And that's with a 3 month break every year. But still, dealing with kids every day is hard work. I know I wouldn't want to do it as a career. I thank those that do.
On the east and west coast, I've met quite a few teachers, and none have a 3 month break every year. Maybe a few weeks, but they are frequently tasked with continuing education or some other task during the summers. And during the year, they're always working 12+ hour days.
I think the "always working 12+ hour days" thing is a myth. My wife is a teacher and I would say her and the teachers she works with will occasionally work extra hours, but by far it's mostly 7.5 hour days (8:30am - 4pm).
I think that's the difference between a good teacher and an average one. My wife was a teacher (left because of the poor salary). She worked 12+ hours a day five days a week (we made sure to keep weekends open but we were there on weekends too sometimes). You could see which other teachers were there 12+ hours. It was the ones that sent the most prepared kids to her class. There was an obvious quality difference between the kids who had teachers that worked 12+ hours a day and those that didn't.
Depends on the grade and subject. Some teachers have a whole lot more grading to do than others. And some grading or planning is slower-going than others. Also some schools are better about keeping time clear during the day for teachers to plan & grade than others.
New teachers are the ones that get the 12hr days. I knew a teacher that told me the early days were hard since he had to develop the lessons and there was a learning curve too but at some point, his days got shorter and it got more enjoyable.
The three month break is a myth. Teachers are generally required to spend weeks doing prep before the year starts and weeks closing out after the year ends. There are also recommended to required activities during the summer. They also typically have to work during the summer because $40-50k is not enough money to live on, in most places.
My girlfriend of the last 5.5 years is a teacher. I can only speak on her experience, and what I've got to know from her colleagues. That said, the three month break is hardly a myth.
> Teachers are generally required to spend weeks doing prep before the year starts and weeks closing out after the year ends.
They stay a few *days after schools out, not weeks. And, most of them recycle lesson plans from the previous year. No one is spending weeks on lesson plans. If they are, it's passively, not 40 hours a week. From what I've been told, most of them download/purchase full plans off the internet.
> There are also recommended to required activities during the summer.
They get paid extra for this stuff too. My girlfriend runs a club, does detention, and works the ticket booth at football games. She gets paid for all of them. Her contract states one extra curricular activity per year. It's all during the school year in her case.
> $40-50k is not enough money to live on, in most places.
$40-50k is the average salary in the US. Outside of major metros, $50k will afford you a nice life (I live in one, most people here would kill to make $50k).
> $40-50k is not enough money to live on, in most places.
But it's not just the pay. They get very nice benefits too.
Yes, it's not a luxurious job but it's a good middle-class job. All workers cry poverty when it comes to pay but for the most part U.S. teachers don't fall in that track.
Along with the other commenters, the 3 month break isn't accurate. It tends to work out closer to about 7 weeks off. I do agree that I also could never do their job! (Source: My wife is a teacher)
Good for her! Unfortunately, your anecdote is not representative. Many older teachers are getting forced out because, well, they're expensive and new teachers are underpaid.
The required education doesn’t help the students so why reward it? Education degrees and continuing professional education have no reliably detectable effect on teacher effectiveness. Experience does, up to six years, and subject matter expertise does, so teachers with a Master’s in Chemistry get better results than ones with just a Bachelor’s but the qualifications most people are talking about are in pedagogy, which has no effect. And it’s not like it’s a secret that the average Ed school degree is a joke, even if you don’t count the bloated Master’s degree that is an Ed.D.
I’m not so sure, my mom has been a teacher for 6 years and makes around 40k. Similar story for her peers.
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.
My wife makes under $40k after about 10 years. Health benefits blow, too. I'd love if the unions around here were some of those mean ol' ones who get teachers way more than they deserve or whatever. The one here can't even keep their daily planning periods clear of bullshit meetings. She grades or lesson plans for over an hour just about every night, has 30-60 minutes of meetings after school at least once a week. That wasn't so bad before we had kids, but it's really shitty now.
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.
The teachers union in my city basically negotiated a deal for higher pay but the union would self fund their health benefits. It turned out to be a bad deal because over the years health care costs skyrocketed compared to the pay increases. What amazed me is some teachers are mentioning premiums higher than the individual market rates. So apparently they can't even negotiate good group premiums.
School district controls ours but this year they were all "the bad news is ya'll got sick too much so the rates are going up and deductible's worse, the good news is it's only going up 10% this year and, oh, probably forever into the future every year, and no we didn't get a second quote, the insurers told us they didn't even make any money on us last year."
There's a shocking amount of incompetence and corruption in school admin. Sometimes it's hard to tell which is which.
My impression (based on having interacted with a lot of teachers, including friends and family members) has been that teachers' unions are "those mean ol' ones who get teachers way more than they deserve", but only for those teachers with a substantial amount of tenure (on the scale of multiple decades). Any other teachers were effectively deemed expendable, getting abysmal salaries and pink slips.
That's terrible, in Quebec median salary is 60K CAD, topping out at 80K at most schools (https://neuvoo.ca/salaire/?job=Enseignant%20Primaire), which is plenty to afford a house (of course not if monoparental). I don't even think that a lot considering the responsibilities they have.
Alberta has teachers top out at around 100K CAD. The Average is around 80k. I suspect the average teacher salary is similar to an average software developer salary here. The data I can find actually shows the average teacher salary higher.
Since Wikipedia says "Quebec occupies a territory nearly three times the size of France or Texas, most of which is very sparsely populated"... well, yeah, you can buy a nice two-floor house for 250k CAD in most of sparsely-populated Texas too.
> 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.
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 am willing to accept that there are studies and statistics that seem to contradict what is commonly accepted. I'm also willing to accept a lot of the evidence here that the problem is not nearly as bad as believed.
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"
But according to this study, they aren’t and are only working ~40 hours. So who’s misunderstanding, this study that used time diaries from teachers or what the other teachers say? Both sources are self reported. I was expecting this study to ignore the extra hours that teachers put in away from the kids, but they seem to account for that.
It's a "study" in the sense that a blog by the American Tobacco Association (fictional entity invented for the purpose of this argument) produces "studies" about the "harmlessness of tobacco smoking".
I am a high school English teacher in a suburban district outside a large midwestern city. There is a large variance between how much work members of different subject areas bring home. I certainly have colleagues that work their 40 hours and don’t spend a minute more thinking about school. The nature of my work is different, and I typically work 50-60/week.
Also for reference, I have been working as a teacher for 6 years and make just shy of 43k.
For the whole year? If you work 60 hours/week, 36 weeks/year, then you only work ~41 hours/week on average. School years are 180 days, for about 36 weeks. I know that teachers do work during the vacations somewhat, but, they also get substantially more time off than most other professional jobs in the US.
That's a good point. Really, you could just say that they have a seasonal part time job, but when they do it they are paid like professionals.
This might not be a problem if there were another part time job that really worked well for getting paid in the other months, but that seems difficult.
I have a choice whether I would like my annual salary paid over 10 months with no pay in the summer or over 12 months. My annual salary doesn’t differ one way or the other.
I think the comparison was median annual income and median days of vacation per year. It doesn’t matter too much if the pay is distributed as a single annual lump sum or paid out every hour.
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.
I don't doubt it's a tough profession, but I have trouble squaring how unattractive it is with stats like the small percentage of applicants the Chicago Public School system actually hires, compared to their very large pool of applicants.
I can't be sure, of course, but perhaps more teachers are trained every year than are capable of being employed (due to policy or whatever else). Perhaps Chicago is seen as a more desirous place to live and work than other places. Perhaps the Chicago Public School system has a good reputation or good policies and many people want to work for them.
My partner is a teacher. She does indeed work 40 hours per week on average, has extensive time off for holidays, has the full summer off (she doesn't work at all during it), has a pension that when she retires will easily fund her lifestyle and more, and is paid the median household income for the city. It's not an easy job, but it could be a lot worse. She was also given a signing bonus and scholarship that together meant she graduated with $0 of student loan debt.
Pensions for teachers are certainly common. I grew up in a completely different part of the country and all my teachers also had pensions. I'm not sure how the median income is a poor indicator -- she makes as much as the median household does for the city.
For a long time there was a bizarre loophole in Texas. Apparently, the decision whether or not to pay into Social Security was made on a per-school-district level. Most districts do not, so do not receive Social Security. Some do, and those retiring from there did get SS. The super-secret trick was to resign from your current position, somehow work for a week or so at one of the minority of districts, then officially retire and collect both your normal pension and social security. I have no idea how it actually worked, I just watched a couple of teachers of my acquaintance do it.
I believe the loophole has been shut down for several years.
Does that matter? If we're talking in terms of annual salary, the fact that they "don't get paid" over the summer is irrelevant; it's just the same amount of money distributed on a weird schedule, isn't it? All things being equal, you'd rather have the $60k job that had "an unpaid summer off" than the $60k job where you got paid all summer, right?
At least the graph in the article is "adjusted" for the 10-month work year. Typically in such discussions, that would mean they multiplied teacher salaries by 12/10 to make them "comparable" to other professions.
Your $60k job is actually a $50k job with an unpaid summer off.
