But most of his students are "high-school students looking to boost their scores on South Korea's version of the SAT."

So is the article really about a $4m/yr teacher?

Or a $4m/yr test prep guru?

Test-prep is a HUGE industry in the USA.

"Princeton Review" alone pulled down ~$150,000,000 in 2012.(1)

John Katzman, a Princeton grad, founded it in 1981.

So we've already tread this right?

And the major criticism of Princeton review and other testing houses is that they drastically skew the balance of the tests by (a) Giving privileged kids an unfair advantage (b) Damaging the test integrity which is designed to find bright kids, not just "well prepared for this one day" kids.

So that's not really that unique and, in fact, we've got a long history of how this type of market has under-served the US' own system.

But great headline, got me to click.

(1) http://www.wbjournal.com/article/20100830/PRINTEDITION/30830...

Either a test is important, or it is not important.

If it is not important, it is a waste of everyone's time and money, and ought to be scrapped.

If it is important, people will obviously try to game it.Therefore all tests should be resistant to gaming: the only way to do well at the test should be to actually be good at whatever the test is trying to measure. If a test doesn't have this proprty, it should also be scrapped, for the reasons you state and also because it is a waste of time and money.

I don't blame Princeton review for bad tests, I blame the people setting the tests.

Privileged kids often had live-in tutors, called governesses. Governesses would teach children foreign languages, musical instruments, and poetry, and other subjects. For a time, being a governess was one of the only ways a middle class single woman could support herself, no matter how brilliant she was. One such governess was named Marie Curie.

In the U.S there was a "brain drain" to other professions. The U.S does not recruit top students to become teachers in the same way that other European countries do, nor does it pay them as well or provide as many benefits. This is one of the reasons that the U.S has fallen in the international rankings.

When I was preparing to run for the Jersey City Board of Education, I spent a lot of time studying that district, specifically, the pay scales, promotion criteria and other structural issues relating to teacher benefits and recruitment, including the union contracts. The single biggest problem that public schools typically face (especially in large urban districts) is that any attempt to reward based on merit (regardless of criteria) is met with fierce, almost violent opposition by the teacher's unions. I know this first hand because a big part of my platform was eliminating seniority pay entirely. I received death threats, but I also received some strong support, mostly from frustrated parents.

The opposition to my position on seniority pay was under the guise that "experienced teachers are an asset to schools and we should pay them accordingly." However, under a pure merit pay system, the more experienced, senior teachers should theoretically be the most meritorious, so they would make more if they were, in fact "better." Obviously, that isn't the case, hence the impassioned opposition.

The opposition to merit pay is not based specifically on the system by which merit is determined, but simply the overall concept of merit pay. The reason is simple, most urban school districts are staffed with a high percentage of people that have no business anywhere close to a classroom, let alone actually teaching in it. During the public comments portion of the Jersey City school board meetings, I would hear teachers complaining about some policy or another and the grammar, body language and word choices used by these "teachers" is not unlike one would expect to find in a prison yard. A teacher ought to be able to, at minimum conjugate "to be" correctly, especially when addressing a public meeting! A complete embarrassment. I'm not saying all teachers in Jersey City are like that, but the many of the highly vocal ones that attempt to pull the political strings in that city certainly are. So any thought of merit pay to them is a direct assault on their cushy position.

In the Jersey City teachers union contract, teachers must arrive no later than 8am and can leave at 3pm. They work no more than 183 days per year, with all holidays off, plus the summers. The average salary is $68,000, for a 7 hour work day, which, discounting lunch is more like 6 hours. The get very nice health plans, pensions, 10 sick days, 3 (or maybe 5, I can't remember) personal days among other benefits. Teachers are hardly underpaid. When I taught at a nice private school in China, I had 9 hour days, making less than half the money with no summers off -- and the students there far outperformed any students I ever taught in the US. Teacher pay has nothing to do with it. Parents in the US aren't as involved and even when they are involved, the machinery of the school bureaucracy make change almost glacial. In China (and when i was in Korea before that,) if a school gets parent complaints, that teacher would likely be fired. In the US, schools never fire teachers over parent complaints. So as a parent, what's the point? It takes an act of Congress to even get your kid transferred to another classroom. Parents in the US are powerless because there is no school choice and there's no market-incentives for schools.

The problem isn't that we don't pay teachers enough -- we pay them what the market will support, the problem is that bad or mediocre teachers are almost impossible to fire. It costs New York city an AVERAGE of $250,000 to fire a teacher. So unless a bad teacher quits or unless there is an obvious dereliction (i.e. criminal activity,) a teacher is pretty much guaranteed lifetime employment.

Wow, teachers in jersey city don't do prep or grading? Sign me up!

> In China, if a school gets parent complaints, that teacher would likely be fired.

Now you are just talking crazy (disclaimer: long term expat in china). My wife had a nice laugh at that one, I don't think you really understand Chinese PUBLIC schools. I don't want to spoil it for you, but the Chinese education system is way much more messed up than the American one, especially when non special schools that 99% of the population without money or guanxi attends.

