My mother is an elementary school teacher, and I don't want her to go back to school this year. The federal government is worse than useless, and the state government is feckless and unwilling to make the tough calls to protect people's lives.
She's been a teacher for ~15 years and still makes less than $30k a year teaching. She loves helping the kids, but her life isn't worth it.
She's in Colorado. The teachers' union agreed to a pay cut & freeze during the Bush financial crisis; pay had had only started to rise again a few years ago.
This is somewhat of a digression, but the extremely low rate of teacher pay (for a job that requires a Master's degree) limits the pool of available teachers greatly. The people taking these jobs typically must have some other way of supporting their family; either their spouse has a higher-paying professional job or they are the beneficiary of some other form of generational wealth.
But we tend to lose the teachers who must make ends meet their own selves on a teacher's pay. There is no good economic argument made to become an elementary school teacher.
> There is no good economic argument made to become an elementary school teacher.
AMEN. I would NEVER recommend ANYONE become a teacher based on my wife's experiences. You used to be able to write off expenses as "non-reimbursed employee expenses" but they cut that out so teachers get the token $200 writeoff. We spend almost 10x that annually supporting her in the classroom.
It really is glorified day care in most peoples minds which is a real shame.
My high school band friend became a high school music teacher. He was making hardly enough money for his family to live without stress or worry, he asked about wages they said they couldn't give raises, the only way they could justify a raise is if he had more education - so he took some student loans and got his masters. He was then told nothing could get him a raise, wages are frozen. Around that time he emailed me asking for help getting a corporate training gig where I was working. Of course I put in a word but I also pressed back because I'd always known him to be incredibly passionate about teaching and music. I always imagined him as a bit poorer than me, but a hell of a lot happier (I was going through a bit of a depressed time thinking about the "meaningfulness" of my corporate life). He said it wasn't about meaningfulness, or enjoying the work, or passion, it was that at one point they had to consider whether or not they had the budget for fucking light bulbs one week. He moved on to a nice corporate training job, and does well now. I haven't talked to him recently about if he still misses teaching, but I am acutely aware there's kids out there missing out on an amazing band teacher because we don't pay our teachers a salary that shows the profession any respect. I guess my friend's richer and happy he can take vacations and buy necessities without worry and for that I am glad, but I see the world as little bit poorer.
My wife hung up her hat after busting her butt for 5 years. Pay was garbage. Expectations too high — mostly from the students and parents. I often jokingly ask if she’d go back if they offered twice her pay. She doesn’t even hesitate - no.
My mother briefly taught middle schoolers as a side job to her cleaning business she was running. One year in, she decided the money and the admin politics and low-key racism was not worth the stress. She is black and was working in a very rural white area. She made a lot more money pushing a mop than teaching.
You can't say "you should clean for the future of these kids, not money" or similar with as much support from society for cleaning as easily as one can for teaching.
Unless there's some regulation in Colorado that doesn't exist in New York, teaching does not require a master's degree. It does require specific training and certification, but there are undergraduate programs that offer this.
There are also master's programs, they just aren't required.
To be fair, it varies in CO depending on the district. More Urban places pay a lot more than the state average. Rural areas will try to make up the pay difference with free housing. Private schools will pay ~80k, but the bar is high to get hired (think PhD requirements) and the hours are longer.
But the point stands, the pay is not good at all for the workload. And that was before covid. Aurora public schools have requisitioned two covid-19 tests per month for it's 4k teachers [0]. That's it. They already had high teacher turnover before this mess. Now, I'm afraid that though the schools may be open, they will not be attended.
My SIL makes, I'm pretty sure okay/decent pay... (for a teacher) HOWEVER, she loves her job, and her kids (Teaches poor kids from the Indian Res.)... so she spends almost HALF! her paycheck on supplies for her kindergartners. It's almost like it's part job part hobby.
I think that's pathetic that we don't give ALL school's enough money so everyone has everything they need.
Edit: my point being, even if a teacher makes good $$, they can spend quite a bit of it on student's so take home really becomes a LOT less.
