See, this is where things go wrong. So they've got mean wage figures which are constructed both on a fact (hourly wage) and an assumption (working hours).
I know n=1 but, my girlfriend is a teacher and I see her working about 40 hours a week, for a 24h job. She has a 0.6 FTE contracted position (and an according 60% monthly salary), she's at the school about 4 days a week. On her off-day, every single evening before work and after work, and at least one, sometimes two days of the weekend, she's grading papers, designing exams, preparing lessons, calling up parents, responding to students on their education platform (some saas application on laptop & phone) etc etc.
There's no way she can handle a 1.0 position, she'd burn-out within 1 or 2 years. She knows this, all of her colleagues know this. Almost everyone works part-time.
She does teach difficult classes (lots of kids from low socioeconomic background, crappy parents, many distractions, little socialisation skills etc etc) but even teaching 'easy' kids, you'll still top-out at 0.8 FTE for the same mental effort / working hours / strain of 1.0 FTE at a 'normal' job (like mine, corporate job at a financial institution).
Hourly wages can't be straight-up compared between jobs high in mental or physical strain (e.g. teaching or construction) versus say an administrative office job. You just can't last 40 years working the former jobs at a full-time position. Not the average person.
The general idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-to-rule
Some examples, many of which only do "work-to-rule" on certain days, not even on all of the days. https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2018/02/09/west-chicago-teacher... https://www.orlandoweekly.com/Blogs/archives/2018/01/26/oran... https://www.floridatoday.com/story/news/2018/01/04/unhappy-r... https://www.tulsaworld.com/news/local/education/tulsa-public... https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2012/11/...
The only effective (read: doesn't cost anything to execute) strategy employers have to calibrate how much workload can be achieved in a given time is to keep increasing the amount of work until people start quitting or jobs go undone, then scale back a little bit. There are other strategies that cost more to execute or require enlightened management; but they aren't the norm in my experience.
All a teacher can really do for a class is either 1:1 time with an individual or N:1 time with a group. All the details of exactly what gets done only obscures the fact that there is always going to be a good outcome for students if the teacher puts in another half-hour of unpaid work and that teachers shouldn't do that because it is unpaid.
Anecdotes consistently run one way, while data consistently runs another.
This analysis would be a lot more useful if broken down by demographic categories, such as gender, marital status, age, and number/ages of children.
The demographic profile of teachers is pretty different than e.g. accountants or lawyers or engineers.
It would also be useful to break this down by salary bracket.
Anecdotally, my mother, a career primary-school teacher, worked 60+ hours/week most weeks (while school was in session; her preparation/cleanup took also took a couple full-time weeks out of every summer vacation, but the rest of the summer vacation she could travel etc.) for several decades. Much harder than most of the much-better-compensated other white-collar professionals I know.
I’m also not sure if self-reported estimates on a survey are reliable measures of time spent. Again anecdotally, people’s self-descriptions of how hard working they are seems to depend substantially on personality / identity. It would be interesting to see some more direct measurements of time use.
And there's more of those around than you might think.
That kind of job should have risk bonuses. Significant ones. Most people just can't do that and pursue anything else. Getting stuck is a real fear.
If salary was determined based on the emotional and physical toll a job takes, I feel like a fast food worker would make more than I do as a software engineer.
It was pure bliss. Most of my time was spent relaxing in my own car with my own music, or socializing with other employees in the pizza shop. Some (very few) customers were dicks, but who gives a fuck? All I do is deliver it, I was neither expected nor in any way able to help them with anything else. There is no concept of "oh, here's a bunch of work I didn't expect to have to do today." Show up, drive around, ???, profit, leave.
Since then I've accidentally stumbled back into software development and while it certainly has its upsides, I am infinitely more stressed. I miss the pizza gig almost daily.
Good thing there's always a budget to build newer fancier schools, but not to pay teachers livable wages, cause that makes sense.
There are some additional reasons for this. The first is that there's not a 1-on-1 correlation between number of classes to teach and hours of work. It is assumed that teachers spend, IIRC, 30 minutes before a lesson to prepare it. The time it requires in practice, though, strongly depends on your schedule: if you have to teach five different levels of students, that means you're preparing five different lessons. If you teach five different classes, but all of them at the same level, you'll be able to spread the preparation time over all five of them, greatly lowering the average time spent.
The other complicating factor is that there are seasons: summer holiday is relatively calm (you'll have nothing to do for most of the time), whereas exam weeks can be enormously stressful. So while on average a teacher might be working close to a regular, full-time job, it's practically impossible to maintain a 1fte job, since there will regularly be weeks in which the work is simply too overwhelming.