The problem with education politics is that people like you love to totally distort the issues. Ya, there are problems on both sides, but we aren't even having honest debates yet.

His was about the closet to an honest debate yet. I also lived in China, and let's be honest, kids from elite families are not in public schools. They go to private schools where they get a superior education and teachers that are subject to much more scrutiny. That being said, as in the US, public schools in wealthier districts are measurably better than poorer districts. I remember walking into a public school in Tongchuan near Xi'an that was nothing more than a tiny wooden frame with aluminum for the ceiling and siding. That was in sharp contrast to a school outside of my apartment in Beijing in Haidian Qu where most of the elite universities are which sported computers, modern facilities, and well educated teacher. Not too much different than a public school in Palo Alto as an example.

Your comment however is more a deflection than addressing the real issue which is teacher quality and whether teachers should be evaluated and paid according to performance. Taking the though further, would a free-market education system rather than the current public system be a better option for improving educational results? That would be a more interesting conversation to have, if you are willing to participate.

Private schools are technically not allowed except for special subjects (after school) and to teach expat kids (aka international schools, though they take some Chinese students also). Also, where you live doesn't determine where you go to school always, especially if you don't have hukou. So a farmer can't just move to Beijing to have their kids enroll in nice Beijing schools. A farmer could move to palo alto however, and take advantage of palo alto schools. The system in china just fails horribly for most of the kids, and you probably know that.

Lets have an honest debate about education in the states instead of throwing up examples that are probably more screwed up than the USA. Only a few countries in western Europe honestly do better than us; even Singapore and Hong Kong have huge warts.

A pure free market system is just going to lead to sad form of libertarian feudalism. The problem with schools is that the rich kids continue to do well, the poor kids do bad, with little social mobility that the schools should be enabling. Any solution had to look at helping kids that need help the most rather than help rich parents game the system for their maximum benefit.

The real debate we should be having is whether our nation can continue to have a publicly funded education system that supports improving quality and can be a platform that provides any child regardless of economic class an opportunity to receive a quality education. I believe it can, but the situation as it stands today, particularly in poorer districts is not encouraging.

By the way, "public" and "private" are distinctions that I have found to be rather loose in China. Let's just say that the class system is alive and healthy post-Mao...

Low quality, sure, but corrupt? The USA is not china or India, our schools are pretty incorrupt even if incompetent. Getting rid of public education in the states would destroy American society as we know it. We will become more like Mexico, brazil, or South Africa, with the rich hiring body guards and living in fortresses to keep out the crime; thankfully it's is easy to get a gun in the states. We ignore the fact that even our imperfect system is better than the crappy libertarian alternative.

I'm sure teacher unions are part of the problem, but lazy parents who blame the unions for the whole problem are just idiots. Finland has teacher unions and they do very good at education. The problems we have are cultural, but deep down inside, the parents are happy to blame the unions and kept things the way they are, like a republican congress they just want to complain, point out their scapegoat, and make sure no improvements actually happen.

Right, the farmer has to live in palo alto somehow to get education for ther kids, but plenty of farmers live in Beijing and their kids get squat.

Having grown up in the inner city, there were plenty of parents that did not care, they were too busy wallowing in the despair of poverty. But there were plenty of other parents that fought to get their kids a better education and were stymied by a system that simply did not appreciate or care for feedback or parental participation. So those that could afford it sent their kids to Catholic schools, the only place left in NYC to ensure kids got a decent education. I was fortunate enough to be one of those kids, but my parents stretched to make the tuition. Today, it is even worse as parochial schools shut down and magnet schools are not able to meet the rising demand by parents fed up with the public options and desperate for alternatives.

This is not an honest debate. Obviously you are coming from one particular viewpoint and I am coming from another. Part of it might be political views and part might be personal interactions with the US educational system. I have children now in public school and can see how misaligned incentives have created a system that simply does not rewards quality.

As for bringing up Finland, that is a country that has less people than Chicago, a completely different culture, and a homogeneous population. What works there simply does not translate (just as the hagwons in Korea do not translate to the US). What does translate however is making quality the pinnacle for reshaping the US education system, something that oddly liberals resist. Instead they protect the unions and the status quo and that sounds like the camp you support.

The issue isn't distorted by the way, the fact still stands: teachers aren't working 60 hours weeks and they aren't working year round and they're getting paid based not on outcomes but based on seniority. If they happen to have advanced degrees, they get paid for that, regardless of their performance. That would be like paying Obie Fernandez for less for Rails development just because he doesn't have an advanced degree and paying someone with an IT degree from the University of Phoenix more by virtue of the degree itself as opposed to capabilities or past performance.

I really don't care what teachers get paid, however they should be paid based on outcomes and not just because they've survived the system the longest.

First, you come off as highly dismissive of teachers in general. Grammar, body language, word choice, and even the way someone conjugates "to be" is often linked to a person's ethnicity, socioeconomic status, or cultural group. To compare that to the language found in "a prison yard" is insulting and makes me think you're more focused on judging how these teachers speak than on addressing the actual concerns they raised.

