2. “The Alt-Knights were originally conceived as a paramilitary wing of the Proud Boys…” (NYT)
3. Freddie on the chat with Chetty; I can’t speak for Raj, but I would gladly pay the better teachers more, if that meant firing the lemons (and I don’t read him as denying this). And many lemons there are, FD doesn’t provide evidence against that by now rather well-established claim, furthermore it is one any high schooler would agree with.
4. Scott Sumner on the two new Fed picks. I view these as very good news.
1. I almost see this in a positive light. The governance and trajectory of the broader system is good, so the politics can afford to be dumb and unstable as long as it doesn’t bleed over into broader damage.
3. I’m not sure policymakers supporting this stuff agree with that. I think that’s part of the attraction of some of the alternatives, in that they promise that the solution will either only cost as much as it currently does, or will save money. In any case, Freddie’s right – there’s not really some giant backlog of folks who want to become teachers under the present conditions.
Of course this long run of prosperity had nothing to do with governance, an article of faith so deep among some that a prime example of prosperity clearly connected to stable governance is dismissed as a problem.
Stable governance is unlikely to be a problem in the U.S. for the foreseeable future. Lucky Americans, compared to those complacent Australians.
So steady “stable government” is an article of faith among left-liberal-progressives ?
The very essence of American Progressivism is constant “change” — especially massive change & expansion of government. The U.S. government/business environment in year 1890 versus 2017 is dramatically different and in no way stable.
Government is always a drain on economic productivity, beyond its basic ‘stability’ function of security and courts.
Government is always a drain on economic productivity, beyond its basic ‘stability’ function of security and courts.
I gather you have a Clivus Multrum in your house.
1. I follow politics in Australia (the old country) via the newspapers. I have always been puzzled why the politics is so bitter when it seems there is so little substantive policy-wise at stake. Now it’s clear.
The Forbes article is bad. The superiority of investing in a flat or house you occupy over the S&P 500 is fiscal: the (non-monetary) revenue you enjoy as the occupier of the home is not taxed, whereas the dividends and capital gains of investing in the stock market are taxed. Saying you “save” a rent is really confusing because when you own a home you occupy you have an opportunity cost: you could rent it out instead and cash the rent: but this rent would be taxed.
You pay rent when you pay mortgage interest. At the end of it you have some equity.
You also pay property taxes and own a deteriorating asset. Say a 20 year life span for most systems; roof, flooring, kitchen, bathroom, heating and cooling.
You also are the one who will pay for the fiscal mismanagement of municipalities. The best investment may be buying a report on the pension liabilities of the place you plan to live in.
The renter also pays for all of that.
The Forbes article isn’t actually too bad. However, downloading the metro it looks like his 9% figure was quite high for any city of reasonable growth in the US. Perhaps he should put in the caveat that in many (high growth) cities this can be as low as 6%. But other than that point he is correct:
(1) Primary homes are tax advantaged in that the benefit that one accrues from having a place to live is not taxed, (2) and the investment can be highly levered. He doesn’t even mention that: (3) the interest can be deduced, (4) a portion of the gains on the home can be deduced.
Although all of these gains come with costs: (a) transaction costs are absurdly high, (b) the investment is subject to a wealth tax, (c) for many it is by far their largest investment and can not be diversified.
Note that most of the strengths of real estate no longer apply for rental properties. While a primary home is a solid investment, rental properties are comparable to a poorly run, highly levered, portfolio.
#5 the incentive to maintain the property in the most efficient way are better when the owner lives there. Also if he does his own maintenance he avoid taxes.
4. The problem remains how to measure teacher effectiveness. If you can’t, and I’ve seen nothing to indicate that you can, then you essentially end up randomly firing people, particularly those who are unlucky enough to get bad students.
The best way to get more effective teachers would be to hire by IQ. Hardly perfect, but there is no better way to get good employees.*
*Things like interviews and references are basically useless.
If you hire by IQ and pay people up to the level people of the IQ you want can expect in the marketplace, you’ll get the employees you want.
I would look for value added before IQ.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value-added_modeling
Not least because if we want teachers to compete, it should be on student advancement, not their own test-taking.
+1 regarding value added.
Indiana has started doing this with schools themselves. Schools get an A-F rating, and they have started using value added.
The surprising thing is that charter schools servicing low income students increased their grade using that measure, and supposedly “good” public schools in the ‘burbs decreased their grade.
Value added is just another dubious education fad.
Value Added = Current Metric – Prior Metric
That works for everything from grip strength, to portfolio performance, to educational gain.
Kind of strange to call quantification a fad.
Louisiana has had this since 2010, and it’s the usual, overly complicated bureaucratic shit show, because measuring work performance of any kind is ridiculously hard. Better to stick with something simple and easy to implement, like IQ based hiring.
Kind of comical for someone to make a self-contradicting claim while championing IQ.
You are saying IQ tests for teachers are good, but yearly performance tests of students are bad.