> the extremely low rate of teacher pay (for a job that requires a Master's degree) limits the pool of available teachers greatly.
Teacher pay is not extremely low. The median teacher salary is usually pretty close to the median salary for the state. Plus they get good benefits, a pension, and much more time off than other jobs. It's a solid middle class life.
ok thank you for explaining my family's lived experience to me, the person whose family's lived experience it is. Maybe later you could swing by and tell me if I'm finding the sun hot or not.
Ehh... those statistics are often skewed. First hit on search for elementary school teacher median salary comparison[1]:
> ...median annual income of $58,230.
> This number would be above the average salary in the U.S., but it's the median of an awfully wide range of salaries. Elementary school teachers in the bottom 10% of income only made around $37,780, while those in the highest 10% could make as much as $95,270.
You then scroll down to the section on per-state numbers and see the wide gaps between states. You also see that this article, like others, suddenly jump to using mean instead of median.
I usually don't play this card, but show the data. You are likely only looking at a specific statistical lens that does not paint a real picture.
The median educational attainment is "some college". In my state we require teachers to hold a degree and do some postgraduate work, so by definition it isn't a "median" position. That's before we get into it recently becoming a dangerous job
While there certainty are places that pay starting teachers more, unless you work for the upper crust of K-12 the pay is quite bad compared to basically any other other job that requires a four-year degree plus certification and/or (usually and) a license.
The sad part is that it isn't like there isn't a budget to pay teachers more. We spend more per kid than we ever have, but now any budget increases get absorbed by growth in the administration. Administration in education and healthcare is a cancer.
No relation, saw one of their engineering jobs on HN and your comment made me think of a solution for your mother's situation (it's teaching over Zoom).
My mom works as an administrator in a public school. She is one year away from being eligible for medicaid, which is when she planned on retiring. She said as of right now, she plans to go back, because getting private insurance with her pre-existing conditions for the next year isn't feasible. I'm seriously considering seeing if my siblings and I can fund it for her for a year so she can just retire now and not have to worry about her as much.
A few other school districts around us have cancelled their in-person plans, at least for a few months, so hopefully her district does the same.
The ACA (aka Obamacare) made it so insurance companies can't discriminate on the basis of pre-existing conditions. Check the exchange in her state for options.
The federal government has no jurisdiction over education. The only exception to that is the civil rights (Brown v. Board of Education) and it's quite limited in scope. COVID is certainly out of scope.
The presidential talk about it is just that - talk.
>The federal government has no jurisdiction over education.
It's possible that GP was referring to the current federal government in general re: Covid-19, not specifically their jurisdiction over education. And in that sense they're correct: the current leadership in the US is a disaster and "worse than useless".
It's the same deal tho - the federal government has no jurisdiction over the healthcare system either. The Obamacare, if you recall, in large part hinged on a "tax" created just for this purpose because taxation is the purview of the fed, which was a hack.
And even if Trump issued a "mask mandate" on the first day, for example, who is to enforce it? The FBI?
Yes, it's not written into law that the federal government has the specific power to drag kids back into classrooms and arrest people not wearing masks.
Do you think they have no levers to pull to affect policy from a federal level other than physically forcing people to do things? I'm not really sure what your point is.
Are you kidding? There are hundreds of nurses and doctors who have gotten sick and that's when wearing full PPE. Do you think teachers and kids are going to be wearing PPE in class?? This is a troll comment.
Proper, full PPE? Low. Proper PPE requires diligence and training, but for medical professionals it’s pretty reasonable to expect them to wear it correctly.
The issue is that “proper PPE” is a bad assumption in America. Normally PPE is one time use stuff; you’re supposed to destroy the N95 after use. But we don’t have nearly enough of the stuff, so doctors have been reusing them for a while. This increases the risk of it failing, which is a huge issue if you’re going to interact with known COVID positive patients.
It takes time and effort to create new ventilators, masks, ppe's, etc... but it takes like 20-30 years to create a new doctor or nurse, they're in limited supply - the more we lose the harder this virus will be to defeat long-term.