Likewise, your calculation on how many hours teachers work is a best-case estimate. I'm not a teacher but I know many, and I went to public school. So I know just how often teachers get to school 30mins to an hour early to prep, work through their lunches, and stay hours after to help students, grade tests, write letters of recommendation, meet with parents, and host clubs or coach sports. And then there are the multiple days at the end of each quarter when teachers work through nights and weekends putting together progress reports. Do you want to factor that into your estimate?

Also, I'm not sure how it is in Jersey City, but most teachers I know spend hundreds of dollars out of their own money on supplies each year because school districts don't have the cash to pay for pencils and paper and other basic supplies.

What school boards need is not someone who is antagonistic to teachers, but someone who is willing to work with them.

As far as "not having the cash" it's interesting how the Jersey City Teacher's Union president earns his FULL teaching salary paid by the taxpayers yet is the full-time union president ALSO making a salary from the Union. He has his own office, paid for by the school district and has zero educational responsibilities.

Blame the union. If you just took his $100K+ salary (and benefits) that could fund 1000 teachers' supplies for a year.

Let's not forget the Jersey City Schools has a 630 MILLION dollar yearly budget and a central office filled with people with no-show jobs. You spend some time going through the line items of the budget and perhaps you'd see the light.

What the teaching system needs is someone to upend the current system, which is essentially held for ransom by the education labor mafia. The reason teachers spend out of pocket is not because there is no money, it is because money that should be benefitting students goes to support poor institutional practices such as keeping poor performing teachers in the system, supporting generous benefits, and frivolous spending on administrative costs. And the parents that send their children to these institutions are powerless to change this or have any impact. All of this is the cost of succumbing to the teacher unions.

We should be glad you do not live in Jersey City. We need voters willing to elect people in place to buck the current system. While you might mistakenly believe the commenter is dismissive of teachers, what I see is someone willing to stand up for quality teachers who still care about their craft and care about the children they teach.

-Mark Twain

It is even more dire that than. The pool of teacher candidates is already compromised since the students pursuing education majors are already the poorest performing of any other college major. Even discounting for the worst performers never completing the degree and licensing requirements, we are generally not talking about a group that is blazing any intellectual trails. Then once a teacher secures a position, there is little incentive for a teacher to improve on the job. Nearly every other job would require some amount for ongoing training, but in education that is rarely implemented.

Teacher quality starts with making the field attractive to more higher performing students. That only happens if the field provides incentives to reward excellence and hard work, and the current arrangement just does not do that. It rewards mediocrity.

You'd better supply a source for a claim like that.

The mean Critical Reading score was 501. Education majors scored 481. The mean Mathematics score was 516. Education majors scored 486. The mean Writing score was 492. Education majors scored 477.

Results directly from a report from the College Board.

I also ran for office three times now as a candidate for Minnesota State Representative. As such, I took a keen engineer's interest in the various reform proposals floating around modern politics. The answers I found may shock you.

The fact is that "merit pay for performance" schemes were invalidated by multiple, peer-reviewed scientific studies that attempted to show they worked.

If any organization had a desire to show that merit pay worked, it was the Rand Corporation. Their close ties to military contractors meant that validating a merit pay link would lead to an easy fix to America's achievement gap woes and a solid solution to produce more and better domestic employees for our nation's contractors.

Instead, Rand's study results aimed high for the merit bonus amounts and achieved record poor results. Several other peer-reviewed studies followed soon after and replicated their results. For an analysis of why this is the case, I recommend the book "Drive" by Daniel Pink.

The fact is, if you want to prove that seniority pay doesn't work, don't stop at teachers. Go to your local software shop. See how they appreciate your suggestion that you should pay engineers instead of based upon years of experience and successful projects finished, pay them based upon the number of lines of code produced and how few bugs are created.

See how quickly they crucify you for crippling their company with vanity metrics. Is it not entirely possible that unions can actually be right at times?

> On average students with private tutors improve their math scores by 19 points more than those students without private tutors. The effect is less on the verbal section, where having a private tutor only improves scores on average by seven points. Taking a commercial course has a similarly large effect on math scores, improving them on average by 17 points, and has the largest effect on verbal scores, improving them on average by 13 points.

http://nepc.colorado.edu/files/Briggs_Theeffectofadmissionst...

These differences (~15 points on a test with a standard deviation of 100 points) are rather small compared to the huge gaps between different socio-economic and racial backgrounds (~100 points between rich and poor). Probably worth the boost if you have the money, though.

I found one book--called something like SAT 1600, which was the max at the time--that talked about how test makers try to assess you, and how questions are constructed. The drill questions were very hard and came with an explanation of how the questions worked. Taking a practice test before and after the book my score went up by over 100 points. It got to the point where I could usually answer a math problem by guessing what the answer "should" be, based on how the question was built, and then just work backwards to verify the answer.

But most test prep was boring drills together with strategies like "use the process of elimination." Yeah, duh. That sort of brain-switched-off busywork is the common pattern in test prep and, more broadly, American education.

