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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?

#221

Post by sjg007 »

musicale wrote: post #200
egh wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It represents the dichotomy between contracted work and what it actually take to do the job.

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#222

Post by thrower123 »

jseliger wrote: post #158
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.

Very few of the teachers that just go in at 7, leave at 3 and work to contract, spread around anecdotes about it.

And there's more of those around than you might think.

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#223

Post by claudeganon »

humanrebar wrote: post #202
claudeganon wrote: post #191

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…

In what ways do teachers' unions campaign to give agency to students' families and career choice to in-demand faculty? Seems like the incentives are mostly oriented around getting teachers to stay in one place and grind out another year of experience, round of continuing education, and extra degrees whether they are wise or not. Otherwise, why don't teachers just quit schools with poor safety records, working conditi…

>In what ways do teachers' unions campaign to give agency to students' families and career choice to in-demand faculty?

I’m not sure what you mean by agency here or how many teachers you actually know. But unions have regularly campaigned for more resources for students outside of themselves, including access to things nurses, counselors, and libraries. Schools in many cities are highly racially and economically segregated in the US because of the country’s broader history of redlining and corresponding deprivation. Teachers unions are one of the only interest groups who have consistently fought against this denial of agency for their students.

As to career choices, I have union member teachers in my family and they change schools as they see fit. There are some problems with state licensing incompatibilities that prevent teachers from being as mobile as they might like and we should probably move to uniform federal standards to correct this.

>Seems like the incentives are mostly oriented around getting teachers to stay in one place and grind out another year of experience, round of continuing education, and extra degrees whether they are wise or not. Otherwise, why don't teachers just quit schools with poor safety records, working conditions, pay, equipment funding, and uncompensated overtime? Because no district really has to worry about being held accountable like that.

Incentives around higher education are perverse in the US in almost every regard, so I’m not sure that teachers are that much of an outlier (especially for their domain, education). As to why teachers stay - I’m not sure if you’re aware but most people tend to live in the regions they’re actually from, where they have family ties and social bonds.

https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2008/12/17/who-moves-who-sta...

Applying some sort of rational actor economic heuristic to civil servants in a service profession seems a foolhardy endeavor. I mean, I’ve worked for big companies across the country, none of which were any better run and some of which were not better resourced than a failing public school, and they all had their fair share of people toughing it out too. What binds people to a place socially and materially, especially among more working class professions, is different from white collar workers.

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#224

Post by SamReidHughes »

cmendel wrote: post #214
prepend wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teacher pay is not correlated to outcome. The US pays more for its teachers than Finland and other counties with much better outcomes. I think the challenge is just measuring and comparing education. If we could, reliably, then we’d likely pay tons more for teachers.

>>Teacher pay is not correlated to outcome. The US pays more for its teachers than Finland and other counties with much better outcomes. I do want to point out that these two points aren't actually related. Just because the US pays more for lesser outcomes does not mean that teacher pay is anti-correlated or uncorrelated to outcome.

Some public schools can't find a decent calculus teacher at the prices they're paying. On the other hand, if they paid a janitor to sit in the classroom while AP Calc students teach themselves, in many places that would work out great.

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#225

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

musicale wrote: post #200
egh wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not about one side arbitrarily adjusting the terms; it's about both sides realizing that they have a shared interest in keeping the organization running. It's just not feasible to write an employment contract that fully encompasses the work needing to get done.

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#226

Post by randogogogo »

minikites wrote: post #210
musicale wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The massive power imbalance between employer and employee is the main factor here and the driving motivation for labor unions.

So much more than that even, so many are teachers must feel compelled to do what they must for the sake of their students. I know it's incidental, but the extra effort I see my own kids' teachers putting in without financial incentive is incredible. Education is a business where a lot of "employees" probably aren't doing the calculations around their pay-per-hour but rather are focused on the accomplishing the things necessary for their students success.

Maybe that's a long winded way of saying that I suspect a lot of teachers are bleeding hearts and do not closely manager their time or monetary budgets closely.

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#227

Post by emcrazyone »

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…

you forgot 9 weeks off every summer, paid holidays, no contributions into social security, and some get classroom aids, they don't design curriculum (it's purchased), throw in common core for good measure....

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#228

Post by sgerenser »

shantly wrote: post #63
simonsarris wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does the school require it? If everyone agrees its silly, why don't they just drop the requirement?

Dunno, they all do it though. I know school stats report the % of teachers with higher degrees and of course they all want those percentages to be higher. Possibly there are state incentives. Mostly it's just a bunch of people doing dumb crap without anyone having the power & motivation to fix it so they can all knock it off, which is a pretty common phenomenon, actually. [EDIT] I mean to you wanna be the superintend…

Yup. NC recently got rid of the automatic pay bump for having a masters degree while simultaneously increasing base teacher pay and there was a huge uproar over it. Nobody wants to lose their boondoggle.

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#229

Post by Florin_Andrei »

DougPhillips88 wrote: post #169
Florin_Andrei wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole "article" is propaganda by a neocon think tank. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Enterprise_Institute

And this contradicts their data... how, exactly?

Thanks for the laugh.

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#230

Post by kissickas »

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…

> Personally I think someone required to have a degree (master's for quoted salary), continued education requirements, and licensing earning under $50K/year starting is too low.

Take away the master's degree (which many teachers don't have) and just say degree, and you've got a great description of a hair stylist. Look into how many hours are required for licensing a hair stylist in your state. Does $50k/year sound too low for that profession, as well? It may, but if not, you have to admit there are more factors at play than just education and training.

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