Likewise the hit to public schools if we lose janitorial, bussing, teaching, and food-working staff MANY of which skew older.
If a school system in a rural town doesn't have enough workers to bus kids, clean up the school, serve lunch, or teach (there's already a teaching shortage because it's a shit job that doesn't pay what it's worth), then schools will be defunkt before long anyways.
What do we do then? It'll be decades before we can replace all those teachers, so we'll have to speedily move to online teaching... what then do we do about parents who need school as daycare so they can provide?
We're beginning to see how intertwined everything in society is, and it's all seemingly crashing down and most people don't even see it happening... it's just a a flu... it'll be over soon.... someone said on FB yesterday that it'll go away as soon as the election is over the only reason it's so big is because of the election....
No. December the election will be behind us, flu season will be upon us, and the 3rd wave will decimate us worse than this one is. Because it'll be cold, we'll be inside, Christmas will come and families will get tired of quarantine again and it's the perfect storm for another explosion of cases.
>There are 5.1 million people working in hospitals.
And most of them are wearing full PPE when possible for many hours a day, if anything your numbers point to the effectiveness of masks.
>Schools across Europe have opened. Children rarely spread the disease. Doctors recommend schools open.
I really don't understand your point of view at all. The US had more cases yesterday than the entire EU combined. We had roughly 1/3 of Germany's total cases over the past 4 months in a single day. How can you actually point to them and think we can do the same things they're doing here in the US?
The US has bungled it's response so badly it boggles the mind. We have by far the most cases and deaths and even on a per capita basis we have by far the most cases and deaths in the developed world and more than most of the developing world. The idea that we should just open up and let potentially thousands of kids, tens of thousands of their parents countless others die so they can sit in a classroom and have a blue haired liberal arts major blather at them for 8 hours a day is simply ridiculous.
>Death rates are not surging in proportion to cases.
Deaths have a 4-6 week lag and are steadily increasing, at the same time a larger fraction of cases are young people(who are less likely to die) flouting the rules and getting infected in large numbers at bars and social events.
You can't honestly be saying that we're overreacting to COVID?
I would hope someone in full PPE everyday has a much lower rate of COVID deaths.
The US alone has more than 25% of global cases - comparing Europe to the US doesn't really make sense. They largely beat covid, the US obviously hasn't (see 70k new cases yesterday)
More people die in car crashes than the flu - doesn't mean we don't spend trillions on road safety, seat belts, etc.
Death rates are surging in proportion to cases, with the expected 2 week delay from infection to death. Yesterday Florida had 116 deaths.
CFR isn't the metric that informs policy... its deaths and potential deaths? IE 141,000 Americans dying this year, which were largely avoidable.
There is no science behind the lockdowns. There is no logic in keeping Walmart open but closing Sears for safety. Yes I believe it is absurd the level to which we have locked down the country.
Some of the states that had the strictest lockdowns, NY, NJ, also had the worst outcomes.
The purpose was never to stop the virus but to slow it.
Growing cases does not concern me. Death rate has blipped up a little but no where near in proportion to the cases.
> Some of the states that had the strictest lockdowns, NY, NJ, also had the worst outcomes.
NYC metro ordered lockdowns after it was hard hit, because it was hit early on before there was a real understanding of what was going on.
A lot of other places still haven’t peaked, the reopening push in response to overall national case decline was driven entirely by NY being past it's peak while the rest of the country combined was still on the upswing.
> Growing cases does not concern me.
The growing list of places at or near ICU capacity should, though.
> Death rate has blipped up a little but no where near in proportion to the cases.
Since the peak death rate was when almost all the cases were in NYC when the NYC health system was overwhelmed, that's unsurprising, we shouldn't see similar death rates in proprtion to cases unless almost all the cases are in similarly overwhelmed locations, which because it hit different places at different times will, even with uncontrolled spread, take a little while.
But with enough cases, you can get a pretty apocalyptic total death toll without going back to the peak death:cases ratio.