So maybe someone that works really hard to be better than others at something is more valuable than someone who is naturally bright?

For example - a naturally bright lawyer isn't as good as a 'good' lawyer that tries really hard to be the best. Being good at a test shows that you'll be good at whatever the test is trying to find - no matter how this is achieved.

"Nationwide, only 2 percent of students who have taken the SAT over the past 10 years have done so untimed. Most of these students' diagnoses are presumably genuine. But in places like Greenwich, Conn., and certain zip codes of New York City and Los Angeles, the percentage of untimed test-taking is said to be close to 50 percent. "

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_exa...

In other words, if you give a thousand students a free practice test, then sign them up for a course that summer, by the time they actually finish the course six months later they're already expected to have improved regardless of whether you teach them anything at all.

Claiming that the SAT measures “college readiness” is complete and utter bullshit. The SAT measures intelligence and the College Board knows it. “College readiness” is a liberal euphemism. It actually turns out that if you try to test specific skills (I think the writing section kind of falls in this category) instead of overall intelligence, the results are less predictive for whatever purposes the test is being used for, since specific skills can be learned, whereas overall intelligence is largely stable and has broad effects. The fact that scores cannot be significantly improved by coaching is evidence that the SAT does in fact largely measure intelligence.

The East Asian countries' entrance exams are orders of magnitude more difficult than US exams and actually cover real subjects in a critical manner. Think of it as AP exams on many many doses of Horse Steroids, where the exams last for hours for multiple subjects over the course of one day. I also believe that the exams are not multiple choice unlike the US.

The exams tend to be a bit on the "cram" style of things from what I've heard, but they are far more rigorous than the SATs ever have or ever will b.

Critical? Seriously? These are mostly pure and simple regurgitation tests...at least the gaokao is. The shoe east Asia education system is driven around memorization and regurgitation, which is why so many still "escape" to the American system around university to actually learn something.

The definitely are multiple choice scantron affairs, though I don't know much a both Japan's system, but they haven't been don't so hot lately either.

People in china look at the American education system in envy, people in America look at china in envy. All this envy is based on ignorance and a "grass is greener" over there mentality.

Here, Khan Academy gives away their video for free.

The subject of the article is more like The Video Professor, rather than what is commonly called a "teacher"

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124278685697537839.html

It's unreasonable to compare a salary from a job working 9 months a year to another profession that works 12 months a year. "Well it's hard, if you had to deal with these kids you'd need a few months off too." Yeah, and that's why I didn't become a teacher. You chose this knowing all the pros and cons. Pro - only work 9 months a year Con - only get paid for 9 months a year

My mother was a teacher. Her time in the classroom was nominally from about 8:00 - 2:30. Her time actually at work was from about 8:00 - 4:30, because there would be students with after-school activities that needed supervision, or staff meetings, or parent/teacher conferences, or putting away classroom activites, etc. Her time away from home, including commuting, would be about 7:30 - 5:30. Her time actually working or commuting to work would be 7:30 - 5:30 + 8:00 - 10:00, because she'd frequently have to spend another couple hours grading papers, or writing up feedback, or planning the next lesson. She would often end up going back to school up to a month before the kids came back, too, to research and plan lessons.

I think the "teachers don't work all that much" meme gets confused by equating time in classroom with work. If you're doing it right, teaching involves a lot more than just delivering instruction to kids. It requires that you really understand each of your students (which could be 20 in elementary schools, but up to 100 in high schools), and where they're at, and that you understand your subject enough to bridge the gap between student and subject. That takes a lot of time, probably more than most industries.

Of course, this all gets confused because there are many, many teachers who don't put in that effort and just deliver a pre-canned lesson plan to 20 bored minds every day. They get up, talk, and go home. Those are the teachers that made my childhood hell.

The unfortunate part is that the way economic incentives are set up, there is no reason for a teacher to act like the first description, and every reason for them to act like the second. Anyone who's willing to actually understand the job they're tasked with doing will put that effort into a more lucrative job (well, except for a few poor schmucks for whom teaching is a calling). So you do, in a sense, get what you pay for.

And based on my personal experience with K-8 in the U.S., there are a lot more of the latter than the former.

So yeah, I bet you can get tons of qualified bachelors degree holders to work for a salary that's higher than the average for their level of education, with superlative benefits compared to what is available in the private sector.

Anyways, the free market works both ways, even libertarians can appreciate that. I totally think that teacher salaries should be market driven, but when you get rid of the all the low-quality teachers (low-quality works exist in the private sector also, mind you), you'll have a huge problem attracting the right standard of talent to fill in the gaps.

So the solutions must be formed like:

(a) get rid of bad teachers

(b) recruit and retain good teachers

A "war on teachers" in general does nothing about (a) and only screws us on (b).

That's highly misleading, because that lumps in MA's together with MD's and MBA's and JD's and MSc's in Computer Science, and skews up the average by the large number of MBA's in NJ who make a lot of money on Wall Street. By and large the MA's that most teachers have are worth almost nothing extra in the job market.