Night big data be able to figure this out over time? – if given a chance –
Teaching K-12 is not an activity that requires above-average IQ. In those schools where replacing “lemon” teachers is difficult, lack of discipline and support from the administration is a bigger factor.
IQ is always the best predictor of job performance in any job. And, yes, teaching K-12 does require above average IQ, just not hugely above average IQ.
And, yes, teaching K-12 does require above average IQ, just not hugely above average IQ.
I don’t know about K, but obviously true of 12.
Yes, Students Do Learn More From Attractive Teachers https://www.wsj.com/articles/yes-students-do-learn-more-from-attractive-teachers-1472223974
> IQ is always the best predictor of job performance in any job.
Really, IQ is the best predictor of performance for professional sprinters? If I’m hiring astronauts I should choose a 16 year old with a high IQ? Good to know.
All these measures of teacher effectiveness are basically ways of avoiding the ultimate test – let the consumers decide (parents with input from their children). The objection is always – but maybe the parents won’t make the right choice! But the teachers and their unions have a basic conflict of interest which the parents don’t have.
I find these assertions where it is impossible, simply impossible to do what is routinely done every day everywhere else to be quite amusing.
It would be really funny if it wasn’t about ruining life opportunities for kids. My experience both at school age and with kids is that schools are ok but if you want your kid to read well and have a broad understanding of how the world works you have to teach it yourself.
We all know that, and the $16k or whatever it costs to educate a kid every year is simply padding the pockets of alot of people who really don’t give a damn.
“I find these assertions where it is impossible, simply impossible to do what is routinely done every day everywhere else to be quite amusing”
Absolutely. I love the argument: teachers are so profoundly exceptional that science hasn’t even figure out a way to measure how good they are.
This doesn’t solve the basic problem. Peter Brimelow tried to write a book about how the teachers unions were ruining everything, and his arguments were underwhelming, to say the least.
The thing is that parents don’t actually observe directly what is going on in schools, so have no basis to compare one with another in effectiveness.
I don’t observe that happens in the mechanic’s shop, either, yet I am somehow allowed to be responsible for deciding which one to use.
The car runs or it doesn’t. Education is not like that.
It’s hard to measure professionals by numbers. I can see why teachers are opposed to it.
The irony is that the more-or-less established and functioning way to manage professionals — have them managed by experienced people in their field who have moved into management — is off the table, by the demands of teachers.
So, here we are.
#3: my experience of university teaching is that attempts by the hierarchy to identify the best teachers are probably doomed. It is, however, much easier to identify the worst. So sack the worst and thereby cheer the best up.
The problem, even then, is that people would be sacked for heterodox views, or even heterodox research interests, or even just not being one of the club. Since school teachers don’t do research, there’s much less risk in sacking them. Perhaps universities could make some progress by offering academics a choice of contract: tenured with lesser salary, untenured with greater.
5. The average price to rent ratio in the US is around 11? In Australia it is about twice that. Probably a bit of derangement going on there. A little derangement’s not too bad, but when the political class is self absorbing they tend to soak it up and then it comes out of their pores at times they really should pull it together and be a bit less deranged.
@Crikey – the average hides a lot of data (and in that sense is a bit useless). Unlike Australia, where 80% of the population lives in the four or five major cities with expensive housing, a much bigger proportion of the US housing market is in places with inexpensive housing. The expensive cities like SF, LA, NY are probably only 25% of the population.
I see. And that means rent ratios should be different why, exactly?
“And many lemons there are, FD doesn’t provide evidence against that by now rather well-established claim, furthermore it is one any high schooler would agree with.”
And who asked them? I can assure tou there are much more lemons among the students than among the teachers. Fire them instead. Research has showed the average American man has the intelligence of 12-year boy. It means tou can only teach half the population above 12-year boy level.
The other issue here is that even “lemon” teachers can improve… with support and guidance, and the right classes.
I’m a high school math teacher in an urban district with high attrition… one thing you notice is that with 1-2 teachers fired every year, one or both of those is almost *always* a teacher with the worst, most difficult classes to manage.
You’d think the administration would notice that every year they have to hire a new “Algebra I Repeating” teacher, a new “Foundations of High School Math” teacher, a new “Functions and Modeling” teacher (that’s the euphemistic name for the 4th year math elective that exists only to help seniors meet alternative state requirements for graduation when they haven’t passed any of the standardized tests)… only to fire them a year later because they weren’t effective in that position.
Honestly, only a very experienced teacher would be effective in that position… but the experienced teachers don’t want that position… and now there’s an even greater problem, which is that your final evaluation will follow you around to any other districts you apply to, at least in the state of New Jersey.
Evaluations have a place, but if you’re fired because you have difficult classes, or because there’s no support from administration, or because of political reasons, or even for just economic reasons (school doesn’t want a lot of teacher high up on the pay scale), now you’re doubly penalized because the low evaluation used to justify your a priori termination will follow you to your next potential job…
And on top of that, my boyfriend who’s a fourth-year apprentice electrician makes more than I do.
The only reason to go into teaching is because you *enjoy* it or because all the other jobs you could be doing pay worse and are less secure.