> Reporting that they are at capacity intimates that they are packed full of Covid patients and overflowing.
No, it suggests that if the COVID numbers go up, someone who should get ICU treatment, whether COVID or not, won't get it because there won't be capacity. Which is kind of an important fact in places where COVID numbers are trending upward.
If your ICU is at 80% capacity, with 20% COVID and 60% everything else, that means you can DOUBLE the number of COVID patients there before running out of space, whereas if all of the patients were COVID patients you could only accommodate an increase of 25%.
Yes, hitting 100% is bad no matter what percent of patients are there because of COVID. But what percent of patients are there for COVID informs how large an increase of cases can be managed.
I’ve never understood this argument. Places in Europe are opening because they think they’ve got the virus under control. It’s an outcome, not a cause.
Before accusing me of denying science, you should actually read the underlying material and try to think about it critically. The AAP guidelines the article is referencing were written more than three weeks ago, when most states were in the middle of a lull between the first wave that we had in March and April and the second one that is starting. It also contradicts CDC's own, current guidelines, which state that remote learning is the safest option for people of all ages.
Furthermore, the AAP guidelines don't say anything about teachers or school staff. It is written purely with kids in mind. When asked about this in an NYT interview, Dr. Sean O’Leary, who helped write the guidelines, said:
"We’re pediatricians. We’re not educators. We don’t want to tread in space where we don’t belong."
In other words, they don't give a shit about teachers or school staff. Well, maybe we should? At least a quarter of American teachers are over 50, and more than third of them have pre-existing conditions. Reopening schools for in-person instruction will decimate them.
Lastly, even if kids themselves are not strong vectors for transmission, there is literally tens of millions of them in the USA that are of K-12 age. What do you think is going to happen when they go on to infect their parents and grandparents?
> There are 5.1 million people working in hospitals.
The person you are replying to is talking about frontline healthcare workers. But you ignored that and ran your math to include everyone who works in a hospital, and then you go on to ridicule the OP based on your incorrect math.
> They are therefore three times less likely to die from Covid than the general population.
This is based on your incorrect math and I'm quite sure is the incorrect conclusion.
> Schools across Europe have opened.
This isn't Europe, though, it's America. The situation is different here.
> Twenty times as many children died of the flu last year than from COVID.
I'm not sure how to interpret this, but COVID did not start to spread until November/December last year and obviously the numbers were small to start. What do you mean to imply with this stat?
> The CFR of this disease does not meet the threshold for a pandemic
The definition of a pandemic has nothing to do with CFR.
> nor does it merit the level of fear engendered by the press.
I haven't seen any fear-mongering from respected press. Most of the fear mongering I see about COVID is from Fox or similar telling us that the masks are something to be afraid of, due to government overreach or something.
But the normal press mostly just reports the facts. If those facts create fear in you, then I'm sorry, but it's not the press causing that fear.
Move to Canada, our teachers are paid 86K (CAD) or around 63K USD.
"Teachers in the province earn an average salary of around $86,000, according to data provided by Ontario's Ministry of Education. Only in Alberta are average teacher salaries higher, around $89,000"
It's the government that the collective beliefs and cultural assumptions of this country have built. Maybe there's a cause-effect link in there, somewhere, you would think?
No, the federal government we have is the result of our outdated, quirky and flawed electoral system, where the votes of certain states are much more valuable than others.
> The Senate is also broken (Wyoming with 500k == California with 39M people).
That's because States are political units, not just arbitrary boundaries. So they also have a voice in the federal government as States. To me, Wyoming being able to not be run roughshod over by California just because California has a lot more people is a feature, not a bug.
If that's true, why does it not also apply to the weighting of the Presidency between those two poles?
What they were describing applies to every federally elected position, in different amounts. Whether it's a bug or a feature (as a whole or for each position) is very much up for discussion, but it's orthogonal.
In that case, I don't think anything really remains of your original comment in this thread? Your follow-ups have blurred the line between factual questions and normative, but in both cases the comment you initially replied to applies at least as much to things other than the presidency.