When I hear calls to pay teachers more, I think back to my own teachers in K-8, the majority of which were very average people.[1] Even if we posit that we need higher-quality teachers who will cost more, why do we have to accomplish it in a way that pays all of these mediocre people far more than they would earn in the private sector? If IBM wants higher-caliber people it doesn't just increase salaries hoping to get more qualified applicants. That's ass-backward. It tightens recruiting criteria, and if it has to pay more to attract candidates that meet the criteria, it does so.

I'm not opposed to paying teachers more on principle, but if its something we want to do, we can't just raise salaries and hope it attracts more qualified people to the job. We need to: 1) screen for quality the way other higher-paying jobs do; and 2) force existing teachers to qualify on the new scales to keep their jobs.

I'd be happy to pay $70k/year starting salaries to teachers if I knew that the school district required a teacher to graduate in the top 25% of their class at a school where the median SAT was at least 1200. But it makes no sense to pay our existing body of largely mediocre teachers even more money.

[1] In a 1990's study, only 40% of teachers scored in the top half of the SAT/ACT, indicating that the pool of teachers skew below average in terms of academic qualifications: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/do-tea....

No, this is exactly what happens in free markets.

Someone worth $X per year in the job market is not even going to apply for a job paying less than $X.

Not sure why you'd expect your K-8 teachers to be anything above average, if they were not paid above average.

Some relevant criteria:

1. Being willing to learn about, and able to implement, the pedagogical best practices in your area. You should not invent your own way of teaching math, because there is solid data on ways that are better and worse.

2. Being good at classroom management and debugging kids' behavioral issues. A huge part of K-8 teaching is just managing the class and heading off disruptions to people learning anything. This might even be more important than #1, because when you screw this one up, everything goes to hell.

3. Having some kind of positive impact on motivating students and making them not hate school or think it's useless. Fairly subjective.

My own experiences are that the "smart" teachers I had in K-8, retired engineers and such who were very good at school and had earned lots of money elsewhere previously, were mostly poor teachers. I'm sure they were actually good engineers, and that might rub off into them being good college-level instructors. But they didn't know how to run a classroom of 8-year-olds, or how they should structure the classes to introduce concepts in a way that works for elementary-school students. So if we're going to up standards, I would want to make sure we up the right standards, rather than selecting for more of those kinds of people. And I group myself there, fwiw; I have fine tech credentials but no ability to teach kids.

More importantly, $60,000 is enough for a middle class income. It's also not the reasonable maximum for being a public or private school teacher in metropolitan areas. You can realistically earn $90,000-$120,000 as a teacher if you're good, network for connections, and stay in the loop for jobs. Seniority and having a degree go a long way to raises.

9-120k$ sounds more like a real professional salary. But then when you get rid of the bad teachers, don't more of them fit into being good? Can society afford this?

The national median income for a bachelors degree holder is $50k. Why aren't all those folks working construction instead?

> An English teacher might not have so many other prospects, but a math and science teacher does

No they don't. Outside programming, there are no jobs for people with biology or chemistry or math bachelors degrees.

There's another issue here too - I know very qualified teachers who can't leave the city public schools because people with tenure reduce the amount of open positions on the market. This is partly market saturation of teachers, but still, it's hard to find a lucrative school system with more than one position open, and even then it's flooded with spammed resumes.

EDIT: I'd like to note that the "unfireability" isn't by itself a bad thing. It's just that the system rewards consistent mediocrity rather than relatively untested brilliance. The first people out the door are young and unexperienced teachers, even if they have a higher track record for success than their seniors. It's deplorable.

Sports athletes are one of the few areas in which people can do basically the same "job" and one guy is paid $20 million a year and another guy is paid $200k a year. You don't have that sort of variability based on actual value produced in many traditional jobs, which I think is a shame.

Are some teachers in the US actually overpaid relative to the long-term value they produce in their role? Surely, even if their base pay is bad I'm sure some of them don't even actually earn what they make. But are some teachers incredibly underpaid? Surely, as well. However, for the vast majority of "traditional" jobs we've created these compensation structures where you can nudge people up or down relative to their peers, but not by nearly enough to adjust for their true value.

Exactly. And if we want better teachers, we need to boost the pros or reduce the cons so it's a better option.

Cashing it out in terms of what we've decided they "deserve" may be gratifying, but it's useless. Let's base our policy based on what will actually best achieve our goals.

Teachers get paid extremely well in most larger cities. In Atlanta, Chicago, Philadelphia, Houston, and New York, starting salaries are in the $40-45k/year range with a bachelors. This might seem low to people on this board accustomed to Silicon Valley pay scales, but it's substantially above average for liberal arts majors. When I graduated college in Atlanta in 2007, the going rate for a fresh BA in white collar professional job (say in the accounting department of a company) was $35k. Teachers were starting at $40k+.

Also, the benefits cannot be ignored. Good health insurance and a pension contribution are extravagant benefits for young college graduates in the Millennial generation. They easily add $15-20k/year to total compensation.

Math/pure science majors aren't worth anything. There is a huge oversupply of people with say biology or chemistry degrees. In the private sector, a biology major is lucky to start at $35k/year.

