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The myth of the teacher pay gap?

nationalaffairs.com

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Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#151

Post by WheelsAtLarge »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #4
WheelsAtLarge wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#152

Post by abakker »

mcguire wrote: post #119
abakker wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#153

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

jyounker wrote: post #150
IkmoIkmo wrote: post #114

> (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 (work…

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.

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#154

Post by WheelsAtLarge »

igetspam wrote: post #11
WheelsAtLarge wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

> $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.

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#155

Post by heyiforgotmypwd »

This is very an ignorant, biased and misleading article.

1) Not every educator is a teacher. Teachers are paid the most and have the best organized labor representation, while substitute teachers and T-A's are lucky if they get enough hours to qualify for benefits.

2) Not everyone lives in a rich area of a big city. Smaller communities typically don't have the tax base to pay livable wages. Cost of living maybe less, but the absolute buying power of educators in rural area is next to nil.

Also, here's some anecdotal personal data-points:

- My half sister and her husband are special ed. T-A's. They're on food stamps.

- Talk to elderly homeless, saner people. You'd be surprised how many were teachers or in the education.

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#156

Post by heyiforgotmypwd »

09bjb wrote: post #131
IkmoIkmo wrote: post #114

> (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 (work…

n=2 now. My wife works a 1.0 FTE that the district rates as 1.6 to 1.8 FTE (seven classes per day). She works 50h / week at the absolute minimum.

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.

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#157

Post by jedberg »

prepend wrote: post #145
jedberg wrote: post #25

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…

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 tha…

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).

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#158

Post by jseliger »

IkmoIkmo wrote: post #114

> (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 (work…

Issue is that BLS data consistently shows teachers working 40 hours per week or less. For example: https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf (PDF).

Anecdotes consistently run one way, while data consistently runs another.

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#159

Post by smogcutter »

defertoreptar wrote: post #27

> 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…

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.

[1] https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=28 [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_size#Class_size_throug...

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#160

Post by sethammons »

nightbrawler wrote: post #147

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…

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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