(I'll note that this doesn't mean there weren't interesting points worth discussing that you've been trying to get at, just that you've at least wound up unclear in how you've been expressing them.)
The Senate is designed to act as a counter balance to the house. The senate with equal representation per state, and the house with population based representation.
No, the votes of people in certain states being more valuable than those in others is also true of the House and Senate.
In fact, the inequity in voting power produced by the Electoral College is a direct consequence of that in the structure of the House and Senate, since the latter is apportioned simply (except for DC) by adding the apportionment of House and Senate seats.
I responded to a similar point by not2b downthread. The following are some additional points I didn't make there.
To some extent the inequity you describe can be corrected by forcing particular methods for apportionment that can better prevent gerrymandering, and by increasing the size of the House to reduce the difference between the populations of the least and most populous districts. A certain amount of inequity of this type is, however, unavoidable in any representative democracy.
Also, this particular inequity is important to people only to the extent that what the Federal government does directly affects their lives. So an obvious way to reduce the impact of this inequity is to reduce the ways in which the Federal government can affect individual people's lives. The idea that Federal laws and regulations should be able to micromanage so many aspects of everyone's lives would have been horrifying to any of the Founders. Not only that, but it also disempowers people by making them much less aware of everyone's ability to find local solutions to local problems.
Another point to make is that the main problem with the Senate and the House has nothing to do with the inequity you describe: it is the simple fact that Congress has very low approval ratings but very high incumbent reelection rates. That means members of Congress are effectively never held accountable for bad policy decisions; they can continue to make them with impunity since they know they are not risking reelection by doing so. (For example, in all the furor over the CDC and FDA bungling COVID-19 testing, nobody to my knowledge has observed that the only reason the FDA had the power to prohibit State and local health authorities from developing their own tests is that Congress gave it that power, and legislation to rethink bad policy decisions like that is not even on the table.) That is not something that can be fixed by adopting a different system for apportionments.
> Another point to make is that the main problem with the Senate and the House has nothing to do with the inequity you describe: it is the simple fact that Congress has very low approval ratings but very high incumbent reelection rates. That means members of Congress are effectively never held accountable for bad policy decisions.
Wrong.
Individual members of Congress tend to have high (often overwhelming) approval in their districts (or states for Senators); members generally do a good job of representing the people they are elected by.
Congress as an institution has low approval rates because people dislike what it does in aggregate, not what the people they have a vote in do. If Congress was more effectively representative—which is a matter of apportionment and electoral system—the aggregate approval would be higher.
This is not only analytically obvious, but borne out by actual results of surveys of public approval of representative democratic governments in general and legislative bodies specifically when compared to measures of effective proportionality of representation.
> Congress as an institution has low approval rates because people dislike what it does in aggregate, not what the people they have a vote in do
In other words, people like their individual representatives because those representatives favor their preferred policies; but they strongly disapprove of Congress as a whole because they don't see any of those preferred policies actually being enacted.
> If Congress was more effectively representative—which is a matter of apportionment and electoral system—the aggregate approval would be higher.
This assumes that, by changing apportionment and the electoral system, more people would see Congress enacting their preferred policies. I don't think this is true. I think the reason Congress as a whole doesn't enact anyone's preferred policies is that there is no broad bipartisan consensus behind any of them; if a majority exists at all in favor of any particular policies, it is a thin majority, and there is no majority with enough consensus on a range of policies to be able to make the required legislative deals to get those policies enacted.
In other words, Congress is reflecting the fact that the country as a whole does not have a broad consensus in favor of most policies that are on the table. And in that situation, those policies shouldn't be enacted. So I would argue that in this respect our current system is doing exactly the job the Founders intended it to do: it is preventing thin majorities from imposing their preferred policies on everyone.
