[culopatin]

It’s a matter of incentives. The avg American grows up with certain “American dream” that clashes with that rural America life. There is no incentive to leave everything behind and go be basically alone. Immigrants have a “lower” baseline or just want the experience of being abroad, or are willing to put up with rural living because from wherever they are, it looks better. You’d have to entice a city teacher to move to rural America.

You’ll say “pay them more”. But who are you taxing more? Because no one is happy when the gov starts looking at being more efficient and starts laying off some admin people either.

[jojobas]

Teachers were like 4% of all H1Bs. Using CS/AI H1B proceeds to increase pay to rural teachers more seems like a no-brainer. The current Alaskan teacher pay seems to be below median, which seems like an good threshold to disallow H1B workers altogether.

[bijowo1676]

Have you considered the possibility that H1B teachers are simply better (at any price point) ?

H1B proceeds go to fund USCIS and its staff, they do not go towards local school districts.

This whole discussion is full of racists and haters who dont know anything about the subject beyond clickbait titles

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

>Have you considered the possibility that H1B teachers are simply better (at any price point) ?

That sounds sort of racist, actually.

[bijowo1676]

It is not racist, but it is true. The Education major is one of the bottom majors, Americans with the lowest grades and lowest SAT scores go on to become public school teachers. and it is well known information among Americans themselves.

https://x.com/marcportermagee/status/1954326425072546055/pho...

https://reports.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/2023-total-group-...

  The average SAT for Education majors: 1023
  It’s ranked 24th, behind Communications (19th), Library Science (13th), and English (11th). The top major: Math.

while foreigners on H1B are top percentile in academic performance and scoring and generally H1B attract top 1% talent from the global talent pool, especially given there are only like 60k visas issued per year.

People who look at the stats objectively should be the first ones to advocate for more H1B teachers, if that meant children would get dramatically better education

[fweimer]

Do SAT scores measure anything about pedagogic aptitude? I expect that at best, you get some form of correlation (in which direction?).

For teachers, other things matter more than reasoning skills or subject matter knowledge, especially in rural or otherwise challenging communities.

[bijowo1676]

It shows revealed preference: all smart people decide to work anywhere but education and public schools are scraping the barrel for talent.

Results you can see with your own eyes. USA had to significantly dumb down SAT, switch to dumbed down “Common Core” curriculum, ditch gifted&talented programs across the board, ditch SAT requirements for college and introduce remedial math at Harvard!!! The creme de la creme of US Education system.

If American teachers were any good, private schools would not be able to charge more than Ivy League tuition for very simple secondary education

This is all consequence of what kind of people decide to become Teachers, and what kind of people decide to become Wall St Traders

In the end this shows up in massive dependence on Foreign talent via H1B visas. US is importing engineers precisely because Americans did not have good STEM teachers who could teach them math and logic in middle school.

https://abcnews.com/amp/GMA/Living/us-students-reading-math-...

https://www.realcleareducation.com/2025/03/20/harvard_launch...

[Erem]

Americans are every race. How could it be racist?

[dani__german]

"H1B teachers are simply better"

Considering the overwhelming demographics of H1B visas are massively racially different from the US, this is Racism, pure and simple.

This is the undercurrent of H1B immigration: people who harbor racism against the US's predominate demographic doing anything they can to scam the system and enrich themselves no matter the cost to others.

[bijowo1676]

I have provided data below. US teachers have an extremely low bar

[riknos314]

Are teaching and software engineering even job categories that overlap enough that they should compete for the same pool of visas?

It seems to me things would be better if they were classified as different visa categories.