Edit: And one additional point: teachers are really bad at negotiating. They can demand higher wages or fewer working hours, but once push comes to shove, most of them will simply put up with it for fear of harming the students.
The vast majority of info about teaching as a career will vastly differ based on location. For example, it is my understanding that teaching in California is closer to a $60k salary, while here in Maine, the majority of schools are more like $40k after 20 years accrued. You get about 3 personal days a year, with just a bit more sick time, meaning teachers often have to just work sick. Teachers are also required to keep their education up with taking college level classes every few years, as well as meeting other requirements (which is a good thing) often out of their own pocket (which is bad thing). You start work not after 7:45, and are "done" by 4, unless you actually do your job as a teacher and want to not be fired, in which case you are done after 7pm. You teach hundreds of students, and often end up being the sole support figure for tens of students per year, basically adopting them and trying to contribute as much as you can to their lives. Everything you do, inside and outside of work, is scrutinized by the entire town. Every little twerp of a kid is an angel to their parents, and 80% of the parents will blame you for any problem they create. Imagine the kind of hate that the lowest retail worker gets, now imagine you went to college for 6ish years and still get that hate.
The single upside (again, here in Maine) is really really good, 100% employer paid healthcare, though no dental. Pretty much the only reason my dirt poor family didn't die on the street.
If school teachers worked how much they are paid, America would have collapsed 50 years ago.
A school where almost all the teachers are working part time sounds unusual to me, and I wonder if that contributes to what sounds like an unpleasant environment. Most schools are staffed by full time employees with nowhere near the burnout rate you stated would occur here.
The thing is, many people in 40-hour-week jobs are doing upwards of 60 hours per week. I'd offer that the better paid the job and the more responsibility the job has, the more hours per week are required. Nearly everybody is doing their equivalent of grading papers and doing lesson plans.
Why does she accept this? You get a salary, you have hours to do shit then go home and forget about work. You need to prepare things? Do it at school during work hours. Stop gifting unpaid time to a corporation which does not care.
If you studied to become a teacher for half a decade, love your job, see the impact on kids who need you, and essentially work at a non-profit, there's very little recourse but leave teaching behind entirely and do something else in the private sector.
You can cut corners and stick to contracted hours but your classes will suck, your kids will know you don't care and won't care either. Both your job becomes boring, soulless, without impact or connection as the relationship with your students goes down the drain. You'll burn out for different reasons.
I'm exaggerating some points slightly but that's the gist of it.
Netherlands btw.
Is that fair? No, but it's the moral calculus regardless. And it's at least one reason why teachers are, indeed, "underpaid".
All data indicates that teachers are working less than 40 hours a week on average, which makes me believe that the ones putting in 50+ hours are a vocal, tiny minority.
Even 20% workload in grading papers (e.g., quantitative works are graded electronically) would mean so much for the entire teaching industry.
They do compare how many hours teachers work to other workers and also analyze the issue along multiple other lines that have nothing to do with hourly wage.
Personally I think someone required to have a degree (master's for quoted salary), continued education requirements, and licensing earning under $50K/year starting is too low. Plus no teacher is working 8-3, you'd have no opportunity for lesson planning, grading, and all those extra curriculars they are essentially guilted into organizing.
The fact that I could walk out of college with zero experience and only a degree, and earn $20K more than that working only 9-5 in the same city seems unfair (as a programmer). But I have no idea how society decides salaries. It seems pretty arbitrary from my perspective.
But it is great that at the end of a long career a few unicorn teachers can earn $100K, a salary I earned within 5 years and still no master's or licencing.
This is an anecdote but my cousin's wife quit her job at a public high school to work at a private school, allegedly for a more flexible schedule/slightly better base pay. She was then diagnosed with cancer (and at 35, that wasn't something she/her family was expecting) and the benefits for sick leave, not to mention medical costs, were so much worse, it was basically a nightmare. Fortunately, her husband kept his education job for the county so the insurance situation was a lot better -- but she lost access to a lot of other benefits that had a very high monetary and quality of life value.
I have other friends back home who left public schools for private, thinking they'd make more money -- found out the grass was not greener -- and then had a hell of a time getting a job back in their old school system.
It may be true in some areas with really poor public schools that private is going to pay better -- but public or private, as you say, in many cases, the pay just isn't going to be great.
Seattle's Catholic Schools are single handedly bringing back Measles & Rubella as a latent disease, where it used to not exist.
With Running Start being an option for the last 2 years of High School (if your in public school), its much easier to advance your education rapidly if you so choose.
Society doesn't "decide". It's a decided by the labor market. Nobody wants to pay programmers six figures.
It's a myth that we think teachers are less important than programmers because they make less on average. There is just a larger supply of qualified teachers willing to work at lower prices.
