53points · 6h ago

To recruit teachers, school districts are building homes

nytimes.com·by mooreds·6h ago

Discussion 47 comments

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wewewedxfgdf·4h ago

The core fabric of society - the deal that was offered by society to the people - to work in a job, own a house, raise a family, have a retirement - has decayed away entirely for many people.

crooked-v·4h ago

The housing part never 'decayed', it was actively blocked by the people who already had homes. That's why you see things now like California actively overriding local zoning.

cucumber3732842·4h ago

>, it was actively blocked by the people who already had homes.

You're not wrong but this is too simplistic and avoids holding up a mirror that really ought to be held up. Zoning was the "we're gonna regulate our way into utopia" of their time. The class of useful idiots who made it happen and the class of useful idiots who will go to bat for it's continuance because they make a buck on it is far broader than that.

tptacek·4h ago

It's not simplistic. It is literally the core problem with housing. Zoning had a first objective of preventing Black families from moving into white neighborhoods, and then, in the 1980s, assumed a new role of driving scarcity (and thus the price of houses in areas of opportunity, to the benefit of existing homeowners).

SoftTalker·4h ago

This is quite a new deal and not one enjoyed by most people for most of history.

Loughla·3h ago

What is the purpose of what you're saying? Because people lived like serfs and slaves for a lot of history, we should be okay with that?

I don't mean to be shitty, and I fully understand that contrary takes are what HN is great at, but I genuinely fail to see what the point of your comment is other than a knee jerk nothing?

AngryData·3h ago

Is that not how the 95% of the population of farmers lived before industrialization? The only difference is the job being their own farm or trade.

andyferris·5h ago

We are very fortunate that my wife got to work at the local school. She now walks to work and I work from home about 4 days out of 5 workdays.

The benefits are huge in terms of time available and costs, and not needing childcare before or after school.

It’s hard to solve couples having two jobs in different places, but having at least one person get to work basically instantly and for zero cost is a massive boon to society.

The issue I saw is that the government department in charge of education is not the one in charge of housing and infrastructure, and there are no incentives to hire locally or make it easier to move locally. Instead you get teachers in suburb A travelling to suburb B and vice-versa, and no way that they can choose to swap roles. We lucked out.

apparent·1h ago

Teacher recruiting wouldn't be so hard if pay weren't lockstep, as it is in so many places. Unions demand this, and it keeps some potentially-effective teachers out of the profession (and keeps old lousy ones in, unfortunately).

analog31·1h ago

Maybe we could use college teaching as a model. College teachers are for the most part non-unionized.

Disclosure: I was one of those teachers for a semester, many years ago.

Also, teacher pay is not as rigid as it seems. In my state, the good teachers advance by moving to better paying districts. Very few teachers stay in rural districts for more than a year or two.

apparent·1h ago

I thought the same thing regarding professors not being unionized. However, in top universities they are paid as much based on research (or outside offers based on research) as they are on teaching capability.

One thing that is truly bonkers about K12 education is that they can get tenure in just a few years. This is much faster (and easier) than a professor getting tenure. But they both result in the near-inability to be fired.

bonsai_spool·1h ago

> Teacher recruiting wouldn't be so hard if pay weren't lockstep, as it is in so many places. Unions demand this, and it keeps some potentially-effective teachers out of the profession (and keeps old lousy ones in, unfortunately).

This is an unhelpful, anti-union sentiment with no actual relevance to the problem of teacher recruiting.

How would it be easier to recruit new, potentially-effective teachers if we had incentive pay based on meritocratic pay scales? There is no rational way to credit someone from a different area for their ability to run a classroom effectively until there's evidence on how that person runs a classroom.

smallerize·34m ago

You don't have to be anti-union to be anti-teachers-union. I know a guy who worked in private schools for a couple decades, and then couldn't get work in public schools because the union would have required a very high pay rate for someone of his seniority. He said they could hire 3 younger people for the same money. I guess freezing out one old guy and hiring three new ones is an increase in recruiting though, right?