However, the disconnect between individual approval ratings and the overall approval rating of Congress does allow something else to happen: since there is effectively no competition for individual seats, there is no accountability for bad policy decisions that do have broad bipartisan consensus behind them. So those decisions can be, and are, made with impunity. The grant of power to the FDA that I mentioned previously is an example: there is no serious opposition from either party in Congress to granting unelected bureaucrats in Federal agencies extremely broad powers that affect everyone and cannot be effectively challenged. So that disastrous policy decision continues on while people squabble over policies that have only thin majorities, if any, in favor of them.
Yes, some states have House seats that represent somewhat fewer people than some other states. I suppose, technically, that means the votes in that state are "more valuable". It's far different from the Senate, though.
It's absolutely true of the House, though because of granularity rather than fixed representation, so it's not simply smaller-states-are-overrepresented. (But instead smaller states have the most variable representation.)
> Yes, some states have House seats that represent somewhat fewer people than some other states
“Somewhat fewer” in the sense that 527,000 (Rhode Island) is “somewhat fewer” than 994,000 (Montana), but, while it's a narrower range than the Senate (65.7:1) or EC (3.59:1), 1.88:1 isn't a close ratio.
Trump did not lose the popular vote. There is no contest for the popular vote. Perhaps one party should try moving a bit to campaign according to the actual contest at hand, rather than try to rewrite the rules.
You assume the Democrats would win a popular vote easily. First, Republicans would actually campaign in California for a change. They might even move left a tad on some issues. Democrats might decide it's the time to go batshit insane and go further left, leaving an even wider, disenfranchised center than we have now.
Dear god, do facts not matter at all? He absolutely lost the popular vote. He won the election through the electoral college. It's the system we have and it's what determines the election but to say he didn't lost the popular vote is false and revisionist.
I believe that you are missing LanceH's point. I'll try to put it in different terms.
Here's a football game. Team A scores 17 points on 284 yards of offense. Team B scores 10 points but has 317 yards of offense. Team B's fans say "We won on total offense!" That's great, Team B fans. Here, have a lollipop.
Why am I being so condescending? Because no football game is decided based on total offense. They're decide on points. Team B "won" something that is a statistical category, not a game.
In the same way, Hillary won a statistic, not an election. So all this "Trump lost the popular vote" is... yeah, so what? Winning the popular vote plus six bucks will get you a latte at Starbucks. And Democrats knew what the rules were going into the election, and have known ever since. Who cares about the popular vote? It's totally irrelevant. They. Lost. The. Election.
I think you misinterpreted what he was suggesting - it is meaningless to say that Hillary won the popular vote because neither party were trying to win the popular vote - you win the presidency by winning the electoral college.
If instead the president was chosen by popular vote, both parties likely would have campaigned differently.
>I think you misinterpreted what he was suggesting - it is meaningless to say that Hillary won the popular vote because neither party were trying to win the popular vote - you win the presidency by winning the electoral college.
This is a non-sequitur. Whether or not that metric (popular vote) has a bearing on the results of presidential election is irrelevant to the statement of whether he won in that metric.
Furthermore, it's counter-productive to the discussion to preface a comment with a politically charged comment (trump and some of his supporters legitimately believes he got more popular vote than clinton, despite evidence to the contrary), then backpedal on that statement by adding a bunch of qualifiers.
Maybe with a definition that you can only "win" a competition that was agreed upon ahead of time. However, a quick search on hn shows that "win" colloquially also can mean beating everyone else at some metric (or in some cases, on a subjective basis). eg.
And that since the rules weren’t “whoever wins the national popular vote is president” we can’t know how campaigns and voters would have behaved under that rule set, making appeals to the “popular vote” meaningless. A position which I actually agree with, despite very much not liking the last couple R presidents who won despite “losing” the (meaningless, and not a useful measure of much given the above) popular vote.
It’s fun to complain about when your (our, perhaps) person loses but is about as meaningful as “our team should have won because we had more men-on-base”. Well, OK, but baseball is played to optimize for runs because that’s how you win, so no, you shouldn’t have won, and also if the other team had been optimizing for men-on-base you may still have lost—we simply can’t know.
She's been a teacher for ~15 years and still makes less than $30k a year teaching. She loves helping the kids, but her life isn't worth it.