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> In the U.S. and Canada, teachers are often underpaid—and many have quit the profession because they couldn't make a decent living Is there a source for this?

• the-dude 10y ago
  I thought it was telling that in 'Breaking Bad' the chemistry teacher needs a second job at a carwash. And nobody seems surprised or finds it odd.
  • humanrebar 10y ago
    He had extra expenses due to having a special needs son. His wife was pregnant and presumably not working at the time. Also, they probably had too nice of a house if they had those other financial pressures. Their biggest financial problem was probably their impulse to overspend on big ticket items "because my family is worth it". If I recall correctly, his wife pressures Walter to go to an oncologist that wasn't on their plan. In general, teachers tend to have better than average healthcare options. Chemotherapy for newly discovered cancer is almost always covered. If it's not, local news stations would love a story about a local science teacher who gets cancer that the big bad insurance company won't cover. Me extrapolating here, but it's possible that they also spent big on different off-plan options for their son.
    • brownbat 10y ago
      > Their biggest financial problem was probably their impulse to overspend on big ticket items Well, in part they had different accounting of their assets, since the wife viewed his social capital (as a cofounder of a massive biotech conglomerate) as a marketable asset, while his pride drove him to refuse to redeem that and yet spend as if he had access to it anyway. Walter's pride was not only his tragic flaw, but also a significant financial liability.
      • sjg007 10y ago
        I didn't understand why the cofounder biotech conglomerate was necessary, except to give Walter and out he would not take and say 'hey he is smart but choosing a life of crime'
        • throwaway7767 10y ago
          It was necessary in order to present some of Walter White's personality traits - he takes his independence seriously, and he can be very stubborn. It sets the stage for later character development.
        • logfromblammo 10y ago
          The biotech firm was to demonstrate options already taken. He already tried the "right way" to monetize his intelligence. And then, as the high school teacher, he has already tried "plan B", which is good enough for most people that fail to succeed in the only moonshot they can afford to take in their lifetimes, but it turns out that the healthcare in "plan B" really sucks. Those aren't just already explored options. They're the control group for Walter's scientific experiment. His hypothesis is that "There is nothing wrong with me. I'm a genius worth millions of dollars, and It's other people that have been holding me back." And the experiment designed to falsify the hypothesis is to just discard all of society's laws and morality and just get the money by any means necessary. The strawman argument of the show is that unfairness in society trickles down and becomes crime. Walter never would have become Heisenberg if his business partners hadn't screwed him out of his share of the company.
  • AnimalMuppet 10y ago
    In the 1970s, the best high school teacher I had spent summers painting parking lots. The year after I graduated, he quit teaching to paint parking lots full time. This was not a net win for society...
• pjc50 10y ago
  Administrative staff and sports, I think. http://247wallst.com/special-report/2016/09/20/the-highest-paid-public-employee-in-every-state/2/ http://247wallst.com/special-report/2016/09/20/the-highest-p...
  • gbog 10y ago
    Very uncommon opinion (I'm the only one I know to hold it): we should not spend one dime more for sport, especially in education. Kid have a minimal need for physical activities which can be easily fulfilled with some gymnastic, but we are in an age where having muscle is pretty useless. Sport is a recent concept invented by the British idle cast, as a way to spend time and money. The world do not have this luxury right now. We need to spend money on education. By the way, an analysis of the two longest civilisations (Jewish and Chinese) show that both have been obsessed with education, and both did never have a particularly strong focus on "sports". Maybe in one century it descendants will count how much of our resources we spent in nothing and will laugh (and cry).
    • fatalogic 10y ago
      On the other hand sports bring in insane amounts of money, publicity and status to colleges, especially state schools where without them they probably couldn't compete with private schools. http://www.cheatsheet.com/money-career/ncaa-20-college-football-programs-raking-in-the-money.html/ http://www.cheatsheet.com/money-career/ncaa-20-college-footb... Also given the rising obesity rates and health concerns related to obesity I would say physical fitness is very important in today's society. Education spending should be improved but education isn't all about studying from books. We need mixture of arts, physical education and formal education.
      • analog31 10y ago
        Unfortunately, I suspect that professional college sports and the physical fitness of real students, are different things. For most students, like the rest of us, college sports is a form of passive entertainment. I went to a smaller college that did not have professional teams, and I suspect that students were healthier than at the Big 10 university near my house. The sports were pretty much open to all students. The captain of my college's football team was a physics major. That tells you something about the quality of the football team, the physics program, or both. ;-)
• philipov 10y ago
  Not only is that money not going to teachers, but you'd still have to adjust it for the cost of living and availability of social support, for it to be meaningful.
• tremon 10y ago
  I often hear similar notions lamenting the demise of US education spending but from what I can tell, the US spends more than most other countries per student Spending is not the same as teacher pay. See [1] for a source: There was a time when it — literally — paid to be a teacher. Unfortunately, that was 60 years ago. In 1940 the average male employee with four or more years of college who did not teach K–12 earned 3.6 percent less than the average K–12 male teacher. [By 2000] the average male with four years of college made a whopping 60.4 percent more than the average male teacher. When the average earnings of male and female teachers are combined and compared with the average pay of all non-teachers with at least four years of college, the difference is 53.5 percent in the year 2000. This actually understates the pay gap because a large proportion of teachers have master's degrees, making them more educated than their comparison group. [1] http://www.nea.org/home/14052.htm http://www.nea.org/home/14052.htm
  • Spooky23 10y ago
    That's a passage that needs to be read and parsed very carefully. Comparing depression era college educated male salaries to the modern workforce is apples and oranges. There were very few college graduates in those days -- and most were teachers. Other professions like law, engineering etc were struggling due to the depresssion. The modern passage is even more weasel worded. You need the worksheet used to calculate to figure out what that actually means.