Are you sure about that? When the Washington Post says that CPS teachers make >$70,000, I'm reasonable sure (but not 100% sure) that's their actual annual compensation. When my kids old school district reports high-school teachers make $110,000, I know for a fact that's their annual comp, not something normalized to their "working months".
Good point. I'm being hyperbolic. But in these discussions you do have to be careful that someone hasn't annualized a 9 or 10 month salary like the article.
This seems to use private education as a benchmark for the entire argument. From quit rates, to pay, to conditions, and beyond, but ignores the obvious which is that private pay and private conditions are largely pinned to be just above public salaries and conditions (meaning private education cannot be used as a benchmark for when someone is under-paid, over-qualified, or has too high of a quit rate because they are related).
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 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).
I updated the wording a little to be clearer. I was trying to say, to earn $50K starting salary quoted as a teacher you were required to have a master's degree ($43K otherwise ($45K otherwise)).
It varies state to state. Some states require you to have a masters degree, some require you to have a masters degree or being the process of obtaining one, some states require you to have a masters but will waive that requirement if there's a need and some states require only a bachelors degree.
Edit: there is a list of state requirements here: https://www.asha.org/Advocacy/state/StateTeacherCredentialin...
My wife's about to hit a wall on pay increases at right at $40k if she doesn't get a master's degree. Never get another real raise, just sub-inflation bumps every year. With quite a damn while left until retirement.
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.
Dunno, they all do it though. I know school stats report the % of teachers with higher degrees and of course they all want those percentages to be higher. Possibly there are state incentives. Mostly it's just a bunch of people doing dumb crap without anyone having the power & motivation to fix it so they can all knock it off, which is a pretty common phenomenon, actually.
[EDIT] I mean to you wanna be the superintendent reporting that proportion of district teachers with master's degrees is up by seven percent since you started, or the one explaining that most of those degrees are bullshit and you don't care about it and neither should anyone else? Bear in mind most people have zero idea what teacher education looks like.
Yup. NC recently got rid of the automatic pay bump for having a masters degree while simultaneously increasing base teacher pay and there was a huge uproar over it. Nobody wants to lose their boondoggle.
Teachers' master's degrees are, in effect, a way to divert money from (mostly) teachers and (a little bit, some places) school districts to universities for no actual benefit, so that's great. Hope they manage to keep it up and that spreads.
OTOH it'd be nice if there were still a way to reward teachers who'd done a real and relevant master's (which very few of them do now), but I don't think anyone's interested in nailing down that distinction. It's not even just degree mills, either, AFAIK the vast majority of postgraduate programs aimed at teachers are designed, primarily, to be pretty easy to pass and to have relatively low time commitments. They all want a piece of that action, and if they increase the rigor demand for their product will drop because a hypothetical very hard, non-bullshit teaching master's from a prestigious school brings the same pay bump as a very bullshit one from a third-rate state school.
> divert money from teachers and school districts to universities for no actual benefit, so that's great. Hope they manage to keep it up and that spreads.
I am hearing sarcasm, which I would wish to encourage in the US, but it is possibly out of place on HN.
So far New Orleans has been my favourite US location that seemed to have sarcasm as a culture (although I have sampled very little of the US).
You got hit with downvotes, but your (sarcastic) reaction is, as intended, spot on for the kind of thing no-one wants to risk hearing if they try to change the way higher degrees work in education. That the whole thing is an (expensive!) load of crap is 100% true, but that isn't widely known, I think, and trying to explain it's harder and riskier (for administrators & others with decision-making power) than just going along with the flow.
Right -- if you want to get above that wall, you need a Masters. And many then go on to get an Ed.S (specialist) and even a Ph.D.
As you say, there is a whole cottage industry of online accredited places (Liberty University, which I don't even consider to be the level of University of Phoenix, is accredited/recognized (unlike University of Phoenix) and used by MANY teachers in the state of Georgia, for instance -- I have a hunch there is some sort of financial relationship between the state and Liberty but I have no proof) -- some counties even offer easy access to loans/do tuition reimbursement.
Don't you realize most people don't have the patience or ability to be a software engineer? That it is one of the most intellectually demanding jobs in society? And that 4 years computer science education is both expensive and difficult? Recognize your privilige - you are very smart and, for you, programming is easy. You are in the minority.
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 that 4 years computer science education is both expensive and difficult?
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.
> Ultimately, teaching education, even graduate education, is not difficult and mostly a joke, which is what is reflected in their salaries.
Flip side: not enough people would put up with going through a "serious" teacher ed program to fill the demand, unless pay went way up. Not even close to enough.
Flip side: intellectuals tend to like intellectual pursuits. Having a dumbed down teaching curriculum means turning these people away, not for monetary reasons, but for lack of stimulation that is easily accessible in the private sector.
My mother, and many other people I know who wanted to go into teaching, wanted to do so because they wanted to be teachers, not the pay. What turned them off to the profession is the incompetence demonstrated by most teachers, professors of education, and school administrators.
Sure, I get that, but you're not gonna replace all the incompetent people in education with competent ones just by making the relevant degree programs tougher. That's a lot of people. Pay would have to go up, probably quite a bit.
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.
These days especially, get ready to get to know kids then have them not show up one day because they killed themselves. Or have one you taught a while back do the same when they're moved up a couple grades. A couple not show up because they're in the hospital because they took a bunch of pills. That kind of thing. Pretty often. It's really bad. And that's at a pretty tame suburban school—the ones with gang violence and such going on are even worse. Plus the kids at those sometimes threaten or even attack teachers, too, and verbal abuse from the kids (talking like 4th graders and up) is a daily occurrence. So that's fun.
> But I have no idea how society decides salaries.
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.
> In the private sector, salaries are based on how much one's involvement in some endeavor causes that endeavor to generate more revenue
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?
No, value to the business only sets the ceiling. The floor comes from the labor supply side of the market. (i.e. can the company find qualified people willing to do it at X rate)
Value to the business is the floor more often than not. Plenty of business activities simply don't generate much money in the first place, with salaries capped accordingly. Albeit not the typical tech company or F500.
When there last name brought associations to wealth to mind and brought in more business. The financial sector is more about trust and imagine than anything. Someone wearing a suit will sell more products than someone in shorts.
Do you think having Obama's daughter on staff will bring in more clients?
> Meaning people are paying for perception, not measurements.
I mentioned that explicitly in my theory by pointing out that it is the ability to convince others that you add value, not necessarily the value added itself.
> From quit rates, to pay, to conditions, and beyond, but ignores the obvious which is that private pay and private conditions are largely pinned to be just above public salaries and conditions
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.
Yeah, I'm not in education, but I was surprised to 'learn' that private schools generally pay less than their public counterparts -- and I've continued to understand that to be the case, but I'd love more information on the matter to correct any misunderstandings I might have.
Less competitive, at least in my state. The higher paying public school districts have a lot of applicants, who are often more senior and have either higher degree levels, or degrees related to the subject they would be teaching. The parochial schools are seen as being somewhat of a stepping stone for new teachers or those who are trying to get a foothold in a desirable location.
> 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).
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.
>how society decides salaries. It seems pretty arbitrary from my perspective.
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.
The labor market is a tool of society. It's like any other tool: it can be fixed or supplemented or even swapped out with something else if it doesn't perform its function effectively.
It's true, and while I also believe teachers should be paid more relative to other occupations, labor market has one thing going for it that makes it hard to replace - it's a very simple process that doesn't require any central coordination.
>>Teacher pay is not correlated to outcome. The US pays more for its teachers than Finland and other counties with much better outcomes.
I do want to point out that these two points aren't actually related. Just because the US pays more for lesser outcomes does not mean that teacher pay is anti-correlated or uncorrelated to outcome.
Some public schools can't find a decent calculus teacher at the prices they're paying. On the other hand, if they paid a janitor to sit in the classroom while AP Calc students teach themselves, in many places that would work out great.
Thank you, I was trying to show by pointing out an example of low pay and high outcomes that pay is not corrected. But I don’t want to say that there’s a negative correlation.
I do think it’s fair, unless I see data that shows it, that pay is not correlated to outcome.
I think there are multiple factors for outcomes and I think further research will help figure this out. But for now, I think it’s false to say that we will get better outcomes if we increase pay. I can think of a few outcomes, but have no data, that would result in higher pay with worse outcomes (eg, higher pay crowds out more passionate but less credentialed teachers who aren’t in it for the money).
I'm not sure how much that holds with the government running public schools and the primary stakeholders being children.
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.
The word "qualified" is pulling a lot of weight in your argument.
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.
Another thing to consider is that the quality of the teacher might not map to improved results in the same way it does in tech. A programmer tends to have a lot more choice in how they go about solving the problem, whereas teachers tend to have very little leeway. Furthermore, it's very difficult to quantify how well a teacher is doing as well.
>>Tech companies have to use a relatively high bar, because bad developers will drive them out of business
Most work in Tech companies even the top FAANG ones these days is crud work.
These people can only afford to pay well, because they make their money through advertising scale. Companies which depend on paying users, can't afford to pay that kind of salaries, nor waste their time interviewing people on rounds and rounds for proxy skills which have nothing to do with the job on hand.
In short only VC companies without profit pressure or web advertising companies pay well. Others don't have this luxury.
> ...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".