Wait until you find out how little art history masters holders make. Amount of training is irrelevant to how much money you get.
You can absolutely hire a programmer for $70k if you're willing to significantly relax your standards. On the other hand, you probably wouldn't be able to hire enough teachers at existing teacher salaries if you significantly raised your standards for what counts as "qualified".
Tech companies have to use a relatively high bar, because bad developers will drive them out of business, but such market forces don't apply to schools. Unless you want to completely privatize education (which has its own set of issues) we have to use the political process to drive schools to raise their both their salaries and hiring standards.
For example if you didn't really care the much about building a software project, but had to do it, you could probably find some 'developers' who would do the work for the same salary that teachers work at.
I'm not sure how the outcome would compare to that of public schools.
Add to this, demand for teachers is directly tied to population growth rates. If more teachers are being produced compared to growth of class rooms the pay falls further.
"Teacher salaries are adjusted based on the assumption of a 10-month work year."
...which is a good way to give them a virtual 17% pay raise. I wonder if the same applies to other professions like independent contractors or lawyers, who can only charge for part of their working time.
This is also not even getting into how much teachers spend of their salary money on the classroom. Which is so prevalent that there’s a tax deduction for it. How many masters professions involve spending salary money for the employer?
It's the old "You don't understand, teachers only work 10 months out of the year!" argument but dressed in some nice statistical clothing. It's asinine to make that argument because teachers can't actually get paid for the other two months. When I was temping in a warehouse unloading shipping containers one summer, there were a few teachers there who were just making ends meet until the school year started.
This isn't true from my experience. I have several friends who teach K-12 education. They only have a bachelor's degree, many times in different areas than what they are teaching (English degree teaching Math, for example).
Mind, the master's degrees most teachers get aren't exactly hard—there's a giant market for easy-as-pie degrees for teachers for exactly this reason, and that's what most universities deliver and what most teachers go for since it's not like you get paid more if you do study in a real program—but you still have to pay for it, and it's not cheap on a teacher's salary.
Huh? The article makes a ton of arguments. Most of which do not hinge on any comparison to private education. This is the most core argument being made:
> Reporters might be more skeptical if they realized that EPI's own pay-gap methodology leads to some other conclusions that are, to put it delicately, less intuitive. Using the same Census data and the same basic techniques that EPI applies to teachers, we find that registered nurses are "overpaid" by 29%. Meanwhile, telemarketers deserve a big raise, as they currently suffer a 26% salary penalty. Aerospace engineers are apparently overpaid by 38%, but "athletes, coaches, and umpires" are paid 21% less than their skills are worth. Photographers should consider going on strike, as they make 16% less than comparable workers. Firefighters are moochers by contrast, taking in 25% above their rightful salaries.
> If all this sounds ridiculous, it's because EPI's method is so simplistic. To arrive at its 21% pay gap, EPI merely compares teacher salaries with the salaries of people who have roughly the same number of years of education and the same demographic characteristics. More specifically, EPI performs a regression analysis using Census Bureau survey data, in which respondents provide information on their salaries along with their age, education, region of residence, marital status, and other factors that are predictive of earnings. Included in this analysis is a "dummy variable" indicating whether the individual is a public-school teacher. The coefficient on the dummy variable represents the effect on salary of being a teacher after controlling for all of the other factors listed above.
Nowhere is private education mentioned.
Most of the private schools around here pay a lot worse than the public schools, especially if you factor in total comp w/ benefits. We have a tiny number with high enough tuition that they might pay well (but I wouldn't count on it), but almost none of the rest do, the bulk of which are Catholic or protestant religious schools.
The effects of M.Ed. and other educational training on teacher effectiveness is not reliably distinguishable from zero. This contrasts with experience which increases teacher effectiveness up to six years and subject matter expertise.
So if continuing education and the most common teacher’s Master’s degree does nothing for students and costs money we shouldn’t reward it. By all means encourage and subsidize things we know help students, like a Master’s in Math for Math teachers or in English for English teachers, but M.Ed.s and Ed.D.s don’t do squat for anyone except the teachers who get better pay and faster promotions.
I read the article and over and over it mentions "public-school teachers" and "public-school students".
It mentions that the union lobbying organization compares their salaries to that of private sector employees with different jobs, but Masters, and who are not in rural areas as much as teachers. The author then argues that may not be the best comparison.
No where in the article do we see a look at private school teachers as you claim.
It's fascinating you're the top voted comment and no one has noticed your thesis isn't true. This suggests no one here in this entire thread has read the article. Weird.