It all hinges on the definition of effective. If educrats and administrators can’t come up with a measure of teacher effectiveness that takes as its baseline the fact a teacher has a room full of difficult or struggling kids, then they’re the ones who ought to be fired.
More generally, we know that student performance has a very strong correlation with the socio-economic status and education levels of the parents. That defines the raw material teachers are working with if you like. Any measure of teacher effectiveness must take that as the baseline. That we don’t do this, and insist on either not measuring it or measuring the wrong things instead, is not an argument for not doing it, or proof of it’s impossibility.
Finally, on your comparison of your salary with your electrician boyfriend’s, be careful you compare like with like. His job is far more dangerous (to him and his clients – if he messes up someone could die), less comfortable (kids, especially small ones, can be grubby, but I doubt you’ll ever have to crawl around under a house with the rats and spiders), far less secure, with a less generous pension plan (if any), and I suspect he has slightly fewer weeks off every year.
Point well taken on boyfriend… at least I work indoors & am paid on salary… I enjoy paid sick and personal days… no threats to my health unless I am working in a REALLY bad area…I’m also not fucking up my back lifting heavy equipment or crawling around on the floor on the regular. Electricians also work as contractors, so their salaries are higher to make up for the time they spend out of work between jobs. You are right that the two jobs really can’t be compared, and I wouldn’t want to switch with him.
With that said, one reason this has been on my mind is that the pay scale for teachers in my district is pretty much flat, so while he moves up the pay scale, I stay the same. I also work longer hours, usually 55-65 hours a week.
Working in schools can be dangerous as well, especially if the administration is unwilling to discipline students. It isn’t unheard of for students to bring weapons to school, threaten teachers, and to assault them.
True but Dan Hill is right… the risk isn’t comparable. There’s more daily risk in being an electrician and if something goes wrong, the electrician bears more responsibility for the mistake.
Even in dangerous areas, the safety of the kids isn’t directly the teacher’s responsibility. As you said, it falls on administration and security and you really have to be in a bad place for there to be NO effective security.
Plus I have to tell you that most violence in schools doesn’t take place in classrooms were teachers are present… generally it’s in hallways, in locker rooms, in classes with substitute teachers, just outside of school or after school…
That said, things do happen… I got this job after the last teacher in my position had her car stolen by a student who was back at school within three months… last year a teacher breaking up a fight was concussed and hospitalized… the school’s drug policy is a joke and busted dealers can return in weeks to disrupt again…. it’s not a routinely dangerous job like being an electrician is, but it can be dangerous, AT TIMES.
Amazing coincidence here. The “best” awarding winning teachers in my local high school are disproportionately the AP teachers.
Both left and right believe an untruth: that education in the United States largely depends on supply–generally teachers. Actually, it depends on effective demand: the more interested, the more prepared, and the smarter the students, the more learning there will be.
The only reason to go into teaching is because you *enjoy* it or because all the other jobs you could be doing pay worse and are less secure.
lol
2: violence begets violence, the NYT has learned.
2. Fake news. There is no such thing as the “Alt-Knights”. Where do they get these stories from?
Have they ever interviewed the black hoodied window breakers of Berkley?
Or, we could all endorse nonviolent protest as a civic right, and sometimes responsibility.
Tank man made his stand in Tiananmen on June 5, 1989. Hero.
Idiot. Tank man, too.
One of the most amazing things about “comments” as a medium is that you can say something as simple as “we could all endorse nonviolent protest as a civic right, and sometimes responsibility” and someone will pop up to fight it.
Related: http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-shouting-class.html
If we are going to play “shouting class” we should try to be positive about it, and not champion violent protest instead.
(I am confident that police across the country are ready and willing to arrest violent protesters, and that is fine. That protects, and does not harm the democratic process.)
I see you’re upset because decent people in this country are starting to rethink the wisdom of tolerating being intimidated, beaten, and vicitmized in the name of nonviolence. Good.
I am not upset at all. And now with “victimized in the name of nonviolence” I see that you are very confused.
“I am confident that police across the country are ready and willing to arrest violent protesters, and that is fine. ”
LOL.
Jason, have you met many cops?
Seriously though, commanders on the ground have a first priority to maintain order, secondly to arrest lawbreakers.
Consider the popularity of a “shield wall” in riot control. Police use it because it imposes order in a rigid way. It may not catch everyone, but the alternative is a
http://www.dictionary.com/browse/melee
A melee is never good for the public order.
Nonviolent protest is stupid because a bunch of keyboard warriors and social misfit brownshirt wannabes think so. Ok, then. Ultimately, this ends with felony riot prosecutions and injuries or deaths on both sides with nothing substantive accomplished.
Shield wall training
https://youtu.be/x7AVMo8P1sM
What, probably a 10,000 year old technique?
“Jason, have you met many cops?”
A few. I’m confident the average cop would be eager to enforce the law, but they can’t decide to do so unilaterally, if the police chief orders them to stand down, they must stand down, see what happened in Berkeley or Evergreen College. In the case of Evergreen, the College president ordered the university police to stand down, why do colleges have their own police forces? They should be abolished.
