Completely correct.

I will posit perhaps a different issue or challenge for this thread that I do not think many talk about or consider as directly as I will say. Perhaps I am wrong and others think this is considered properly.


First off I think we need to define what the function of an 'education' is?

Some seem it solely as basically a grades Olympics where students distinguish themselves by that scoring and others can do with that information what they will. Thus the higher grades you get the more benefits generally (scholarships, jobs, etc) that flow to you.

Others see it as part 'grades Olympic' but also that other factors 'well rounded' matter because an education is also preparing you for the Work Place and more than just grades matter in determining who should get all the benefits (best jobs).


To the latter point (which I subscribe to) is why eventually extracurricular activities started to become weighted in to those decisions (scholarships, jobs, etc) and rightly so. I think few people would argue that a person who gets a 95% GPA with a near obsessive focus on grades to the exclusion of all else, is necessarily a better student or future hire for a company than a guy with a 89% average who was also Captain of the Football team and who was President of the Student Union and very active in that regard.


So why did those type of considerations get 'weighted in' and end up rebalancing the scales to the types of kids who would choose a more balanced path over a more focused one.

The answer is because a certain segment of society saw it as unfair that their kids should end up with this form of punishment (less scholarships, worse jobs, etc) for seeking to be balanced when those experiences or extra challenges actually helped them develop other valued characteristics such as toughness, adaptability, leadership, etc.

Few today question that some form of that weighting should be involved and utilized. They recognize the extra BURDEN that being 'well rounded' can put on achieving peek scholastic goals and give credit to the person overcoming those challenges and yet still getting good 'enough' grades, that they curve upward in recognition.

Thus a 'well rounded' person may actually be selected over a person with higher grades with little controversy.


Problem mostly 'fixed' within that certain segment of the populace that might suffer that type of challenge to their kid succeeding if those 'extra curricular' activities are not given weight'.


So now on the issue, challenge, problem of how do we and should 'weight' other 'extra curricular' things.

Is it only losing focus due to 'playing football' that can impact someone's grades and if you took away the football they might actually get the higher grades, ...be smarter, etc? Or can one rightly try to consider and weight the myriad of disadvantages of being 'poor'?

Is someone who has an environment where they can dedicate an obsessive pursuit of grades at the expense of all else and gets a 95% GPA really smarter/better employee than someone who was 'Captain of the Football team, lead the Student Union' and got a 91% GPA... and are those two really smarter/better than a kid who grew up in the hood, had no access to prep school, tutors, lived in an unstable home, etc and got a 85% GPA?


Whenever 'weighting' is considered for the latter suddenly the cries of 'unfair' start to become more present. Why? Answer - those are not the type of challenges MY KID typically has so they don't resonate with me and I would see it as wrong for others to then benefit from weighting them.

But back to 'Football' , ya that is a true challenge. Not fair to expect my kid to be Captain of the football team and yet still get 95% GPA... lets weight his activities properly and give him the boost he deserves!!!

How about we worry about making sure everyone graduates high school with the ability to read at a 5th grade level before tackling the problem of the top 30 colleges not being fair to the top 0.1% of the student population.

Almost forgot which forum I was on for a second there.

If both are problematic, I'm sure you can solve them in parallel. This not even being problems that require the same resources to solve.

It is a common rhetoric trick to portray politics and policy as serial processes, but it's usually untrue.

It's really not a solvable problem.

The issue is 5000 kids wanting to make a list with room for only 500.

Move the goalposts all you want, but that subset of the population will follow them all over the field no matter the social and psychological consequences. Extracurriculars are already a critical factor in college acceptance in the US. Maybe not so wherever Cuepee is from.

Why do you think Cuepee is only talking about admissions to top colleges? The only thing in his post that even slightly implies that is that he used high GPAs in his examples. It seems fairly clear that he was talking about education in a much more general sense than just considerations for college admissions.

You may speak better Cuepee than I do then.

For sure, let's make education a wholistic experience. But maybe start with basic literacy and then add complexity from there, shall we?

