Education policy is the issue that drew me to participate on Hacker News,[1] so I'll jump in here too. I get the impression that mathattack, whose comments I enjoy reading, may have posted this article for disagreement. The Answer Sheet blog from which this guest post comes is basically a propaganda organ, and some of the guest posts from the same blog that were submitted to Hacker News in the past were exposed as hack jobs after discussion here.[2]

The obligatory disclosure here is to note that I am a classroom teacher by occupation. Over the years, I have been a teacher of Chinese to native speakers of English, a teacher of English to native speakers of Chinese (and other languages), and most recently a teacher of advanced elementary mathematics ("prealgebra" mathematics for third-, fourth-, and fifth-graders) for a nonprofit organization in my town. My HN user profile describes a bit more of my background.

Yep, classroom teaching is hard, no doubt about it. It has emotional rewards that some people value highly enough that it is a sought-after occupation, not a labor-shortage occupation, and that has the most to do with teacher compensation. Classroom teaching by teachers in private practice (like me) can also be poorly compensated (relative to the difficulty of doing the job well) because most clients have already paid for "free" lessons at the local public schools through their taxes, and will only pay out of pocket for a private lesson if it is truly superior in some way. "In modern times [as contrasted with ancient times] the diligence of public teachers is more or less corrupted by the circumstances which render them more or less independent of their success and reputation in their particular professions. Their salaries, too, put the private teacher, who would pretend to come into competition with them, in the same state with a merchant who attempts to trade without a bounty in competition with those who trade with a considerable one. . . . The privileges of graduation, besides, are in many countries . . . obtained only by attending the lectures of the public teachers. . . . The endowment of schools and colleges have, in this manner, not only corrupted the diligence of public teachers, but have rendered it almost impossible to have any good private ones." -- Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book V, Part 3, Article II (1776)

A couple of the comments posted here before I arrived in the thread mention the particular skills that a teacher needs to have to teach a class effectively. There is much interesting research on this coming from the charter school movement, with some of the best how-to research coming from the Teach Like a Champion[3] project. I love learning about new ways to be a more effective teacher. Besides actual teacher skills, another grave problem in United States school is extremely poor teaching materials[4] and I devote hundreds of hours to curriculum planning and seeking out the best available textbooks[5] for the subjects I teach.

A good teacher is worth a lot.[6] We would not go far wrong by saying that a good teacher is literally worth his or her weight in gold. But the tricky issue in school administration is distinguishing effective from ineffective teachers. To ensure that school leaders have incentives to find and reward the best teachers, we need to make sure that learners (or the adult guardians of minor learners) have the power to shop, the power to refuse the services of an ineffective teacher and to seek out the services of an effective teacher. Teachers will gain both more pay and more respect if learners gain power to shop.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4728123

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3327847

[3] http://teachlikeachampion.com/

[4] http://open.salon.com/blog/annie_keeghan/2012/02/17/afraid_o...

[5] http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Store/viewitem.php?item=p...

[6] http://hanushek.stanford.edu/publications/valuing-teachers-h...