I say Antifa should realize the error of their ways and unilaterally disband before things escalate further.
Sure.
“I say the American regime should realize the error of their ways and unilaterally disband before things escalate further.”
Poor NYT. They and their kin had a terrific strategy. Step one: intimidate the police into inaction through widely available cameras, editing software, and social media. Step two, instigate violence against all who oppose their views. Brilliant. And it has worked for years. Sadly for them it looks like the people have had enough of this and are now striking back. Not only does this stop the free hand of the left, but it also induces the police to stand up to antifa and their ilk.
Keep up the good fight.
Number 5 also misses a big issue: joint school and house choice. In our nice area with highly desirable schools, it is virtually impossible to rent a house of a certain standard in a place with good neighbors. I tried when I first moved and it was impossible. When one of our neighbors goes away for a year and rents their place out, it’s gone in sixty seconds. Rental units in the same school district are usually unattractive flats that are substantially below the quality of the owner housing units. So there are no perfect rental substitutes for the houses for sale. Building restrictions are designed to favor richer families and to preserve the quality of public schools. Given these and other housing “games” it is sometimes quite inefficient to rent unless you tolerate lower housing stock.
4. Sumner believes Mr. Goodfriend is a superb choice. Would Goodfriend support NGDP targeting? Goodfriend: “If you’re going to be transparent in an activity like the Fed, you have to be much more rule-based in what you’re doing”.
Mr. Goodfriend is a critic of QE: “Mr. Goodfriend has said that the Fed should not purchase mortgage bonds, because doing so promotes economic growth in a particular sector — the kind of judgment that should be left to those who determine fiscal policy.” https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/02/business/economy/federal-reserve-board-nominees-trump.html? NGDP targeting would be “rule-based”, so it’s possible Goodfriend would support it – although he clearly would not support Fed purchases of mortgage bonds as a way of achieving the target. Would he support purchases of Treasuries if NGDP were below the target? Sumner is a market monetarist, known for his support for NGDP targeting coupled with a futures market for NGDP, with the Fed committing to buy or sell Treasuries if the futures market is below or above the target. While Sumner’s views on the futures market (or even the need for the futures market) have evolved, NGDP targeting works only if the Fed is committed to adjust policy until the futures market predicts the target will be met. [An aside, Roger Farmer supports NGDP targeting coupled with a commitment to buy and sell equities not just bonds, an audacious idea.]
Look Vanderbilt let a Dearborn slip by, so I suppose, he’s actually a good guy, but the truth of dearborns is that one will dirty rotten spoiled and they’ll go to England before they go to college and then wish they went to Gettysburg or reed college and being a reed is afterall a pretty cool thing to be in charlotte.
#3: Freddie cannot separate in his own mind pedagogical goals from social goals, and his social goals are a waste of time.
He should just pipe down and leave the commenting to internet cucks like me WINK!
I kept twisting myself into cheesecake poses to interest Freddie and he just didn’t notice me.
This is true, but he is relatively honest about it. In his long essay on education policy that Tyler previously linked to, he grants that the massively ramped up education funding of the past 50 years has bought us almost no improvement on academic measures, but has bought us school lunch programs and a system to inculcate left-wing diversity values in the next generation.
if conn college puts paint on their cigarettes and Lewisburg ceases to exist the planet would be a merrier place.
5. “First, owner occupied houses pay a significant annual dividend in the form of free rent. According to Zillow, the average price to rent ratio in the U.S. is around 11, meaning that around 1/11th of the value of a house is saved each year in rent. If you stay in a house for 11 years, you save the equivalent of the price of the house in rent”
This is somewhat comforting for me personally. My home is still not worth anymore than I paid for it in ’07, in fact it could still be down a bit according to Zillow, not even accounting for inflation. But I only have another year to go before it made more sense to buy than rent.
BONUS!
Of course, that is ON AVERAGE, not in my particular case. It seems to me that high end homes don’t rent for as high a ratio as hovels in the ‘hood do.
Yes, this is the problem I have with it. There is no rental market for a lot of these homes at 11%. 2BR 2BA condos, yes, I can see it.
Forbes ignores the returns your trapped capital should have been earning… And compounding.
Forbes also conflates owner occupied housing with being a landlord. The output of a house is the stream of housing services if you are a landlord, you sell that stream–that’s an investment.
If you live in the house you are consuming 100% of the stream and must pay for repairs etc. the issue with owner occupied housing is that it usually causes people to overconsume and undersave.
I’ve found that the whole leverage thing offsets the foregone returns in the market.
@#5 – “According to Zillow, the average price to rent ratio in the US is around 11…” – sorry, contrary to what The Engineer thinks, this is not true, in big cities it is closer to 20 or 30. In small towns it may be much less, but who wants to own real estate there?
