Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- Could just, you know, pay more…by AvAn12
- On net, that's no improvement - just more money handed to landlords since it's chasing the same limited supply.
- Or allow pay that is not lockstep/tied to mostly-useless degree completion. Unions fight this stuff like hell because the people in charge have gone through the current system and therefore benefit from it.
It is not that hard to do outcome-based pay over a multi-year period, but this is the main criticism. You can either track kids over a number of years and track their relative growth in each year, or you can use bargaining up-front whereby teachers can vote on a "multiplier" for each class before they know who will end up with which class.
by apparent - In some areas like the San Francisco Bay Area, schools would have to pay astronomically more in order for teachers to compete against software engineers. I’m a community college professor in the Bay Area making a low six-figure salary, but even a townhouse in the neighborhood my college is in is easily $1 million for a two-bedroom, and rent for a two-bedroom apartment is easily $3500/mo. A modest salary boost can help me rent a two-bedroom apartment, but if I hope to buy closer to work, my salary would need to double, and there’s still the challenge of saving for the down payment, since there’s no such thing as RSUs in a not-for-profit institution.
At least teacher housing provides a way for teachers to obtain secure housing closer to work without having to directly compete against highly-paid corporate workers with RSUs.
by linguae - Why not make housing cost less instead?by dpbriggs
- Teachers in major metro school systems already have quite a good deal. Rural schoolteachers really do have the deal everyone heard about in 1990s politics, but urban schoolteachers are generally economically privileged.
(That doesn't mean they aren't impacted by housing scarcity in ways that disrupt the administration of school systems; they are. But the problem isn't compensation, the problem is corrupt regulation written to prop up homeowner assets.)
by tptacek - Who eats the loss if home values fall before the resale restriction lifts?by jnyst1985
- A land value tax would fix this
- How?by trashcan
- A land value tax without changes in non-tax land use regulations would not fix, and a land value tax would not be necessary after removing the non-tax land use restrictions which this responds to.by dragonwriter
- Not on its own. You also need to relax or remove direct (and indirect, eg parking minimums) restrictions on residential density.by lokar
- I know the Georgism joke here, but we don't need an LVT to fix this; we just need states to override home rule on minimum density requirements for residential and mixed-use zoning. The core problem here is in fact very simple!by tptacek
- My SO was a teacher before moving on and would see offers like this all the time.
A few of the rural school districts here offer this incentive to move out there. Sometimes they include a car too. Note they tdo not do repairs though.
The issue with taking one of these rural offers is that it's a dead end. Your schoolhouse of many grands gets smaller and smaller over time until they don't need you anymore. And then what? Your career as a teacher is essentially useless for any larger district as they do not care at all about teaching multiple grades at once and barely (or not) making state standards. And then you don't even have a house left over to sell (likely for a loss), it's the district's.
I know it's the reverse of the article, but the incentives are the same and they don't make sense for any of the parties.
by Balgair - Teacher recruiting wouldn't be so hard if pay weren't lockstep, as it is in so many places. Unions demand this, and it keeps some potentially-effective teachers out of the profession (and keeps old lousy ones in, unfortunately).by apparent
- > Teacher recruiting wouldn't be so hard if pay weren't lockstep, as it is in so many places. Unions demand this, and it keeps some potentially-effective teachers out of the profession (and keeps old lousy ones in, unfortunately).
This is an unhelpful, anti-union sentiment with no actual relevance to the problem of teacher recruiting.
How would it be easier to recruit new, potentially-effective teachers if we had incentive pay based on meritocratic pay scales? There is no rational way to credit someone from a different area for their ability to run a classroom effectively until there's evidence on how that person runs a classroom.
by bonsai_spool - Maybe we could use college teaching as a model. College teachers are for the most part non-unionized.
Disclosure: I was one of those teachers for a semester, many years ago.
Also, teacher pay is not as rigid as it seems. In my state, the good teachers advance by moving to better paying districts. Very few teachers stay in rural districts for more than a year or two.
by analog31 - It used to be like this in rural communities even up into the 70s and 80s. The town's branch manager would be young, shipped out for a few years and live in a house the bank owned and given a stipend to maintain it. Same with the postmaster and other professions.by morkalork
- We are very fortunate that my wife got to work at the local school. She now walks to work and I work from home about 4 days out of 5 workdays.
The benefits are huge in terms of time available and costs, and not needing childcare before or after school.
It’s hard to solve couples having two jobs in different places, but having at least one person get to work basically instantly and for zero cost is a massive boon to society.
The issue I saw is that the government department in charge of education is not the one in charge of housing and infrastructure, and there are no incentives to hire locally or make it easier to move locally. Instead you get teachers in suburb A travelling to suburb B and vice-versa, and no way that they can choose to swap roles. We lucked out.
by andyferris - The core fabric of society - the deal that was offered by society to the people - to work in a job, own a house, raise a family, have a retirement - has decayed away entirely for many people.by wewewedxfgdf
- This is quite a new deal and not one enjoyed by most people for most of history.by SoftTalker
- Well states need home prices to increase because the majority of their pension funds for their employees is invested in hedge funds seeking outsized returns that use single family homes as an investment vehicle.
This can never be solved until we resolve the public pension crisis.
Lawmakers in my state of Oregon are soon going to debate how the state invests in hedge funds but the simple truth of the numbers says that there's no possible way Oregon can meet its pension obligations without their stated returns.
by anon291 - The housing part never 'decayed', it was actively blocked by the people who already had homes. That's why you see things now like California actively overriding local zoning.by crooked-v