Obviously you can dramatically increase your salary by acquiring programming skills and going into software development, but that's not unique to teachers. Programmers make way more than pretty much every other field you'd find yourself in after getting a non-engineering bachelors degree, except maybe economics.

Understand, I acknowledge you might have more knowledge/experience on this, I'm just skeptical. I would think - and the tone of your argument seems to posit - that it matters more what you decide to do with that degree than what degree you have.

Is it really worthless to have a good math degree if you become a quant? I understand market oversaturation, but that could be said of almost every degree, moreso liberal arts.

But your typical teacher doesn't have a 3.8 at Dartmouth, and the option to go make $80k/year as an energy trader at a major power company. They've got a 3.4 at the local second-tier school. Recruiters at those jobs won't even read these peoples' resumes. Their alternatives to teaching are entry-level jobs at laboratories. The average starting salary of a biology/life sciences major nationwide in 2010 was $33k: http://www.forbes.com/2010/08/11/college-degrees-best-salari.... If you throw in math and physics, which pull the averages up, the average for the math/sciences category is $42k, not that much better social sciences at $37k: http://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2013/04/15/college-de....

http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf

Your second paragraph seems to make some kind of fairness or economic efficiency argument about teachers. Why not ask a question about society? If the best people (for the most part) weigh the pros and cons and decide they want to own a home and have two kids, and therefore choose a non-teaching career, is that best for society?

Now that's 13k lower but that's only one salary when many household's have two and, as the top commenter says, 9 months instead of 12. Plenty of teachers pick up some extra cash over the summer.

Sounds pretty middle class to me.

1. http://www.indeed.com/salary/q-High-School-Teacher-l-San-Fra...

2. http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/counties/SanFranciscoCounty....

My definition of "middle-class" includes being able to buy a house and have two kids. You'd have a hard time doing that in SF on 58K, even given your assumptions about a spouse and summer cash.

http://www.zillow.com/local-info/CA-San-Francisco-home-value...

And in the end, society loses.

Any definition of "middle class" that excludes median-income households is non-sensible.

Living in San Francisco is a luxury. Middle class people do not buy a house and have two kids in San Francisco. They commute from Oakland or some place with cheaper housing.

Those NY-Fi people also saw themselves as solidly middle class.

Yours is interesting too though!

$45,000 in Chicago (a city with average CoL as far as urban areas in the U.S. go) is about $2,700 per month take home. A decent 1BR runs about $750 in a decent neighborhood. You can live very comfortably for that much. And people do--that's a very typical income for a college graduate professional in the city.

The US has very highly paid educators too. The only difference is they generally don't set foot in the class but rather serve as consultants ... on how schools can reduced average teacher pay and imposed pay-for-performance (among other things). This was the case for Beverly Hall, who created the local model for No Child Left Behind, sold it on a national level and was eventually arrested for falsifying the system.

Her report on Atlanta School's local program which NCLB (No Child Left Behind) emulated:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Hwl55bH...

Her arrest: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57577688/ex-atlanta-scho...

Edit: And another posters mentions, this isn't a "teacher" in the conventional sense of the word either but a slightly more hands-on testing-guru. So we can pretty much move along now...

Unsurprisingly, it's a political nonstarter due to union opposition.

Issue 1: A kids past performance and out of school issues dramaticly impact learning independent of the teacher. So teachers in schools in poor areas are often at a huge disadvantage under most of these systems.

Issue 2: Without an increased budget paying meaningfully more money to great teachers can significantly reduce the income for new and or average teachers.

Issue 3: It fails to attract talent because it does not increase the all important starting salary.

PS: Teacher direct compensation is a significant portion of US educational costs but bumping the minimum starting salary to say 50k is not nearly as expencive as you might think. Paying new teachers more, reducing seniority perks which reduces pension obligations and adding incentive based bonuses is IMO a far better use of funds than the administrative overhead that keeps increasing over time.

A VAM score is (actual score of their students - expected score of statistically similar students). If a kid has low past performance, his expected score will be low, and thus the bar is lowered for his teacher.

VAM tends to hurt teachers in top schools far more than those in the bottom schools due to the ceiling effect - if your students expected score is 97%, there is no room for them to improve.

As for teacher pay, this is a non-problem. Teachers are overpaid when you account for pension, job security and summer vacation - as a result, there is a glut of people attempting to work as teachers, rather than a shortage.

Students are not predicted to score 97% school wide due to reversion to the mean.

As to a teacher glut it's not a question of body's it's a question of quality. Plenty of people would be CEO of Ford for far less money that does not mean there over paid.

This is simply nonsense. How would this fact not be reflected in the mean performance of students grade 8, income in [$0,$15], race=white, grade 7 percentile in [25%,50%]?

I'm beginning to think that most of the critics of VAM don't even understand what it does and are merely repeating critiques of blindly measuring raw test scores.

I'm beginning to think that most of the critics of VAM don't even understand what it does and are merely repeating critiques of blindly measuring raw test scores. And your ignoring the huge statistical significant difference having an under preforming peer group has on student performance.