    • tremon 10y ago
      But then, what does it mean according to you? To me it still says that salary of the teacher profession has not kept pace with the wage development of similarly-skilled workers.
      • Spooky23 10y ago
        I think all middle class jobs have lost pace salary wise. Non technical white collar gigs don't pay what they used to either.
• allengeorge 10y ago
  What's the source for claiming that teachers are underpaid in Canada? Here's an article (admittedly from 2012) on teachers salaries in Ontario: ‪http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/education/anatomy-of-an-ontario-teachers-paycheque/article6015968/‬ http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/education/anato... More recent reports (from the shrill National Post) claim an average salary of almost 87K for secondary school teachers, but they don't state their source information. Also consider that teachers - like other public sector unions - are one of the last few sectors to get a defined benefit pension plan, a luxury that few others will ever have.
  • mabbo 10y ago
    > teachers - like other public sector unions - are one of the last few sectors to get a defined benefit pension plan Just to clear up a misconception, teachers get a great pension, but (in Ontario at least) they put 10-13% of they're base salary into that pension plan for their entire careers. Anyone who invests that much money into their retirement will do well. Also, the Ontario teachers pension plan is one of the best investment groups in the world. Many years they see 20+% returns. They own everything. Sports teams, malls, airports- they own the channel tunnel!
    • friendly_chap 10y ago
      That's fascinating! How is this possible? How come the traders (is that the right terminology) don't get poached by bigger firms? Are they doing well because they know the local market?
      • stan_rogers 10y ago
        They don't trade as such, they buy (a lot) and hold -- and manage what they buy as well, when they can. Basically, it's the Warren Buffet approach to investment, and it took a long time to build from what used to be a more ordinary-looking pension fund wa-a-a-ay back when I was a kid (50 years ago).
      • mabbo 10y ago
• Spooky23 10y ago
  I always hear that lament, then I talk to my friends who are teachers. Most are in my age group (late 30s) and are making $70-85k, with summers and another month of vacation and good pension/healthcare. The only lousy benefit is that maternity leave sucks. They all are incredibly frustrated with the increasing meddling and red tape attached to federal and state funding. Half the job is paperwork nonsense, which wasn't true even a decade ago.
  • ashark 10y ago
    More like 35K-50K for teachers here in their early to mid 30s. Mid-sized midwestern city, so the cost of housing is low, but that's still not great, especially considering that you need advanced degrees to approach the top end of that range. Compensation varies greatly by district—typically the worst districts pay the best, but they're still undesirable for teachers because the conditions are terrible—being cursed at and threatened daily by 5th graders (no joke) and witnessing assaults gets old fast. [EDIT] I should add that their healthcare plans tend to suck and are totally useless (1.5-2x as expensive as other options) for covering one's family, but the retirement's good. They're also better for people planning to take maternity/paternity leave than probably any other employer in the area, especially if you time it so your leave rolls over into Summer and are willing to be docked a couple weeks' pay—you can achieve near-parity with lower end of normal for parental leave in other OECD states that way! What a perk.
    • nine_k 10y ago
      While we're at it: I think it's a terrible idea to confine 20-30 5th-graders together. This is the age when interpersonal relationships form, and hierarchies start building. 20 kids of same age have no other way to build a reasonable hierarchy except forming cliques and having fights. They are all peers, painfully pitted against one another. For most of the human history (and pre-history) kids grew in multi-age groups. This allows older kids assume roles of leaders, care about younger kids and protect them, and teach the younger kids what they already learned (the best way to learn something is to teach someone). The younger kids have some role models before their eyes who they can relate to more easily than to adults. This setup seems to work well in e.g. Montessori schools. It's sad that the majority of schools do not adopt multi-age groups.
• cmdrfred 10y ago
  Teachers make median income of around 57k[1] in the US and that is on par with other professions with similar educational requirements despite the fact that they don't work nearly 1/4 of the year. [1]https://www.bls.gov/ooh/education-training-and-library/mobile/high-school-teachers.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/education-training-and-library/mobil...
  • hdctambien 10y ago
    Teachers don't work 1/4 of the year like football players only work 3 hours a week for 16 weeks. There's a lot that has to happen (work) when the students aren't in school so that teaching can happen.
    • cmdrfred 10y ago
      So they are required to be at school for 8 hour days year round?
      • jschwartzi 10y ago
        More like 12-hour days while school is in session.
        • cmdrfred 10y ago
          Not where I went to school, half an hour after the kids left the vast majority of teachers were gone.
          • Goronmon 10y ago
            I mean, a lot of comes down to the individual teachers. The good ones, who care about their students, will spend extra time running student groups (drama clubs, etc) and participate in teacher groups. Add in grading and planning on top of that and you can easily be working 12 hour days, easily. But you can still have plenty of teachers that don't care about making the extra effort.
• Eridrus 10y ago
  And the pay they are offering teachers really doesn't seem good enough to base a headline around: $14-22/hr depending on incentives: http://t.vipkid.com.cn/faq/payment http://t.vipkid.com.cn/faq/payment