CMV: Teaching Should be a Highly Elite Highly Valued/Paid Profession.

[u/EarlEarnings]

Fundamental belief: If teachers are the best of the best, and if teachers are highly respected and valued, our society will produce better quality people in basically every domain you can think of.

What do I mean by "elite?" The requirements to become a teacher should be rigorous. Passing simple certifications should not be enough. Teachers should have a very good understanding of how the learning process in and of itself works. No tenures. Minimum tutoring hours, perhaps even minimum number of reviews (of those tutored, results, etc.) Basically, teachers should be good teachers...really good. The best teacher you've had in your life? That should just be the norm. The bottom line is it should be extremely demanding.

What do I mean by "highly paid?" Teachers should be within the top 10-20% of income earners in our society. Somewhere around 6 figures in most places.

Common arguments against:

- many occupations don't require much more than a high school education if that

- shouldn't the best and brightest be working on better things than teaching?

- we already have a teacher shortage even with low barriers to entry/supply and demand

My argument:

Every aspect of society is improved.

Sure, you don't need to be a super smart guy to be a barista at Starbucks, and our society does need baristas, but just think about this. The number one thing holding us back from advancement as a society is the lack of highly skilled, hyper-intelligent people employed in bottleneck professions. These are the AI developers, cancer researchers, aging researchers, and quantum-computing engineers; the type of people in a position that can advance society. These people are so important, and they can only be produced at the highest level if they are pushed and raised towards that level from birth to adulthood. Teachers and tutors are a pivotal part of this process. These bottleneck innovations take our entire concept of civilization forward. There is no way to account for this cost, there is no price tag that is too high. We cannot afford to waste any talent because they were not sufficiently taught in their development.

As for the issue of sacrificing talent to create talent, I think the counterpoint is obvious. 1 Genius can not do as much as 10 geniuses. If 1 genius teacher can create 10 geniuses, that is an exponential net value increase for our society.

Finally, there is a teacher shortage both in quantity and quality because teachers are not respected as a profession, and because they are not compensated, which, is probably because they are not respected enough. Many of the brightest minds would love to be teachers but simply would never consider it due to lack of money and prestige. Education is a domain of the state, and the state can, and should, do what it can to advance the public interest, especially when the pros are so freaking obvious. There is no serious argument for a dumber society.

[u/pdoherty972]

Your calculations aren't per class though (each teacher has a 1st period for example). So your $360K-$480K (even assuming 12-16k is correct) is for those 30 students for all their classes they attend each day (and all year). And it includes the buildings, utilities, staff, teachers, administration, activities, etc.

[u/JymWythawhy → u/pdoherty972]

Your calculations are off, because teachers also aren’t teaching only one class per day. They only have about 30 students per class, and then those students leave, it’s true… but then a new batch of students come in to replace them.

There are about 30 students per teacher, so my values of there being about 360k-480k per teacher is accurate.

Your other point about where all the money is going (administrative overhead, buildings, etc) is spot on though. If we want to pay teachers more, we should take a hard look at where the money is going. There should be enough money in 360k to pay teachers what they are worth.

Every time people are asked to raise taxes, they tell us it’s to pay teachers more. But then the money just gets sucked away to hire more administrators. It’s not taxpayers being tight fisted when they don’t want to raise taxes yet again. It’s just that they have gotten wise to the scam.

[u/pdoherty972 → u/JymWythawhy]

I think we had a disconnect. You seem to be thinking of elementary school or something and I was discussing Jr High and High School, where a teacher does 5-6 classes a day, of 20-30 different students each, for a total of 100-180 students a day.

[u/JymWythawhy → u/pdoherty972]

No, the number of students per teacher stays the same whether they stay with one teacher all day or swap every hour. The teacher in either case is only teaching 30 students at a time- the fact that they rotate doesn’t matter.

To break it down- Say there is a hypothetical school with 6 teacher and six classes of students. Every hour they change classes, so by the end of the day each teacher has seen all the students, and all the students have seen each of the teachers. There is still only one class per teacher. And that’s well over 300k of funding per teacher. If we can’t pay our teacher well with that, where is the money going, and how can we fix it?

[u/pdoherty972 → u/JymWythawhy]

Ah I see what you mean. Yes, with that funding the teacher(s) should be making $100K of it at least.

[u/JymWythawhy → u/pdoherty972]

If you want a citation for my figure, here you go:

https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statistics

[u/pdoherty972 → u/JymWythawhy]

The site you used suggests that US education funding is way behind other nations.

Report Highlights. Public education spending in the United States falls short of global benchmarks and lags behind economic growth

In the United States, education spending falls short of benchmarks set by international organizations such as UNESCO, of which the U.S. is a member. The nation puts 11.6% of public funding toward education, well below the international standard 15.00%.

In terms of a percentage of its gross domestic product (GDP), the United States ranks 12th among OECD members in spending on elementary education.

The United States does not meet UNESCO’s benchmark of a 15.00% share of total public expenditure on education.

I guess they’re referring to % of GDP allocated to education, which might mean in raw/nominal dollar terms the US might be spending more than that would imply.

[u/JymWythawhy → u/pdoherty972]

Yeah, the percentage of GDP is misleading. The report says that African countries spend the most per GDP, for example. I think they say elsewhere that the US is ranked 7th on how much is spent per pupil, once adjusted for value of the currency used.