This is precisely my point. You should read the earlier posts in the thread. Unfortunately, there are people in this thread who are denying this point. Maybe they are CTR trying to distract from the Sec. Ed. nominee criticisms.
“Can” does not mean “will”. There is a complicated application procedure for middle and high school. It’s not as though everyone in NYC is sending his or her kids to his or her top choice of middle or high school. Don’t kids get priority to go to the middle school or high school in their own districts? What happens when space runs out? I don’t know if I would agree that even the “better” public schools are uniformly “great”.
In any case, elementary school is very important. There are many elementary schools that are really bad in neighborhoods with affordable housing.
The middle class parents I know in NYC are mostly desperate unless and until their kids get into one of the specialized high schools.
When I was a child in NYC (Queens), there were good public elementary schools in the neighborhood and the housing costs in the same neighborhood were affordable for a large family living on 1 teacher salary. Those days are long gone.
@Plotinus “Can” does not mean “will”. There is a complicated application procedure for middle and high school.
Except that, if you are a teacher, you are well informed about education and school options, you value education, you may know the ins and outs of the ‘system’, you may have ‘connections’ at various schools, you know how what a strong application looks like, you are well equipped to help your child. I think it is fair to assume that a teacher who is looking for middle and high school options for their child ‘will’ put forth a strong search effort and will likely have a leg up on other candidates.
Repeated references to oligarchs and accusations about CTR (whatever that is, having looked up the abbreviation I am still not quite sure) just sound odd.
There is no reason at all for teacher salaries to be set at a level that a one salary household with four kids can thrive in NYC. If a teacher wants that lifestyle, maybe try Ames, Iowa.
Decent schools seem to get decent teachers already. Terrible schools just don’t deserve, nor will they benefit from, highly paid super academic teachers.
Many schools need teachers with a law enforcement personality, plus a bit higher level literacy than the highway patrol. Not Google candidates.
Some people may be able to thread the needle. That does not mean conditions are fine or even close to fine. The government and our society has to decide whether it is a better investment for our children to spend more money to recruit and retain teachers, or to put money into the computerization of education and the pockets of private and charter school backers.
A recent article in Forbes made some good points. Basically their conclusion was comparable to the Goldilocks tale: teacher salaries were not too high, not too low but just about right. When looking at national averages they concluded:
And I think it is fair to make adjustments for the roughly 38 week work-year.
And those adjusted numbers do not take into account additional income earned by teachers during the summer months for tutoring, summer program employment or other work. I continue to believe that arguing the salaries are too low based upon the cost of living in NYC makes little sense. There are unarguably parts of the country that are more affordable than others – it has always been that way and always will be. We all make adjustments in every area of our life depending on our financial circumstances – that’s just life.
Many leading scholars have argued that US democracy has become an oligarchy, in which the government aligns its interests with those of wealthy powerful elites rather than with those of average citizens. This view has been endorsed by several public figures, including Jimmy Carter and Robert Reich.
The word “oligarch” is part of contemporary political discourse.
Whenever the government proposes a large expenditure of taxpayer dollars, it is important to ask whether the expenditure is in the interests of average citizens or the wealthy elites.
Yes. Especially considering many of the ones who left teaching felt K-12 teaching…especially in the most challenging neighborhoods/areas was far more stressful than known stressful professions such as Wall Street/Finance, law(including biglaw), or becoming a corporate exec at a Fortune 500.
Heck, my CS major friend briefly considered being a STEM teacher before dismissing it because he understood himself well enough to know he’d hate having to deal with K-12 classroom disciplinary issues, entitled irate/unreasonable parents who demand more for their child/refuse to acknowledge their child’s misdeeds/responsibility for self-inflicted problems, micromanagement from school admins/educrats, serving as a punching bag for politicians…especially during election campaigning season, etc.
Haven’t read this entire thread in detail but what I can of course say as someone who grew up in Queens and attended NYC public schools and as someone involved in educational sales and deal with public, private and parochial schools throughout NYS and two other states I cover (WI and CT): I can respond/add the following:
In my previous post I typed Sibley Friends as a possible school in D.C for the youngest Trump when I of course meant Sidwell Friends.
Personally I think Michelle Rhee would be an absolute disaster as Secretary of Education and Eva Moskowitz not interested because I think she is planning a future run for either NYC Governor or Mayor down the road
There is so much complexity to the NYC School System including both the development of charters, how charters come about, where they are located, whether they siphon off funds and “better students” from the public schools, how poorly run some are as compared to their local public school or in general , the charter school process of “weeding out” students. the vast difference let’s say between Stuyvesant, Forest Hills HS, the endless small schools that have replaced formerly large schools such as Jamaica HS or Christopher Columbus HS and many others, the endless changing mandates for teachers and so much more.
Yes in NYC and in NYS, teachers are required to acquire a Masters Degree within (l believe it is 3 years).