Real estate is a tough business. Unless you have over $9 M in net worth and real estate approaching that figure, as the 1%-er my family does, it’s probably better to stick with investing in stocks, or, perhaps if you’re a Man Without A Chest, like my fiend and follower Sam Fulsome is, just put your meagre savings in a Savings & Loan.
That’s cool that you actually have fiends at your bidding.
Since this is a link post, let me add one: In the raging multiverse wars one of the physicists uses an economic argument. It sounds plausible to me. See the comment by “Bee” in the discussion of this link: http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=9349
The problem that nobody seems to want to talk about is that rather than trying to find a minimal model that explains the data and leave it at this, there are many hundreds of models for inflation all of which are almost certainly wrong because they contain too many details that aren’t supported by data. As the philosophers have it, these models are severely underdetermined. (Good paper about this here.) —
Theoretical physicists produce these models literally because they can make money with it. They make money with it by getting them published and then using the publications to claim it’s relevant research so it’ll get funded and they can hire more postdocs to crunch out more papers. It’s the same reason why theorists invent dark matter particles and extensions of the standard model. It’s a way to make a living. —
Steinhardt & co have an issue with this because this overproduction crisis tends to crowd out alternative explanations. I agree that that’s a problem, but that doesn’t mean of course that Steinhardt’s alternative is a better explanation for the data… —
What’s really missing here is a scientific criterion to draw the line and say, look, at this point in time it entirely pointless to produce further variants of speculations because the data isn’t there and won’t be there for decades to come. But nobody in the community has an incentive to come up with such a criterion. That’s because along the line everyone makes money with this overproduction. It’s for this reason I’m putting my hope on philosophers to help us out because I find this situation pretty embarrassing for my discipline.
It is entirely pointless to produce further variants of speculations because the data isn’t there and won’t be there for decades to come.
This is the best link of the day. Is there something like this going on in other disciplines? Genetics?
Freddie deBoer is right that in much of the country, there is no large “bullpen” of people who can take the place of teachers who are fired. And that taking away tenure will make teaching less attractive, further decreasing potential supply of new teachers. Combined with not raising salaries, you have an unworkable situation.
No one talks about making teaching more attractive, i.e., increasing the compensating differential. I can think of two things that would make a big difference.
One is consistent back-up for “classroom management.” If a disruptive student is sent out, the administration must do something about him or her, not just send him or her back after some time has passed. If it happens too many times, the student never comes back but gets some alternative placement.
Second, teachers are not given the impossible task of teaching everyone from the extremely bright to the very stupid, from the extremely well-prepared to the very unprepared, from the very interested to the totally uninterested.
Alas, those gore sacred cows of inclusion and keeping age-peers together.
If I remember correctly, teaching was one of the most overproduced majors (graduates vs starting positions) ten years ago. I see that there has been a big decline.
http://neatoday.org/2016/03/15/future-teachers-at-all-time-low/
I wonder how that affects the current application / position ratio?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewbiggs/2015/08/13/is-there-really-a-teacher-shortage/
24 / 1 in Connecticut?
Teachers will be treated like “professionals” when they start acting like them.
In fact, teachers are not professionals. They are unionized labor, and that it what they act like.
The first thing to address any “shortage” is to get rid of the BS licensing restrictions that keep people from becoming teachers in the first place, or that keep teachers from one state from moving to another.
Teachers run the gamut, just like engineers. Some are punching the clock, and some are spending weekends studying new methods.
Not a huge fan of public employee unions.
I have a multitude of retired or near retirement female teachers in my family. I’m sure this has been said before, but we reaped a windfall of extremely hard working, intelligent labor for many years due to discrimination in the labor force.
Their daughters are now doctors, consultants, bankers, professors, etc etc. We trapped millions of top tier talent women in socially useful jobs. Which is morally wrong, and it is a huge boon to freedom that these women can follow whatever career path they so choose.
But yeah…the stock of labor we were pulling teachers from is not the same as it was in 1970.
Aligning incentives is a challenge in any industry, made all the worse by public sector unions. At the end of the day the taxpayer has little say or veto.
but we reaped a windfall of extremely hard working, intelligent labor for many years due to discrimination in the labor force.
Rubbish. Primary and secondary teachers account for 2.4% of the workforce and about 20% of them are male. Women accounted for about 1/3 of the workforce in 1957. The % of working women in the United States employed as teachers 60 years ago was in the single digits.
I was taught by women who entered the teaching profession in that era. I cannot recall any I’d have described as ‘extremely hard working’. I knew some who I’d have called intelligent. Hard work is something you find on farms and construction sites, not in classrooms.
If you’re relations are typical teachers on the cusp of retirement, they were born ca. 1958 and entered the trade ca. 1982. I’m not sure why you fancy the labor market in 1982 was peculiarly difficult for women qua women.
Compared to the demand, there is a greater supply of elementary school teachers than middle and high school teachers. One way to bring this more into balance would be to separate their salary schedules, i.e., pay more to middle and high school teachers relative to elementary teachers.
Fake News!