apparent·58m ago

Why do you think it is not relevant to the problem of teacher recruiting? I would be more likely to go into teaching if I thought it could be a good place to work and I would be paid fairly. My impression, from seeing my kids go through public schools, is that the lockstep pay (which can be bumped by getting mostly-useless online degrees) creates bad incentives. There is no way to move up quickly by being an awesome teacher, and mediocre teachers are impossible to get rid of. This hurts morale and drains districts of resources that could be used to pay better-performing teachers.

beepbooptheory·31m ago

I too would be more likely to be a public school teacher if it paid more.

morkalork·4h ago

It used to be like this in rural communities even up into the 70s and 80s. The town's branch manager would be young, shipped out for a few years and live in a house the bank owned and given a stipend to maintain it. Same with the postmaster and other professions.

ReactiveJelly·5h ago

A land value tax would fix this

tptacek·4h ago

I know the Georgism joke here, but we don't need an LVT to fix this; we just need states to override home rule on minimum density requirements for residential and mixed-use zoning. The core problem here is in fact very simple!

dragonwriter·4h ago

A land value tax without changes in non-tax land use regulations would not fix, and a land value tax would not be necessary after removing the non-tax land use restrictions which this responds to.

lokar·5h ago

Not on its own. You also need to relax or remove direct (and indirect, eg parking minimums) restrictions on residential density.

trashcan·5h ago

How?

OutOfHere·4h ago

It would allow housing to be substantially denser.

dragonwriter·4h ago

How would an LVT do that when the barrier to dense housing is zoning restrictions?

Changing the tax structure doesn't remove that restriction.

tptacek·4h ago

An LVT addresses the incentives underling zoning. The LVT imagined by Georgists would very probably result in radically altered zoning rules. Zoning, after all, exists primarily to prop up the finances of homeowners.

dragonwriter·3h ago

A Georgist LVT is based on the value of the bare land, which is constrained by permitted uses. Adopting it without first removing zoning restrictions would increase the incentive for homeowners to defend the existing zoning rules, since the removal of the rules would increase the scope of alternative uses of the land in ways which would make it economically impossible for most existing single family homeowners to afford the taxes on the property.

On the other hand, once you remove the zoning restrictions, the existing economic incentives will produce densification without LVT, tbat's the whole thing the zoning restrictions exist to stop.

ahazred8ta·3h ago

An LVT results in McMansions on quarter acre lots being taxed at the same rate as trailers on quarter acre lots. It's the perfect way to allow rich people to buy out poor people and pay the same tax as poor people. Welcome to unintended consequences.

AvAn12·5h ago

Could just, you know, pay more…

tptacek·4h ago

Teachers in major metro school systems already have quite a good deal. Rural schoolteachers really do have the deal everyone heard about in 1990s politics, but urban schoolteachers are generally economically privileged.

(That doesn't mean they aren't impacted by housing scarcity in ways that disrupt the administration of school systems; they are. But the problem isn't compensation, the problem is corrupt regulation written to prop up homeowner assets.)

Loughla·3h ago

I genuinely need to see what data you're citing with this statement. Until recently, I worked in education and often worked with urban schools. Starting salaries of 55-60k/year living in a major metropolitan area is not what I would call economically privileged.

tptacek·3h ago

The average CPS salary is somewhere around $75k, with 10+ weeks of vacation, but that undercounts it dramatically because CPS teachers get defined-benefit pension plans and often earn tens of thousands in additional cash comp for extracurricular work, and that's before what happens when you get a masters.

jt2190·2h ago

> the average is around $96,000

https://www.cps.edu/media/community-updates/2025/january/neg...

tptacek·2h ago

What are you trying to say by posting this link?

dpbriggs·5h ago

Why not make housing cost less instead?

ninjalanternshk·4h ago

Because we’ve been sold the story that your house has to appreciate in value 2-3 times over the period you live in it, consequently, homeowners vote against anything that lowers housing costs.

OutOfHere·4h ago

They're not mutually exclusive goals. Wanting a more affording salary and scalable housing both are valid goals.

lumost·4h ago

Governments may be uniquely positioned to offer housing incentives as they often own the land, and control the zoning.