> Is there anything to prevent the pay for our most important and meaningful jobs from approaching zero?
The real blackpill here is that there's very little evidence that teachers matter at all. I mean somebody has to be there to supervise the kids and read from the workbook and it'd be nice if it were somebody trustworthy and reliable, so we might want to require proxies for that (like a 4-year degree), but beyond that the evidence just isn't there that it matters that much.
I reject the entire premise, in other words. Teachers do work that needs to be done, but they aren't individually important and almost anybody can do it. That's why the work isn't more remunerative. (Although it actually pays quite well (in the U.S. at least) for what it is.)
Some of my teachers regressed me. Some of my teachers SAVED me.
In particular, at a formative age (and when we only had one teacher for all subjects):
- 8 year old: I still feel very uncomfortable (and really quite sad), when I think of my classroom experience. Horrible. I regressed and was getting Ds and Es. The teacher was dismissive and belittling. I stagnated socially.
- 9 year old: Average teacher / no particular change.
- 10 year old: Incredible teacher that brought me from D/E to A/B, but more importantly brought me out of my shell.
Perhaps others in my 8YO class had different experiences, but regardless - I can't reconcile your statement "there's very little evidence that teachers matter at all" to my experience.
Perhaps you're meaning 'in terms of skill level', and perhaps increased wages wouldn't correlate to 'better' teachers as I am defining 'better'. But 'they aren't individually important and almost anybody can do it' doesn't strike me as true at all.
Edit: Also, I was having.... a bad time, at home and outside of it (No shade on my parents). I am so thankful of my 10YO teacher. They were the only person able to see it and in a position to help, and help they did (as much as could be done).
That is not at all what GP is saying. What they said, very clearly, is they believe anyone who can stand in front of a class, maintain some control, and read from a workbook is equal to all other people who can do the same.
Ridiculous claim IMO and is dismissible on the basis of most people’s own experiences, but that’s what they’re claiming.
Sometimes if I go into the same coffee shop every day for a couple years I will develop a rapport with one of the baristas and, of course, I like some of them better than others. Maybe one in ten ends up being so nice that they are memorable.
But none of that changes that new baristas can be trained to do their job in a few days and almost anybody can do the work.
Your claim is closer to “there’s no difference between a good and bad barista.” Of course there is. And of course closing the gap between a good and bad barista is much easier than closing the gap between a good and bad teacher.
If you take any person off the street and have them make you a cappuccino, you will absolutely regret it. But apparently you don’t believe this is true of teaching children?
All your evidence points to a much, much simpler explanation: most teachers are just average, and even exceptionally good or bad teachers can have their own exceptionalism overpowered by other factors.
This does not mean it would be wise or yield just-as-good or better results by throwing any person off the street into this role, which would be the natural implication of “it doesn’t matter which individuals you put in front of the classroom.”
What's interesting about this to me is just how obvious it is that somebody with 99th-percentile verbal skills and the ability to explain difficult topics clearly should be doing what that second guy is doing, not working one-on-one with individual students.
I think you might be right for general education. But in more free market economies (take Indian high and higher secondary education for instance), the right teachers command a market premium for their ability to successfully either identify children who will do best on entrance exams or train them into those.
Coaching classes are effectively highly paid teaching jobs though the majority of teachers are not paid well.
This perhaps points to the idea that this market is near winner take all. I was hoping that remote education would have transformed teaching into a perfect winner take all.
However, it looks like the "keeping order" part is significant. Perhaps there are many children who need to be bootstrapped into self-directedness. I know I had to be. But I was by my parents.
I agree, there are hundreds of comments in this post, which is not at all unusual for these kinds of societal topics, yet very few actually clarified the basics.
The goals, desires, motivations, assumptions, etc., of the various parties and groups involved.
Without this, the vast majority of effort seems to be spent going in circles. Some might be convinced from position A to B, some might be convinced from position B to C, and some might be convinced from position C to A.
I went to what I assume was a fairly typical U.S. public school (if maybe a little smaller than average) and, sure, I had some teachers I liked better than others, but I don't think any of them made any difference. (And remember, the argument here isn't that the player on the field never caught a popup; it's that they didn't do it any better than any other random person could have.)
In fact, since my town was pretty small, I actually started kindergarten with a lot of the same people I graduated high school with, so I knew these people across their entire primary and secondary educational experiences. And, basically, things more or less shook out exactly how you could have predicted if you'd just have given my entire kindergarten class IQ tests and pre-registered SAT/ACT scores on that one data point.
Yeah I went to public school in San Francisco and the consensus among my friends (in high school) was that fully half our teachers were quite literally insane. Like "should be in an institution (not a school)" crazy.
We felt that the fact that the adults in the situation (parents, teachers, the PTA, the school admin, the Education System up to the Board of Education, and society en mass didn't do something about this, that instead our teachers were half of a insane asylum, really put a damper on our enthusiasm for the whole thing.
That’s just evidence that relative performance within a group is not affected when the entire group goes through roughly the same experiences. This is obviously true and is completely orthogonal to “the individual teachers don’t matter.”
That would be true except that we see the same thing across school districts. (There’s no evidence that teacher ability predicts district-level outcomes, either.)
The real blackpill here is that there's very little evidence that teachers matter at all. I mean somebody has to be there to supervise the kids and read from the workbook and it'd be nice if it were somebody trustworthy and reliable, so we might want to require proxies for that (like a 4-year degree), but beyond that the evidence just isn't there that it matters that much.
I reject the entire premise, in other words. Teachers do work that needs to be done, but they aren't individually important and almost anybody can do it. That's why the work isn't more remunerative. (Although it actually pays quite well (in the U.S. at least) for what it is.)