The article cites a decline in the intended college major of education, equating them to “future teachers.” In fact, a large proportion of teachers major in something else, due to the fact that education is a notoriously easy major and that just about anything else provides a better signal.(See the SAT scores of those ed majors.)
I’ll buy the “teacher shortage” when I see some evidence. My sister is a teacher, with views common to them: Leftism and a belief in this “teacher shortage.” For a year after gaining her certification she could not find a job. The following year she found a job teaching in one of the least desirable rural areas in the state, forcing her to move out there, to the intense frustration of her as a liberal.(She swore it was solely due to the rednecks, nothing to do with the fact that the district is 70% Hispanic.) Only this year did she find a job teaching in an area she wanted to.
And yet she remains a believer in the “teacher shortage,” when I asked her about her inability to find a job despite the “shortage,” she frowned and asked “What’s that got to do with it?” That’s the level of intelligence we’re dealing with here.
Since she’s your sister it’s a good bet her intelligence is very similar to yours.
Re disruptive students: my experience as a substitute teacher bears this out. I felt, as a non-educator, that the administration would understand when I sent a student to the office, it was because, presumably unlike the teacher I was filling in for, I hadn’t the experience or relationship built up to handle him/her. [After awhile, if you chanced to be around such a kid long enough, you maybe picked up on the “tricks” the teachers employed with them, how to predict their little triggers, massage their ego, and so on – like handling something delicate. But this you never had on first encounter.] I thought they would want to shield the school, if not me, from the consequences of the disruption.
But no, the kid was usually sent back to me in a matter of minutes. In hindsight, I now see that I took too seriously the imperative to actually get through the lessons the teacher had left. I would feel no such compunction now, and so perhaps disruption wouldn’t matter so much.
In middle school subbing I took to handing out the bathroom pass and saying, take your time, go the long way round, don’t hurry back. I had the sense never to venture into the high school.
Once a counselor – whom the teachers lived in fear of – even hinted that I, a sub who had known him an hour or two, should have a session of mutual discovery and understanding in her office with a particularly disruptive and manipulative brat. He and I had exchanged no words or had any sort of “incident” – my only interaction with him had been to acknowledge I couldn’t teach the class with him in it, and ask the office to allow him to hang out there. I kind of thought he’d be pleased, as the dynamic in the class was the other kids hating him, as kids tend to do an angry blowhard who yet cries a lot. I felt a little sorry for him having such an accursed personality, but was pretty sure validation was not the answer, and declined the counselor’s offer.
The disruptive kids, I saw, were a sort of hot potato, that no one wanted on their hands for long.
Increasing compensation only helps improve performance when you have some way of reliably picking who will perform better. And the only thing we have that does that is IQ tests.
And that taking away tenure will make teaching less attractive,
What if you have this backwards?
What if people would like to become teachers, but the fact that so much compensation is back-loaded into later years (like pensions that are worth zero at year 9 but hundreds of thousands in year 10) means that they don’t bother?
What if they don’t want to work with people who cannot be fired? I’ve worked jobs where management was too incompetent/shy to fire people, and it sucked.
There’s nothing special about teaching that is should have the bulk of its compensation hidden away beyond a gate only available to people who put in enough years. It should be much easier to get into and out of teaching.
Good comment
3. “The median teacher in this country makes ~$57,000 a year; the 75th percentile makes ~$73k, and the 25th percentile, ~$45k. Compare with median lawyer salaries well above $100,000 a year and median doctor salaries close to $200,000, or an average of $125,000+ for MBA graduates. So we’re not going to pay teachers more, and we’re going to sufficiently erode labor protections, if we’re going to dismiss those less effective teachers. This doesn’t sound like a good deal already.
Of course, teachers don’t just suffer from low median wages compared to people with similar levels of schooling.”
Teachers do not have “similar levels of schooling” as doctors, lawyers, and MBAs. A medical doctor has a… doctorate. Lawyers and MBAs have masters degrees.
Teachers have a bachelor degree. Yes, some go on to get masters degrees, mostly because of credentialism. Their union wage scale jumps up with education levels, so there is an incentive to get the higher degree. But there is absolutely no evidence that those degrees have any worth whatsoever. Certainly not as much as the jump in wages from getting the degree would suggest.
A great swath of society is uncomfortable with the idea that teaching k-12 is an entry-level job.
+1
Bog standard in New York is a bachelor’s degree in some subject conjoined to a four or five course certificate program. You’re permitted to teach with that for a run of years. You have to complete an MEd. to continue. The trouble is, the bachelor’s degree is commonly in ‘education’ and the content of such degrees may incorporate some useful methods courses but is often padded with junk. Again and again, you discover superintendents, principals and vice principals with very little post-secondary academic study in their past or extramural vocational training They’ve all got degrees in ‘education’ and ‘guidance and counseling’. They’re trained (in a way) to manage students, not to teach them much of anything.
