Are teachers underpaid? It depends.

My wife is a high school English teacher. The ongoing joke with teachers is they get 3 months a year off. What other profession gets that, right?

Speaking from experience, she generally brings home work every night (grading, lesson planning, etc). Weekends too. This fluctuates based on time of year (grading a round of research papers, preparing new lessons for a new quarter, etc).

Summers off? Kinda. New lessons and curriculums often have to be prepared for the following year. She's been doing that for a bit already whenever our little guy naps.

The other part of overlooked is the emotional toll. In my wife's case, she's dealing with high school freshmen, juniors, seniors, all who are one hell of a handful most of the time. Last year, she had a class that had her crying more than a few times. The kids were literally trying to make her cry.

But besides all that, teaching is a profession that is charged with preparing and educating our youth for tomorrow. Obviously, teachers go into it knowing this, and often for that very reason. But in my eyes, that's quite a responsibility. There are plenty of better paying jobs out there with less vacation that, at the end of the day, don't make much of a difference.

(For the record, my wife's district actually pays pretty well, so I don't think she's underpaid).

> "The first time you teach a class, it’s incredibly hard and time consuming, but the difficulty drops like a logarithm to a relatively low plateau after you’ve done it a few times. This appears to be reflected in data."

I'm not entirely sure if this is a good reflection of the teaching role, or at least what it should be. Also, this statement to me gives the impression that teaching is a fairly static or fixed process -- once you've done it a little, your subconscious can take over. Sadly one can get by with that mindset (and unfortunately I've had plenty of teachers who act like they believe this), but any good teacher would be saddened by this. Proper teaching is so much more than just knowing the subject, or the routine. The amount of effort and thought involved in skillfully and effectively teaching any idea or concept to a wide range of different people with different backgrounds and knowledge and world views isn't a task that I believe can become automatic. Good teaching involved understanding your students and understanding where they're coming from and what they know, and tailoring everything you do to get each individual student deeply involved in the subject at hand. That's no easy task, even for seasoned teachers!

I'm not suggesting you necessarily are part of this mindset, however sadly so many in the US have such an obscured view of what teaching truly is. In my opinion, that is one of the core problems with education in the US.

> "Note too that people getting teaching degrees at the graduate level get substantially lower GRE scores than those in almost all other disciplines."

Sorry I don't understand -- what's your point with this, what is this supposed to prove, or how does this contribute to the argument?

"But besides all that, teaching is a profession that is charged with preparing and educating our youth for tomorrow. Obviously, teachers go into it knowing this, and often for that very reason. But in my eyes, that's quite a responsibility. There are plenty of better paying jobs out there with less vacation that, at the end of the day, don't make much of a difference."

If you ask me, that's all the more reason to increase pay and remove the near absolute job security. (Note: I haven't independently fact checked the job security so if its wrong please let me know). Given how important the job is, doesn't it make sense to align the incentives properly?

For the most part, when I hear people disagree with this, they tend to bring up specific problems with things like No Child Left Behind. Its hard to disagree that using bad techniques to measure teacher performance is a bad idea and I don't have a specific better solution, but I don't think that means we should stop trying.

Very interesting -- thanks for the reference! Will read through it this evening. I sincerely hope it proposes good methods of improving teachers, ones other than the horribly flawed method of judging teachers based on student test scores.

I keep hearing from die-hard conservatives that teachers make "exorbitant" salaries with "unbelievable" benefits, and that they are a drain on our society. On the other hand, every single peer/friend I know who went into teaching is pretty much lower-middle class.