Looking at the data, perhaps even that is a step too far. First we need to actually get kids to show up to school on a regular basis.

i come from a family of educators

what's important to understand is not to compare to an average salary - my parents were comfortable, got to travel the world during summers, had incredible benefits packages that dramatically increase value of job if you count that and not just salary

having said that, they both had masters degrees - my father was an econ undergrad, had he pursued a financial related MA at the institution he got his graduate degree in then he'd have easily earned several more multiple, my mother in art history, not so much - she almost certaintly followed the only related career path available to her degrees

likewise, my sister is now a highschool science teach, she also has a masters in biochemistry - had she chosen the pharmaceutical industry she'd certaintly be doing much better than she is now - but she's still comfortable despite that her husband is also a teacher

another sister has an mba but uses that to manage non profits so lol wasted degree right there as well but not for teaching but another "seek the job you want not the salary" pathway

meanwhile my brother turned his masters in becoming an architect, he easily earns more than my parents and sisters would at their peaks combined

me... well i'm the



my point is that you don't become a teacher accidentally and you shouldn't have any more sympathy for them than you would the college grad who works at starbucks who unlike them is most likely not earning less than their degree would dictate but also never meant to be following this path - those are the sad sacks you guys should look out for, not people who knew exactly what they were getting into and still dove in headfirst

if anything, i think making their salaries more desirable would be a bad move because it'd draw in people for the wrong reasons - remember, this is a profession that's incredibly hard to objectively judge so if you have people who aren't passionate about doing it then that's really bad and it's very difficult to efficiently figure out who sucks and who doesn't and there'd be a ton of people taking the job and phoning it in if it paid market rates

If in InsoO speak "start with" means 'put more emphasise upon' then I am ok with that.

But no thanks to suggesting that until 'that' issue is solved (which may be never) we do not focus on the biases and their impact across the board including at the top levels then no way. That is just a way to stretch out the benefits, privileges and protections that greatly benefit one cohort over another, based on historical protections/privileges.

Rickroll, it's really not that difficult to identify the poor teachers. It's just impossible to get rid of them.

As with anything in the labor market, if you increase compensation you're going to increase the quantity and quality of applicants.


What is the actual problem that you are talking about, Cuepee?

I went back and read your post again and it seems like you're suggesting that kids from certain socio-economic backgrounds need to be given a sort of handicap. Like if they come from a shitty zip code, just throw a 20% modifier on to their GPA.

This already happens, to a certain extent.

The specific child in your example (grew up in the hood, had no access to prep school, tutors, lived in an unstable home, etc and got a 85% GPA) is going to be able to go to college and almost certainly able to do so for a significantly reduced cost.

That doesn't mean they get to go to whatever school they want.

insoo, it is difficult

to test objectively you check student progress over the year but that's shown to have a cobra effect where teachers give their students the initial test used to benchmark blindly and then train them to do better on that one specific test later - it's incredibly easy to game and takes emphasis away from teaching anything beyond test taking tactics

but most importantly, the good teachers who just teach and don't adapt to game that system get punished while the crap teachers who teach the kids to read the answers first and try to fit them into the question will look good

the other system is more subjective, there you need feedback from students and then it becomes a popularity contest, which isn't the most accurate measure of teaching ability, while often correlated, I look back at my youth and can recall a number of teachers i loved who weren't very good and others i hated but actually taught me a lot

the other solution to student feedback is to bring in observers to monitor the teachers and while this is a normal occurence, the sample size is lol and the presence of that monitor will dramatically change the result so they then observe an observed class rather than a normal one

of course we could just install cameras in the classrooms and hire a team to monitor and evaluate but alas you get the idea

i deeply disagree with the notion you'll get better applicants, if you wouldn't want to be a teacher at 40k I don't think you'd be a good one if you did it while earning 80k

Is there any other profession where this kind of analysis gets applied? I mean, “let’s slash pay for heart surgeons and that way we’ll only have guys who are truly passionate about their work” is not an argument one will ever hear.

You just told me how it can be difficult to pick out the most effective teachers. Maybe so. Doesn't matter in the context of the original statement. I'm talking about identifying the ineffective ones, and anyone who has spent time teaching will have no shortage of opinions on how to do that.

I may not be able to pick out the objectively best wine in a tasting lineup because of the wide variety of factors involved, but if one is black and tastes like ****, I think it's safe to nix that one.

Cameras in the classroom would be a fun little wake up call for society. Let's give that one a try for a year, if only for the shock value.

FYP. Because those 15% that are unworthy troublemakers...**** them.

I don't think there are a lot of people suggesting teacher salaries need to be raised to an exorbitant level where people who have no passion for it are jumping in because they'll be overpaid and underworked. Most of what I've seen have been suggestions that in places where teachers are being paid low salaries, that should be fixed, and that teaching should be a valued profession and compensated accordingly.

