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The myth of the teacher pay gap?

nationalaffairs.com

191–200 of 308 posts

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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.

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#192
post #148

> (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…

Yes, the truth is if teachers worked their contractual hours schools would fall apart; and teachers will emphasize this point as protest! 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/ora…

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.

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#193
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.

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.

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, plenty of people working other jobs that would like to have 2 entire months off every year.

Sure. It's one of the biggest advantages of teaching. But you still can't pay for groceries with time off.

You can't pay for groceries with health insurance either but you still have to include fringe benefits when calculating total compensation.

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 consis…

> Teacher’s unions don’t opposes “school competition.” They oppose school privatization,

How would one have meaningful 'competition' without privatization?

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#196
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 consis…

> Teacher’s unions don’t opposes “school competition.” They oppose school privatization, How would one have meaningful 'competition' without privatization?

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.

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#197
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 consis…

> Teacher’s unions don’t opposes “school competition.” They oppose school privatization, How would one have meaningful 'competition' without privatization?

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.

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#198
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure but can you buy a nice two floor house for 250k CAD in the US? In most of Quebec you can.

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.

By that I mean majors city like Quebec and Montreal. Sure Montreal is expensive but nothing like Toronto.

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#200
post #181
post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teachers should just work their contractual hours. Now that would be a protest!

google "work to rule"

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.

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