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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?

#71

Post by crumpets »

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…

No, value to the business only sets the ceiling. The floor comes from the labor supply side of the market. (i.e. can the company find qualified people willing to do it at X rate)

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#72

Post by [deleted] »

SamuelAdams wrote: post #23

Why not just go directly to the source? https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm#25-0000 Secondary School Teachers: annual mean wage: $64,230 If we zoom in on a particular type of teacher, you get ranges: Middle school teachers https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes252022.htm bottom 10% earn 39k or less. bottom 25% earn 46k 50% earn 58k 75% earn 74k 90% earn 93k Based on these metrics, it seems like a fine occupation…

[deleted]

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#73

Post by yellowapple »

shantly wrote: post #14
marricks wrote: post #7

I’m not so sure, my mom has been a teacher for 6 years and makes around 40k. Similar story for her peers. And even a 20% raise wouldn’t allow her to afford a home, or to send her kids to college without a huge debt burden... To be honest, I don’t even really care if that ends up being “in line with industry” some how, that’s still way too damn low. At that point everyone should be paid more. EDIT: realize I mistyped…

My wife makes under $40k after about 10 years. Health benefits blow, too. I'd love if the unions around here were some of those mean ol' ones who get teachers way more than they deserve or whatever. The one here can't even keep their daily planning periods clear of bullshit meetings. She grades or lesson plans for over an hour just about every night, has 30-60 minutes of meetings after school at least once a week. Th…

My impression (based on having interacted with a lot of teachers, including friends and family members) has been that teachers' unions are "those mean ol' ones who get teachers way more than they deserve", but only for those teachers with a substantial amount of tenure (on the scale of multiple decades). Any other teachers were effectively deemed expendable, getting abysmal salaries and pink slips.

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#74

Post by wolco »

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…

When there last name brought associations to wealth to mind and brought in more business. The financial sector is more about trust and imagine than anything. Someone wearing a suit will sell more products than someone in shorts.

Do you think having Obama's daughter on staff will bring in more clients?

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#75

Post by tptacek »

julianapostate wrote: post #43
vkhn wrote: post #9

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…

does she work summers too? winter break, spring break?

Does that matter? If we're talking in terms of annual salary, the fact that they "don't get paid" over the summer is irrelevant; it's just the same amount of money distributed on a weird schedule, isn't it? All things being equal, you'd rather have the $60k job that had "an unpaid summer off" than the $60k job where you got paid all summer, right?

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#76

Post by Qwertystop »

gridlockd wrote: post #67

Why do teachers have such an elevated standing in society anyways? If we're being honest, schools are, for the most part, daycare centers. Secondary education is, for the most part, completely useless. Yet, unlike with most other professions, the government guarantees that those glorified daycare jobs will continue to exist. Why should these jobs pay well?

Because they ought to be more than that? In some cases, perhaps, because they _are_ more than that?

I'm pretty sure my K-12 education (public school) and college (private university) were both above average, but I definitely learned _something_ from at least a few classes every year in K-12, and at least could tell you what sorts of things I've forgotten from them. Meanwhile, I couldn't tell you what about half of my college classes were even _supposed_ to have taught, shortly before graduation, despite passing all of them with (almost all) high marks.

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#77

Post by floren »

jefft255 wrote: post #22
marricks wrote: post #7

I’m not so sure, my mom has been a teacher for 6 years and makes around 40k. Similar story for her peers. And even a 20% raise wouldn’t allow her to afford a home, or to send her kids to college without a huge debt burden... To be honest, I don’t even really care if that ends up being “in line with industry” some how, that’s still way too damn low. At that point everyone should be paid more. EDIT: realize I mistyped…

That's terrible, in Quebec median salary is 60K CAD, topping out at 80K at most schools ( https://neuvoo.ca/salaire/?job=Enseignant%20Primaire ), which is plenty to afford a house (of course not if monoparental). I don't even think that a lot considering the responsibilities they have.

60K CAD is 45K USD, so it's pretty damn close to the OP's cited figure.

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#78

Post by vondur »

Here in California, teachers make decent money now. The starting salary in Long Beach Unified is 60k/year. It's not uncommon for veteran teachers with Master's Degrees in Education to earn 6 figure salaries.

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#79

Post by crdoconnor »

crumpets wrote: post #69
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…

>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 labor market is a tool of society. It's like any other tool: it can be fixed or supplemented or even swapped out with something else if it doesn't perform its function effectively.

Re: The myth of the teacher pay gap?

#80

Post by tptacek »

shaggyfrog wrote: post #35
Florin_Andrei wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This was, however, clearly written by statisticians that have no teacher friends or family. Or it's paid propaganda by whoever. In fact, I think this has a higher probability to be true. I'm married to a teacher and the whole "article" is bullshit.

> Or it's paid propaganda by whoever I was curious about the site's owner (American Enterprise Institute) and looked them up on Wikipedia to give me context for reading the article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Enterprise_Institute Half my family are teachers, at least. They spent a huge amount of time outside of a "standard" 40-hour work week preparing lessons, grading, etc. It's a tough profession if you…

I don't doubt it's a tough profession, but I have trouble squaring how unattractive it is with stats like the small percentage of applicants the Chicago Public School system actually hires, compared to their very large pool of applicants.
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