Anyway, private school teacher salaries are generally lower than public school teachers anyway. Good teachers will take a salary hit to have better students, more control of their classroom and curriculum, and enforced discipline. When I went to a private school most of the teachers had PhDs and the classes were comparable to university level.
Supply and demand.
Teachers tend to get very generous benefits packages, including retirement pay.
Salaries are set by supply and demand. Being a programmer is in greater demand relative to its supply.
So what? With many other degrees, you can walk out six figures in debt and land a job at McDonalds. Is that fair?
> But I have no idea how society decides salaries.
In the open market, it's (supposed to be) supply and demand. If salaries are high, that's a signal that there's too few people in the profession. Programmers are privileged for now, but lots of people are joining in.
Once supply outweighs demand, salaries will fall. Just wait for the next recession when the bullshit startup train will go off the rails.
Take away the master's degree (which many teachers don't have) and just say degree, and you've got a great description of a hair stylist. Look into how many hours are required for licensing a hair stylist in your state. Does $50k/year sound too low for that profession, as well? It may, but if not, you have to admit there are more factors at play than just education and training.
I think your confusion stems from the fact that society does not decide salaries. In the private sector, salaries are based on how much one's involvement in some endeavor causes that endeavor to generate more revenue (or how much you can convince someone your involvement generates more revenue), combined with how easy it would be to find someone willing to do the same job with the same impact at a lower rate. If the value add is high and there is no one able or willing to do what you do for cheaper, you will have a high salary. If you add little value, and no one is willing to do what you do, you will be fired and likely not replaced -- they'll do without. If you add lots of value, but someone else is willing to do your job for less, you will be kept around if you accept a lower salary. If you add little value and someone else is willing to do your work, they will be hired for a lower salary. This isn't rocket science.
That's never been my experience. I've seen people add tons of quantifiable value to a business, including dock loaders, customer facing staff, and even cleaners but in spite of their value being quantifiable they weren't rewarded. Clients and customers would literally say that staff is why they came back, but nothing.
Your post seems to be largely a THEORY of why salaries are set the way they are. In my experience social "value" seems to be a far bigger indicator of future salary rather than actual historical value. Meaning people are paying for perception, not measurements.
You can see that just by looking at affluence typically white kids flowing from private schools, to named colleges, straight into the financial sector. When did they generate historical value for the business when they were hired at double the natural average salary?
How about dental hygienists? Dental Hygienists made a median salary of $74,070 (2017). https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/dental-hygienist/... That's a very easy job that only requires 2 years of training. Shouldn't they be paid less so teachers can be paid more?
And where I went to college the 4 year CS degree was the same price as a 4 year education degree (aside from books/misc expenses). They both required the same number of credits, and class costs were largely normalized (with a few exceptions). Plus then teachers have to take the licensing exams and pay for your own background check/license.
If people really believe teachers have it made I strongly encourage them to give it a shot. We could always use more teachers. Plus then it might give a perspective on what it is like being a teacher (workload, hours, pay, conditions, stress, etc) and why the turnover rate is so high.
Exactly. As a point in favor of this worldview, I'll use my mother. She completed her economics and English degree in India (undergrad). She also completed her liberal studies undergrad and a graduate teaching credential again in the United States (they would not accept her foreign undergrad, so she had to repeat). She said that the teaching education was mostly a joke and her classmates absolute dunces. This was at a public university -- cal state fullerton, to be specific.
Ultimately, teaching education, even graduate education, is not difficult and mostly a joke, which is what is reflected in their salaries.
- In high cost areas like the Silicon Valley, almost every teacher is married to an engineer or is the child of an engineer. That is why they don't need a second job. Because they have a support network.
- Teacher quits are low because most of the people who would be great teachers simply never get into the job because of the crappy pay and work conditions. The people who are the best at it could easily get other jobs. My wife if a great example -- during the summer she worked a temp job in the first few years that was basically a management job that would have an annual salary in the six figure range. She only kept doing teaching because she loved it and because I made enough money to support us.
There are high quit rates in other industries that would have the same loss of potentially awesome staff as well. Why do teachers quit so infrequently compared to other professions? Maybe it’s because it is a low risk job with really unusual benefits (2 months fixed leave every summer).
Lots of people work for jobs that they love, it’s not unique to teaching. Comically, love of job drives salary down because it increases supply. If teachers hated their job the salaries would go up because it would decrease supply.
This reminds me of a girl in one of my teacher education classes(I have a certification that I've never used because software engineering pays way better and was easier to break into back in '09). We were talking about teacher pay and she mentioned that since she was going to have her husband support her she didn't see any reason to campaign for a higher salary, which was pretty inflammatory for just about the entire rest of the class.