Anecdata: Schools that won't hire more qualified candidates (e.g. graduate degrees complete) instead preferring more green applicants because the latter are contractually cheaper.
That is, in some instances schools could hire better for the same money but cannot because of labor contracts.
>>There is just a larger supply of qualified teachers willing to work at lower prices.
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.
I would note that at least based on the educators I know, private schools often tend to pay LESS than public. Obviously, this may be dependent on area, but in Georgia at least, teachers at private schools typically make less once you factor in things like 401k, retirement, and health insurance. A lot less.
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.
Private schools are a 10k to 15k pay haircut in Seattle, most require a morality clause that makes being LGBTQ+ a firable offence, and the vaccination rates are appallingly low compared to public schools.
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.
Seattle has hundreds of private schools, I doubt more than a handful have anything like the morality clause you cite, and most that I am aware of are explicit about their support of LGBTQ+. Do you have some source for your claim?
Kings School, all Catholic run schools (which are the majority of the private schools in the region) and the other various religious schools have this clause.
My neighbor was fired over it and had trouble finding work at other private schools as there are just a handful of Montessori and language immersion schools, with everything else that isn't SPS having a Morals clause.
I confess general ignorance of the religious schools in the area, but while this obviously this isn't an exhaustive survey the following examples seem typical of secular schools in the area (all quotes lifted from the school's websites).
Northwest School
"Diversity is our commitment to build [a] community that includes individuals and families who represent a wide variety of ... gender identity and expression, sexual orientation"
Seattle Academy
"includes and embraces a spectrum of differences in ... gender, sexual orientation"
Lakeside
"Lakeside is committed to creating an inclusive and equitable community in which all individuals can participate in and contribute to the life of the school, regardless of ... gender, ... sexual orientation, or any other aspect of their identity."
> Catholic run schools (which are the majority of the private schools in the region)
Going to various directories that let you filter by religious affiliations shows that catholic schools are probably ~20% of the private schools in Kings County and ~15% across Washington State. Christian schools make up another ~25% in Seattle and ~20% statewide. So, while a significant portion, Catholic is definitely not the majority and the combination of Catholic+Christian might approach 50%.
I went to the first two schools alphabetically in NWAIS's directory of members for Seattle and they both had nondiscrimination policies that included sexual orientation and gender identity. Neither is Montessori or language immersion.
> 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.
Salaries are set by supply and demand. Being a programmer is in greater demand relative to its supply.
Check the caption for the "Median Annual Wages..." graph:
"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.
Yeah, and this makes so much sense considering how easy it is to find a high-paying 2-month temporary job. /s
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.
I'm not sure what your point is. You have to include fringe benefits generally when calculating total compensation. Whether or not that happens to include healthcare is pretty immaterial.
Yes, but the value of benefits is highly dependent on the employee. 30% off international flights might be an awesome deal, but unlikely for someone who cannot even afford a car.
Vacation has great value, but usually only after basic needs are met. Cutting someones hours is often used as a punishment for a reason. At the same time it also makes total sense that other companies don't want employees reducing their working hours.
> Yes, but the value of benefits is highly dependent on the employee. 30% off international flights might be an awesome deal, but unlikely for someone who cannot even afford a car.
Sure but that's a strange point to make given that they know what the benefits of the job are in advance. It's not like summer vacation is something that's sprung on teachers after they've taken the job.
> Vacation has great value, but usually only after basic needs are met. Cutting someones hours is often used as a punishment for a reason. At the same time it also makes total sense that other companies don't want employees reducing their working hours.
Most teachers are not incapable of meeting their own basic needs. They may be paid less than comparable private sector workers, but they're not literally starving. Given that, vacation is unequivocally a benefit. They may prefer the opportunity to work more...but if they preferred that, then they should have taken a different job.
Yeah came here to talk about the same thing. Teachers have a 40 hour a week in the school job paired with a 10-20 hour wfh job preparing lessons, grading papers, etc. Those summer months are paid for by extra hours during the school year as far as I’m concerned.
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?
How many master's professions insist on local monopolies for their employers? Other than predisposed ideological beliefs, it doesn't make sense for teachers' unions to be as against school competition as they are, at least with respect to employing exemplary educators.
Teacher’s unions don’t opposes “school competition.” They oppose school privatization, which is largely a predatory scheme with wildly misaligned incentives. We don’t need a repeat of all the problems with the US healthcare system in education.
Conflating performance with unions is bunk anyways. Japan’s teachers are heavily, heavily unionized, historically far more militant than teachers in the US, and they’re consistently among the highest performing OECD countries.
Though I doubt it would work very well in practice, students could be free to enroll in school in another school district with their home district paying a tuition fee to the host district.
It’s entirely possible within a publicly funded framework to have different models and observation of outcomes. Schools just have to be allowed the leeway to experiment without threat of privatization. State universities and community colleges do this across the country. And it’s not as if high-performing countries arrived at their (almost exclusively public) systems without this kind of iteration.
> It’s entirely possible within a publicly funded framework to have different models and observation of outcomes.
Possible, yes. Practical? No. Democratic bureaucracies are effectively incapable of learning and adapting. Schooling is basically implemented identically today as it was 100 years ago.
> Schools just have to be allowed the leeway to experiment without threat of privatization
This is a strange statement to me. In what sense is privatization a threat to public schools? If public schools were so great and privatization were so bad, why would people want to send their kids to privately run schools? Wouldn't public schools invite the challenge if they believed their model was superior?
The fact that they even view it as such an existential threat tells you basically all you need to know. Even they believe they'd be outcompeted almost immediately.
> And it’s not as if high-performing countries arrived at their (almost exclusively public) systems without this kind of iteration.
Firstly, the idea of differential country performance of schools is largely a myth. When you disaggregate by ethnicity, most of that disappears. Japanese kids in the US do about as well here as they do in Japan. Which is to say that differential performance between countries is more about who is in those countries than how it is those countries educate.
> If public schools were so great and privatization were so bad, why would people want to send their kids to privately run schools?
A good old prisoners dilemma. If you got more resources to spend on education, you don't want to sit in the same class as someone who can only contribute little to the course. Just like worse graduates will ruin the prestige of the school and thus value of your degree. Outcome-base exclusion can be fine, unless it ends up as proxy to select for socio-economic factors and thus make society offer less equal opportunity.
Just looking at "existential threat" -> "outcompeted" only works in a highly simplified world with no market failures and other issues.
> differential performance between countries is more about who is in those countries than how it is those countries educate
I'd like a source on that. I do understand culture will have a significant influence, especially on what value people place on education. But your statement seems to go a lot further into "school doesn't matter" territory. This directly contradicts with earlier statements and e.g. many chines studying in the US.
> A good old prisoners dilemma. If you got more resources to spend on education, you don't want to sit in the same class as someone who can only contribute little to the course. Just like worse graduates will ruin the prestige of the school and thus value of your degree. Outcome-base exclusion can be fine, unless it ends up as proxy to select for socio-economic factors and thus make society offer less equal opportunity.
Let's trace that out a little more. Are you implying that private/charter schools have more dollars to spend per student? Because that's certainly not true for Charter schools. It's probably true for some private schools, but also not all. And if that's not what you're saying, then i'm not sure I understand your argument.
> I'd like a source on that. I do understand culture will have a significant influence, especially on what value people place on education. But your statement seems to go a lot further into "school doesn't matter" territory. This directly contradicts with earlier statements and e.g. many chines studying in the US.
I can no longer find the source where I originally read it, but we can reconstruct the data. I'm going to show it for math, but the results are similar for other subjects.
Now, the US doesn't jump to the very top, but it does jump to just below Norway and right above Austria. Certainly a solidly high quality education. You'll see the same results across other subjects too.
Of course, that doesn't mean our educational system doesn't have room for improvement. It most certainly does. But the idea that we're severely lagging the rest of the developed world is mostly false, when you adjust for this confound.
In what ways do teachers' unions campaign to give agency to students' families and career choice to in-demand faculty?
Seems like the incentives are mostly oriented around getting teachers to stay in one place and grind out another year of experience, round of continuing education, and extra degrees whether they are wise or not.
Otherwise, why don't teachers just quit schools with poor safety records, working conditions, pay, equipment funding, and uncompensated overtime? Because no district really has to worry about being held accountable like that.
>In what ways do teachers' unions campaign to give agency to students' families and career choice to in-demand faculty?
I’m not sure what you mean by agency here or how many teachers you actually know. But unions have regularly campaigned for more resources for students outside of themselves, including access to things nurses, counselors, and libraries. Schools in many cities are highly racially and economically segregated in the US because of the country’s broader history of redlining and corresponding deprivation. Teachers unions are one of the only interest groups who have consistently fought against this denial of agency for their students.
As to career choices, I have union member teachers in my family and they change schools as they see fit. There are some problems with state licensing incompatibilities that prevent teachers from being as mobile as they might like and we should probably move to uniform federal standards to correct this.
>Seems like the incentives are mostly oriented around getting teachers to stay in one place and grind out another year of experience, round of continuing education, and extra degrees whether they are wise or not.
Otherwise, why don't teachers just quit schools with poor safety records, working conditions, pay, equipment funding, and uncompensated overtime? Because no district really has to worry about being held accountable like that.
