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Pay Teachers More

nytimes.com

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Re: Pay Teachers More

#11

Post by alextingle »

tokenadult wrote: post #2

One of the startling factual claims in the article is that there were times in the United States, and are now places in the world, where lawyers make little better compensation than schoolteachers. Really? I recall reading in the 1990s in a book about education policy in the United States that schoolteachers are more numerous than doctors, lawyers, scientists, and engineers COMBINED. If there are that many more schoo…

Why would a lawyer earn more money than a teacher? Only your ingrained cultural expectations suggest this. Can you strip those out and suggest any objective reasons that lawyers are worth more? Do they train for longer? Is their work more important? Do they need better school grades?

Re: Pay Teachers More

#12

Post by xxpor »

TomOfTTB wrote: post #6
spoiledtechie wrote: post #4

We could pay teachers more if they removed Tenure and Teachers that don't preform. In what other industry does it pay you for not preforming. I am tired of thinking you need to throw more money at the problem. You need to remove the biggest problem. Those that don't preform. If you remove the teachers that don't preform, not only would you have more money, but have better preforming students. I am tired of this overa…

Agreed. I have a very conservative, very anti-union family and there's not one of them who isn't in favor of higher teacher pay as long as it's tied to performance. So I really don't know who would be against it

What's a fair way of measuring performance though?

Re: Pay Teachers More

#13

Post by mmaro »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #9
mmaro wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teachers do not work less than 40 hours per week. A ton of time is spent on grading, prep, helping slow students, school meetings, complying with NCLB requirements, etc.

According to the BLS, the average full time teacher works slightly less than 40 hours/week (see Table 2). This includes time at the workplace, at home and at another location. http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf

Ah, right. I made a very stupid mistake in thinking they teach students for ~7 hours/day. I was also biased by my (probably) above-average experiences with teachers.

Re: Pay Teachers More

#14

Post by lallysingh »

alextingle wrote: post #11
tokenadult wrote: post #2

One of the startling factual claims in the article is that there were times in the United States, and are now places in the world, where lawyers make little better compensation than schoolteachers. Really? I recall reading in the 1990s in a book about education policy in the United States that schoolteachers are more numerous than doctors, lawyers, scientists, and engineers COMBINED. If there are that many more schoo…

Why would a lawyer earn more money than a teacher? Only your ingrained cultural expectations suggest this. Can you strip those out and suggest any objective reasons that lawyers are worth more? Do they train for longer? Is their work more important? Do they need better school grades?

There's a better merit->pay feedback cycle. A good lawyer will get repeat business. When am I going to take a class again?

Re: Pay Teachers More

#15

Post by yeahsure »

[deleted] wrote: post #7
bkaid wrote: post #3

I never understand why people get overly emotional about teacher salaries but not other public positions like fire, police, military, etc. While I empathize (my mother and 2 sisters are teachers), they do only work 9 months out of the year, and less than 40 hours per week. And teachers insist on remaining unionized, basically ensuring bad (non-criminal) teachers can't be fired once they get tenured after 2-3 years in…

[deleted]

"You don't know any teachers"

He said his mother and two sisters are teachers. Am I missing something?

Re: Pay Teachers More

#16

Post by maratd »

Let's try a thought exercise. If we pay engineers more, we'll get safer buildings. If we pay police officers more, we'll get safer streets. If we pay doctors more, we'll get better care. You see how this works? More pay attracts higher quality individuals, but it's a zero sum game. Those people are coming from some other industry. So if you'll pay teachers more, you'll have a lower quality of service elsewhere. That low-quality teacher just became a doctor and the doctor became a teacher. Not good. I want the best and brightest doing the most critical work, not babysitting children.

Re: Pay Teachers More

#17

Post by tung »

spoiledtechie wrote: post #4

We could pay teachers more if they removed Tenure and Teachers that don't preform. In what other industry does it pay you for not preforming. I am tired of thinking you need to throw more money at the problem. You need to remove the biggest problem. Those that don't preform. If you remove the teachers that don't preform, not only would you have more money, but have better preforming students. I am tired of this overa…

s/preform/perform/ ?

Re: Pay Teachers More

#18

Post by archgoon »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #9
mmaro wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teachers do not work less than 40 hours per week. A ton of time is spent on grading, prep, helping slow students, school meetings, complying with NCLB requirements, etc.

According to the BLS, the average full time teacher works slightly less than 40 hours/week (see Table 2). This includes time at the workplace, at home and at another location. http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf

I looked at the chart for percent of teachers working on a given day (orange and gray one). The orange alone gives 9.5 hours per day. That alone is more than 40 hours per week.

Re: Pay Teachers More

#20

Post by kjksf »

xxpor wrote: post #12
TomOfTTB wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I have a very conservative, very anti-union family and there's not one of them who isn't in favor of higher teacher pay as long as it's tied to performance. So I really don't know who would be against it

What's a fair way of measuring performance though?

If we assume that it's impossible to measure performance (in any job, but also when applied to teaching), then market salary is minimum wage.

We know we have unemployment i.e. there are people available that would take the job.

If you can't tell if a person A does a given task, in this case teaching, better than a random person from unemployed pool, the rational thing to do is to hire a random unemployment person for minimum wage.

That, of course, would be absurd: we all know that there are differences in performance and they can be measured and they are being measured.

As everything fuzzy in life, they are not always being measured perfectly, but that doesn't mean we should throw the baby with the bathwater by declaring that because we can show that sometimes the measurements aren't fair, they can never be fair. That's a fallacy and even article in question is based on assumption that you in fact measure the quality of teachers.

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