I'm also curious - if this effect cannot be included in a model, how can one demonstrate it's existence in a statistically significant manner?

They can and do. However, when it comes to teacher pay and student performance such things are politically untenable. No Child Left Behind does not mean except for when your peer group is full of truants.

The best evidence for this is actually from tracking randomly assigned edge cases. Often good schools will accept X numbers of students from another area and when they pull randomly from the pool of available students it's not hard to track what's going on and compare crossovers performance with students from each area that stayed in that area.

The "teacher" works for an after school tutoring academy. He makes most of his money selling access to his online video for $4/hr.

I don't know of anything preventing that here. Except, of course, for lack of demand for it.

I also dislike the idea of kids going to school twice. From what I understand, research has shown that kids need more free time, not more time sitting in lectures, at least younger children. Additionally, the SK system seems like it would double-penalize low-income families since their children often need to get jobs in high school. So not only can't they afford the best tutors, their kids wouldn't have time to sleep!

"Asian" educational models will never work in the USA. You can't convince middle America to pay more for teachers and/or enroll their kids in programs that involve hard academic work. After school academic programs are crazy, only for obsessed nerds. When would they have time for football practice? This model only works in American communities with large Asian populations. It partially works in low income communities in which the main benefit is keeping the kids away from their screwed up home life.

This is a bit off topic, though. The article is about a guy who makes money off of video lectures. Americans do pay money for videos of things they care about, such as losing weight or improving their golf stroke. Only a small subset of the population would pay for academic tutoring videos.

They can vote for more funding all they want, but they know the funding can go anywhere once it's approved.

For example, in 2012 Prop 30 in California was supposed to go to the education system.. turns out it went to cover bad investments and otherwise non-education expenses racked up elsewhere: http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/11/18/Surprise-...

If you want to make sure your money goes somewhere, you need to spend it on that.

I know this works, because this is what people did where I grew up. Will it work everywhere? No, that was part of my point. Many people just don't value education enough to spend more money on it than they absolutely must.

Another thing to keep in mind. The article says that "students are the customers". But this is false. Parents are the customers. So what you've got to compare is South Korean parents and American parents.

Dances/events are usually funded by fundraisers. Although an exorbitant amount of money is spent on sports, they also have a lot of funding from booster clubs and fundraisers.

Schools do get stuck paying for extra sports staff, and sports facilities. Sometimes a wealthy donor will spring for a giant football field. That actually sets a bad precedent, because then neighboring towns feel they need to spend more on their sports facilities.

Arts and music programs receive almost no money from any source and are cut every year.

It is assumed that your success in life comes from your relative standing, your percentile in the forced ranking, not from your absolute level of education. Both the public and the private education systems optimize for getting their students as high on the relative ranking as possible, not for training each to be as valuable as possible in terms of what actual services he can provide to his family, his employer, and his society.

It is often assumed (around the world) that the former will yield the latter. In other words, competition for ranking will make everyone more valuable. This is only partially true, though. The ranking is a one dimensional aggregate of a few dimensions that are easiest to measure: solving math problems, answering trivia questions about English vocabulary and grammar, remembering historical facts, and so on. This causes those few areas to be over-invested in, hence others to be under-invested in, relative to their real ability to produce value for self and others in adult life.

The real economy (not just money but quality of life) is far more diverse and multidimensional. Post-primary-school education would be better if it didn't force everyone to focus almost all their time and effort on maximizing the same three or four dimensions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_South_Korea

Unmentioned is that written Korean was designed by an accomplished linguist (around 1500), making it very easy to learn. This in contrast to English, a bewildering mashup of incompatible spelling & phonetic rules made up by happenstance.

This is due not only to the British Empire but also the fact that they essentially let language develop on its own. Unlike say, France (which had a similarly expansive empire), which tightly controlled the French language and still does to this day.

> , because it developed organically taking input from all around the world. It is quite arguable that this is it's greatest strengths as a language.

Having a lot of loanwords is one thing: not having any sane and simple rules for spelling and phonetics is quite another. If 'organic' spelling is it's greatest strength, then it seems like a language more suited for spelling bees# then for communication.

#I doubt you'll find something like a Spanish spelling bee: from what I've seen of its diction, a Spanish spelling bee would be too trivial. Like making a competition out of tic-tac-toe.

The way something becomes an acceptable part of the English language has less to do with following some arbitrary set of constraints, than what becomes accepted by actual human beings who use the language to communicate with other actual human beings.

There are more ways of saying any particular thing in English than most if not all other languages, and while you may view this as a weakness, I rather appreciate being able to decide what sounds good on my own.

https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm

There is also a larger point to be made. If English was such a hindrance why is the world like it is today? Language is one of the most important components of society, so if English really sucked, we'd probably be using some other language on HN. Please explain why, despite what you consider it's shortcomings, English is and will be the lingua franca of the world for the foreseeable future?

My ancestors are from India, and I've visited there from time to time. Anyone with anything to contribute there speaks English, even if as a second (or third or fourth) language. If someone doesn't, that person isn't usually educated or hardly even literate.