Huh? My neighbor at my (fortunately extremely low-cost) apartment is single, a teacher, and he barely gets by, especially in summer (if he wants to have "fun money" during summer it means taking a summer school teaching job). Obviously one person out of a plethora of teachers in the Bay Area, but that's a ridiculously general statement.
There's only one that I know that is single and without support, and she lived with me because we rented her a room at 1/2 normal rents until she could afford to buy a condo.
If an alien visitor to Earth was looking at this sorry situation, they could make some interesting assumptions about the priorities of this society and culture, as a whole, with regards to education.
Their entire argument seems to be based on "the pay gap calculation is dumb", but the problem is, even if that is true, that doesn't disprove that teachers are underpaid.
The point about teachers having above average pensions is a good point.
Salary correlating with required skill level also misses some of the point, I believe, because qualitatively speaking, skill level isn't the most driving factor behind choosing to become a teacher.
The "if teachers aren't paid well, why aren't we seeing more of them quit?" is a lousy point. Some jobs are simply more important than others, and its jobs practitioners know that. They are less likely to quit.
I wonder if there's a way to calculate replacement cost. Like, what the long term damage to society would be if 20% of a particular work force disappeared. That might be a better way to estimate how much teachers should actually be paid.
They reaaaally like to pull the guilt card every chance they can too. 'Think of the children!', 'If you quit, who will be there for these kids?', etc..
I don't know that removing a lot of the guilt would make teachers quit more, but I do think they would quit bad school environments more in favor of better ones, but they don't want to abandon the kids.
https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm#25-0000
Secondary School Teachers: annual mean wage: $64,230
If we zoom in on a particular type of teacher, you get ranges:
Middle school teachers https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes252022.htm
bottom 10% earn 39k or less.
bottom 25% earn 46k
50% earn 58k
75% earn 74k
90% earn 93k
Based on these metrics, it seems like a fine occupation. But I wonder how many teachers are new versus how many stay in the field a long time? I also wonder how location-dependent these salaries are.
[1] http://www.nea.org/home/2017-2018-average-starting-teacher-s...
Scaled up from 10 months to 12 months of work, that's $37,702 and $66,251, respectively. The median household income is $53,386 in Montana and $82,372 in DC [1][2]. In both cases, even the un-scaled teacher's salary easily accounts for half of a typical household's income.
So even without tenure and averaging effects, this data backs up the article's claims.
She also works a lot more than 40 hour weeks and has to deal with some pretty intense stuff.
The effect of supply and demand has on job markets gets mentioned too little when discussing whether salaries are fair. We can't at the same time be encouraging more students to become teachers and complain about salaries when demand for those positions don't dictate incentivizing the supply. A more productive discussion would be about nudging students toward career paths that need them. The article mentions there's a "premium" on nursing right now based on the method used to criticize teacher's pay. Maybe there's a good reason for that.
- If the argument is that teacher pop growth outpaced student pop growth, therefore there’s an oversupply of teachers, that includes an implicit assumption that the 1987 ratio was correct. There’s no reason to assume that’s the case.
- There’s been a great deal more attention paid to special ed in the past few decades. Changing special ed practices, like inclusion classrooms, also create more demand for special ed teachers to co-teach and work in the same classroom as general ed teachers. I don’t have figures but wouldn’t be surprised if that accounts for a chunk of the growth.
- > If class sizes remain at today's levels, which are themselves much smaller than in the past...
This, from the previous paragraph, is simply false. Per [1], student/teacher ratio in 1989 was 17.2, and in 2011 was 21.2 for elementary and 26.8 for secondary. Per [2] (Wikipedia, but it cites a real source), nationwide average secondary class size was 23.6 in 1992 and 23.4 in 2007.
- If class sizes aren’t shrinking, what are all these “extra” teachers doing? A few guesses: special ed, teaching smaller or specialized classes in wealthier districts, or there’s something misleading about how they’re counting teachers.
[1] https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=28 [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_size#Class_size_throug...
Yes there is. Total cost in K-12 is up 180% since 1970 and results in Math, Science and Reading are basically flat. Employees are up almost 100%. If you almost triple inputs while outputs stay the same you’re probably just wasting money.
https://fee.org/thinkecon/articles/the-problem-with-educatio...
https://www.cato.org/blog/public-school-spending-achievement...
The obvious fix would be to get rid of the summer break, and give teachers a ~20% increase in salary to compensate them for the increase in working days. This would solve other problems as well: Summer break causes serious childcare problems for working-class families, and research indicates that it probably hurts educational outcomes as well. However, this is unlikely to happen for various reasons: It would stretch (or over-stretch) the limited budgets of local school districts, and summer break is politically popular and has relatively powerful state-level lobbying from tourism-related businesses.
