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by NoMoreNicksLeft 122 days ago
>That basically is the suggestion. The world is not an RPG, where being good at one thing necessitates you being bad at everything else. On the contrary, aptitude in one task is pretty well correlated with being good at any task.

We need, for a nation the size of the United States, millions of teachers. Quite literally. The process that somehow selects not one good (or more literally, very few, just so the pedants don't complain) teacher now, but will select mostly/all good teachers if we were to implement it is 15% raises across the board? 40%? Never mind that doing that could only possibly attract something like 5-10% of personnel change... and I'm supposed to believe this is about increasing the quality of education instead of pandering to a voting bloc that will help you to enact your non-education agenda? No thanks.

>With that in mind, it's not at all unreasonable to believe that somebody who would make a great teacher

Blah blah blah, I've already moved past that. No need to try to make the sale here.

1 comments

Are people really arguing that there are few good teachers? In my (admittedly anecdotal) experience, most people can list a mix of good and bad teachers they had over their educations. The goal is just to increase the proportion of good teachers, and hopefully raise the floor of the how good the worst teachers are.

Increasing pay probably won't raise the ceiling on how good the best teachers are. If they've got that strong a passion for teaching, they're probably already doing it.

> Are people really arguing that there are few good teachers?

Yes, in general, people from both the left and right argue this, though they quibble over details. And people like you chime in with "we could get better teachers if we paid them more", which strongly implies that you don't think that the current batch are sufficient.

If they're already good, then why do you want to pay them more? I don't see extraordinary outcomes that deserve extraordinary pay. And in any even, even if you do see extraordinary outcomes, the pay they're receiving is sufficient, because they agreed to accept it.

>most people can list a mix of good and bad teachers t

Sure. And one or two truly bad teachers can spoil a child for their entire school career. Hell, here in the United States, they don't have multiple teachers per year until 7th grade, give or take... one bad teacher can truly fuck that kid up. Even later on though, they can do alot of damage. I don't think the "there only one little turd in your soup" defense holds up when it comes to education.

>The goal is just to increase the proportion of good teacher

Let's just double pay to have 0.4% more good teachers, huh?