The problem with that, per Thomas Sowell, is that the content of ‘education’ degrees (as a rule) makes them a dysfunctional screen. They don’t train teachers very well, but they do screen out people who cannot tolerate their inanity. See also Michelle Ker and KC Johnson on the machinations of people like Rachel Lotan and NCATE, who are working to incorporate required adherence to their witless social views into teacher certification programs. (LeMoyne College has had scandals relating to this).
One of the biggest problem with the American educational system is that both lawyers and doctors expect extra compensation due to the fact that they had to complete both college and graduate school.
In most places, law and medicine are degrees you do straight after high school, and the costs are a fraction thereof.
The only thing that the American system does is create a lot of costs, both direct and opportunity costs, which advantage the powerful, the privileged and the few. Think about the huge costs that go into the educational-credential complex – books on advices how to write admission essays, companies organizing volunteer experiences, SAT prep, LSAT prep, etc. and etc.
There is no evidence that doctors and lawyers in the UK, the most comparable EU country to the US, are any less competent for not having jumped through the endless hoops to get to law school or medical school.
Funnily enough every MD I have ever worked with from overseas also expects extra compensation. The average British MD earns around double the average British teacher (81,000 for a GP vs 41,000) for a teacher. The average American doctor makes around three times the average American teacher ($189,000 for a family med doc vs $57,000 for an American teacher). Places that do not have a high enough premium for doctor’s salaries tend to have a very large outflow of MDs to places that do.
This is always going to be the case. I can and have taught high school anatomy; I likely could master the needed body of material to teach any subject at the high school level or below in about six months. Mastering my job – even after you have undergrad, med school, and maybe a masters on the side – still takes you another few years; and that is after the selection filters of the MCAT and USMLE.
Now I grant there are some unnaturally gifted teachers who can inspire and run a classroom well who will always be better than anyone who just memorizes the material they need to cover. The problem is that I have seen zero evidence that such skills can currently be taught.
For the teachable skills, there are far more people that can master the bare minimum required to be a teacher than can master the bare minimum to become a doctor. That seems to hold across countries, political systems, cultures, etc. Supply and demand is always going favor doctors because people who can become doctors are more scarce than people who can become most other professions (though not as rare as star athletes).
This is why I doubt raising the wage of teachers will do much to improve quality on its own. Sure you may be able to get some very bright people to take the positions, but unless you can further incentivize actual performance, I suspect that once you put anyone into the current teaching situation they will drift toward the default performance if only because bucking the system is too painful.
Funny how the market apparently does nothing to alter those relative expectations. I’m sure the world would be a much better, more just place if only you would be appointed to set wages and prices (and, as far as teachers versus doctors and lawyers, the annual working hours, the amount of risk and responsibility assumed, etc).
I had Thomas Sowell as a teacher (Econ 1, UCLA 1975.)
It was generally accepted at the time he was the single worst professor in the department. If knowing something about what your commenting on is any kind of requirement, the last thing he should be talking about is education.
Sowell’s comment about screening for the inane squares completely with my experience of administrators of many stripes – it’s one of those things that should be obvious and yet required someone to point it out. To deaf ears, apparently, judging from the fad in my state of completely content-free “leadership” degrees. Anyone can read an Econ 101 textbook but if Sowell said three or four things that smart and memorable, he will have most college professors beat (admittedly, mine were mostly in the humanities – I did have a class with Ilya Prigogine, but I see now how sad and demeaning it was for him to have to lecture kids like me, and in any case his accent made it difficult to distinguish “reversible” and “irreversible,” among other things).
From my personal experience, Sowell did not have most college professors beat. In fact, he didn’t have any of my college professors beat and was right there with my high school German teacher who was awful.
“Those who can’t, teach. Those who can’t teach go to work at the Hoover Institution.”
From my personal experience, S
From my personal experience, people offering claims that an abnormally lucid commentator on public affairs is incapable of teaching introductory lecture courses are lying.
Doctors don’t have doctorates in the sense that you are implying. They have “professional doctorates”. It is a big difference and partially explains why they expect larger salaries.
“So: no higher salaries for a relatively low-paying profession, eroding the job security that is the most treasured benefit of the job, continuing to degrade and insult the current workforce as lazy and undeserving, getting rid of hundreds of thousands of them, and yet somehow attracting hundreds of thousands of more talented, more committed young workers to become teachers.
According to what school of economics, exactly, is such a thing possible?”
I am no fan of the education reform crap and think teachers are not the problem, but this is easily possible if you ease up on the barriers to entry for teachers.
but this is easily possible if you ease up on the barriers to entry for teachers.
So there exist “hundreds of thousands of more talented, more committed young workers” who are raring to become low-status, lowly-paid, teachers, but for “barriers to entry”? What are those barriers?
Licensure and the education credentials required for it. Mostly courses of dubious value in education.
who are raring to become low-status, lowly-paid, teachers
Typical cash compensation for academic secondary schoolteachers puts them at about the 75th percentile of the workforce, and this in an occupation where the fringe benefits are quite good.
While we’re at it, the mean annual compensation for nearly every category of school teacher is within 4% of that which prevails for academic secondary teacher. The exceptions are various sorts of pre-school teacher.
