[Lerc]

Alright covers a broad spectrum of properties.

Most teachers have been asking for more resources for decades, warning of the consequences of not doing so. It seems a little on the nose to ignore their warnings and when the consequences manifest opt to blame something else entirely.

[pj_mukh]

This is not about resources anymore.

What’s especially interesting is that a lot of teachers take a paycut [1] to go teach in private school partly because the kids are better adjusted, rich kids have more comprehensive childcare and don’t need to rely on screens/social media for the gaps in parenting.

For a taste of all these details, go on r/Teachers

[1]: https://www.ccu.edu/blogs/cags/2011/12/teaching-in-private-s...

[Lerc]

I encountered something just the other day that mentioned r/Teachers. I can't remember what it was exactly, but there was definitely a huge caveat about it not being a representative sample.

There is correlation between socioeconomic status and academic performance, but it is not the be-all-and-end-all. Schools serving lower socioeconomic populations should have vastly higher resources to address the additional challenges. One of those resources, is the number of teachers.

A teacher taking a paycut for a different job is not because they want less money, it is because the ratio of what they are paid to the work that is asked of them is better in the lower paid job. That is exactly a resource issue. If you pay a teacher 20% more and ask them to do a job that takes two teachers, then it is unsurprising that they will go for a job that more reasonably asks of them proportional to what they are paid.

[pj_mukh]

The problem is, a classroom full of TikTok zombies doesn’t fit into the 20% more work vs. 80% more work dichotomy. It’s simply spending 40 hours a week talking to an (almost literal) wall.

It’s money sure, and some teachers who don’t care can keep going. But most who do, would be happy to switch to a place where they can make a difference.

This is all a separate conversation to school resources is my point.

[throwaway85825]

I can't remember which state it was but they spent 2/3+ of the entire states education budget on one underperming school district. In the end they ended up with new buildings but the scores went down because school spending isn't actually correlated with student success.

[applicative]

The postwar American glory period depended on the fact that half the brain power of society couldn’t get a job except in teaching. Now the sort of women who taught me in high school are federal judges and captains of industry. Teacher salaries would need to be two or three times as high to get the quality of the period of American greatness.

[bell-cot]

> ... couldn't get a job except in teaching.

Or nursing, or a fair number of other career tracks. Perhaps as important, there were plenty of smaller and family-owned firms. In many of those, talented women could get quite a ways ahead - though perhaps with less public acknowledgement than is currently fashionable.

> Now the sort of women who taught me in high school are federal judges and captains of industry.

Your HS teachers were in the 0.001%? No 2X, 3X, or even 25X to teacher salaries could replace a meaningful fraction of today's teachers with such people - because, by definition, the supply does not exist.

[hollerith]

Of course it had nothing to do with America's having been on the winning coalition in two world wars or its being the only developed country whose homeland was not devastated by the second of the two wars because those reasons wouldn't feed into the narrative that America is prosperous because it benefited from oppression (of women in this case).

Somehow the much greater oppression of women in the Islamic world doesn't make the Islamic world prosperous.

[dd8601fn]

Smart money says it’s more to do with kids being more uncontrollable, prone to violent outbursts, and completely disinterested in anything that isn’t smashing their dopamine buttons every three seconds.

The teachers didn’t start being bad at teaching. The parents got bad at parenting in an environment where everything is working against them.

[Lerc]

Buildings don't relate to student scores, they relate to how many students you can teach. If the new buildings house the same number, as before but were actually required then they spent money on basic human dignity. If the buildings were not required, the money was wasted. That is the opposite of spending it on resources.

Teachers, more of them, with more training is one of the main things that is needed. Increase the amount of one on one time. Adjust the curriculum to what each student needs. Measure the improvement in individual students, not the improvement in the mean of the lot of them.

Only teach things after the principles that they depend upon have been learned.

[kian]

It doesn't seem like there's been a precipitous drop in resources compared to the decades of requests and warnings that have led up to this point. So what's different now, if not resourcing?

[yorwba]

There hasn't been a preciptious drop in outcomes either. There have been statistically significant drops in average test scores, but the large number of students who take those tests means that even small differences can be statistically significant. Generally, the average test score just fluctuates within a few percentage points over the long term. The differences between individual students are much larger. If you pick two random students in a year and compare their scores, they'll likely be much farther apart than the average scores of different years.

As a corollary, the variation that people personally experience at small scales (e.g. high-school teachers comparing the various students they encountered throughout their career) is dominated by changes in class composition. Some years, there are just randomly more bad students than in others. When the students seem to be getting worse over time, the teacher might attribute this to societal decline; when the students seem to be getting better, they credit their skill at teaching instead.

Thus things are constantly getting worse and the sky is falling, yet somehow it never makes contact with the ground, and when you compare with ancient records, it's more or less where it has always been.

[Lerc]

I'm not sure which precipitous less than a decade drop you are referring to, but I would be inclined to think, in the last decade, a period of social isolation and absence of education might have been a factor.

[throwaway85825]

Resources have never been higher. Theres an expectation now that the schools will do everything and pay for everything but its never enough.

[applicative]

Pay is comically non competitive - a fraction of what it would need to be to reconstitute the sixties.

[TitaRusell]

Pay for teachers has ALWAYS been terrible. Governments are shit like that.

But you know what teachers got? Respect. Teachers were part of the elite that ran the village.

[applicative]

Yes, but you can get away with it when you keep 51% of the ultra-high quality brain power of society in bondage. If you want to replicate American greatness under conditions of free competition, you must ~triple the wage. People do not think through what America had in its public schools in the postwar period and expect good results when wages have fallen behind even nursing. Ask your preferred AI to compare nurse:high school teacher:dentist:physician between the 50s and today, keeping in mind that high school teacher pay was grossly suppressed by the bondage of women. The teaching staff of American greatness and economic dynamism was ultra-highly educated women who were paid basically nothing. Teachers are paid in a much lower proportion to e.g. physicians - another hightly trained service, than they were in the 50s. The difference is that women can be physicians. Educator wages and thus competition for them is infinitely too low in contemporary America. If you want to bash teachers, I'm fine with that, the fact is we get what we pay for.