While it is silly to say that “no one coming out of NYC schools other than Stuyvesant” can get into an Ivy League there are always exceptions… certainly not the norm but both Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan did very well. Clearly not the average student.
About WI there is flat education funding since 2008 along with states such as AZ, KS, NC and Maine (just passed a tax on incomes above $200,000 earmarked for education) The current WI governor’s push to rollback teacher pensions has resulted in a huge retirement among teachers and school librarians. In the case for school librarians, those positions are frequently not filled resulting in some districts in which there is only one librarian for 5-7 schools and sometimes that one came from PK-2… challenging to be assisting AP level students with research projects. The current IL governor by the way is taking up the same position in IL and along with state’s fiscal crisis…resulting in huge education cuts.
The next target in WI has been funding cuts to the state colleges…apart from the flagship. Same situation in AK which has resulted in a huge faculty exodus from the state’s colleges along with elimination of departments. Because of the geography of AK…not a lot of community colleges to expand programs for students and faculty.
I never said that you couldn’t get into an Ivy League school coming from a non-specialized public NYC high school, but Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan would hardly be counter-examples to this claim.
Elena Kagan went to Hunter College High School (n fact, she was there at the same time I was), another specialized high school like Stuyvesant. She did not go a regular public high school.
Sonia Sotomayor went to Cardinal Spellman High School, a well-known private high school in the Bronx (current tuition about 12K per year). She did not go to a regular public high school.
Neither of these two came out of a regular public NYC high school.
Of course the problem is not limited to education. I only bring it up in relation to education because the federal government has invested and is planning to invest huge amounts of taxpayer dollars to pay for school computers and standardized testing – and now possibly vouchers for private and charter schools – when better teacher pay could be part of a more effective plan to improve education.
The question is: what is the best use of additional government money for education?
If the federal government were not planning to spend mega-tax dollars on education in these ways, I would not bring up the issue of teacher salaries.
That’s an unfortunate stance, and one that evidences a distressing my way or the highway attitude. There is much work that can get done to shape/moderate the application of policy at the cabinet level. Plus, it is a heck of a lot easier to persuade people if you are actually in the room, rather than standing outside, complaining.
Mea culpa… yes I would not say that Hunter College HS is an average NYC public school. I have a cousin whose son is in 4th grade and when he was admitted her parents were trying to get her to move back to MA and live with them, as she was recently divorced and neither she nor her ex (one adjunct faculty/freelance editor and one tenure track faculty/well regarded writer of non-fiction/fiction/NYTIMES contributing writer) could afford two rental apartments. I had to help explain to her mom about why her son’s admit was like winning the golden ticket in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. So… he is now in 4th grade and she still cannot afford her apartment, actually had to move from the LES to the less desirable upper East Side.
Forgot that Sonia Sotomayor went to Spellman, an awesome school by the way and yes DeBlasio’s son is at Yale (graduate of Brooklyn Tech HS and NYC debate champion along with his partner).
Not that I went to Harvard, I went to one of the SUNY schools for almost zero dollars thanks to what was then known as Regent scholarships but the valedictorian of my year did go to Harvard and several others went to Cornell, Amherst and other schools. The high school that I graduated from is now an awful school however but my older d, a Brandeis grad met one of her best friends in her dorm freshman year, a Cardozo grad.
Obviously the two jobs appeal to two different types of people. I am someone that was considering both, because I have an interest in research but also in education. When I told people I wanted to be a college professor, they were generally encouraging. But when I told people I wanted to be a high school teacher, I would get strange looks, the implication being that I was too smart to be a teacher. I don’t know anyone from my graduating class that is a K-12 teacher. But I know many people in PhD programs that would like to become professors.
Only a handful of HS classmates from my graduating class and the prior one worked as K-12 teachers. Most have found it to be too much of a hassle and left before their first 5 years would have been up for perceived less stressful jobs like biglaw attorney or fortune 500 corporate exec with much higher pay and perceived respect from peers/society at large.
The few who remain as K-12 teachers are not only teaching in the best NYC/Boston public schools(think Boston Latin School or Academy, FH High, Midwood, Townsend Harris), one is coming up for serious consideration as chairperson of the math department at one of those schools.
Yeah, not so much. I have been a big law associate and partner, married to a teacher, etc. Not even close, and no one who is sane and works in either field believes it to be.
All of those classmates who quit teaching felt dealing with the pressures of biglaw or being a fortune 500 exec far less stressful/taxing than dealing with multiple classrooms worth of 20+ K-12 students and moreso, dealing with being stuck in the middle between students/parents on one side and micromanagement/serving as effective scapegoats for all student ills by higher educrats/politicians.
All that was eliminated as for them, it was much easier to just deal with micromanaging bosses and clients who were all ostensibly adults. And they’re all much happier for it.