91–100 of 308 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
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…
Salaries are set by supply and demand. Being a programmer is in greater demand relative to its supply.
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?
in all seriousness, i'd love for the US government to throw serious cash at teachers' salaries. it's basically a wise investment in the country's future. so what if they're daycare teachers? we have plenty of $ to spend on providing a safe place and food for our children in the US for 8 hours a day. a lot of the money is spent on the backend on welfare or prisons anyway, so it's probably not very expensive when the externalities are factored in.
looking outside the US, i think Finland understood they had no resources other than timber, snow, and their population and started tooling up their educational system, to the tune of high salaries/prestige/perks or something for teachers (someone will correct me here). anyway, they do really well on int'l standardized tests (yes this is not ideal, but is useful at least as a relative measurement) and seem to have one of the highest per capita incomes in the world, low GINI, etc.
if it weren't so darned cold and dark seasonally, i'd be interested in relocating there for the sake of my children's education.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's true, and while I also believe teachers should be paid more relative to other occupations, labor market has one thing going for it that makes it hard to replace - it's a very simple process that doesn't require any central coordination.
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…
For example if you didn't really care the much about building a software project, but had to do it, you could probably find some 'developers' who would do the work for the same salary that teachers work at.
I'm not sure how the outcome would compare to that of public schools.
Granted, you're going to struggle to pull in the same kind of hourly rate during the summers working a seasonal job, unless it is something special. But, if you have a family, your kids are going to be off school anyway, so you could actually spend some time with them. There's some trade offs.
Think about it: A teacher should be paid according to their skill, supply, and demand. A great teachers time is highly valuable and there should never be a cap on how much they make or considerations on such an important task to hinder on concepts such as tenure.
If I hire a private teacher for my kids to teach them programming, I know that a great teacher has options to go work anywhere and I need to pay enough to afford a good one. I might get a couple friends kids to join to afford his time. Put together a few different subjects and all of the sudden you have a school.
So the question is why is this simple concept not being followed? The answer is lack of accountability, artificial barriers to entry, limitations on control to pick your instructors, standardized testing requirements, checkbox mentality, teachers unions, etc.
Steve Jobs was right, if were going to continue taking money from peoples paychecks to fund a dilapidated educational system, we are much better off giving the money we spend on a kids education directly to the parents (with the obligation to spend it only on education), and letting them select the course of education for their own kids themselves.
I will acknowledge that in many parts of the country, teacher pay is atrocious -- especially in high cost of living areas -- but I do think the conventional wisdom that teachers are hideously underpaid for what they do isn't exactly true.
Take my mom for instance. She got a BS in journalism, worked as an editor for a few years and then after getting pregnant with my older sister, was a stay at home mom for 14 years. She went back to work -- initially part-time, then full-time, when I was 8 years old.
Now, her specialty (school counseling -- which then became school psychology), requires a Masters, so she got that when I was in kindergarten and she was like 41. She followed this up by getting her Ed.S a few years later (while working full time) and then got her Ph.D (ditto) -- back then (early 90s), they didn't have the online/paint-by-numbers grad school programs they have now -- so she'd go to class a few nights a week after work and then full-time in the summer. (Side note, I fell in love with college libraries when I was 6 years old and would spend summer afternoons with her at UGA, while she was studying).
So she's 43 when she starts working (Masters), is maybe 45 or 46 when she gets her specialist, and then was like 50 or 51 when she got her Ph.D. I point this out b/c this is relatively late in life for most people to become educators. Many of her peers were in their late 20s or early 30s and those closer to her age had been working for 15+ years. I will add that a key thing here is that she was smart and achieved tenure VERY early. If you don't have tenure, you're fucked.
I think she was probably making close to $100k a year when she retired early in 2013 or 2014. Now, that's probably less than most Ph.Ds make -- and it is certainly less than she could make in private practice -- but considering the fact that she worked 9 months a year and lived in the suburbs, that's not bad.
Moreover, even though she retired 22 or 23 years in -- meaning she didn't do the "minimum" for full retirement -- she still got a really good retirement package from both the state and the county.
My mom loves retirement -- but what lots of teachers/counselors/educators do, is they retire after they do 25 or 30 years (so if you start teaching at 22, you're like 50 when you reach full retirement), get their full retirement, and then get hired back either part-time or three-quarter time (and in some cases, full-time), at a salaried rate. They can do this and still earn their retirement. (You don't get dual retirements after the fact, I don't think -- unless you were in multiple counties/states)
So my mom has friends who "retired" at 48 -- then went right back to work and essentially get double their pay, plus benefits.
I would also add that benefits are one of the areas where being a teacher is really valuable. With the price of health care, having high-quality insurance that is free or very inexpensive, is a reason many people (especially women) are in education.
That was part of my mom's impetus -- my dad is an entrepreneur (real estate) and shit got bad and she needed to make sure we'd have good insurance and other protections as a family. She loved what she did (and was fantastic at it), but part of the reason she became a counselor (and later school psychologist) was because it would allow her to be off during the summer's when I was home -- and allow her to be home in the evenings (when she wasn't doing the grad school years) for the family.
I'm not a parent -- but I can't discount the value of having that kind of flexibility -- even if it means you make less than what you could. Because my dad primarily worked for himself, my mom having summers off meant we had a lot more flexibility as a family for things like summer vacations or cruises over spring break.
And not to say that education isn't stressful -- but there is also more flexibility in the job itself than in something like say, tech. She was always able to take me to my doctor appointments growing up and handle other issues that might come up. When my grandmother was diagnosed with Alzheimers and had to go into assisted living and later a nursing home -- my mom had flexibility in her benefits to take time off to travel to Florida to help her elderly parents (and a sister who lived there and did much of the work). There was a "pool" her county offered employees to donate some of their sick leave into that would act as insurance for other employees in that pool if they needed to exceed their own sick leave/personal days in the event of an emergency or personal event that didn't rise to the level of going on temporary disability.
So yes -- part of me fully acknowledges that teachers/educators are often paid less than what their skills might get in a different sector. And I fully acknowledge that not all parts of the country are as good as the county where my mom worked. But when you look beyond just the pay and you include the time off, the benefits, the retirement (I mean, I'll never have a pension at my six figure job), and the flexibility -- it's not quite as bad as it appears either.
The biggest thing with teacher salaries that people usually forget is that you have to multiply by 1.2 to 1.25 to get the equivalent for a 9-5 job that works year round, if you want to compare apples to pomegranates. My mother as a school teacher worked 190 days a year. I work 245 days a year. Granted, you're going to struggle to pull in the same kind of hourly rate during the summers working a seasonal job, unless i…