People are forgetting the economics of this and focusing in too much on the "teachers are heroes" thing. Teachers are paid what the market will bear. If the market pays too low, prospective teachers find other things to do. If the market pays too high, there will be more teachers coming in to the market. It's simple economics.
As for the "teachers are heroes" thing: yes, they are heroes and so are firefighters, police, military, nurses, doctors, PAs, social workers, counselors, pharmacists, EMTs and other first responders, rehab administrators, volunteers, those doing compulsory community service, those doing volunteer community service, medical technicians, lab technicians, anyone working for a nonprofit, public works employees, linemen(and women), sewage treatment operators, and anyone else working in a job that keeps the public safe and educated and healthy. All of the aforementioned should be paid well for their services as long as the market will bear it. Why society has chosen to put teachers on a pedestal over the others - I'm not sure. They're all important. Let the market do what it's supposed to do and things will settle themselves.
Additionally, during the week, she works waaaay more than 40 hours a week, so even the time during the summer she isn't working I think is really just averaging out from her overtime during the school year.
I wouldn't have a problem with her pay if she actually worked as much as detractors seem to think all teachers do, but her pay:time ratio is awful.
And even a 20% raise wouldn’t allow her to afford a home, or to send her kids to college without a huge debt burden...
To be honest, I don’t even really care if that ends up being “in line with industry” some how, that’s still way too damn low. At that point everyone should be paid more.
EDIT: realize I mistyped wage, my points still stand about houses or college, and it’s not like her wages will go up much.
Lots of her co-workers work second jobs to make ends meet. Luckily for us I make a whole lot more than she does, which is dumb because she both does way more good than me and works much harder.
For many state college systems in the US $40k and below is the magic cut off for family income where any kid accepted not only gets 100% of all tuition and fees paid for, but all room and boarding is paid for as well. So in your mom's case her cost of sending kids to college would be nothing. From $40k to $50k it doesn't cover room and board though, so families in that range will expect to pay $12,000 a year or so for that, minus the $6000 Pell Grant they'll get for being under $50k.
I don't care how much teachers make nationally, - I care how much teachers make at my local schools.
To give an analogue example : the same mechanism applies, in an exacerbated way, across countries. Comparing salaries of Americans with those of -for example- a Frenchman will not take into account that healthcare and education are much more expensive in the US.
No. In fact, there's a saying in politics: "All politics is local."
“National Affairs is a quarterly magazine in the United States about political affairs that was first published in September 2009. Its founding editor, Yuval Levin, and authors are typically considered to be conservative.[1][2] The magazine is published by National Affairs, Inc., which previously published the magazines The National Interest (1985–2001) and The Public Interest (1965–2005). National Affairs, Inc., was originally run by Irving Kristol, and featured board members such as former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick, and author Charles Murray.”
Additionally one of the authors works at the American Enterprise Institute, ie., his job is to promote a politically conservative narrative on issues like these.
That, I think, is where the sense (among teachers) of being underpaid comes from: teachers aren't getting institutional support. That's something that the National Affairs article mentions with regards to discipline, but it's true in other ways as well. When you toss in the fact that a great deal of educational achievement happens outside of the classroom-- as the article mentions-- but teachers are expected to make up for that gap, often without the community support they would need.
Saying that "I'm not paid enough to deal with this shit" doesn't seem that out of line to me.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/16/us/teachers-school-suppli...
Eliminating all the unnecessary support positions and dividing those salaries amongst teachers could result in a more balanced salary for teachers.
Think about it: A teacher should be paid according to their skill, supply, and demand. A great teachers time is highly valuable and there should never be a cap on how much they make or considerations on such an important task to hinder on concepts such as tenure.
If I hire a private teacher for my kids to teach them programming, I know that a great teacher has options to go work anywhere and I need to pay enough to afford a good one. I might get a couple friends kids to join to afford his time. Put together a few different subjects and all of the sudden you have a school.
So the question is why is this simple concept not being followed? The answer is lack of accountability, artificial barriers to entry, limitations on control to pick your instructors, standardized testing requirements, checkbox mentality, teachers unions, etc.
Steve Jobs was right, if were going to continue taking money from peoples paychecks to fund a dilapidated educational system, we are much better off giving the money we spend on a kids education directly to the parents (with the obligation to spend it only on education), and letting them select the course of education for their own kids themselves.
Most alternative schools are like TM Landry, with profit or religous indoctrination often being the 1st priority, and actual education not being statistically different than what public schools offer.
You could work at Google for a year and take a year off to do research and repeat indefinitely and still come off a lot better than you do now. There are contractors in London with no degree whatsoever who work six months a year and spend the rest in Thailand who make more than that, never mind Google.
