41–50 of 308 posts
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> My wife is a teacher, and I can tell you exactly why. Which is?
They do a ton of work at home outside of school hours.
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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.
My girlfriend of the last 5.5 years is a teacher. I can only speak on her experience, and what I've got to know from her colleagues. That said, the three month break is hardly a myth.
> Teachers are generally required to spend weeks doing prep before the year starts and weeks closing out after the year ends.
They stay a few *days after schools out, not weeks. And, most of them recycle lesson plans from the previous year. No one is spending weeks on lesson plans. If they are, it's passively, not 40 hours a week. From what I've been told, most of them download/purchase full plans off the internet.
> There are also recommended to required activities during the summer.
They get paid extra for this stuff too. My girlfriend runs a club, does detention, and works the ticket booth at football games. She gets paid for all of them. Her contract states one extra curricular activity per year. It's all during the school year in her case.
> $40-50k is not enough money to live on, in most places.
$40-50k is the average salary in the US. Outside of major metros, $50k will afford you a nice life (I live in one, most people here would kill to make $50k).
I am willing to accept that there are studies and statistics that seem to contradict what is commonly accepted. I'm also willing to accept a lot of the evidence here that the problem is not nearly as bad as believed. This was, however, clearly written by statisticians that have no teacher friends or family. If they did, they would have asked more relevant questions of the data. For example WHY do teachers work "on av…
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…
Most of the private schools around here pay a lot worse than the public schools, especially if you factor in total comp w/ benefits. We have a tiny number with high enough tuition that they might pay well (but I wouldn't count on it), but almost none of the rest do, the bulk of which are Catholic or protestant religious schools.
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…
> 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…
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 is why they came back, but nothing.
Your post seems to be largely a THEORY of why salaries are set the way they are. In my experience social "value" seems to be a far bigger indicator of future salary rather than actual historical value. Meaning people are paying for perception, not measurements.
You can see that just by looking at affluence typically white kids flowing from private schools, to named colleges, straight into the financial sector. When did they generate historical value for the business when they were hired at double the natural average salary?
That, I think, is where the sense (among teachers) of being underpaid comes from: teachers aren't getting institutional support. That's something that the National Affairs article mentions with regards to discipline, but it's true in other ways as well. When you toss in the fact that a great deal of educational achievement happens outside of the classroom-- as the article mentions-- but teachers are expected to make up for that gap, often without the community support they would need.
Saying that "I'm not paid enough to deal with this shit" doesn't seem that out of line to me.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/16/us/teachers-school-suppli...
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Don't you realize most people don't have the patience or ability to be a software engineer? That it is one of the most intellectually demanding jobs in society? And that 4 years computer science education is both expensive and difficult? Recognize your privilige - you are very smart and, for you, programming is easy. You are in the minority. How about dental hygienists? Dental Hygienists made a median salary of $74,0…
Teaching doesn't require patience or ability? And where I went to college the 4 year CS degree was the same price as a 4 year education degree (aside from books/misc expenses). They both required the same number of credits, and class costs were largely normalized (with a few exceptions). Plus then teachers have to take the licensing exams and pay for your own background check/license. If people really believe teacher…
Working as a teacher certainly doesn't.
Source: had teachers (not in the US, just for the record).
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…
> 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 Most of the private schools around here pay a lot worse than the public schools, especially if you factor in total comp w/ benefits. We have a tiny number with high enough tuition that they might pay well (but I wouldn't count…
Their entire argument seems to be based on "the pay gap calculation is dumb", but the problem is, even if that is true, that doesn't disprove that teachers are underpaid.
The point about teachers having above average pensions is a good point.
Salary correlating with required skill level also misses some of the point, I believe, because qualitatively speaking, skill level isn't the most driving factor behind choosing to become a teacher.
The "if teachers aren't paid well, why aren't we seeing more of them quit?" is a lousy point. Some jobs are simply more important than others, and its jobs practitioners know that. They are less likely to quit.
I wonder if there's a way to calculate replacement cost. Like, what the long term damage to society would be if 20% of a particular work force disappeared. That might be a better way to estimate how much teachers should actually be paid.