#3. “… I would gladly pay the better teachers more, if that meant firing the lemons…” – as long as it wasn’t your money being spent. There is so much wrong with your perspective. What constitutes a “better teacher” or “lemon”? Is it something which persists over time or does it vary by student, subject, and context? Does a great teacher ever fail to reach all of his/her students? Is the better teacher for my kids the same as the better teacher for yours? Does a better teacher ever have an off-day, month or year? Do they burn out? Is a better teacher more likely to burn out than a mediocre one? Is there really an argument that the skill set for a 1st Grade teacher and a High School Advanced Placement Chemistry teacher don’t have enormous differences? Or their personalities, minimum EQ, IQ, and enthusiasm? IMHO, part of the problem, MOST of the problem, is idiots posting nonsense suggesting the fix to our broken educational system is as easy as separating the wheat from the chaff, or
“gladly paying them more”…
All your kvetches of “how can we possibly manage teachers” have been dealt with for generations by other professionals.
Good teachers are experienced teachers…. like writing, swimming, or playing piano, it’s a job where the longer you do it, the better you get at it. And contrary to what some people think, you have to be a very particular kind of person to persist in this job when you are not good at it… every time I do a bad job teaching a lesson or managing behavior, my students revolt, I have to reteach the lesson, and I have to spend MORE following up on behavior issues after the fact. The only way to NOT hate the job is to either get better at it, or to give up entirely and give every student an “A” or “B” without attempting to teach them (which students love, of course).
Make sure teachers are actually teaching by walking through their classrooms frequently… penalize teachers who have given up on teaching… encourage mentoring and peer-teaching so you can leverage the staff you already have and avoid paying high consultant’s fees for PD… this issue of ineffective teaching will solve itself over time, because it’s not rewarding to teach when you are not good at teaching, and if you are teaching every day, you WILL improve.
The statistics I’ve seen indicate that teaching effectiveness doesn’t improve much after the first 3-5 years. And even then a good deal of the seeming increase is due to ineffective teachers leaving the profession. As you say, “it’s not rewarding to teach when you are not good at teaching.”
First and second year teachers don’t have all the skills of more experienced teachers but they partly make up for it with energy and optimism (and, I suspect, fear). At least that was my experience in many years as a high school teacher.
Sounds about right, though I see teachers with more than 3-5 years experience doing more of the heavy lifting in school leadership… leading department meetings, mentoring, organizing the prom, organizing school assemblies, arranging scholarship opportunities for students, providing a sense of continuity and stability that students can sense, etc.
Unless they are extremely competent, most beginning teachers don’t have the time or institutional knowledge to take on a lot of additional challenges outside of teaching their classes (and maybe running an afterschool club). And that seems like the way it should be, that during your first few years you should concentrate on building up your core skills before you stretch yourself too thin with too many other responsibilities.
I wouldn’t doubt at all that you are right about the stats, though.
I remember reading this https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/10/why-kids-should-grade-teachers/309088/, which suggests that having kids evaluate teachers is effective, even at fairly young ages. It’s from 2012, so not sure if the results still hold up.
Like the Lucas Critique, this feels like something where you would get good results until you relied on them.
Most of my cohorts in high school knew which teachers sucked and which ones were excellent. But if you gave us the power to decide their fate? Geeze, that’s a different ball game.
If spiders had gods, they would be giant webs in the sky (whatever that meant for a spider) just as metal-age humans fathom a builder god and computer programmers fathom a coder god (i.e. the universe is a simulation).
3. Value-added in K-12 education is a function of the joint “quality” (including effort) of parents, students, teachers.
Like V = P.S.T
Yes a better teacher makes for a higher V, everything else equal. Good luck measuring the values of P and S at the level of the individual class with statistical validity. And it gets worse, since there are negative as well as positive externalities of human capital a few bad students can screw up an entire class for a whole year. Compared to this measuring the value added of individual physicians should be a piece of cake.
Seems a bit related to Item 6 — spirders and their webs.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-theory-of-reality-as-more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts-20170601/
Does make me wonder about markets, globalization, trading blocks, trade barriers and verticial integration themes.
#3 the worst teacher that I had in K-12 schools, my mother also had 30 years earlier. he could not control a class at all. Sad for him, but I doubt that is effected my education. He was a science teacher.
“The median teacher in this country makes ~$57,000 a year; the 75th percentile makes ~$73k, and the 25th percentile, ~$45k. Compare with median lawyer salaries well above $100,000 a year and median doctor salaries close to $200,000, or an average of $125,000+ for MBA graduates. So we’re not going to pay teachers more, and we’re going to sufficiently erode labor protections, if we’re going to dismiss those less effective teachers. This doesn’t sound like a good deal already.”
Some people are willing to teach children for free, far fewer would do lawyer work or boring business work for free. I am fine with paying teachers more but when get away for supply and demand like that you can create some odd problems. On example, when I was looking for a schools for my boys one school boasted an MD teaching a class each week, I think it was biology. He was not doing it for the money.