Comment by trelane
7 days ago
> is there shortage of teachers in USA?
No, there is a steady stream of teachers being fed into the maw of public education. The pay is low and job security is terrible until you get tenure. My wife was a teacher; I have heard horror stories.
You get paid based on a combination of how much money you earn your employer and how easy you are to replace. Schools get paid by taxes, and there are a ton of them produced every year. So, the pay is abysmal.
My gf makes about $90k a year, tons of time off, at 35 years old in a California public school. If she wasn't a teacher, she admits she'd probably be a cop or 911 dispatcher, because government gigs are what her entire extended family recommends. She has trouble adding 50 cents to 75 cents, but luckily she only teaches English and social studies to middle schoolers.
I have a kid who just graduated elementary and is about to enter Middle school.
Your post actually explains why every single classmate of my daughter has enrolled in private middle school ($50k+ tuition), despite being in the best school district (Palo Alto School District).
Apparently public middle schools are really bad in California, but you can still find decent high and elementary schools
All top private middle schools in the bay are oversubscribed and cannot accomodate everyone, and require ridiculous exams and admission process that rivals Ivy League, situation is really bad, and demand for good teachers is infinite
I like the girl but I can't help but dislike what her and her social circle are doing to schools. I go to their social events after hours for happy hour or family events and I honestly don't think these people are capable of molding the youth into anything but lame 'nice' kind stupid people. Yes, being nice and kind are important, sure. But you get major problems when these teachers can not inspire or provoke thought. And they can't, because they are honestly borderline retarded. Half the kids are just nodding along, and the other half realize by around 7th grade that their teachers are stupid and start really mistreating them and ignoring them. Its a mess.
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What happened was there were a lot of boomers that taught my generation in the bay area. So when I was in high school around 94-98 the teachers were typically 40-50ish year old boomer generation. These people were pretty good at teaching. Mostly white. As generation X started getting into the game, and bureaucratic processes the introduced "core" and "new math". Both pretty bad. I was in the middle of the transition so I did get pre-new-math as well.
What happened next? Well pretty much all of us got jobs at Google, Apple and other places. The only way for any of us to have stayed in teaching would have been major compromises. We decimated the teaching industry because it didn't realize the salaries these companies were waiting to pay us. They had no chance.
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