Education in the United States

Inso's basic premise is that "No child left behind" pretty much guarantees all children are left behind. As a minority of bad actors can and do compromise the education of the majority, regardless of money spent. And the main value of private/quasi-private schooling is the ability to exclude the bad student minority.

I know teachers are underpaid in a lot of "right to starve" states. But in CA public school teachers are actually pretty well payed (avg high school teacher $72k/yr), and the fact they still have trouble finding teachers is a testament to how difficult the job is made by public school policies.

Yeah and once it becomes private you can be damn sure companies will be looking to cut costs to improve margin. I know the flip side is you can cut the fat on the underperforming teachers, competition, etc... but in the case of it being guaranteed money from the government and not the free market, I'll stay cynical that providing the best product is going to be their main objective.

Private schools should never receive public money. It's to the point now, GOP have achieved their goal in the capture of education $$$. It really might be easier to do away with the Department of Education than try to provide education to our children. Which is sad because it shows how far beyond repair American politics is.

Sure but the gap in outcomes has more to do with the students being upper middle income (and associated benefits) than schools themselves.

This is just factually true, at least in terms of school spending per capita. But we all know school isn’t all of a child’s educational environment.

Private charter schools have proven to be good tools in regulating/reforming school districts. DC even found a way to make them focus on outcomes by ranking charter schools annually.

There are models that work. What some advocates for private charters/vouchers won’t like is the models that have worked so far have so much monitoring the the lines between private and public are very blurry.

How is it not blatantly obvious that Republicans' beef with public education is a grift? The education Department was headed by Betsy Devos. Republicans have been trying to kill public schools since integration and they've succeeded while making their buds richer.

I think you are correct in assuming that long-term the voucher system (that does not call for any public school closures) will result in public schools closures because nearly everyone knows that most parents care about their children and therefore will send them to the much better private schools.

I can't think of one sector that the govt has competed against the private sector in and has actually succeeded. The longer you and others like you hold out hope for the govt to fix themselves in education is another year we aren't giving kids the opportunities they deserve.

It my view I think teachers are one of the most overpaid professions in the US. However, I am factoring in all benefits and not just their salary. In many states that are able to retire super early and live off a very generous pension - a combination almost unheard of for most professions. On top of that they famously do not work near as long as most other professions on an annual basis.

It's because low SES students are terrible and not fixable on average as discussed some weeks ago.

But at least voucher schools allow the portion of low SES students which aren't terrible a chance to a normal education.

You will still have plenty of utter failures because there is no policy to fix the quality of low income, low SES, single parent household students.

Especially with assortative mating at the highest level ever.

There is no policy to fix this

Teachers are underpaid, where you want to fill position and you don't with the currently offered wages and benefits.

Teachers are overpaid, where you have long queues of applicants to teachers position well in excess of job offerings, more than for other job offerings in the economy on average.

What is what might be very different depending on the subject taught, the grade, and mostly local area wages and benefits for teachers, and for other jobs.

It isn't a matter of opinion, we can't go with "underpaid!" Because a number looks low to us or "overpaid!" Because wages+ benefits for the effort look too high for us.

Because it's not a grift, it's an attempt to dismantle a democrat power source, as public teachers unions are a core pillar of the democrat party.

Yes and what keeps the quality decent is the competition like for literally every other good or service of decent quality you can access in the economy.

Food stamps are guaranteed money from the government to buy a necessary good, their existence does NOT make supermarkets inefficient.

The main objective is always to make money, providing a good price/quality option to customers is how you make money.

Btw in the meanwhile you have people raking in the money whose objective is simply to elect people who will increase their salaries, decrease their work load, and let them retire with higher pensions.

And the customer (the student) can go **** himself in the process

Compensation varies greatly by state and district. Teaching is a notorious passion industry filled with people that aren't primarily motivated by money.

I don't think the answer is to take money from the people working in the cushy districts, and I wouldn't consider them overpaid. They may put in fewer hours than other certified professionals, but they have an important task and society should reward them for doing it well. The only people in the teaching industry that are actually overpaid are at the college level, but it's certainly not every one of them. Making $200k for teaching 2 classes at a technical college without any research work in your downtime is bonkers.