Considering the outcome a good teacher can have on the life a child (even though it may be hard to measure that) I think it makes sense to imagine teaching as such.
This is exactly where the article fell apart for me. There is no "shorter work year". Assuming that a teacher has zero work responsibilities when school's "out" (even setting aside summer school programs, "track"-based schedules, etc.) betrays a gross misunderstanding of exactly how much work a typical teacher has to do outside of class hours. Lesson planning alone is a major time sink, especially at a middle or high school level when you'll often be teaching entirely different classes with entirely different curricula (for example: a history teacher might be teaching both regular and AP variants of both US History and US Government; this is, in fact, exactly what my grandpa did).
I will acknowledge that in many parts of the country, teacher pay is atrocious -- especially in high cost of living areas -- but I do think the conventional wisdom that teachers are hideously underpaid for what they do isn't exactly true.
Take my mom for instance. She got a BS in journalism, worked as an editor for a few years and then after getting pregnant with my older sister, was a stay at home mom for 14 years. She went back to work -- initially part-time, then full-time, when I was 8 years old.
Now, her specialty (school counseling -- which then became school psychology), requires a Masters, so she got that when I was in kindergarten and she was like 41. She followed this up by getting her Ed.S a few years later (while working full time) and then got her Ph.D (ditto) -- back then (early 90s), they didn't have the online/paint-by-numbers grad school programs they have now -- so she'd go to class a few nights a week after work and then full-time in the summer. (Side note, I fell in love with college libraries when I was 6 years old and would spend summer afternoons with her at UGA, while she was studying).
So she's 43 when she starts working (Masters), is maybe 45 or 46 when she gets her specialist, and then was like 50 or 51 when she got her Ph.D. I point this out b/c this is relatively late in life for most people to become educators. Many of her peers were in their late 20s or early 30s and those closer to her age had been working for 15+ years. I will add that a key thing here is that she was smart and achieved tenure VERY early. If you don't have tenure, you're fucked.
I think she was probably making close to $100k a year when she retired early in 2013 or 2014. Now, that's probably less than most Ph.Ds make -- and it is certainly less than she could make in private practice -- but considering the fact that she worked 9 months a year and lived in the suburbs, that's not bad.
Moreover, even though she retired 22 or 23 years in -- meaning she didn't do the "minimum" for full retirement -- she still got a really good retirement package from both the state and the county.
My mom loves retirement -- but what lots of teachers/counselors/educators do, is they retire after they do 25 or 30 years (so if you start teaching at 22, you're like 50 when you reach full retirement), get their full retirement, and then get hired back either part-time or three-quarter time (and in some cases, full-time), at a salaried rate. They can do this and still earn their retirement. (You don't get dual retirements after the fact, I don't think -- unless you were in multiple counties/states)
So my mom has friends who "retired" at 48 -- then went right back to work and essentially get double their pay, plus benefits.
I would also add that benefits are one of the areas where being a teacher is really valuable. With the price of health care, having high-quality insurance that is free or very inexpensive, is a reason many people (especially women) are in education.
That was part of my mom's impetus -- my dad is an entrepreneur (real estate) and shit got bad and she needed to make sure we'd have good insurance and other protections as a family. She loved what she did (and was fantastic at it), but part of the reason she became a counselor (and later school psychologist) was because it would allow her to be off during the summer's when I was home -- and allow her to be home in the evenings (when she wasn't doing the grad school years) for the family.
I'm not a parent -- but I can't discount the value of having that kind of flexibility -- even if it means you make less than what you could. Because my dad primarily worked for himself, my mom having summers off meant we had a lot more flexibility as a family for things like summer vacations or cruises over spring break.
And not to say that education isn't stressful -- but there is also more flexibility in the job itself than in something like say, tech. She was always able to take me to my doctor appointments growing up and handle other issues that might come up. When my grandmother was diagnosed with Alzheimers and had to go into assisted living and later a nursing home -- my mom had flexibility in her benefits to take time off to travel to Florida to help her elderly parents (and a sister who lived there and did much of the work). There was a "pool" her county offered employees to donate some of their sick leave into that would act as insurance for other employees in that pool if they needed to exceed their own sick leave/personal days in the event of an emergency or personal event that didn't rise to the level of going on temporary disability.
So yes -- part of me fully acknowledges that teachers/educators are often paid less than what their skills might get in a different sector. And I fully acknowledge that not all parts of the country are as good as the county where my mom worked. But when you look beyond just the pay and you include the time off, the benefits, the retirement (I mean, I'll never have a pension at my six figure job), and the flexibility -- it's not quite as bad as it appears either.
