were doing anything else.

And we also know that they're getting things that they value more than said "extra money". (The alternative is that they're incapable of evaluating their own utility function.)

That said, I'm willing to pay more to get more. Of course, that means paying other folks, because current salaries are adequate for the current teachers. (You don't want to argue that they'd teach better if they were paid more.)

However, "get more" requires some proof, not a "you'll get better people" argument.

So, how do you propose to measure the benefits that you expect to get from these new teachers? (Surely you're not willing to pay for something that you don't get....)

[skimbrel]

> Oh really? Public employees are far more likely to have pensions than the rest of us. Public employees earn significantly more too and have greater job security. We blame them because they have a huge effect on who gets elected, which directly affects how much we have to pay for them.

So you're saying public employees are one of the few segments of the US population who have enough input on how they're compensated (via electoral control of their bosses). If private-sector workers are unable to negotiate comparable compensation for their work, then maybe we should blame labor practices in the private sector. Unionized industries aside, compensation is almost entirely at the discretion of the employer. Isn't that a little screwed up? Again, what I am saying here is that the solution to "hey, those public employees have a better deal" is not "take it away from them", because nobody wins in that case. Instead, demand the same deal from your employer. It really wouldn't hurt their bottom line that much.

> What's your method for determining whether children are learning? We tried trusting teachers and schools - that didn't work.

I will admit that I don't have a real answer to this. But I am a fairly recent graduate of the public education system (finished high school in 2006) and I can tell you that 90% of my graduating class managed to pass the tests but were still complete idiots who couldn't think for themselves. (Sadly, I could say this about at least a few of my fellow UC Berkeley 2010 graduates as well.)

Mandating testing gets you graduates who are good at passing tests. Tests are not the real world.

> The US govt collects about as much in taxes per person as the "high tax/high services" countries. (The US actually collects significantly more per person than Canada.) Yet, we don't get the services. More money can't solve that problem.

Okay, then how do we solve it? For one, we could stop spending a trillion dollars per year on our military. Beyond that, we could probably eliminate a lot of bureaucracy. My high school had a principal and three assistant principals for 900 students. Probably a little unnecessary.

Teachers are not the ones to penalize here, dammit. When I have kids, I damn well want their teachers to be well-paid and happy with their jobs. Forty hours per week for thirteen years is a huge amount of time, and there's a lot that can be done to screw up a kid in that time.

[anamax]

> So you're saying public employees are one of the few segments of the US population who have enough input on how they're compensated (via electoral control of their bosses).

There's a big difference between CA and Ford - I can choose whether I want to take the risk that Ford is doing something dumb.

> Instead, demand the same deal from your employer. It really wouldn't hurt their bottom line that much.

Ah, yet another expert who isn't putting his money where is mouth is.

If you're correct, the consequences (better for you, better for your employees, worse for "bad employers) are pretty close to a moral imperative.

Yet....

> I will admit that I don't have a real answer to this.

Then how do you know that the existing system isn't an improvement?

Note that "{x} is bad" doesn't imply "{y} is good", or even that a good {y} exists.

> But I am a fairly recent graduate of the public education system (finished high school in 2006) and I can tell you that 90% of my graduating class managed to pass the tests but were still complete idiots who couldn't think for themselves. (Sadly, I could say this about at least a few of my fellow UC Berkeley 2010 graduates as well.)

You're talking about folks who could read. I'm concerned with folks who graduated despite not being able to read.

> Tests are not the real world.

Neither is anything else.

> My high school had a principal and three assistant principals for 900 students. Probably a little unnecessary.

Actually, a huge fraction of the money disappears before the school. How much educational benefit do you think that it produces?

> Teachers are not the ones to penalize here, dammit. When I have kids, I damn well want their teachers to be well-paid and happy with their jobs.

I do too, but we're pouring enough money into the system. If you can't make sure that it gets to the right place, you're out of luck.

Why are you more upset with the folks who are unwilling to waste more money than you are with the folks who are wasting the money? The latter are stealing from your (future) kids....

[matwood]

I would be interested if that salary included only teachers or also administrators. Some districts have nearly a 1:1 ratio of administrators to teachers. To me that sounds really high.

[lurker19]

That is not entirely fair. Median income is the position of low-skilled labor, not work that requires a college degree and a position of trust and responsibility for children. Income is closer a power law distribution, not a normal distribution bell curve.

[ChrisLTD]

If having good teachers is a priority, then teachers should earn whatever is required to lure qualified people away from private-sector employment.

[protomyth]

Public sector teachers make more than private sector teachers.

http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d09/tables/dt09_075.asp

[dhume]

Ever wonder why the private school teachers are content with their lower salary?

Public sector teachers have to deal with all of the problematic students that private schools can remove or refuse to admit in the first place.

[protomyth]

I would imagine some of it is lower bureaucracy and a bit more freedom.

Problematic students exist in private schools and are often backed by serious money. I wouldn't make the generalization that behavior problems are only found in poor people.

[scott_s]

The HN community generally accepts that companies should expect to pay good developers well. And, the corollary to that is if you're not willing to pay well, don't expect to get good developers.

[hugh3]

You also need to pay good developers better than bad developers, and fire the worst developers, and have competition among companies for the best, and have some way of knowing who the best and worst developers are.

Imagine what the state of the software industry would be like if developers were hired like teachers! Anyone with an appropriate qualification would be given an office and told to write code. Every year their salary would go up. The codebase would get worse and worse, and everybody would complain about it but nobody would ever fix it.

Privatise the whole school system, equip children with generous vouchers, let schools compete for students. Throw in an accreditation scheme and a bunch of compulsory examinations upon graduation if you're concerned about quality. And if you must, throw in a government-run "backup" school just for any students who can't get accepted into any private school. I don't see any drawbacks of this plan.

[jbooth]

Uh, how about we just abolish last-in-first-out? That solves all of your problems without privatizing the whole school system.

[dasil003]

The problem is that teaching isn't a meritocracy. We talk about how hard it is to evaluate coder skill, but it's infinitely easier than evaluating teacher skill. Throw in institutional, cultural, union factors, and how far-reaching the implications are to every single person in the country, and you can see why it's such a clusterfuck of a problem.

That said, I think teachers are undervalued and scapegoated in society in a lot of ways that certainly harm our ability to produce great teachers.

[hugh3]

The problem is that teaching isn't a meritocracy. We talk about how hard it is to evaluate coder skill, but it's infinitely easier than evaluating teacher skill

The interesting thing is that students know perfectly well who the good and bad teachers are. And really, the school principals should know this as well... and if they don't know then they could easily find out just by sitting in on classes and looking at the students' work. It's not really a big problem for a boss to know how well his individual employees are doing, bosses do that all the time.

[jbooth]

Students do not know perfectly well who the good and bad teachers are. Adults with hindsight can discern the good and bad teachers but I can think of multiple cases where I had my good/bad flipped as a student compared to later on when I compared my knowledge level to other adults.

I had a writing teacher I didn't particularly like, then I got to a good college and found out I was one of the better writers. Turns out she was pretty damn good at her job.

[rapind]

The problem is that even the most astute principals can't do anything about their bad employees. They can only trade them off to other schools (and what do you think they get in return?).

Once a teacher has tenure it is almost impossible to fire them... and they know it. The concept of tenure in general isn't necessarily an issue, it's just an incredibly bad implementation (only takes 3 years! come on!).