Incentives around higher education are perverse in the US in almost every regard, so I’m not sure that teachers are that much of an outlier (especially for their domain, education). As to why teachers stay - I’m not sure if you’re aware but most people tend to live in the regions they’re actually from, where they have family ties and social bonds.
Applying some sort of rational actor economic heuristic to civil servants in a service profession seems a foolhardy endeavor. I mean, I’ve worked for big companies across the country, none of which were any better run and some of which were not better resourced than a failing public school, and they all had their fair share of people toughing it out too. What binds people to a place socially and materially, especially among more working class professions, is different from white collar workers.
> Schools in many cities are highly racially and economically segregated in the US because of the country’s broader history of redlining and corresponding deprivation
But also because of the public school system that ties zip codes to affluence and introduces artificial geographical barriers to integration. Something teachers unions have a vested interest in, at least indirectly.
> ...most people tend to live in the regions they’re actually from...
One can switch schools and districts without switching regions. But it should be much easier than that, even.
> Applying some sort of rational actor economic heuristic to civil servants in a service profession seems a foolhardy endeavor.
I'm just saying it's counterintuitive that teachers unions in particular are for teachers without being especially for empowering individual teachers to have leverage with respect to their employment agreements and conditions.
> This seems to use private education as a benchmark for the entire argument. From quit rates, to pay, to conditions, and beyond, but ignores the obvious which is that private pay and private conditions are largely pinned to be just above public salaries and conditions
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.
> This seems to use private education as a benchmark for the entire argument. From quit rates, to pay, to conditions, and beyond, but ignores the obvious which is that private pay and private conditions are largely pinned to be just above public salaries and conditions (meaning private education cannot be used as a benchmark for when someone is under-paid, over-qualified, or has too high of a quit rate because they are related).
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I think it's more useful to look at new teacher salaries by state to get around tenure and averaging effects [1]. Fine vs. not fine varies a lot by location in this list.
For others who might be interested, the lowest starting salary listed is Montanta ($31,418), highest is DC ($55,209).
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.
It didn't feel good as a teenager to hear teachers complain about education levels, workload, and salary when my intelligent and hard-working parents made less, worked as much, and had much less employment certainty.
There's more to the story though. In my partner's school district it takes an average of 7 years of supply teaching before you land a full time position. You are making about half as much and get little benefits during that time. So after schooling that's 13 years of preparation for a 64k job.
She also works a lot more than 40 hour weeks and has to deal with some pretty intense stuff.
You'll notice a lot of people commenting here "my wife is a teacher" (myself included). I think these statistics are missing two very big factors.
- 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.
> That is why they don't need a second job. Because they have a support network.
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.
> - 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.
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.
>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.
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.
I mean my N is about 150 (the number of teachers I know personally regarding their living situation) and all but a few are married to a high earner or are supported by high earning parents. The rest have either been teaching for 30+ years and got lucky enough to buy a house way back then, and one of them is married to a cop and together they make a decent wage because he has a good union.
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.
There’s actual data on both points you make. These anecdotes and conjectures are not very valuable.
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.
There is no data on how many people don't choose to teach because of the perception of low wage and poor working conditions. I'm not even sure how you would measure that. I also can't think of another profession that has the same reputation. Most jobs have a reputation of either poor working conditions or low pay, or if they have both, are unskilled or low skilled positions. Teaching is the only job I can think of with low pay, poor conditions, and high skill required (a bachelor's+credential or master's degree).
> From the fall of 1987 through the fall of 2015, the number of public-school students increased by 20%, but the number of public-school teachers increased by 64%. More recently, in the four years leading up to the 2015-16 school year, teacher employment grew by 400,000, even as the number of students barely changed.
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.
I couldn’t find a citation in the article for those statistics, but they don’t smell right as an argument for teachers being oversupplied:
- 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.
> 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.
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.
The question is, relative to what? If teachers were under supplied to begin with, that wouldn’t be the case. I’m not saying that either answer is correct, just that the quoted figures aren’t actually good evidence.
This is literally the argument: “Back in the day, there were x teachers and y students. Now there are 1.6x teachers and 1.2y students. That’s too many teachers!” See the problem?
There's something missing from this. Teachers often buy classroom supplies themselves, instead of the district providing them. Yeah, they only spend about $479 on average [1], but it's still a pretty unique situation.
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.
The entire opening of the article seems to be designed to take advantage of confirmation bias - the initial "there is no pay gap" is just an assertion, and then a bunch of therefores are built on top of it.
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.
> 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.
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.
This article is a political screed, cherry-picking data to discredit a single source of data. There's no new useful data, or ideas about addressing problems in education. Its only purpose is to provide political cover for cutting education spending. Key detail: "Andrew G. Biggs is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute". Please remove.
> Unlike in the EPI analysis, however, teachers (the black dots on the chart) receive a salary premium of 9% once their shorter work year is accounted for.
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).
Why do teachers have such an elevated standing in society anyways? If we're being honest, schools are, for the most part, daycare centers. Secondary education is, for the most part, completely useless.
Yet, unlike with most other professions, the government guarantees that those glorified daycare jobs will continue to exist. Why should these jobs pay well?
Because they ought to be more than that? In some cases, perhaps, because they _are_ more than that?
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.
> I definitely learned _something_ from at least a few classes every year in K-12
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.
My point is that public primary and secondary schooling seems to have been more effective (anecdotally) than private higher education. This is a strike against the idea that the government shouldn't be paying for it, in that in at least this one case the government paying for it seems to be working better than a non-government organization doing that doing so. Since educational institutions aren't going to disappear altogether, those are the alternatives.
> My point is that public primary and secondary schooling seems to have been more effective (anecdotally) than private higher education.
Primary and secondary public education often fails to provide basic literacy competence. As a result, a high-school diploma isn't worth much, but the right college degree statistically is worth even the absurd prices that are now being paid for them.
> This is a strike against the idea that the government shouldn't be paying for it, in that in at least this one case the government paying for it seems to be working better than a non-government organization doing that doing so.
The government can pay for it without running it, see the Swedish model and the voucher system, which has resulted in improvements. However, teacher unions are obviously against this. They fear their jobs will be less secure if most parents had a real choice in where to enroll their children.
you're right, it's not important to have an educated citizenry. we can just set them up with iPads and have them watch YouTube all day for a lot less - let's get a couple startups going on this ASAP - keywords: disruption, innovation, EdTech, Hadoop
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.
> You're right, it's not important to have an educated citizenry.
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.
I'm with you. I just had to study really hard to get successful and my teachers didn't contribute very much to that. What did help was having peers who also wanted to do really well and having parents who pushed me hard.
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.".
Here in California, teachers make decent money now. The starting salary in Long Beach Unified is 60k/year. It's not uncommon for veteran teachers with Master's Degrees in Education to earn 6 figure salaries.
The more I read articles in education based on national numbers the more I realize that national macroeconomic views are pretty much meaningless compared to local micro views.
I don't care how much teachers make nationally, - I care how much teachers make at my local schools.
There may be the saying "all politics is local politics" but this is hardly a proof of the situation. If anything, the worst politics happens through a purely local lens - for example, the refusal of silicon valley cities build housing for workers in the companies around them based on "local concerns".
There was no specification in the OP's comment about whether it's good or bad. But the fact remains that all politics is local.
With the exception of the president, people vote for their local city government, their local county government, their local school board, their local senator, their local representative, and on the macro level (governor), they vote for the person who they think will best help their own, local interests.
His point is that a phrase like "this [teacher|nurse|officer] only makes xx" can be deceiving when the local economic context is not taken into account. Cost of living is not equal.
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.
Actually national view adjusted for the cost of living is still interesting. The unadjusted numbers are not so relevant, given some huge differences between parts of the country - looking at SV at the high end one still wonders how the average teacher could live there.
The biggest thing with teacher salaries that people usually forget is that you have to multiply by 1.2 to 1.25 to get the equivalent for a 9-5 job that works year round, if you want to compare apples to pomegranates. My mother as a school teacher worked 190 days a year. I work 245 days a year.
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.
Unfortunately, those who you are buying things from rarely multiply their prices by 0.83 because you are a teacher. And you are indeed going to struggle to pull in the same kind of hourly rate for two months during the summer and one during the winter.
The problem with the teacher pay to me is obvious, market forces aren't allowed to play themselves out.
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.
I do get that dealing with the main argument and providing a counter argument is hard, but I don't think you can actually win an argument by attacking the credibility of deliverer rather than the argument they propose.
Stipend and educational "choice" programs rarely work as intended, hence the charter school movement withering in the US.
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.
Great. First thing we have to do is figure out a way to evaluate teacher school, something that I'm sure will be totally uncontroversial to do and not simply be a group of people bringing all their own biases in.
How are those people who were already failed by the terrible education system you mention going to be smart enough to choose a good course of education for their own kids? Or is this just a wordy way of saying, "I'll get mine and forget everyone else"?
The article is completely US-centric, but the subject isn't. Teacher's pay in France is quite low, from primary school to university. I'm an associate professor of compsci in France and, after 4 years, I make less than 2200€/month (it starts under 2000€ at the beginning). I should get to 3000€ 15 years from now. A typical mid- and high-school teacher is paid less than that and can only hope to get to 3000€ by the very end of their career. Most primary school teachers are paid just above the minimum legal salary which is a bit under 1200€.