The suburban districts have hundreds of applicants per open position not because the pay is so fantastic, but because you can actually do your job out there. Teachers may not be motivated by the pay, but they still gotta eat. If you lower the pay even further, you're at risk of drying up the already lacking pipeline for future talent.

The teachers who flee the urban schools are already taking a pay cut to do so. I'm sure there's a dollar amount that'll get some of them to tough it out, but it would be less expensive to society to just cut out the cancer. Those kids are already on a path to prison, so just skip the wait. Condemning 100% of students to failure because 15% cannot behave themselves is just insane to me.

We may also need to force low income families to send their kids to preschool. If you're not caught up to the standard for literacy by 1st or 2nd grade, you shouldn't be allowed to move on. You get to do it again, and literacy becomes the primary focus of your time in school. Bus all of these failed 2nd graders to a central location if you have to. But you can mitigate this risk by forcing pre-school in lower income zip codes to make up for the lack of at-home learning.

I think the reason there are places where they are having trouble finding teachers isn't because of the total compensation package. I think it is because of poor marketing on the job of schools trying to attract new teachers and because schools don't support their teachers enough in teacher vs parents disputes. I think the #1 fix should be to eliminate all pensions and up the take home pay and then market how few hours teachers actually work. The schools should also either A) market to the potential new teachers that they have incredible job security and it doesn't matter how poor they do at their job or B) stop paying all teachers the same based off their years of experience and start paying them based on how good they are.

The voucher system would quickly kick bad teachers to the curb and the good teachers pay would sky rocket as schools compete to attract them.

GOP opposes education, defunds it, fights tooth and nail to make it suck since racial desegregation.

...

Trump, known for running scam universities himself, becomes president. He appoints DeVos to run education. She has financial interest for profit education institutions that are known to be fraudulent. She changed regulations on the for profit schools she makes money from directly.

...

Grifters scurry about to spin up as many crappy "schools" as they can that employ temps and bare minimum staff with no lesson plans...

....

Grifters profit, school's disappear, children suffer, tax dollars evaporate.

We're pulling up the ladder on everyone. Public education is one of the only things that actually allows upward social mobility.

Only until they discover teachers matter little for educational outcomes, except at the extremes (very bad teachers and exceptional teacher matter some).

Schools will quickly discover they just need to spend to attract the best students (and be superstrict to kick away the problem students) and that matters insanely more than everything else for educational outcomes.

But teaching math wouldn't be paid the same as teaching english

But that doesn't do anything for us. The best students will succeed and everyone else will be tossed aside. We need a system where marginal students become successful students. Yes, the worst of the worst can't be fixed, I get that. But we need to put in the extra effort to turn the ones around that can be.

It makes us a better society and breaks the cycle for a lot of families.

It does, the normie from low income areas attending the school with the good students will perform decently (at his normie levels), instead of horribly as it does in the terrible school with terrible students currently.

The effort is basically about that, having normie spots in the bright students schools, and giving up completly for the bottom of the pile

What, why?

It takes more money to attract qualified math teachers.

Unlike English majors, math majors don't really have a hard time finding other high paying jobs.

Oh, right, yeah, that makes sense. I thought Luciom meant they'd be paid less.

it's very clearly just this.

this sounds like a guy that gives bonuses in pizza parties to his employees...

You are judging teachers effects on kids' education in a system where teachers have no incentive beyond doing the bare minimum (they are typically paid for their years of service - not the quality of their work). The current system compared to the voucher system is the equivalent of going from socialism to capitalism.

As I said the voucher system puts a hell of a lot of power in the hands of parents/kids and takes it away from politicians and the teachers union (hints why neither of these groups supports the vouchers). If parents start saying I want a school that can turn my marginal student into a successful student then schools are going to work hard to do that so they can then use their results in ads to attract more kids.

Well if republicans would actually care about the teachers and working class in general it wouldn’t be so …

That’s actually how democracy work .
You vote for those that benefits you , when you actually are informed enough to know who actually benefits you ….but many on a certain sides of the aisle can’t even read a chart !

From a guy that probably wouldn’t last a year in the teaching sphere ….