1) Not every educator is a teacher. Teachers are paid the most and have the best organized labor representation, while substitute teachers and T-A's are lucky if they get enough hours to qualify for benefits.
2) Not everyone lives in a rich area of a big city. Smaller communities typically don't have the tax base to pay livable wages. Cost of living maybe less, but the absolute buying power of educators in rural area is next to nil.
Also, here's some anecdotal personal data-points:
- My half sister and her husband are special ed. T-A's. They're on food stamps.
- Talk to elderly homeless, saner people. You'd be surprised how many were teachers or in the education.
Of teachers starting today? Probably not.
Older government employees often had ludicrously lucrative compensation packages compared to what we have now.
It may or may not depending on what group we're talking about.
> Many older teachers are getting forced out because, well, they're expensive
Do you have information for that one, the link provided just lists starting and average salaries.
This was, however, clearly written by statisticians that have no teacher friends or family. If they did, they would have asked more relevant questions of the data. For example WHY do teachers work "on average 40.6 hours during the work week, compared to 42.4 hours for private-sector professionals".
My wife is a teacher, and I can tell you exactly why.
Also, I laughed particularly hard at "teaching jobs are not particularly stressful or unpleasant compared to other occupations"
Hilarious.
Median income is also a poor indicator.
Which is?
Or it's paid propaganda by whoever. In fact, I think this has a higher probability to be true.
I'm married to a teacher and the whole "article" is bullshit.
I was curious about the site's owner (American Enterprise Institute) and looked them up on Wikipedia to give me context for reading the article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Enterprise_Institute
Half my family are teachers, at least. They spent a huge amount of time outside of a "standard" 40-hour work week preparing lessons, grading, etc. It's a tough profession if you don't love it.
If you ever wonder if they underpaid, go ask one. They would be happy to complain, I am sure.
"Well,I don't want to be a teacher",my daughter said. "Well I don't blame you", I said.
Granted, you're going to struggle to pull in the same kind of hourly rate during the summers working a seasonal job, unless it is something special. But, if you have a family, your kids are going to be off school anyway, so you could actually spend some time with them. There's some trade offs.
Yet, unlike with most other professions, the government guarantees that those glorified daycare jobs will continue to exist. Why should these jobs pay well?
I'm pretty sure my K-12 education (public school) and college (private university) were both above average, but I definitely learned _something_ from at least a few classes every year in K-12, and at least could tell you what sorts of things I've forgotten from them. Meanwhile, I couldn't tell you what about half of my college classes were even _supposed_ to have taught, shortly before graduation, despite passing all of them with (almost all) high marks.
What if the guy managing your retirement fund lost 85% of your money, would you stick with him because you got to keep at least some of it?
> Meanwhile, I couldn't tell you what about half of my college classes were even _supposed_ to have taught, shortly before graduation, despite passing all of them with (almost all) high marks.
Are you beginning to see a pattern here?
in all seriousness, i'd love for the US government to throw serious cash at teachers' salaries. it's basically a wise investment in the country's future. so what if they're daycare teachers? we have plenty of $ to spend on providing a safe place and food for our children in the US for 8 hours a day. a lot of the money is spent on the backend on welfare or prisons anyway, so it's probably not very expensive when the externalities are factored in.
looking outside the US, i think Finland understood they had no resources other than timber, snow, and their population and started tooling up their educational system, to the tune of high salaries/prestige/perks or something for teachers (someone will correct me here). anyway, they do really well on int'l standardized tests (yes this is not ideal, but is useful at least as a relative measurement) and seem to have one of the highest per capita incomes in the world, low GINI, etc.
if it weren't so darned cold and dark seasonally, i'd be interested in relocating there for the sake of my children's education.
Did you, in all honesty, go through the public school system and came out with an "yeah we need more like that"? Seriously?
> in all seriousness, i'd love for the US government to throw serious cash at teachers' salaries. it's basically a wise investment in the country's future.
You really believe that?
> so what if they're daycare teachers? we have plenty of $ to spend on providing a safe place and food for our children in the US for 8 hours a day.
Schools, a safe place? Where did even you go to school?
> a lot of the money is spent on the backend on welfare or prisons anyway, so it's probably not very expensive when the externalities are factored in.
I'm pretty sure most of the prison inmates had their share of public education.
> Finland
You can't just pick your favorite nordic country and act like it is representative of anything. What about France? Total free government education and massive youth unemployment. What about Spain? Everyone is running around with one or more degrees, but no job.
And besides, we have that old HN saw: "If you can't hire anyone, you aren't paying enough.". Well, that coin has another side: "If you're hiring lots of people, you're paying enough.".
Where did you go to school? Sounds like a bad one.