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.
I'm not an educator but my mom is a retired school psychologist and my father used to be on my county's school board, so I grew up around teachers/educators.
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...
The 10-month working year is a core issue here. It's hard to convince voters and other government workers that teachers deserve a X% or XX% raise, when teachers receive 2.5-3x (summer break, plus other holidays) more paid leave than the average American. That paid leave is worth something: I think many people would choose a job with a $50k salary and 10 weeks of leave over a $60k salary and 3 weeks of leave.
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.
I've long been a proponent of the "block" schedule, but this would be a side benefit too.
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.
My wife spends most of her summer 'break' working, including multiple weeks of it being required to be in the classroom or at district offices.
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.
> (2) Annual wages have been calculated by multiplying the hourly mean wage by a "year-round, full-time" hours figure of 2,080 hours; for those occupations where there is not an hourly wage published, the annual wage has been directly calculated from the reported survey data.
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.
I used to work in fast food. I would gladly get paid less per hour for my current software development job than I was back then (as long as it was above making rent). It was a much more draining job and it's effects consumed every waking minute during work days and spending off-days just recovering.
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.
Its relative, I have plenty of friend who work in restaurant, they wouldn't want to trade with my software job. True that software development job is physically lot less demanding but for them its mentally exhausting.
I find software development both emotionally and mentally exhausting. And frankly, quite boring most of the time. I would love to be able to make the same money slinging pizza like I did back in college. The job was trivial enough in complexity that it freed my mind to think about and do other interesting things.
It's not really relative. It's very varying depending on your tasks, location and environment and kind of restaurant.
We were at a very stressful location and working at another location could be a huge relief because of lower load. I would imagine the work environment would have to go to absolute trash for the dev job to come close.
If you say restaurant, it feel like it's not fast food, and the average differences in wages, hours, stress level and customer appreciation between establishments called restaurants vs fast food places is probably quite significant.
I agree about fast food work being draining. Even on the hardest day, I've never left my software engineering job at the end of the day feeling half as exhausted as I did at my high school fast food jobs. From standing for 8 hours a day to the incessant churn of customers to the insults, condescension, and unreasonable demands that some of those customers would make, it is a demoralizing position.
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.
I've never worked in an actual restaurant, but I did give up programming for a couple of years recently and after a while got a job delivering pizzas (in my car).
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.
I know a retired couple, my grandparents' best friends, who were both high school teachers. They traveled every year and somehow managed to keep from burning out. If teachers had to work the entire year, the burn-out rate would be 99%/year.
I'm somewhat baffled as to why "work to rule" is considered a sort of strike or protest.
If two parties have already agreed that one will perform a certain amount of work and another will pay a certain amount of money, it is unreasonable for either side to demand more than what the other side agreed to.
A contract becomes meaningless if one side can arbitrarily adjust the terms.
So much more than that even, so many are teachers must feel compelled to do what they must for the sake of their students. I know it's incidental, but the extra effort I see my own kids' teachers putting in without financial incentive is incredible. Education is a business where a lot of "employees" probably aren't doing the calculations around their pay-per-hour but rather are focused on the accomplishing the things necessary for their students success.
Maybe that's a long winded way of saying that I suspect a lot of teachers are bleeding hearts and do not closely manager their time or monetary budgets closely.
It's not about one side arbitrarily adjusting the terms; it's about both sides realizing that they have a shared interest in keeping the organization running. It's just not feasible to write an employment contract that fully encompasses the work needing to get done.
Ensuring that a class gets taught well isn't just a matter of standing up in front of them from 8 to 3; any teacher can tell you about the amount of random surprise work that needs to get done at a school. You can call that work exploitation if you want, but the bottom line is still that someone has to do it.
I fully support the teachers doing this, but the response by employers is more likely to be to lower the workload than anything else.
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.
I've never known a decent teacher that puts in less than fifty hours per week, and a typical week is more demanding than all but the most stressful weeks I've worked in software.
I've always wanted to be a teacher, still do. But their job is like 10x harder than mine and pays 1/10th the price, so as much as I'd enjoy it and I think I'd be good at it, it just seems insane.
Good thing there's always a budget to build newer fancier schools, but not to pay teachers livable wages, cause that makes sense.
I think the difficulty of the job is relative to your talent set.
My favorite teacher was my AP calc teacher in high school. She only graded during her planning session, never worked overtime, let us not only fix a broken classroom computer that the school basically abandoned but we also take turns playing GTA on it during lectures. Almost everyone in the class passed the AP exam. She was in MENSA and left a lucrative career fixing math for defense contractors because she just wanted to teach. There just aren't enough people with those kinds of chops to go around, regardless of the salary we are willing to pay.
How much preparations and grading there is depends on the subject (among other things). And mathematics is where you get most for free for just being smart and knowing your subject.
In (good) mathematics lessons, very little of the time is spent explaining the theory. Instead a lot time is spent doing exercises – both the teacher demonstrating and the students trying it out them selves. At that point the teaching becomes reactive, as the student get stuck and you help them figure it out. This requires little prep (basically finding good exercises).
In other subjects there is much more story telling and explaining. And it requires much more preparations in order to make it interesting, and keeping all kinds of details fresh in your mind.
As for grading, grading mathematics is quick and mechanical. While correcting an essay is a lot more draining.
So, I do not think talent is actually what is deciding factor here. The way you phrase it, it sounds to me like "Oh, if the teacher were better at their job they would have to work a lot less".
> Grading a multiplication test in grade school might be quick and mechanical but grading trig and calculus is not.
I gravely disagree. I spent a lot of time grading calculus exams at universities, and it is a quick and fairly mechanical procedure. A group of five can churn through three hundred final exams in a working day.
Answers in maths are quite uniform and contain a few sentences which can be quickly judged by how correct they are. Calculus and trigonometry might be difficult for the students, but for someone who has taught it a few years, it is absolutely straight forward to recognise correct solutions.
Grading say, English short stories or essays is a completely different thing. There are a lot more sentences, which have to be analysed grammatically and semantically. You have to judge how coherent the student is, which is a non-local property. Does the end match the beginning? What is the student trying to say? Do they use a clear language? If not, what feed-back can you give that will improve it. What literary effects does the student command? Allusions? Irony? Foreshadowing? Contrast?
The answers are highly personal and even using rubric grading every one is a non-trivial judgement call.
I believe that the nature of the tasks and subjects have a bigger impact on how much time it takes to grade it, than how efficient the individual grader is. I have experience correcting in groups where I have been able to compare grading speed. Yes there are differences between how fast people grade, but they are minor, and often speed is inversely correlated with quality (of feedback given to the student).
> Some people are more effective/efficient/faster than others.
Learning takes time. Students learn by doing different activities related to the topic. Sometimes listening to the teacher explaining, sometimes working on problems of their own. In mathematics, it is easy to find good examples to demonstrate and problems for the students to work with. Other subjects, it is much more difficult, and requires prep work.
Taking less time to prepare will usually mean worse teaching. For instance I had a history teacher who would just put on recordings from History Channel. He thus had to spend little time preparing the lessons. But the learning outcome was not the best.
I think it's hyperbolic to claim teachers don't make 'livable' wages. In the U.S. median teacher salary is north of $60k [0]. Maybe there's an argument that this is too low to be fair but when the median U.S. wage is below $32k/yr it's hard to make the case it's not livable
Sometimes HN takes too much of a SV-centric view, especially in terms of wages.
Okay, but starting teacher salaries in CA are in the low $40s. Try living in SF or LA on that. I know my friend was teaching for 8 years and got a job in LA for $80k, but she left to go to Vegas because they pay a lot better there ~$100k, plus no state tax, plus it's way cheaper.
So, yes, maybe median is not bad. But starting out -- especially in a city -- seems really bad.
Especially when you factor in almost all of these teachers have college debt of about $30k+ to pay off...
The article touched on that point, though. It spoke about how the narrative is skewed because many teachers are in rural locations.
That same link shows that the median teacher salary in California is $82k, which is still 17% above the median household income in California [1]. The average student loan debt is right around $30k [2], so above average wages combined with average student loan debt shouldn't be construed as unlivable, unless that term is extended way beyond the plight of teachers (which may still be fair).
Again, it should be taken in context (outside the SV bubble). I know engineers who started at <$40k (albeit a few years back during the recession)
> On average for all days of the week, teachers worked 18 fewer minutes per day, and did household activities—such as housework, cooking, lawn care, or financial and other household management—12 more minutes per day, than all other full-time professionals.
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.
That doesn't mean the annecdotes don't represent a significant problem, it may just not be one that is universal. It may be endemic to certain states or school districts.
you forgot 9 weeks off every summer, paid holidays, no contributions into social security, and some get classroom aids, they don't design curriculum (it's purchased), throw in common core for good measure....
>9 weeks off every summer
Unpaid. Also depending on location, it's more like 5 weeks
>paid holidays
No more than required by law
>no contributions into social security
Must be dependent on location. Here in Maine, my mother contributes to social security but is not eligible for benefits from it unless she retires after 30-35 years of teaching.