Elon Musk’s companies openly admit they underpay people and recruit for people who are willing to sacrifice their life and soul at the altar of Elon for five years before their options vest.

That’s not a scalable staffing model.

Nope, they just need some special accommodations, like to be shipped off to a military-style boarding school. That comes with its own unique set of policies.

Traditional classrooms can still educate underprivileged kids. It happens every day by the millions.

No, but that's not my point. My point is it's a livable wage that offers incredible benefits and time off. It's definitely better than most jobs and only fails to hold up if you compare the opportunity cost of becoming a teacher as opposed to a lawyer.

Case in point there's no real shortage of teachers. Increasing salary would definitely get some good candidates to consider who otherwise wouldn't, but it'd also get some people who others have no interest in it as well. Like others said, rooting out bad ones is incredibly difficult.

This we can agree with. However, the cost of living in those areas is also quite low and they have summers to work seasonal jobs to supplement income. Furthermore, their benefits are incredibly good regardless of pay.

Private school teachers sometimes make half what a public school teacher will earn. But they get that back via not needing to pay for housing/food/utilities etc and prep school teacher salaries are often bundled into those statistics. A new teacher at a prep school is definitely making <30k their first few years.

Well this is just simply untrue.

Don't be confused by the massive interest in open teaching positions out in the suburbs, because there is a very real shortage of people willing to be called a **** and slapped around by 5th graders in the inner cities.

There are 400 applications for every position in your neighborhood because those are 400 rats scrambling to get off the ship they're currently drowning on elsewhere.

The worst shortages are in the areas of expertise that are most directly affected by the relatively low wages. Why become a STEM teacher when you could make 4 times as much with your STEM expertise outside of a classroom? You can love teaching all day long, but do you love it enough to effectively pay a six figure yearly membership fee compared to what your true earning potential is?

Wow, I find myself fairly aligned with an Inso0 position in this thread!

Getting people to work in the projects and corn fields isn't exclusive to teaching

This is the problem with that discussions, it always just boils down to a bunch of people who aren't involved in education themselves but love to virtue signal about it anyway

I don't know about Inso0's involvement in education, but I believe his wife is a teacher. I'm pretty confident that I'm far more involved in education than either of you, but in Canada, so I won't pretend to have expertise on the teacher demand level in the US.

America has a lot of both, so I don't think it's appropriate to just hand-wave it away as if it doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things.

You admit you're the family ****up, but you're surrounded by highly educated professionals who are going to make sure you don't fall through society's cracks.

Nobody is there to help the kids in 53206. Maybe your family of teachers can lend their assistance. I happen to be married to someone who will be serving as an advisor with a new Charter that'll open its doors in 2022. They're going to be looking for quality educators, but unfortunately with it being a charter school, they'll have to take some of their compensation in the form of passion fulfilment.

Let me ask wtf the point of this thread is about?

Nothing, absolutely nothing. It's just a circle jerk of virtue signaling.

Not a single teacher got into it with expectations of a higher salary and got the rug swept out from under them. They all have livable wages, would class benefits and absurd amounts of time off. They don't need a pity party. Find some other nonsense to all make yourselves feel better.

It's just the same tired narratives over and over again and it's just sad watching it happen and seven bleed over here into a poker forum.

And now because I disagree with you, you take a joke I made and turn it into an ad hominem attack. You know nothing about me or what I've done and accomplished in my life. You should be ashamed of yourself for yet another rtardedly drawn false conclusion.

Ooh advisor. Wow! That's so amazing! Good for you!

None of the politics of being Principal, not as much public-facing responsibility as a Director.

You're right though, maybe if she spent less time worried about the actual logistics behind setting up and operating an entirely new publicly chartered school, she'd have more time to think of a cool title to impress any professional couch-surfers on the internet. Good call on that.


Edit: I didn't put nearly as much malice behind the "family ****up" comment as you read into it. Perhaps a little too close to home? Sorry, friend.

You really got a douchebag vibe going here. Look at this swarmy pos fake apologize just to double down. You're a pathetic virtue signaling loser stemming from your own insecurity.

This thread is circle jerk and you're the soggy biscuit.

The minute you switch to ad hominem is when you realised you had no other response. Utterly pathetic