Indian languages developed from the same roots as European ones, which is why the term Indo-European exists#. Yet somehow, amongst all the possibilities, the most successful Indians use English. There is something to be said for that.

# http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages

What does this mean?

> The way something becomes an acceptable part of the English language has less to do with following some arbitrary set of constraints, than what becomes accepted by actual human beings who use the language to communicate with other actual human beings.

You mean the way most languages evolve? You're gonna have to have a pretty authoritative enforcement of the use of a natural language to keep it from evolving at all.

If someone wants "proper" English, they also have the Oxford Dictionary.

> There are more ways of saying any particular thing in English than most if not all other languages, and while you may view this as a weakness, I rather appreciate being able to decide what sounds good on my own.

That might be great for an English connoisseur (hey, there's another word for a potential spelling bee), but not so much for someone who is learning the language. And learning languages was what the person you originally replied to was talking about.

> There is also a larger point to be made. If English was such a hindrance why is the world like it is today? Language is one of the most important components of society, so if English really sucked, we'd probably be using some other language on HN. Please explain why, despite what you consider it's shortcomings, English is and will be the lingua franca of the world for the foreseeable future?

I guess by "larger point" you mean a historical point, which has nothing to do with the linguistical properties of a language. No-one has said that English sucks to such a degree that it couldn't have gained traction as an international lingua franca, but nice try with the straw man. But that doesn't mean that it is a arguably sub-par in some ways, in this case the original complaint was about the seemingly random phonetics and spelling of the English language.

> My ancestors are from India, and I've visited there from time to time. Anyone with anything to contribute there speaks English, even if as a second (or third or fourth) language. If someone doesn't, that person isn't usually educated or hardly even literate. Indian languages developed from the same roots as European ones, which is why the term Indo-European exists#. Yet somehow, amongst all the possibilities, the most successful Indians use English. There is something to be said for that. # http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages

Yeah, there is something to be said for that: the British Empire (which you've already mentioned and other historical developments. Or what do you hint at with the last line, that the English language itself played a key role in the cultures and civilizations that made English an international language? That they wouldn't have been as successful if they spoke something like Romanian?

Meanwhile you've said nothing about the original complaint, which is the spelling and phonetics of the language, but if you want to talk about history I guess that's cool, too.

Also, Asian counting system is very regular, allegedly easing the learning for young pupils.

ps: I found english very easy, unlike french which is probably only meant for world class writers.

Odd anecdote: this became notable in the recent hyped Zimmerman trial when a 19yo witness couldn't read a letter she claimed to have written - it was in cursive. The usefulness of cursive (as an obsolete notation) aside, any high schooler should at least be able to read it, and any witness should be able to read any standard script.

As for Shanghai, I have to wonder if the cost of living in some areas necessitates literacy more than other areas. If you can't read, you can't produce value commensurate with the high price of existing there: survival dictates read or get out.

1) Shanghai is a very developed part of China (along with Beijing, and a few other big cities).

2) I'm pretty sure they rigged it. There's various ways the teachers could have rigged the test, and I doubt there was any effort by the local schooling system to keep them honest.

No, that would just make things infinitely worse. The SK education system consists of nothing more than rote memorization, and produces a pressure-cooker environment that is responsible for an extremely high teenage suicide rate.

he makes his money selling online video for $4/hr, which is not the same as classroom teaching. "Entrepreneur" would be a better term for him, rather than "Teacher"

The "teachers don't make enough", "we don't spend enough on education", etc. debate is on the wrong point. The education system and philosophy in the USA is broken at all levels. Citizens are acting rationally by not volunteering to spend more tax dollars on it.

Those that can afford it bypass it entirely by paying for private education, or if they don't have quite that much money, by moving to a community that is wealthier and has better public education.

Economic forces combined with the digital age's technology will inevitably lead to the creative destruction of the education industry, just as other industries formed under Industrial Age economics have been deconstructed.

Unfortunately this is being fought to the death by the established education community and its monopolistic, union-based government and quasi-governmental constituents.

Try telling a public school teacher any of this, and you'll get not a reasoned response, but scorn, anger, and a slamming door in your face.

It's going to be brutal for them when it comes.

I think we should start measuring education systems by results not by test scores. This is stupid that we are elevating a system which makes kids score better on a few tests but produces a workforce that is persistently behind the American and European workforce in terms of accomplishments. Great your kids can read really really well. Mine are changing the world by becoming the leading Engineers, Scientists and Doctors. Maybe these tests aren't what we should be optimizing for.

If you told me to go out and reform our public school system the last thing I would do is say is keep the kids in class twice as long and remove any vestige of childhood or independent though to thoroughly condition them to check the right box come test day. That's the impression I am getting from this article.

"They don't have benefits or even a guaranteed base salary; their pay is based on their performance, and most of them work long hours and earn less than public school teachers."

http://youtube.com/watch?v=kJ4SSvVbhLw

Education superpower for having well-educated citizens? Or educations superpower for having many of the top universities?