>and some get classroom aids
That's a laugh, teachers don't even get sufficient budget to buy school supplies for their classroom.
>they don't design curriculum (it's purchased)
Untrue. Maybe dependent on location, but once again, here in Maine, teachers are responsible for designing, building, and running their own curriculum, on a per-subject basis.
>throw in common core for good measure
Not sure what you mean by that
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.
> my girlfriend is a teacher and I see her working about 40 hours a week, for a 24h job...
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.
> 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.
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.
A few reasons. One, it's not a corporation, virtually every single school in the country is a public school. She's essentially a gov employee. Teachers have been striking and protesting against low wages for years, gov doesn't budge.
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.
She shouldn't accept it, but generally teachers aren't just working for a company and serving a customer. - They are responsible for the future of the kids they are teaching, and most of them are taking that responsibility very seriously.
My friend works as a full time teacher. Has 24 * 45min=16h of classes each week which is above the norm which is 20 * 45min. He spends 2-3 more hours each week on grading things in case they have exams that week and about 2-3 hours each week in case he needs to prepare some materials. Most exams are already prepared and so are lessons. He doesn't call up parents (lol wtf) and students don't really ask questions on the platform. He has 3 weeks of winter vacations, 2 months of summer vacation and a week of Easter vacation. He has engaging lessons and always comes home with a new story about some cool interaction he had with the kids. He's way happier than when he was working in the private sector. He's teaching STEM classes in a high school known for problematic kids. He says the biggest problem with teachers is that half of them aren't for this job. They don't know how to handle the complex teacher-student relationship and start getting bullied by the worst kids with no way out. He says a big part of some of his colleagues being broken down shells of humans is that and the fact that they never worked in the industry so they don't appreciate the perks of being a teacher
I taught for 3 years before entering private sector and this largely jives with my experience. So many teachers had only ever been teachers and had only ever developed their classroom and subject matter skills. spending hours a week being unproductive or marginally productive on grading, grade entry because they were scared to or refused to learn more productive ways of accomplishing the same tasks. I would watch teachers spend hours a week grading, calculating and manually inputting informal daily comprehension checkouts-- a mini pop quiz to get a check on daily comprehension of the learning objectives for that day. These made up 10% or LESS of the students grade, and while they were very important information for the teacher to know where there were deficiencies ahead of formal assessment, the act of manually grading and inputting the information represented 90% of their work in this area. it was a complete inverse of effort on the teachers part vs impact on the students grade. I used technology to make these nearly completely automated. My first year all we had were smart clickers so I was limited to multiple choice but by my last year students had chromebooks and if I took the 3 minutes to put together an online assessment ahead of time, I could make it anything i wanted and have it auto score. I then made a choice to not even count the daily assessments in the student grades because apart from a classroom discipline perspective, they did not serve the student learning nearly so much as they gave me immediate data to judge how well I had presented the material. I spent maybe a half hour a week on this and it freed me up to use my planning time to assess critical thinking assignments, adjust to near real time assessment data, and plan more interesting and dynamic lessons. I did leave education because while i was not laid off, my fourth year fell in 2009 and there was a chance of being laid off (my tenure would have begun the first work day of my fourth year) and the projected retirement pool was smaller (retirement accounts took a big hit that spring) than the number of cuts needed to achieve full staffing. I do not know If I would have had a job come august but its irrelevant. I went from teaching science, engineering and technology to working in science, engineering and technology, and while not adjusting for 190 work days vs 240 work days a year, I make about double what I would make on negotiated pay scale, but this is the exception that proves the rule-- my pay was bound to a rate lower than private sector because demand and compensation in my field was so much higher than other fields. I do miss teaching, but I don't miss how tunnel visioned and inflexible it could be. I do not think that dramatically increasing compensation will achieve any gains in student learning but I do think that dramatically increasing student to teacher ratios, introducing the modern knowledge worker workflow to the profession, differential compensation and programs to better engage parents and communities (look at how horribly the transition to common core math has gone-- a much better way to teach numeracy that was atrociously communicated and taught to communities, parents and even many teachers to the point of becoming a political issue) will all improve outcomes, and really the only metric that really matters at the end of the day is increasing student learning, everything else is ancillary to that.
It's weird right? In the same way that programmers seem to like to brag about working all weekend or till 10pm on some killer bug, teachers like to brag about grading papers all week.
Online school stuff isn't perfect (looking at you blackboard and friends), but they can sure take a lot of this drudgery away if you are willing to learn a platform.
Slave morality is a thing. In terms of “Learn a new platform to keep the drudgery away”, perhaps, but you could also spend all your time learning new platforms then look back and realize you have accomplished very little else. If human interaction is the unique and critical component of school based education, then maybe that aspect should be where teachers focus their efforts? Leave the digital disruption to Ed tech and get back to the basic human fundamentals of pedagogy.
Manually grading papers takes so much time (my experience as a TA in graduate school) I definitely thought about ways to reduce the workload with machines .
Even 20% workload in grading papers (e.g., quantitative works are graded electronically) would mean so much for the entire teaching industry.
Wait a second, are American teachers only paid for the hours they are spending in the classroom? Here in Germany, 20 hours is what you spent teaching, but it is a full-time job, as it is expected that you spent at least an hour preparing for every class.
They're generally salaried so they're paid a fixed amount no matter how much they work, with that amount normally negotiated by their union.
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.
I think it depends on the grade and/or subject you're teaching. My wife has taught HS English for a decade and the 45-50+ hr weeks has been the norm for her and her colleagues.
I have the impression (from my wife and her coworkers) that it's much easier for elementary and middle school teachers to work the contracted hours and not bring their work home with them.
High school just comes with a lot of extra baggage too.
I can see high school English being more time consuming than average, and certainly more than elementary school.
I've never understood why subjects and student age aren't considered in teacher pay scales across the board. My experience is limited, but I've never seen an instance where anything other than time and credentials (generally degrees) were considered.
Do you think that the non-work hours and other non-financial incentives (perks vs bricks) get used to vary the incentives for different types of teachers?
"Union contracts generally mandate that gym teachers must be paid the same as calculus teachers, with the predictable result of surpluses of gym teachers and shortages of calculus teachers."
Not sure where you're from, but I can at least confirm that in the Netherlands, we're really bad at estimating the amount of time teachers work - erring towards underestimating it.
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.
What would happen if your girlfriend worked her contracted hours only? Specifically, would there be a negative impact on student outcomes?
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.
I hardly think you can refute an in-depth analysis that comes at the issues from many different angles based on a single line.
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.
The source needs some consideration. From Wikipedia on National Affairs:
“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.
All this means is we get a conservative spin on the question rather than the usual liberal one. I am yet to find in life a simple, one sided answer to a complex question.
"All this means is we get a conservative spin on the question rather than the usual liberal one."
You have excellently explained the purpose of comment you responded to.
My wife used to be a teacher and there is something I haven't seen mentioned and that is all the district support staff. Her district had literally hundreds of high paid support staff. Many were older former teachers that either wanted out of the classroom or were moved to a support position instead of being let go, often with a pay raise.
Eliminating all the unnecessary support positions and dividing those salaries amongst teachers could result in a more balanced salary for teachers.
Back when I was teaching high school math in inner city San Bernardino, there were more administrators than teachers in the district. It didn't make sense.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 246 ms ] threadMy girlfriend of the last 5.5 years is a teacher. I can only speak on her experience, and what I've got to know from her colleagues. That said, the three month break is hardly a myth.
> Teachers are generally required to spend weeks doing prep before the year starts and weeks closing out after the year ends.
They stay a few *days after schools out, not weeks. And, most of them recycle lesson plans from the previous year. No one is spending weeks on lesson plans. If they are, it's passively, not 40 hours a week. From what I've been told, most of them download/purchase full plans off the internet.
> There are also recommended to required activities during the summer.
They get paid extra for this stuff too. My girlfriend runs a club, does detention, and works the ticket booth at football games. She gets paid for all of them. Her contract states one extra curricular activity per year. It's all during the school year in her case.
> $40-50k is not enough money to live on, in most places.
$40-50k is the average salary in the US. Outside of major metros, $50k will afford you a nice life (I live in one, most people here would kill to make $50k).
But it's not just the pay. They get very nice benefits too.
Yes, it's not a luxurious job but it's a good middle-class job. All workers cry poverty when it comes to pay but for the most part U.S. teachers don't fall in that track.
not 12 weeks but 7 is still nice...
https://www.teacherportal.com/teacher-salaries-by-state/
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.
I mean, couldn't I equally well say that the compensation packages we have now are ludicrously miserly?
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.
There's a shocking amount of incompetence and corruption in school admin. Sometimes it's hard to tell which is which.
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.
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.
Which is?
It's a "study" in the sense that a blog by the American Tobacco Association (fictional entity invented for the purpose of this argument) produces "studies" about the "harmlessness of tobacco smoking".
Also for reference, I have been working as a teacher for 6 years and make just shy of 43k.
This might not be a problem if there were another part time job that really worked well for getting paid in the other months, but that seems difficult.
I think the comparison was median annual income and median days of vacation per year. It doesn’t matter too much if the pay is distributed as a single annual lump sum or paid out every hour.
