The myth of the teacher pay gap? • Hacker News Board

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#111

Post by StreamBright » Wed, Oct 02, 2019, 9:40 PM UTC

praxulus wrote: post #110

crumpets wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 histo…

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 w…

Or you happen to be in middle of nowhere, or there are other incentives like equity that you can use to make up for the subpar base salary.

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#112

Post by childofteacher » Wed, Oct 02, 2019, 9:43 PM UTC

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.

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#113

Post by jschwartzi » Wed, Oct 02, 2019, 9:45 PM UTC

mcguire wrote: post #106

Someone1234 wrote: post #10

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…

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.

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#114

Post by IkmoIkmo » Wed, Oct 02, 2019, 9:45 PM UTC

> (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.

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#115

Post by darawk » Wed, Oct 02, 2019, 9:46 PM UTC

Someone1234 wrote: post #10

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…

> 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.

Nowhere is private education mentioned.

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#116

Post by awinder » Wed, Oct 02, 2019, 9:46 PM UTC

mcguire wrote: post #106

Someone1234 wrote: post #10

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…

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 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?

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#117

Post by mcguire » Wed, Oct 02, 2019, 9:46 PM UTC

thrower123 wrote: post #102

nilkn wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In some states, teachers don't pay into Social Security, so their pension/retirement plan is in place of that. At least this is the case in Maine. It's especially bizarre that the rules also penalize drawing on spousal survivor benefits.

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.

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#118

Post by tathougies » Wed, Oct 02, 2019, 9:47 PM UTC

Someone1234 wrote: post #45

tathougies wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 sam…

> 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…

> 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.

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#119

Post by mcguire » Wed, Oct 02, 2019, 9:48 PM UTC

abakker wrote: post #41

karl11 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do a ton of work at home outside of school hours.

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.

"Substantially more time off" is probably the wrong way to look at it when you don't get paid for the two or three months off.

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#120

Post by tathougies » Wed, Oct 02, 2019, 9:49 PM UTC

shantly wrote: post #53

tathougies wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 teachi…

> 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.