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.
I knew it. The "article" is 100% propaganda.
What possibilities have you considered?
Median income is also a poor indicator.
It's especially bizarre that the rules also penalize drawing on spousal survivor benefits.
I believe the loophole has been shut down for several years.
Your $60k job is actually a $50k job with an unpaid summer off.
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 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.
[EDIT] I mean to you wanna be the superintendent reporting that proportion of district teachers with master's degrees is up by seven percent since you started, or the one explaining that most of those degrees are bullshit and you don't care about it and neither should anyone else? Bear in mind most people have zero idea what teacher education looks like.
OTOH it'd be nice if there were still a way to reward teachers who'd done a real and relevant master's (which very few of them do now), but I don't think anyone's interested in nailing down that distinction. It's not even just degree mills, either, AFAIK the vast majority of postgraduate programs aimed at teachers are designed, primarily, to be pretty easy to pass and to have relatively low time commitments. They all want a piece of that action, and if they increase the rigor demand for their product will drop because a hypothetical very hard, non-bullshit teaching master's from a prestigious school brings the same pay bump as a very bullshit one from a third-rate state school.
I am hearing sarcasm, which I would wish to encourage in the US, but it is possibly out of place on HN.
So far New Orleans has been my favourite US location that seemed to have sarcasm as a culture (although I have sampled very little of the US).
As you say, there is a whole cottage industry of online accredited places (Liberty University, which I don't even consider to be the level of University of Phoenix, is accredited/recognized (unlike University of Phoenix) and used by MANY teachers in the state of Georgia, for instance -- I have a hunch there is some sort of financial relationship between the state and Liberty but I have no proof) -- some counties even offer easy access to loans/do tuition reimbursement.
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?
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.
Flip side: not enough people would put up with going through a "serious" teacher ed program to fill the demand, unless pay went way up. Not even close to enough.
My mother, and many other people I know who wanted to go into teaching, wanted to do so because they wanted to be teachers, not the pay. What turned them off to the profession is the incompetence demonstrated by most teachers, professors of education, and school administrators.
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.
Working as a teacher certainly doesn't.
Source: had teachers (not in the US, just for the record).
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?
Do you think having Obama's daughter on staff will bring in more clients?
I mentioned that explicitly in my theory by pointing out that it is the ability to convince others that you add value, not necessarily the value added itself.
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.
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.
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.
I think the challenge is just measuring and comparing education. If we could, reliably, then we’d likely pay tons more for teachers.
I do want to point out that these two points aren't actually related. Just because the US pays more for lesser outcomes does not mean that teacher pay is anti-correlated or uncorrelated to outcome.
I do think it’s fair, unless I see data that shows it, that pay is not correlated to outcome.
I think there are multiple factors for outcomes and I think further research will help figure this out. But for now, I think it’s false to say that we will get better outcomes if we increase pay. I can think of a few outcomes, but have no data, that would result in higher pay with worse outcomes (eg, higher pay crowds out more passionate but less credentialed teachers who aren’t in it for the money).
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.
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.
Most work in Tech companies even the top FAANG ones these days is crud work.
These people can only afford to pay well, because they make their money through advertising scale. Companies which depend on paying users, can't afford to pay that kind of salaries, nor waste their time interviewing people on rounds and rounds for proxy skills which have nothing to do with the job on hand.
In short only VC companies without profit pressure or web advertising companies pay well. Others don't have this luxury.
Anecdata: Schools that won't hire more qualified candidates (e.g. graduate degrees complete) instead preferring more green applicants because the latter are contractually cheaper.
That is, in some instances schools could hire better for the same money but cannot because of labor contracts.
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.
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.
My neighbor was fired over it and had trouble finding work at other private schools as there are just a handful of Montessori and language immersion schools, with everything else that isn't SPS having a Morals clause.
Edit: The GSBA directory only lists 2 schools, most private schools in Seattle are not supportive: http://thegsba.org/business-resources/guide-directory/single...
Northwest School
"Diversity is our commitment to build [a] community that includes individuals and families who represent a wide variety of ... gender identity and expression, sexual orientation"
Seattle Academy
"includes and embraces a spectrum of differences in ... gender, sexual orientation"
Lakeside
"Lakeside is committed to creating an inclusive and equitable community in which all individuals can participate in and contribute to the life of the school, regardless of ... gender, ... sexual orientation, or any other aspect of their identity."
The Seattle Academy isn't on the list and literally held the state conference for GLSEN this year ( https://sites.google.com/glsenwa.org/2019-conference/home ).
> Catholic run schools (which are the majority of the private schools in the region)
Going to various directories that let you filter by religious affiliations shows that catholic schools are probably ~20% of the private schools in Kings County and ~15% across Washington State. Christian schools make up another ~25% in Seattle and ~20% statewide. So, while a significant portion, Catholic is definitely not the majority and the combination of Catholic+Christian might approach 50%.
I went to the first two schools alphabetically in NWAIS's directory of members for Seattle and they both had nondiscrimination policies that included sexual orientation and gender identity. Neither is Montessori or language immersion.
Bertschi (admittedly on the GBSA list also): https://www.bertschi.org/jobs
Billings: http://billingsmiddleschool.org/employment
Salaries are set by supply and demand. Being a programmer is in greater demand relative to its supply.
"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.
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.
Vacation has great value, but usually only after basic needs are met. Cutting someones hours is often used as a punishment for a reason. At the same time it also makes total sense that other companies don't want employees reducing their working hours.
Sure but that's a strange point to make given that they know what the benefits of the job are in advance. It's not like summer vacation is something that's sprung on teachers after they've taken the job.
> Vacation has great value, but usually only after basic needs are met. Cutting someones hours is often used as a punishment for a reason. At the same time it also makes total sense that other companies don't want employees reducing their working hours.
Most teachers are not incapable of meeting their own basic needs. They may be paid less than comparable private sector workers, but they're not literally starving. Given that, vacation is unequivocally a benefit. They may prefer the opportunity to work more...but if they preferred that, then they should have taken a different job.
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?
Conflating performance with unions is bunk anyways. Japan’s teachers are heavily, heavily unionized, historically far more militant than teachers in the US, and they’re consistently among the highest performing OECD countries.
How would one have meaningful 'competition' without privatization?
Possible, yes. Practical? No. Democratic bureaucracies are effectively incapable of learning and adapting. Schooling is basically implemented identically today as it was 100 years ago.
> Schools just have to be allowed the leeway to experiment without threat of privatization
This is a strange statement to me. In what sense is privatization a threat to public schools? If public schools were so great and privatization were so bad, why would people want to send their kids to privately run schools? Wouldn't public schools invite the challenge if they believed their model was superior?
The fact that they even view it as such an existential threat tells you basically all you need to know. Even they believe they'd be outcompeted almost immediately.
> And it’s not as if high-performing countries arrived at their (almost exclusively public) systems without this kind of iteration.
Firstly, the idea of differential country performance of schools is largely a myth. When you disaggregate by ethnicity, most of that disappears. Japanese kids in the US do about as well here as they do in Japan. Which is to say that differential performance between countries is more about who is in those countries than how it is those countries educate.
A good old prisoners dilemma. If you got more resources to spend on education, you don't want to sit in the same class as someone who can only contribute little to the course. Just like worse graduates will ruin the prestige of the school and thus value of your degree. Outcome-base exclusion can be fine, unless it ends up as proxy to select for socio-economic factors and thus make society offer less equal opportunity.
Just looking at "existential threat" -> "outcompeted" only works in a highly simplified world with no market failures and other issues.
> differential performance between countries is more about who is in those countries than how it is those countries educate
I'd like a source on that. I do understand culture will have a significant influence, especially on what value people place on education. But your statement seems to go a lot further into "school doesn't matter" territory. This directly contradicts with earlier statements and e.g. many chines studying in the US.
Let's trace that out a little more. Are you implying that private/charter schools have more dollars to spend per student? Because that's certainly not true for Charter schools. It's probably true for some private schools, but also not all. And if that's not what you're saying, then i'm not sure I understand your argument.
> I'd like a source on that. I do understand culture will have a significant influence, especially on what value people place on education. But your statement seems to go a lot further into "school doesn't matter" territory. This directly contradicts with earlier statements and e.g. many chines studying in the US.
I can no longer find the source where I originally read it, but we can reconstruct the data. I'm going to show it for math, but the results are similar for other subjects.
PISA Rankings by country:
https://www.businessinsider.com/pisa-worldwide-ranking-of-ma...
As you can see, the US looks pretty abysmal, given how rich it is. However, if you look at the math PISA scores for whites and asians, you see this:
https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2015/pisa2015highlights...
Now, the US doesn't jump to the very top, but it does jump to just below Norway and right above Austria. Certainly a solidly high quality education. You'll see the same results across other subjects too.
Of course, that doesn't mean our educational system doesn't have room for improvement. It most certainly does. But the idea that we're severely lagging the rest of the developed world is mostly false, when you adjust for this confound.
Seems like the incentives are mostly oriented around getting teachers to stay in one place and grind out another year of experience, round of continuing education, and extra degrees whether they are wise or not.
Otherwise, why don't teachers just quit schools with poor safety records, working conditions, pay, equipment funding, and uncompensated overtime? Because no district really has to worry about being held accountable like that.
I’m not sure what you mean by agency here or how many teachers you actually know. But unions have regularly campaigned for more resources for students outside of themselves, including access to things nurses, counselors, and libraries. Schools in many cities are highly racially and economically segregated in the US because of the country’s broader history of redlining and corresponding deprivation. Teachers unions are one of the only interest groups who have consistently fought against this denial of agency for their students.
As to career choices, I have union member teachers in my family and they change schools as they see fit. There are some problems with state licensing incompatibilities that prevent teachers from being as mobile as they might like and we should probably move to uniform federal standards to correct this.
>Seems like the incentives are mostly oriented around getting teachers to stay in one place and grind out another year of experience, round of continuing education, and extra degrees whether they are wise or not. Otherwise, why don't teachers just quit schools with poor safety records, working conditions, pay, equipment funding, and uncompensated overtime? Because no district really has to worry about being held accountable like that.
Incentives around higher education are perverse in the US in almost every regard, so I’m not sure that teachers are that much of an outlier (especially for their domain, education). As to why teachers stay - I’m not sure if you’re aware but most people tend to live in the regions they’re actually from, where they have family ties and social bonds.
https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2008/12/17/who-moves-who-sta...
Applying some sort of rational actor economic heuristic to civil servants in a service profession seems a foolhardy endeavor. I mean, I’ve worked for big companies across the country, none of which were any better run and some of which were not better resourced than a failing public school, and they all had their fair share of people toughing it out too. What binds people to a place socially and materially, especially among more working class professions, is different from white collar workers.
But also because of the public school system that ties zip codes to affluence and introduces artificial geographical barriers to integration. Something teachers unions have a vested interest in, at least indirectly.
> ...most people tend to live in the regions they’re actually from...
One can switch schools and districts without switching regions. But it should be much easier than that, even.
> Applying some sort of rational actor economic heuristic to civil servants in a service profession seems a foolhardy endeavor.
I'm just saying it's counterintuitive that teachers unions in particular are for teachers without being especially for empowering individual teachers to have leverage with respect to their employment agreements and conditions.
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.
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.
Supply and demand.
Teachers tend to get very generous benefits packages, including retirement pay.
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.
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.
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.
1. https://datausa.io/profile/geo/washington-dc/
2. https://datausa.io/profile/geo/montana
She also works a lot more than 40 hour weeks and has to deal with some pretty intense stuff.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
Game development? Much lower pay relative to other programming jobs, insane hours, and usually requires much deeper and specialized skills.
I guess it's not low pay on an absolute scale like teaching is.
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...
This is literally the argument: “Back in the day, there were x teachers and y students. Now there are 1.6x teachers and 1.2y students. That’s too many teachers!” See the problem?
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...
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.
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).
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?
Primary and secondary public education often fails to provide basic literacy competence. As a result, a high-school diploma isn't worth much, but the right college degree statistically is worth even the absurd prices that are now being paid for them.
> This is a strike against the idea that the government shouldn't be paying for it, in that in at least this one case the government paying for it seems to be working better than a non-government organization doing that doing so.
The government can pay for it without running it, see the Swedish model and the voucher system, which has resulted in improvements. However, teacher unions are obviously against this. They fear their jobs will be less secure if most parents had a real choice in where to enroll their children.
Where did you go to school? Sounds like a bad one.
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.".
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.
I don't care how much teachers make nationally, - I care how much teachers make at my local schools.
No. In fact, there's a saying in politics: "All politics is local."
With the exception of the president, people vote for their local city government, their local county government, their local school board, their local senator, their local representative, and on the macro level (governor), they vote for the person who they think will best help their own, local interests.
Well, technically, people vote to guide the electoral college on who they should vote for.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
I've been running an excavator recently to do some...yard work...and honestly that line of work seems pretty appealing, and quite lucrative.
We were at a very stressful location and working at another location could be a huge relief because of lower load. I would imagine the work environment would have to go to absolute trash for the dev job to come close.
If you say restaurant, it feel like it's not fast food, and the average differences in wages, hours, stress level and customer appreciation between establishments called restaurants vs fast food places is probably quite significant.
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.
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/...
If two parties have already agreed that one will perform a certain amount of work and another will pay a certain amount of money, it is unreasonable for either side to demand more than what the other side agreed to.
A contract becomes meaningless if one side can arbitrarily adjust the terms.
Maybe that's a long winded way of saying that I suspect a lot of teachers are bleeding hearts and do not closely manager their time or monetary budgets closely.
Including software. It is also one of those reasons why the 40 hour work week is mostly a myth.
That's not good for anyone.
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.
Good thing there's always a budget to build newer fancier schools, but not to pay teachers livable wages, cause that makes sense.
My favorite teacher was my AP calc teacher in high school. She only graded during her planning session, never worked overtime, let us not only fix a broken classroom computer that the school basically abandoned but we also take turns playing GTA on it during lectures. Almost everyone in the class passed the AP exam. She was in MENSA and left a lucrative career fixing math for defense contractors because she just wanted to teach. There just aren't enough people with those kinds of chops to go around, regardless of the salary we are willing to pay.
In (good) mathematics lessons, very little of the time is spent explaining the theory. Instead a lot time is spent doing exercises – both the teacher demonstrating and the students trying it out them selves. At that point the teaching becomes reactive, as the student get stuck and you help them figure it out. This requires little prep (basically finding good exercises).
In other subjects there is much more story telling and explaining. And it requires much more preparations in order to make it interesting, and keeping all kinds of details fresh in your mind.
As for grading, grading mathematics is quick and mechanical. While correcting an essay is a lot more draining.
So, I do not think talent is actually what is deciding factor here. The way you phrase it, it sounds to me like "Oh, if the teacher were better at their job they would have to work a lot less".
>"Oh, if the teacher were better at their job they would have to work a lot less".
I'm 100% saying exactly that. This is true of basically every profession. Some people are more effective/efficient/faster than others.
I gravely disagree. I spent a lot of time grading calculus exams at universities, and it is a quick and fairly mechanical procedure. A group of five can churn through three hundred final exams in a working day.
Answers in maths are quite uniform and contain a few sentences which can be quickly judged by how correct they are. Calculus and trigonometry might be difficult for the students, but for someone who has taught it a few years, it is absolutely straight forward to recognise correct solutions.
Grading say, English short stories or essays is a completely different thing. There are a lot more sentences, which have to be analysed grammatically and semantically. You have to judge how coherent the student is, which is a non-local property. Does the end match the beginning? What is the student trying to say? Do they use a clear language? If not, what feed-back can you give that will improve it. What literary effects does the student command? Allusions? Irony? Foreshadowing? Contrast?
The answers are highly personal and even using rubric grading every one is a non-trivial judgement call.
I believe that the nature of the tasks and subjects have a bigger impact on how much time it takes to grade it, than how efficient the individual grader is. I have experience correcting in groups where I have been able to compare grading speed. Yes there are differences between how fast people grade, but they are minor, and often speed is inversely correlated with quality (of feedback given to the student).
> Some people are more effective/efficient/faster than others.
Learning takes time. Students learn by doing different activities related to the topic. Sometimes listening to the teacher explaining, sometimes working on problems of their own. In mathematics, it is easy to find good examples to demonstrate and problems for the students to work with. Other subjects, it is much more difficult, and requires prep work.
Taking less time to prepare will usually mean worse teaching. For instance I had a history teacher who would just put on recordings from History Channel. He thus had to spend little time preparing the lessons. But the learning outcome was not the best.
Sometimes HN takes too much of a SV-centric view, especially in terms of wages.
[0] https://www.onetonline.org/link/summary/25-2031.00
So, yes, maybe median is not bad. But starting out -- especially in a city -- seems really bad.
Especially when you factor in almost all of these teachers have college debt of about $30k+ to pay off...
That same link shows that the median teacher salary in California is $82k, which is still 17% above the median household income in California [1]. The average student loan debt is right around $30k [2], so above average wages combined with average student loan debt shouldn't be construed as unlivable, unless that term is extended way beyond the plight of teachers (which may still be fair).
Again, it should be taken in context (outside the SV bubble). I know engineers who started at <$40k (albeit a few years back during the recession)
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSCAA646N
[2] https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2017-economic-we...
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.
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.
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".
Online school stuff isn't perfect (looking at you blackboard and friends), but they can sure take a lot of this drudgery away if you are willing to learn a platform.
Even 20% workload in grading papers (e.g., quantitative works are graded electronically) would mean so much for the entire teaching industry.
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.
I have the impression (from my wife and her coworkers) that it's much easier for elementary and middle school teachers to work the contracted hours and not bring their work home with them.
High school just comes with a lot of extra baggage too.
I've never understood why subjects and student age aren't considered in teacher pay scales across the board. My experience is limited, but I've never seen an instance where anything other than time and credentials (generally degrees) were considered.
"Union contracts generally mandate that gym teachers must be paid the same as calculus teachers, with the predictable result of surpluses of gym teachers and shortages of calculus teachers."
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.
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.
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.
“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.
Eliminating all the unnecessary support positions and dividing those salaries amongst teachers could result in a more balanced salary for teachers.